51–60 of 444 posts
I find the concept of UBI and redistribution of wealth terrible to a free society. If wealth redistribution is what the rich and common both "want", why allow the wealthy to set the rules? It seems easier to string them all up by the neck and take it all so we have fair redistribution of wealth, why half ass it?
Setting aside ethical issues as you clearly don't care, it really isn't at all easy. It's not like people haven't tried.
Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during…
I haven’t read all of the literature on basic income, but my (admittedly semi-educated) impression is that one potential downside is that it fosters dependence on the state and is thus not anti-fragile. I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough f…
> what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs What if, instead of yammering about UBI, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, went out and started a company to make such technologies? The way to innovate is to innovate, not to try to milk money out of the government. The whole discussion about UBI misses this basic point: to make it easier for people to…
"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort…
I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does UBI even work? Won't it just lead to rampant inflation where the basic income is spread thin, eaten up almost entirely by the rising cost of goods? It seems like this in turn will require an even higher basic income, which exacerbates the problem. Isn't an analogous situation that of private loans for tuition? Tuitions have risen across the board to eat up all the new "free" money in the system. Won't UBI ma…
Every redistributive program that gives the poor more money increases demand for goods that poor people want - that's the whole point! It's no problem because supply can adjust to compensate - the exception to this is land, which is why a UBI ought to be funded with a land value tax. This is why Yang's UBI isn't very good, because it is sales tax funded (he's too much of a centrist to tackle land and capital, touchin…
UBI is just an excuse to do the real fix, and that's tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share. It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.
Good idea. How about a flat tax with no loopholes? Seems fair to me.
This is what causes the main issue with flat taxes. The problem is that at the end of the day, flat taxes are simply very inefficient in that they cause much more suffering for less revenue compared to progressive taxes.
"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort…
Sure, and that's why we need a mechanism to redistribute that wealth... like a UBI.
> a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay.
Yang proposes to exempt basic goods from the VAT, but more importantly, the central appeal of a VAT is that tax evasion is made more difficult!
A VAT naturally creates an audit trail of both parties in every transaction where value is added. If one party is incentivized to report, for example via a tax credit for the end consumer, then everyone else in the chain of crediting is incentivized to do so also.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main cause of inflation is the artificial restriction of supply on certain items from govt/business. Housing isn't expensive because of the cost of labor/materials, for example. It's expensive because the government literally says "you can't build that here". So the 100 old parcels of land where you want to live have 1000 people bidding for them. UBI maybe on paper would cause additional inflation in that scenari…
That sounds like a pet theory someone in the bay area comes up with. No economist I’ve read has any such opinion.
The total legal occupancy of SF is smaller than the number of people who want to live there. The city delays the issuance of permits for expanding occupancy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a pet theory someone in the bay area comes up with. No economist I’ve read has any such opinion.
Please explain to me how you view how reality works then. I'm not related to SF in any way btw. The total legal occupancy of SF is smaller than the number of people who want to live there. The city delays the issuance of permits for expanding occupancy.
The bay area is rich and the rents follow suit. They are still limited to the overall supply of money in the area. Obviously increasing supply of real estate would help the issue of course.
"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort…
this is very inflammatory and false. The VAT is not highly regressive. Money is power but poverty stricken people literally have zero money. How are gov't "programs" going to help? democrats love "programs" because it just gives them something to show off. it hardly solves any real problems. I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that…
> I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"
The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.