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A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

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Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#101

Post by colomon »

chrishacken wrote: post #52
mattmanser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone's being paid $1000 per month more, you'd expect all jobs to pay less, and the profits from companies used to pay for it.

So then essentially everyone would make the same they are now; thus resulting in little to no-change. When it's all said and done, having a $1000/m basic income would be little different than increasing the minimum wage by the same amount.

That's not even close to true, because increasing the minimum wage 1) only affects people who have jobs 2) will cause some of those people to lose their jobs. $1000/m basic income is a vastly better solution because everyone at the bottom will be helped.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#102

Post by LyndsySimon »

oneplane wrote: post #73
bmcusick wrote: post #31

Ignoring whether the study's assumptions are accurate, one problem with this sort of rhetoric is that "the US economy" isn't a political constituency. There's just people, and their claims on the economy in terms of personal wealth and income. It's sort of like when you say "NAFTA grows the US economy but $1 trillion" and the guy who's job was outsourced to Mexico ask "Okay, but how does that help me make rent or buy…

Minimum wage isn't just "you have to pay workers enough to survive", it's also "you have to acknowledge that workers are worth amount X".

Alternatively, it's "you cannot hire employees who are less valuable to you than this arbitrary threshold."

If someone wants to work for $1 / hour and someone else wants to hire them for $1 / hour... what right does a third party have to prevent them from doing business with each other?

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#103

Post by blunte »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #20

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.

The governments routinely implement plans without reasonable research to back up their claims, so why not try this?

There have been some studies, and from my recollection the takeaway is that most people, once their basic needs are met, strive to actually do something "useful". People on average do not become drug-addled sloths.

For many reasons it is difficult to do a comprehensive, long term study on this idea. The first, of course, is the cost. People or organizations with the money to spend on research tend to be motivated by profit, and thus far we've been taught (incorrectly, I would argue) that giving things away doesn't result in having more for yourself.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#104

Post by chimeracoder »

lotu wrote: post #68
chimeracoder wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 and the trailer park, in turn, could charge it's renters more and put in the system. 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 a…

> 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. That's assuming the only objective was to fix trailor park sewage, when realistically there are thousands or maybe t…

> The government simply doesn't have the resources and logistical capabilities, to identify and address each need in turn.

We already made the assumption that they do, with the original claim " 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".

Without that requirement, you're taking on the risk that the rentiers will extract the additional income and make no changes to the sewage system. That assumes a few things:

(1) The trailer park owners don't currently have the money to building a sewage system

(2) The lack of money is the only reason that the owners aren't building a sewage system

(3) The owners don't have other goals that they prioritize higher than providing a sewage system to tenants

(4) The amount that the rentiers would be able to extract from the stipend would be enough to cover a sewage system

I'm generally pretty sympathetic to the premise that allowing rational actors to choose how to spend their limited resources tends to produce results that ~everyone agrees are better than top-down planned efforts. But when you're talking about a situation in which the negotiating leverage of the two parties is so drastically imbalanced, and a problem which has such wide-reaching externalities as this one does, that's a really big leap of faith to take. Compare that to the alternative, where we've identified a concrete problem that we're looking to solve, and we use a normal process for budgeting and directing funds towards a targeted goal.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#105

Post by xena »

chrishacken wrote: post #52
mattmanser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone's being paid $1000 per month more, you'd expect all jobs to pay less, and the profits from companies used to pay for it.

So then essentially everyone would make the same they are now; thus resulting in little to no-change. When it's all said and done, having a $1000/m basic income would be little different than increasing the minimum wage by the same amount.

Except employers pay less, which would help make them stop complaining about wages costing too much.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#106

Post by Frondo »

psadri wrote: post #96
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to point to the single concept that has to be re-examined to understand basic income it is this one: "Paying people to do **nothing** when there is **so much** to be done seems crazy to me." It speaks to the foundation question of value for capital that is pounded into our heads (in the US at least) from birth that if you want to make it you need to get a job that pays well. And it forces us to ask the ve…

Money represents value created. If you simply hand out money, say in the form of BI, without it being in exchange for value created, you are simply deflating the value of money. This will cause inflation. And you'll end up back where yo started - the recipients of BI have more money but its buying power has been reduced, canceling each other out. I'm with the parent comment. There is so much work to be done in this w…

I find this argument unconvincing not just because the evidence doesn't support it (and it doesn't), but because this claim is the same one made whenever anyone proposes anything to put more money in the hands of the poors.

Every time, it's the exact same argument, "if you give the poors more, everything will cost more, and they'll be right back where they started." And, well, we didn't always look like this. Obviously it's possible for there to be a different equilibrium in society, one with less disparity. So something has changed.

Seems like there should be ways to change it back, even to the disparity we had (overall, I know life was horrible for PoC) in post-WWII America. That'd be a step up from this.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#107

Post by 013a »

lucozade wrote: post #72
cmiles74 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just don't get the logic. If, today, the trailer park owner is not required to provide adequate sanitation (which strikes me as heinous btw), why would UBI change that? Either the state couldn't care less or their are laws that are being flouted. Either way, it's not clear why a change in distribution methodology would change either. The bit of your argument that I completely agree would occur is that the trailer p…

I agree. UBI is such a fascinating idea, but much like communism it feels like an extreme that will never work in practice.

Everyone gets an extra $1000/month. Great. That's extra money flowing into an economy which absolutely affects supply/demand for the things everyone needs (food, shelter). Food might be fine because there's a lot of competition, but landlords? Rental prices are almost completely set by market demand, not cost of service.

Its possible UBI could help sidestep this by allowing more people to purchase homes, but housing supply is constrained in many urban areas today; adding more capital to that market will increase prices. Granted, this isn't as bad a thing as money entering the renter markets, because that money just goes to build more developments and eat up more land that could be owned by people to build equity instead of corporations. But its still something to keep in mind.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#108

Post by LyndsySimon »

chimeracoder wrote: post #49
jrs95 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 debt holders , not net debtors, so they're the ones primarily harmed by quantitative easing and an increase in the money supply. EDIT : Fi…

> The right tend to be net debtholders, not net debtors

Do you have a source for this?

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#110

Post by jm__87 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #49
jrs95 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 debt holders , not net debtors, so they're the ones primarily harmed by quantitative easing and an increase in the money supply. EDIT : Fi…

So net debtors benefit if there is inflation before they have to make payments. The more inflation there is before you make payments, the greater the benefit to the debtor. As inflation naturally occurs over time, this benefit is less pronounced for debt where the principal repayments are amortized - the most common type of debt regular Americans have (e.g. car loans and mortgages). The US has averaged about 2% inflation over the past 10 years which is not very substantial.

On the contrary, central banks buy financial assets with the money they print from QE. This directly benefits investors who hold those assets as the central bank buying increases the prices of those assets.

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