601–610 of 746 posts
UBI is meant to be a gambit to distract us from seeing that the playing field is so heavily tilted against everyone but the very rich and fortunate. the rich buy this diversion by periodically sliding some pennies down to the rest of us on the other end, while patting themselves on the back for doing such a magnanimous thing. what we really need to do is bring transparency and fairness to labor markets, and squeeze r…
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…
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.
Now give all these poor people a chance to prove that they're not like you, and many will.
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There would still be markets and competition. There would be some baseline price increase when people stop being exploited. At a certain point equilibrium will be met and someone will come along with cheaper toilet paper. The difference will be there are more consumers in a safe position to make purchasing decisions.
You don't get it. The cost of labor would rise. You would have to pay paper factory workers more when they could just not work at all. The truck driver also needs to get paid more. The shelf stocker also needs to get paid more. The security guard needs to get paid more. Eventually you get $100 toilet rolls. > At a certain point equilibrium will be met and someone will come along with cheaper toilet paper. Yes, from o…
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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.
People are trying to express this idea that the "people will be lazy and content themselves with a meager UBI" is not an accurate one, and nearly every reply you've made has been a nonsequitor about how we should presumably be resentful at paying surfers to surf.
UBI should cover government-regulated and government-provided essentials to living. Ex.: * Government housing: $500 * Government basic food package - daily (1500kcal): $300 * x kJ electricity, x m3 water, x m3 gas, x bps internet connection: $500 * Clothing, hygiene, cleaning supplies: $50 * Universal healthcare: free (and free condoms) * Free education (from abc to PHD) This is not a comprehensive list, or even the…
I tend to agree - it should be Universal Basic Stuff (UBS). Particularly if housing is in a low cost of living area, then everything should get cheaper through automation. High End Manufactured housing [1], MOOCs, Telemedicine, Consumer Products will all get cheaper. Entrepreneurs in SV can create robots to automate the production of these things so even more UBS categories can be added. UBS assurances will avoid the…
UBI should cover government-regulated and government-provided essentials to living. Ex.: * Government housing: $500 * Government basic food package - daily (1500kcal): $300 * x kJ electricity, x m3 water, x m3 gas, x bps internet connection: $500 * Clothing, hygiene, cleaning supplies: $50 * Universal healthcare: free (and free condoms) * Free education (from abc to PHD) This is not a comprehensive list, or even the…
I tend to agree - it should be Universal Basic Stuff (UBS). Particularly if housing is in a low cost of living area, then everything should get cheaper through automation. High End Manufactured housing [1], MOOCs, Telemedicine, Consumer Products will all get cheaper. Entrepreneurs in SV can create robots to automate the production of these things so even more UBS categories can be added. UBS assurances will avoid the…
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Even universal has winners and losers. How do you deal with different cost of livings between Bay Area and Mississippi? If the UBI is not adjusted and covers living expenses in cheap areas but not expensive areas, then people might decide to live cheaply without a job. That risks creating slums. If it's adjusted to locality, then areas will grow and dwindle based on accuracy of those adjustment tables. Which would tu…
If you’re treating people wanting to live cheaply without a job as a negative situation that should be avoided, then I don’t think you’re in a mindset to be evaluating UBI specifics correctly. You should just be wholesale against it. The whole point is to free people from wage slavery. You’re worried that it will work! On an even broader level though, location caused cost of living differences being taken in to accou…
It's one extreme that could worsen class divide. The other extreme is making UBI too comfortable, which you highlight. It's a balance, and I don't know how to do it across different COL.
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you've cleverly argued in a way to make hidden the major point i wanted to make - which is that insurance companies making a profit is a loss to the payer. I'm purely talking about the insurance system, and not the medical provider system (hospitals/doctors etc). > The large majority of the money isn't going to the insurance company, it's going to healthcare providers. Any money going into insurance as profit is a lo…
It's really even worse than that. The amount of money spent on medical billing is just obscene. It isn't "profit" for anyone, but it's vast inefficiency.
It really is obscene and totally a waste, and it doesn't have to be this way. The notion that the free market does things more efficiently isn't always true, particularly in captive-market situations like healthcare, particularly in purely middleman industries like insurance which are actually incentivized to poorly allocate money to the alleged business purpose (covering medical services for people) because it increases their own profit margins.