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…
Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
661–670 of 746 posts
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
> UBI should cover government-regulated and government-provided essentials to living. The reason you don't do this is that the government is not better at making diapers and laundry detergent than Procter & Gamble nor better at manufacturing Tylenol than Johnson & Johnson nor better at growing tomatoes than local farmers. If you give people $300 then they can buy $300 worth of food. if you give people $300 worth of "…
this whole school choice and insurance choice neoliberal mantra is what has gotten us into this mess to begin with. The entire insurance sector is a huge waste of manpower and essentially just huge dump for the surplus of white collar university graduates that have nowhere to go. There's not a single person on the planet who derives benefits from navigating the trade-offs of byzantine insurance plans, and school choi…
With school choice, parents do incredible amounts of research, and can send their kids to excellent schools wherever they live, or however bad their local school boards are. And yes, ALL parents invest in their kids' success, your (not OP's but generic reader's) stereotypes against minorities aside. It's a relatively efficient market. It benefits from choice + competition, with just transparency regulations (choice schools should be subject to FERPA, PPRA, public records laws, allow parent visits, etc.), and possibly governance regulations (not-for-profit school choice works best).
Medical choice comes up when I'm hit by a car. I don't have time to do research then, and it's the definition of an inefficient market. I go with whoever shows up, and worry about the bankrupting bills and/or malpractice lawsuits later.
Dumping private insurance 100% makes sense. It's pure overhead. It's a place conservatives deny science and evidence.
Providing school choice 100% make sense too. It makes for better schools. It's a place liberals deny science and evidence.
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Competitive markets will probably be fine. There seems to be enough automation in manufacturing businesses driving the prices down. How do you deal with monopoly businesses? What prevents them from rising prices to pocket sudden excess of UBI money?
I guess that those monopolies would be split to ensure that the market is competitive.
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what if someone spends it all on whiskey or oxy? They're maximising their own preferences. If they were addicted to alcohol, sudden withdrawal can kill. One of the big reasons for UBI is the belief that an individual can better assess their own needs and wants, and procure them more cheaply than the government. This is partly a moral/philosphical stand - the tension is between giving individual freedom in the form…
I agree very strongly with you, but I don't think that's where the parent poster was going. Imagine we have a UBI, and we do all kinds of other smart things -- end the War on Drugs, establish Bismarck-style national healthcare[1], all that. Let's do a thought experiment. What happens when Alice blows all of her UBI on Lady Lee Vodka and Oxy. Nothing left for rent, food, the rest. Nobody else in the picture to help: n…
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competitive markets will probably be fine. There seems to be enough automation in manufacturing businesses driving the prices down. How do you deal with monopoly businesses? What prevents them from rising prices to pocket sudden excess of UBI money?
Abuse of a dominant position in a market is already forbidden in many countries. I guess that those monopolies would be split to ensure that the market is competitive.
Second, you still have to deal with aggregate monopolies - ie when one societal class has monopoly pricing power over another. You cannot break up these as they are already broken up.
The prime example is real estate and land market. Landlords have monopolistic pricing power over tenants. Price for rent is not governed by landlord's costs but by what the tenant can bear.
If you inject UBI to the economy then tenants can suddenly bear more and landlords can and will rise rent prices convincing others that their cost increased so it's justified.
It's not the inflation of produced goods which would kill VAT or similarly funded UBI but rent and monopoly good inflation which by definition can't be competed away.
Therefore before you can implement UBI you have to deal with monopolies first.
Hint1: Fix it by implementing monopoly based taxes such as Land Value Tax and natural resource auctions. You will raise more than you need and will also abolish labor taxes stiffling productivity.
Hint2: Georgists (economical movement after guy named Henry George in 19th century - who coined the term "Progressive") were discussing UBI ideas already pretty extensively and understood these implications. They realized the monopoly problem and made it central to their teaching. Only instead of UBI they called it a Citizen's Dividend.
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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). But then you're not addressing the majority of the problem, because insurance company profits are only a single digit percentage of premiums. And even the…
What's going wrong with the system of perfect competition with insurance companies?
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#667I 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.
We are currently with unemployment doing a great UBI experiment. Lots of people are earning more with unemployment than before. The benefits are only a year, but I'm willing to bet these people take their time finding work if it means a pay cut. California is a perfect place to test these sorts of public welfare and social safety net initiatives. It's the 5th largest economy in the world, and medi-Cal already covers…
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#668UBI 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…
My perspective.
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
> provide coverage for $5000/year with a $10,000 deductible, instead of $10,000/year with no deductible. that's the wrong way to think about it. The above makes an implicit assumption that by doing this you "save" $5000/yr because the insurance company is "more efficient". That's wrong - you actually cost $5000 (this being the "profit" the insurance company makes if you _didn't_ need the medical treatment that year).…
> Under the gov't version, if you were healthy, you're "free". You only cost when you actually need the medical treatment. Government insurance is still insurance. It isn't that each individual costs the government $10,000, it's that most cost them nothing and one in ten gets cancer and costs $100,000. Insurance is the same. The large majority of the money isn't going to the insurance company, it's going to healthcar…
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...
In the UK the NHS (2016) per capita cost was $4,192 (PPP) and in the US the per capita cost was $9,892 (PPP). The OECD life expectancy average for the same year in the UK was 81.2 in the US it was 78.6. Comparable healthcare outcomes for vastly different costs.
I don't know how the politics of healthcare and lobbying differ between the UK and the US but whatever they are the numbers show that Universal healthcare is better for everyone in spite of your (or really anyone's) arguments against it.
Re: Jack Dorsey is giving Andrew Yang $5M to build the case for a basic income
#670When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!