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Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

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Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#491

Post by somethoughts »

fastball wrote: post #488
somethoughts wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just happened to be reading about how the current stimulus checks are being used this morning. Perhaps its a bit of click bait, but interesting to ponder nonetheless. It does seem like using UBI to play in the stock market would not be the intent of UBI and be hard to prevent. "Many Americans used part of their coronavirus stimulus check to trade stocks" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-...

Isn't buying stock a great way to help the economy recover?

I'm not making any morale or financial decision making judgements :) - I'm mostly pointing out that using your UBI to make stock market investments is not usually mentioned as a use case by UBI proponents.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#492

Post by osdiab »

throwaway_jobs wrote: post #5

I don’t think there is any good way to test UBI at any small scale, I think there needs to be a critical mass of people who can pay their housing and food costs how society and economic activity would be reshaped under such a system.

The GiveDirectly trial in progress now (been a few years) is the closest to what you're talking about - 20k people in 197 villages in Kenya getting a basic income covered fully for 12 years.

https://www.givedirectly.org/ubi-study/

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#493

Post by WalterBright »

nyhc99 wrote: post #411
WalterBright wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of work is to not have to anymore so you can follow your passions. So Bob needs to work so Fred can follow his passion for surfing and video games?

Bob needs to work because Bob wants to buy nicer things and lead a fuller life than sitting around playing video games in a dirty shack like Fred. Bob's work isn't subsidizing Fred's lifestyle unfairly (at least under Yang's proposal) because the UBI is paid for by a tax on consumption (the VAT)

I suggest you and Andrew Yang start giving Surfer Fred a cut of your paychecks every month. I bet the idea palls after you pass Fred hurrying to the beach with his surfboard as you drive to work.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#494

Post by cmendel »

jariel wrote: post #459
hadtodoit wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here but I really wish he wouldn't kowtow every time some wackjob group is screaming at him. He took a very moderate and reasonable stance on a lot of contentious topics during his campaign then rolled them back within a day of getting lit up by twitter trolls. I think he lost a large section of centrist voters by appearing spineless. He took the best policies from the left and right, but also seemed obligated t…

"every time some wackjob group is screaming at him" "He took a very moderate and reasonable stance " No, you don't get to label anyone who disagrees with a risky, existential upheaval as a 'whackjob'. UBI is a fairly extreme ideology, partly because of the social welfare application, but mostly because of the cost - which its proponents tend to ignore. We can argue a little bit over what 'free money' means for people…

>about 3 Trillion a year. What a coincidence, that is approximately how much we've spent on corporate welfare since the Corona Virus crisis started.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#495

Post by zozbot234 »

zaroth wrote: post #464
habitue wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it's often formulated as a negative income tax

Wouldn’t a negative income tax mean that the credit gets progressively larger as you earn more money? This would not be the desired effect. I think the desired effect is simply a refundable tax credit, and then you can adjust the existing progressive tax rates as needed.

No, it's an income tax which grows progressively with income plus a general refundable tax credit. So the overall tax liability goes negative for low incomes, and since the credit is "refundable" that involves actually getting money from the government. The general idea is sound, there's some difficulties involving ease of administration, e.g. paying the grant weekly or monthly rather than yearly.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#496

Post by solveit »

twblalock wrote: post #483
slg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because replacing all other forms of social welfare is completely impractical from a political standpoint in either the short or medium term. It would involve huge societal changes that would require most people to rethink how government works. That isn't something that would happen quickly. If you are a UBI proponent, you can either spend multiple decades fighting that fight before you see any progress or you compro…

If you aren't going to replace existing welfare systems, why not improve them, instead of adding yet another system to the mix?

Because in the long term you do plan to replace existing welfare systems.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#497

Post by flurdy »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #228
zelly wrote: post #157

UBI only makes sense in the science fiction world that Andrew Yang and other non-technical journalists think is somehow imminent. We still need people to make things. There are still guys hanging off the side of garbage trucks every day and people still pick fruits by hand. If no one does these things, you will starve and die. We cannot survive forever on financial engineering by bureaucrats and importing all our nec…

1) The "U" in "UBI" means that working another job does not stop you from receiving UBI, which means it may still make sense to do so if you want more income. UBI is supposed to be enough to live on, not enough to have everything you might want; there are at least preliminary results that show UBI doesn't stop people from working. 2) UBI will tend to mean less people willing to work low-paying unpleasant jobs, which…

You can already see this in countries with less extreme difference in the society's economy, e.g. Scandinavian countries.

They do not have UBI (yet) but have generous benefits for unemployment, sick pay, disabilities and pseudo minimum pay so that most people earn a decent income.

I am not an economist or sociologist but the economy still works, most people still work and it has lead to 2) and 3). There is less interest in the less desirable jobs so their salary has subsequently increased. And there is heavy investment in automation, in farms, in manufacturing, in shops, etc.

It is not perfect though. Maybe UBI will be even better.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#498

Post by osdiab »

foobar_ wrote: post #397
barrenko wrote: post #381

UBI is inevitable. Like software development, whoever makes it first will win and bring us closer to our Star Trekian furute.

Are you sure were are not heading towards The Expanse ;P Here's one counter argument for UBI. Who will do all the boring work needed for building a dam / apartment ? If we are honest about it, most of this boring, physically harmful and repetitive infrastructure work is only done by the working class that chooses to do it because the alternative is begging. It's because of the threat of extreme poverty and unemployme…

The boring work has to get paid better because companies can't exploit the fact that people have no other choice. I think the businesses based only on that exploitation and not on real innovation will probably suffer as a consequence.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#499

Post by solveit »

1propionyl wrote: post #467
jacobr1 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only keep the prices high with cartelization or true scarcity. Though removing subsidies (for things like public transport) can also raise prices. But our food supply is highly distributed. If one vendor charges higher-prices, others will take the opportunity to offer lower prices as long as they still can get the margin. We often debate various forms of market failure on this forum, but in the cases of funct…

This is only if you assume that a market saturated by advertisement is (properly) "functioning". While advertisers like to claim that they are merely improving distribution of information (bringing us closer to that mythical "perfect information" assumption about competitive markets), in practice they mostly do the opposite. That is, taking advantage of cognitive biases to sell people things they don't need, increasi…

Which is why Coca-Cola, which has decisively won the advertising war as much as a corporation can, can jack up prices willy-nilly and people plagued by cognitive biases don't switch to Pepsi.

Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income

#500

Post by totony »

zozbot234 wrote: post #314
Tiktaalik wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a big bureaucratic problem to give people several thousand dollars and then demand most of it back later. Most people don't notice income taxes since it comes out of their paycheque. It would genuinely be tough problem to educate people to not spend their basic income, or to design a system where it's clawed back through paycheques.

> or to design a system where it's clawed back through paycheques. It would be no different than e.g. the existing payroll tax, or income tax withholding. You'd just notice it as a reduction in your paycheck. And if your income is high enough, the UBI can simply be a tax credit.

I agree, payroll tax could just take the ubi into account and take more depending on ur expected income
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