111–120 of 164 posts
And it would cost 3.6 Trillion (300M adults x 12k), so where does that come from? I'm all for basic income, but id love to see a way this to actually be funded. Ideally from the corporations that are gaming the tax laws. Or is it reducing social security / medicare / other welfare etc?
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Following that maybe-pessimistic-maybe-realistic vein a bit further, that might not be such a bad thing. Crime is a huge problem in poor communities, dealing with it is hideously expensive to taxpayers, and one of the major motivators behind it is economic stress. Wouldn't it be sweet if people who are currently motivated to commit crimes were instead motivated to do nothing?
Crime is caused more by envy for what others have and a failure to understand the role of work in getting what you want. Basic income will only FEED these two problems.
Sure, some crime is due to just people being too lazy to get a job, but it's not a universal cause.
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…
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…
"And some projects aimed at reducing poaching by alleviating poverty have backfired, said Duffy. For example, one program in Ghana was intended to decrease poaching by paying a premium on crops, on the theory that hunter-poachers would focus instead on farming. They did for a period, but then used the money they’d earned to buy more sophisticated weapons that they used to shoot more lucrative species [1]."
Beyond that, everyone seems to ignore the inflationary nature of BI. What will happen to the economy in real, not nominal, terms?
[1] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/22/zambia-poach...
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You need more than BI and warm bodies to improve your crumbling city infrastructure. There's a whole lot of skillsets that go into infrastructure development, including some type of organizational structure.
There are. It's very hard to acquire those skill sets if you need to choose between having enough money to pay the bills, and spending time and money on acquiring those skills. Or alternatively, it's a lot easier to attract people with those skills into your community if you have the money to pay them for their skills. My point remains, I think you'd see people in blighted areas sink a lot more of their resources int…
Most companies don't have incentives to care about the communities their employees are from, or the skills to help. It's not deemed productive or efficient in current corporate interests to use corporate wealth to ensure their employees have healthy home lives in healthy communities. (Shareholders, C-Suite, board members most companies certainly care enough about their home lives/communities right now, but outside of the investor class there's very little financial empathy and little incentive to have empathy because that stuff doesn't necessarily show up on a quarterly report.)
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You need more than BI and warm bodies to improve your crumbling city infrastructure. There's a whole lot of skillsets that go into infrastructure development, including some type of organizational structure.
There are. It's very hard to acquire those skill sets if you need to choose between having enough money to pay the bills, and spending time and money on acquiring those skills. Or alternatively, it's a lot easier to attract people with those skills into your community if you have the money to pay them for their skills. My point remains, I think you'd see people in blighted areas sink a lot more of their resources int…
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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?
If people had the right not to work, you'd have a more liquid labor market. If people's basic necessities were met before needing to work, you'd have a more liquid labor market.
Until that day, minimum wage are basic hacks to try to present some of those labor externalities as a basic deserved negotiating position.
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> 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% infla…
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".
Someone's wage has an absolute ceiling at the level of "this is how much value I produce per hour". No one will hire you for more than that. And currently, there are some people who cannot be hired at minimum wage.
A UBI (and national health insurance) would help a lot with wages though. With less fear of losing their job, employees would have more bargaining power. They'd also have more resources to spend on commuting or time off work for interviews. By expanding the number of potential employers a person has access to, you indirectly allow them to bargain for higher wages, even without explicitly setting a minimum wage.
"$1,000 paid monthly ... by increasing the federal debt would grow the economy." Borrowing money from my credit card does not increase my annual salary.
No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP. If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy. If you have the same people, with the same wealth, buying and selling stuff to each other, that grows the economy. If you have the same people buying and selling stuff faster, they may still retain the same wealth but the economy will grow eve…
At the expense of future growth. All of the money borrowed must eventually be paid back, which reduces growth by reducing that same money supply (increasing taxes to pay for it reduces the money supply similarly). It only makes sense to borrow when the future rate of return is greater than the interest rate of the debt, i.e. it'll take more than 8 years to see any return on investment from UBI.
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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…
Your comment hints that the government (federal or state) will be the employer and the work will involve public works of some kind. So far, neither have been interested in actually doing these kinds of projects despite the need. Maintaining such project is also a concern: in an area where the income of the population is tied directly to public works projects, what happens when these projects come to an end and the population returns to unemployment?
The current regime explicitly excludes those who do not have income. Whenever we talk about helping people in poverty in the US, we inevitably circle back to tax breaks. If these people have little or no income to begin with, in what way will tax breaks help? If so many decisions are going to be made based on "the market deciding", how will they participate without enough income? If we look at broadband access in these areas, we'll see vendors complaining that there's no point in rolling out service if no one can afford it.
Basic income will allow these people to participate in the market and, hopefully, in their local economy. They will decided what projects deserve funding based on the way they spend their money.