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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

#531

Post by WalterBright »

uoaei wrote: post #519
WalterBright wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A functioning economy is not built on pieces of paper. It's built on people working and producing value.

That's literally untrue. It's built on people spending money. If there is no trade, there is no economy. This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work is a very American concept with corollaries in only a couple other countries. This is not the norm and certainly not a healthy way to look at labor and the economy.

> It's built on people spending money

Money is a recent invention, and economies have flourished without it. Money facilitates trade, increases liquidity, and reduces friction in transactions.

> This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work

It is not a proxy for the value of a human life. It is a representation of the value of the labor of that human.

Americans are very generous in voluntarily giving to charities.

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

#532

Post by mehrdadn »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #384
moduspol wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have the financial literacy skills to manage it properly. I'm not trying to be unreasonably judgemental, and I don't mean things like bond rates or yield curves. Things like making sure you have enough dollars at the end of the month to make a rent payment. Making sure the check gets written so it actually happens. Keeping track of automated withdrawals and ensuring the number stays above zero with the tim…

I believe this has been debunked by previous UBI studies, Give Directly, etc.. The vast majority of poor people do just fine with money when given to them. The 1-2% who are addicted to substances or mentally ill will always need additional services, but why throw out the huge efficiency gains in just direct cash transfers to all because of the worry that 1-2% might waste it? The efficiency gains of a UBI vs. most mea…

> I believe this has been debunked by previous UBI studies, Give Directly, etc..

One shortcoming of the UBI studies I've heard about is that (naturally) they focus on settings that I don't have much confidence would necessarily translate to other settings like the current US. I can easily imagine the efficiency of UBI changing over time, let alone across locations, due to a plethora of factors. This isn't really a criticism of the studies (they're probably doing the best they can, and achieving good results on those is obviously a prerequisite), but rather of how much we can extrapolate from them and how much weight we can put in positive results currently. No matter how perfect their results, I'd totally expect people to be reasonably skeptical of their extrapolability (if that's a word) in the beginning.

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

#533

Post by misun78 »

nexuist wrote: post #522
sneak wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea here is that UBI replaces all of the other government welfare programs, no? What happens when someone spends all their UBI on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry? Should we keep food stamps around? Why can't we do that part (universal food stamps) by itself? I don't think the all-or-nothing approach of UBI makes a ton of sense. We can do things today like more free or subsidized foo…

> What happens when someone spends all their UBI on whiskey or oxy and consumes it all and is then hungry? What's the difference between that and the current reality? Food stamps can be sold and bought on the black market in exchange for drugs and alcohol; people who want whiskey will be able to get it. Whatever money is spent on enforcing the "sanctity" of food stamps could just go to more people directly. And this…

If that’s the core argument for UBI i.e. it’s far more efficient, why do such proposed initiatives come with significant tax increases on the population? Your analysis should theoretically support a net decrease in spending on welfare (hence lower taxes) or best case, no additional increase. You would have a lot broader support if UBI wasn’t tied to egregious tax proposals like a wealth tax.

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

#534

Post by sthomas1618 »

jm4 wrote: post #489
hotgoldminer wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI needs to be framed more as a dividend. It isn't the safety net. It is profit sharing.

What profit sharing when we run a deficit every year?

As long as the GDP grows faster then the deficit/interest, we’re good.

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

#535

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

jedberg wrote: post #182
cheeseomlit wrote: post #136

If the government starts giving me enough money each month to subsist while drastically raising taxes on my earnings from employment then I'll simply stop working. I would imagine most people would do the same.

Every experiment in UBI says otherwise. Direct cash grants usually lead people to do more work, because now they can do the work they enjoy. Also, look around groups of wealthy people. The ones who don't have to work anymore. Sure, some of them live a life of leisure, but many of them still work, because they get bored otherwise.

> "Also, look around groups of wealthy people. The ones who don't have to work anymore. Sure, some of them live a life of leisure, but many of them still work, because they get bored otherwise."

People who built their wealth, they keep working because it's in their personality makeup.

People who inherit wealth often wind up frittering it away.

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

#536

Post by WalterBright »

Frondo wrote: post #507
WalterBright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the government provided food, shelter, and video games, I expect quite a few people would see no purpose in working. Also the surfers and backpackers.

I wish you'd explain why this is a bad thing, and that you'd elaborate on it. Do you think half of the people in a UBI world stop working entirely and subsist entirely on their pittance? A third of the people? How few people would be allowed to go screw around instead of working, for this outcome to be okay?

The next time you see a surfer, give him part of your paycheck so he can play in the surf all day while you work to support him.

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

#537

Post by keeganpoppen »

sthomas1618 wrote: post #534
jm4 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What profit sharing when we run a deficit every year?

As long as the GDP grows faster then the deficit/interest, we’re good.

has that been happening? i guess so, in some sense, because the interest rate is "0"...

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

#538

Post by somebodythere »

RockIslandLine wrote: post #528
jariel wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"The UBI discussion really needs to start with 'where do we get $350B a month'?" Congressional appropriations create money. That's how fiat currency works. We're not on the Gold Standard, we don't need to trace who holds how many Pretty Yellow Rocks. The real question is "What is the inflationary impact of that spending?", and thus what level taxes have to be raised to destroy enough money to negate the inflation.

One interesting insight of MMT is that taxing $1,000 from the rich and giving $1,000 to the poor, is not actually necessarily "free", or net-non-inflationary. Because the poor on average spend more of the money that they have (on basic necessities like food and consumer goods), causing prices of those goods to rise which reflects in headline inflation. Whereas money in the hands of the rich tends to result in inflation of financial asset prices.

If a redistribution of this sort did cause a too-high level of consumer inflation, some additional counter-cyclical policy would be needed to counteract it. (The point I'm trying to make is that making sure that federal spending debits and credits cancel out to zero is neither necessary nor sufficient for good economic policy.)

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

#539

Post by uoaei »

WalterBright wrote: post #531
uoaei wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally untrue. It's built on people spending money. If there is no trade, there is no economy. This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work is a very American concept with corollaries in only a couple other countries. This is not the norm and certainly not a healthy way to look at labor and the economy.

> It's built on people spending money Money is a recent invention, and economies have flourished without it. Money facilitates trade, increases liquidity, and reduces friction in transactions. > This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work It is not a proxy for the value of a human life. It is a representation of the value of the labor of that human. Americans are very…

> It is a representation of the value of the labor of that human.

By withholding economic power until someone provides "labor" as defined by the state, and leaving them embedded in an economy which requires money to survive, you are directly tying the value of the human life to the value of their labor.

> giving to charities

Interesting, probably has a lot to do with the low taxes and high amount of disposable income.

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

#540

Post by RockIslandLine »

luckylion wrote: post #36
twic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you did it in some moderately isolated place, like Alaska? Alaska already has almost-universal not-quite-basic income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

How do you handle people wanting to move to Alaska? And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it? If you're not asking them to fund it, you're not testing UBI, you're testing "if an external entity provides money to a community without asking for anything in return, will that be cool?"

"And how do you get Alaskans on board for paying higher taxes to fund it?"

The APF is funded by severance taxes on oil & mining. I suspect that most people are entirely fine with that tax model.

The problem is that it only supports a small benefit.

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