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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

#731
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would people making individual purchasing decisions tend to coincide with prices going down for essential goods like food and clothing, but not for healthcare?

Because the largest chunk of healthcare delivery expenditures is for chronic and severe or emergency procedures for which people have no ability to shop around for due to the time sensitivity of the issue, or because the complexity and presentation of their health issue is not understood enough to put any price on. For example, you go into the hospital for abdominal pain, but it turns out that you need a massive orth…

> Routine doctor's office visits to remove a wart from your foot, or diagnose a sore throat, which you can shop around for, are not where the high costs comes from.

Yet those do have insanely high costs as well, as compared to the rest of the economy. We live in an economy where medicine tends to get more expensive, rather than less, i.e: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/diabetes/u-s-insulin-costs-pa....

Doesn't it make sense to figure out why the basics are getting more expensive, before suggesting we engage in a national price-fixing experiment?

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

#732

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.

What about work nobody enjoys doing? Who will do this work?

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

#733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same old tired argument again and again. "European countries have lower costs, therefore socialism is better than capitalism." There are two problems with it. First, the US system is completely broken. It isn't a free market system, it's a worst of both worlds compromised hellscape. It's like comparing the USSR to Colombian druglords as evidence that communism is a great system. The USSR isn't great, Colo…

Ultimately the problem with a private healthcare system is there is no incentive to provide appropriate affordable healthcare and every incentive to divide, marginalize, and monopolize markets in the aim of driving down competition and driving up profits. Now that the US healthcare industry has grown so rich and powerful it can lobby and win against any serious political efforts to either increase market competition…

Yet there are no aspects of public healthcare that are any more efficient. It could be largely worse because people have no options and are compelled to pay whatever the government stipulates for whatever coverage they end up with. There is no more incentive to lower prices at the doctor or hospital than there is with private insurance.

Personally I think insurance should be done away with and you should pay strictly regulated costs directly to the doctor. However that's just another pipe dream. There is no single solution to healthcare.

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

#734
post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What about work nobody enjoys doing? Who will do this work?

Immigrants who don’t qualify for UBI.

That’s why it’s important we don’t accidentally create a two class system with UBI.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here we go again. People are not always in a position to leave a job. People are living paycheck to paycheck and not able to get other jobs. You're being disingenuous.

"Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery Living paycheck-to-paycheck or hand-to-mouth like most humans lived for most of human history does not make one a slave. To state otherwise is to compare mere existence to slavery. Unless someone is an actua…

Literalism does nothing here because the concept of wage-slavery is more like the concept of serfdom than slavery. But language is malleable over time and it's commonly understood what it means, especially to people familiar with the struggle to survive in the modern economy.

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

#736
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal…

But it wouldn’t be $2000 per worker, as you’d have to get enough tax money to pay the people who aren’t working that $2000. If I make $6000 a month and you make $0 a month, and then we both get $2000 a month from my taxes, how can my take home pay remain $6000?

You would get an increase of $2000 in the form of UBI, but increase in taxes of $2000, so your net would remain the same. It's assumed tha UBI would replace current unemployment benefits. Of course UBI can be expensive if the amount is too large.

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, some monopolies are monopolies forever - network and utility monopolies. Could you expand on this a bit more? Network and utility companies can clearly be broken up. The actual infra can be owned by municipalities. > Price for rent is not governed by landlord's costs but by what the tenant can bear. Citation needed. There is competition amongst landlords as long as housing supply is not severely limited. If…

You can have competition among landlords but you can't provide the key ingredient of which there is fixed supply - land. No more land + people moving in = price only goes up. > The flat I just started renting a few months ago was priced on supply-and-demand, not on how much I earn (otherwise the landlord did a pretty terrible job of gouging me because relative to my income I got a good deal). A single example doesn't…

The nice thing about land is that modern technology allows you to stick more than one person on a piece of it.

The land supply is finite. Housing supply is not.

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

#738
post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what “outlier” means. If every country attempted to implement Singapore’s system, and only Singapore succeeded, then you would be correct that it is an outlier. Instead, other nations settled for different systems and are generally satisfied. There lacks a political will to move out of the local optima. Singapore’s path to its current system wasn’t by accident. It tried an NHS style system, which failed du…

So then what are the friction points of the Singaporean healthcare model that prevents other countries from adopting it? If it were a Bill up for a vote by politicians in the US then what issues would they have with it? Also comparing healthcare costs of Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland with the UK from the links I posted earlier clearly shows that socialised healthcare is more efficient. The per capita cost in…

> So then what are the friction points of the Singaporean healthcare model that prevents other countries from adopting it?

The friction points aren't necessarily with the model itself, the friction is strictly political will. Democracy doesn't always seek out the most objectively superior solution, it simply seeks out the solution that the people want. Strict gun control might be a "superior policy", but that doesn't mean that people in America want that. Similarly, people in Denmark don't really want to change their system, even if there exists a superior system in Singapore.

In contrast, the US is in a unique position in that there is growing political will to change the status quo system, and the Singapore model happens to be one of the few that enjoys bipartisan approval. Also uniquely, the fully socialized single-payer system couldn't even get majority support among the Democratic Party. Indeed, the current nominee was the guy who explicitly campaigned on "the public option" rather than a strictly socialized system.

> If it were a Bill up for a vote by politicians in the US then what issues would they have with it?

The GOP's proposed Fair Care Act[1] happens to make one key change that moves the US closer to parity with Singapore: namely easing the rule that requires one to enroll in a high-deductible plan in order to qualify for an HSA — so that even those on low deductible plans may take advantage of the HSA. The American HSA is similar to the Singaporean Medisave system, which is a pre-tax savings account for healthcare spending only, where the savings are invested in funds. With American HSA's, they are private custodial mutual funds. With Singapore's Medisave, the fund is the Singapore sovereign wealth fund.

The Fair Care Act may get buy-in from the Left if it includes universal catastrophic coverage (analogous to Singapore's Medishield), and also making HSA contributions compulsory, just like Singapore.

Indiana's government offers its employees what is widely considered to be superior health insurance[2], in which the state deposits funds into HSA's equal to the annual deductible. This is very similar to Singapore's Medisave + Medishield system.

Another proposal that enjoys generally bipartisan approval: Medicare Advantage For All. Medicare Part C, or Medicare Advantage, is the part of America's Medicare system that is working best. Medicare Advantage plans have lower costs, broader benefits, and better health outcomes than traditional, single-payer Medicare. Today, almost 40% of Medicare enrollees are in a Medicare Advantage plan, as opposed to traditional "single-payer" Medicare[3].

So the political will is there, and the empirical results are proven by one of the US's very own states (run by the GOP, no less).

> Also comparing healthcare costs of Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland with the UK from the links I posted earlier clearly shows that socialised healthcare is more efficient.

> The per capita cost in Germany ia 32% higher than the UK, Netherlands it is 28% higher, and in Switzerland it is a whopping 88% higher compared to the UK.\

> Even France and Greece which are more socialist than the UK and both also have national insurance schemes are much better value than their private counterparts.

"Cheaper" != "More efficient". While you're right that the nations that provide "socialized healthcare" can have lower costs per capita — Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore all enjoy higher average life expectancies than Denmark, UK, and Greece. Switzerland & Singapore both enjoy higher average life expectancies than Denmark, UK, Greece, and also France. The goal of these systems is to get the most bang for our buck, not strictly to just spend the least.

This is why Singapore's system shines — it enjoys the lowest per capita spending while enjoying the best health outcomes.

I'll close by saying that Singapore tried the UK's system[4] (listen at 12:35). The US also has a UK-like single-provider healthcare system, the VA — and that's been an abject failure[5]. The fact that this failure was reproduced twice, independently, suggests that UK's success might be the "outlier" (to use your framing). In contrast, we are yet to see a failed attempt at replicating Singapore's system, and thus cannot yet conclude that it is some sort of an anomaly.

[1] https://www.niskanencenter.org/can-the-fair-care-act-deliver...

[2] https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/466289-why-isnt-mayor...

[3] https://freopp.org/medicare-advantage-a-platform-for-afforda...

[4] https://soundcloud.com/reuters/the-exchange-too-small-to-fai...

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/28/va-veterans-affairs-history-...

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

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct from yangs site ( https://www.yang2020.com/policies/value-added-tax/ ) > This VAT would vary based on the good to which it's applied, with staples having a lower rate or being excluded, and luxury goods having a higher rate. That's the beauty of a VAT. It can be tuned to reach the desired result.

> That's the beauty of a VAT. It can be tuned to reach the desired result. But who will do the tuning? My guess, as a former corporate tax lawyer, is that it would be done by industry lobbyists, seeking preferential treatment for their clients' products.

This sounds like more of a criticism against our representative democracy than it does against UBI or a VAT.

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

#740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be Bob.

Bob is somebody who enjoys his job, or creating value, or material things, more than surfing and playing video games. The thought is that we have enough Bobs in the world now, and enough technology and infrastructure, that allowing the Bobs to be Bobs and the Freds to be Freds will still work out fine. (And I agree.)

> somebody who enjoys his job, or creating value, or material things, more than surfing and playing video games

AKA: responsibility

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