41–50 of 164 posts
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the difference is the Alaska pulled natural resources out of the ground. Basic Income is just wealth transfer.
Hipster way to say "stealing" ;)
If you think taxes are stealing, you don't have a problem with hipsters. You have a problem with governance of civilized society over the last hundred years (much longer for most of the world, since the signing of the 16th amendment in 1913 in the US).
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Hipster way to say "stealing" ;)
Absolutely not. There's no such thing as individually made profits that don't rely on a ton of collective factors. It s not stealing if it wasn't yours in the first place. It's ours.
You're confused. Depending on a factor does not mean that this factor owns what you produced. Example: To make ice-cream, you depend on cows. Cows do not own your profits.
I'm currently on an Amtrak train between Philadelphia and NYC. Especially in leafless winter, the sheer uglyness of this swath of in-disrepair America is almost shocking. Abandoned factories and houses. Lifeless downtowns. Trash along the tracks. Non-sweet graffiti. Paying people to do nothing when there is so much to be done seems crazy to me. It's not like we have figured out how to solve these problems with AI or…
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> you'll end up just injecting those trillions back into the economy. Right; that is, whichever economy those rich folks choose to call home. :)
Yeah ok. I call BS. Let's see all these millionaires move to Jersey (the island), or the Cayman Islands.
At a cost of $24 trillion? Ha! 250m[1] * $1000 * 8 * 12 = $24,000,000,000,000 1. http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat...
It's more than the expense of paying the money and whether people will continue to work. What needs to also be closely studied is: - Effect on crime - Effect on drug addiction - Effect on family outcomes - Effect on education opportunities I'd gladly pay more taxes if I could draw a direct link between UBI and a safer, happier society.
There was recently an article about a study on the prevalence of hookworm in is US south[0]. It seems to me that basic income could go a long way towards resolving this issue. One of the examples cited in the article involved a trailer park where they pumped sewage into open pools. If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system an…
What you're describing is a special case of the exact sort of inflation that critics are afraid of (more money for tenants across the board just means more money that rentiers can extract).
If the argument is "we could use tax money (via a stipend to citizens, and then extracted as rent) to implement a law that required a trailer park to provide a functioning sewage system", then the easiest and most efficient way to do that would be use tax money to provide a functioning sewage system.
I'm currently on an Amtrak train between Philadelphia and NYC. Especially in leafless winter, the sheer uglyness of this swath of in-disrepair America is almost shocking. Abandoned factories and houses. Lifeless downtowns. Trash along the tracks. Non-sweet graffiti. Paying people to do nothing when there is so much to be done seems crazy to me. It's not like we have figured out how to solve these problems with AI or…
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There's been studies that found the rich don't leave a place due to taxes. I.E. California has one of the biggest economies in the world... http://minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2011/02/documents/...
Makes sense, if you’re already wealthy then you pick where to live based on where you want to live. Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap, I’d imagine they’d rather solve that by making more money. Plus it’s not like US citizens have much choice, they have to pay the IRS no matter where you live in the world forever. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide haha.
Depends on the total amount of taxes paid. Some people dodge a couple billion every year by doing some clever tricks with their residence, citizenship and tax domicile.
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We're already doing that[1]. It's just that Quantitative Easing is being injected in the economy via banks. [1] I'm actually European, but the ECB and the Federal Reserve are behaving in similar fashion, in this case.
In a sense basic income would be an improvement over this in that the money would be going to everyone instead of primarily to the rich.
Quite the opposite.
The people who benefit the most from quantitative easing and inflation are people who are in debt. The rich tend to be net debtholders, not net debtors, so they're the ones primarily harmed by quantitative easing and an increase in the money supply.
EDIT: Fixed typo