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We're officially launching UBI

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Re: We're officially launching UBI

#141

Post by shkkmo »

logfromblammo wrote: post #131
shkkmo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not know which of 1-7 are needed by which people, so giving them to everyone is wasteful. In addition, providing those basic necessities for free destroys the paid market for those goods and harms economic growth. > UBI is, in essence, an attempt to create a mixed economic system that is communist at the bottom end and capitalist at the top end. I think you do not know what "communism" means. There is nothing i…

Destroying the paid market for a minimum standard of existence is the whole rassafrassin' point! The idea that you have to pay something if you want to continue living is the root cause of trade relationships that are fundamentally skewed against the already-disadvantaged party. You give everyone the bare minimum for free, and charge for anything on top of that. It's the freemium model applied to national economies,…

> Destroying the paid market for a minimum standard of existence is the whole rassafrassin' point!

Except those paid markets are critical for finding and creating the efficiencies that allow us to raise everyone's standard of living. We need to balance the trade relationships, but we need to do it with without destroying these markets. Indeed, balancing the trade relationship means increasing the number of choices available to the already-disadvantaged parties, which will increase the average total benefit of each trade and increase the efficiency of the overall market.

> It's the freemium model applied to national economies, and the market for smartphone apps suggests that it would work fine.

The freemium model works because there is COMPETITION among app creators to provide the correct combination of things for free that incentivized people to play so they will want to pay for more.

Relying on a bureaucracy to figure what what the "bare minimum" should be is ineffective and inefficient. There is no one set of "bare minimum" needed by everybody and trying to create a bureaucratic system to calculate the needs of the individual is enormously hard and prone to corruptions and abuse. Some people grow much of their own food and don't need assistance with that. Some people are perfectly happy living on rice and beans but want to buy lots of books. Some people have high metabolisms or expensive dietary restrictions. Some people want to live out of a van and don't need subsidized housing. Some people need to live in big cities with high property values for work. The people who have the best information as to what their "bare minimum" is are... themselves.

"Taxes in-kind" are still not communism (and they sound enormously difficult to implement, there are important reasons we use currency rather than barter). Not really sure what the point of that digression was.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#142

Post by wu-ikkyu »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #28

Like others have said, pilot programs are a poor trial for UBI. You're creating wealth for select individuals (even a village), so you aren't dealing with economic issues such as inflation. For example, read about Mansa Musa, who gave away so much gold in his pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1300s that he caused devaluation of money (hyperinflation) for nearly 10 years [1]. The huge influx of "free" money caused lasting da…

>you aren't dealing with economic issues such as inflation. For example, read about Mansa Musa, who gave away so much gold in his pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1300s that he caused devaluation of money

This is why a UBI should be resource based, rather than money based.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#143

Post by shkkmo »

ttoinou wrote: post #122
shkkmo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then you did not understand the quote. Perhaps you picked a bad quote then. That quote pretty explicitly contradicts your claim.

They are to be given "sufficient to live in dignity," and it is appar­ently to be no business of the tax­payers if a recipient chooses none the less to live without dignity Dignity is subjective ofc. If you think otherwise I can understand how you can interpret the quote in another way :)

Since dignity is subjective, how can someone (the taxpayer) have any business having an opinion on whether someone else is living with dignity?

I fail to see how the subjectivity of dignity has any relation to your claim that "What does matter is where does the money come from."

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#144

Post by greggman »

dawnbreez wrote: post #2

I suspect that UBI, or something similar, will be necessary when automation/AI/whatever-you-like is good enough to replace "front-end", customer-facing jobs. At that point, it'll be hard to break into the job market without having a degree in something, and there'll be a sharp spike of unemployment in the lower class.

Vox recent uploaded a video about that topic arguing that might not happen

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TUmyygCMMGA

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#145

Post by ttoinou »

matt4077 wrote: post #140
ttoinou wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single proposal of UBI has included it replacing all other welfare benefits Only so that their cost calculations don't go crazy and seem sustainable. No one in the UBI side is even remotely interested in deleting previous welfare

Now you're just making stuff up to sustain your apparent hatred of everyone "in the UBI side". I think you're working from some wrong assumption who these UBI proponents are, and what their motivation is. Just to give you an idea, Wikipedia lists Elon Musk, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Bill Gross, and Tim Draper, among others. These aren't lazy know-nothings trying to get you to finance their lazy Tu…

I'm more concerned about people in governments, not rich millionaires. The only way it could work would be to create a UBI of 0 at the beginning and publicly say to increase it only every time a social welfare is deleted. I have huge doubts about the doability of this solution.

I don't have any issue with billionaires believing into UBI and sending cash to Kenyans. I don't know their true agenda, but they might gain some political influence / power when they'll try to implement this into western countries (and it will be with our money this time of course, not theirs).

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#146

Post by pyoung »

wavefunction wrote: post #20
eksu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have a hard and fast threashold but have it taper off on a progressive curve.

Sure, but my main point about it being a terrible implementation is that it's still means-tested requiring a bureaucracy that our current non UBI system features, which would be unnecessary and a cost-savings under a UBI scheme where every citizen receives $x each year.

One of the main arguments in favor of a negative income tax is that it would require less bureaucracy, not more. With the tax, you could just let the IRS handle it, whereas with UBI you would probably set up another agency, similar to social security, to handle it.

For what it is worth, from an economic perspective, the two ideas are basically identical. In a very hypothetically scenario: If someone gets a UBI of $500 a month, and then makes $500 in income with a 20% tax, than they would net $900 for the month. With an NIT, you would design it so that they get a tax credit of $500 per month, and then every $500 in income reduces their tax credit by 20%. So that same person would get $900 of the month.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#147

Post by ttoinou »

matt4077 wrote: post #80
ttoinou wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't even form a useful moral argument about it until we know its effects Of course we can. It's ok for people to donate their money and time for this kind of experiment. It's not ok for governments to tax citizens for a new social giveaway unless others social benefits are reduced accordingly (which will never happen).

It's completely ok to spend citizens' money on benefits both old and new, if that's what society decides. It might not always be smart, or sustainable. Just as it wouldn't be smart not to do it at all. But there's no first principle of morality to reduce to. And if there were, there'd be you'd still need agreement on it for it to be meaningful.

   if that's what society decides
So if 50 percent of people are ok with it, then "that's what society decides" so it's ok for everybody ?

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#148

Post by GuB-42 »

ythn wrote: post #112
GuB-42 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is just a special case of a negative income tax where numbers cancel out. The biggest advantage of UBI is its simplicity. You just get your UBI, done, much easier for people to understand and for the government to manage.

> You just get your UBI, done And what about the people that waste their UBI and can't afford to pay the rent or for food? The existing social safety nets can't go away, otherwise people who are irresponsible with their UBI will be left to starve, etc.

People who are irresponsible can be counselled or, in extreme cases, assigned a legal guardian. UBI doesn't change much in that case.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#149

Post by fareesh »

zacharycohn wrote: post #128
fareesh wrote: post #126

The results from this experiment will likely be used to influence government policy at some point or another. Whoever is funding this effort is probably going to do that in phase 2, once the results are sufficiently in their favor. Isn't this a convoluted implementation of the Wal-Mart model? Keep minimum wages low and influence policy to be as such, so that people use food stamps, which are mostly spent at Wal-Mart.…

It's very much the opposite of "Walmart wants to keep people on food stamps so they spend their food stamps at Walmart" because they're getting cash they can spend anywhere.

In theory yes, but if you had research saying that if people received universal basic income, your specific industry, maybe food, maybe alcohol, maybe cigarettes, would have a 10% increase in purchases, disproportionate to all the others, you'd think it was a good idea.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#150

Post by ttoinou »

shkkmo wrote: post #143
ttoinou wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are to be given "sufficient to live in dignity," and it is appar­ently to be no business of the tax­payers if a recipient chooses none the less to live without dignity Dignity is subjective ofc. If you think otherwise I can understand how you can interpret the quote in another way :)

Since dignity is subjective, how can someone (the taxpayer) have any business having an opinion on whether someone else is living with dignity? I fail to see how the subjectivity of dignity has any relation to your claim that "What does matter is where does the money come from."

They don't have business in it. But they might find how their taxes are spent immoral from their point of view.

UBI will never solve the economic problem of "we all should be living in dignity", ours values are subjective.

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