311–320 of 1001 posts
UBI isn't free money. It's working for the government. You better do as the government tells you, or you're not getting your UBI payment this month. This can easily be abused.
This is pretty much the only counter argument you need to dismiss the whole concept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government... The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter. Indeed, the arguments that we should do otherwise are to the benefit of the rich, because the proposed cutoff invariably comes somewhere in the middle income r…
> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. Seems even easier to increase the standard tax deduction we already have and are familiar with. Then you can increase tax rates to make sure those evil rich people don't see any benefit.
The EITC does, but it has a cutoff with the aforementioned problems, and if it didn't (and the amount was high enough to replace the other programs) it would be hard to distinguish from a UBI, outside of the easily-gamed income requirement which does little more in practice than discriminate against honest homemakers who don't get to claim it.
There are a lot of people here dissenting on the idea of UBI on the premise that they find meaning in work, and to take the incentive to work away will lead others (themselves included) not to have meaning in life. I’ve taken a year off of work to start a business that failed and spent the past few months hanging out with my kids. At first, my stress levels were high because daycares were shut down and I was panickin…
A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…
I don't see how this would really work. A carbon tax in an ideal situation is just a consumption tax. This means that it's the consumer that pays it. Rich people don't eat more food nor do they drive dozens of cars at once. If we want this carbon tax to offset our greenhouse emissions then that means it will necessarily disproportionately impact poor people. And then you want to turn around and pay that money back to…
A UBI paid for with a carbon tax would both save us from the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it. Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis... They did a followup 5 years later: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis... It seems like…
I don't see how this would really work. A carbon tax in an ideal situation is just a consumption tax. This means that it's the consumer that pays it. Rich people don't eat more food nor do they drive dozens of cars at once. If we want this carbon tax to offset our greenhouse emissions then that means it will necessarily disproportionately impact poor people. And then you want to turn around and pay that money back to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most likely implementation in the existing US federal government is a negative income tax. > I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. You aren't alone, so your $1200 would not go as far in that future as it does now. There would be some inflation (perhaps only localized increased costs to some industries), but I'd suspect that people working less would be a featu…
“There would be some inflation” Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount. “UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“ Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessi…
That's great, but if a significant number of people feel that way, then there is a noticeable loss of productivity in the economy as say 35% of people are not producing anything of economic value. That impacts tax revenue. It probably also means there is work not getting done, like the stuff nobody wants to do.
I am opposed to UBI. I want smart people to have more money. I want less smart people to have less money, provided they have enough to live on. A smart person might invest in books, study and self improvement. Then those industries that create these will be stimulated. That is what you want. Less smart people might spend their money on lottery tickets, junk food, booze etc. Those industries would be stimulated by UBI…
No SWE makes as much as top sports players, even though the first group would be, on average, smarter than the latter. Is that unfair?
UBI gets rid of a lot of such gatekeeping, and aims to give people enough to live off. What you do with your time is then up to you, and who knows what the net effect would be. Maybe your local janitor finally gets some spare time and money to reduce work hours, and start a hit podcast. Maybe they spend it all merely supporting their extended family. Maybe they blow it all on drugs. Are we really in a position to dictate how people live their life? I'd rather everyone gets a base level of opportunity in life, and then they can further lift themselves upwards, should they choose to.
Furthermore, I find it interesting how a lot of the UBI studies concerned substantially lower amounts than the amounts currently discussed in American politics. I hear amounts usually ranging from Yang's US$1000 as a "starting point" to $2000 monthly, but there are many people throwing even higher numbers out there.
There's also a decent amount of straight up lies, mistruths, and misrepresentations of UBI and previous experiments. Articles about Mincome, the Canadian experiment, like to say or imply that it paid out a substantial amount (I've seen several people claiming that it was $16,000 of today's CAD a year for a single individual), but the reality is that it was far lower. From a paper about Mincome, the calculation for how much Mincome you got was 60% of Canada's low income cutoff [0], which was $3386 in 1975 CAD for a single person living alone and $4907 in 1975 CAD for a family of two. The official Bank of Canada CAD CPI inflation calculator puts that at 16130 of today's CAD (12092 USD) and 23375 of today's CAD (17523 USD). I suspect this is where the erroneous $16k figure comes from. Doing the correct calculation, using the Canadian CPI inflation calculator and multiplying by 0.6 would give 7255 USD per year for a single person and $10513 USD per year for a family of 2.
That, of course, completely changes the game. Nobody's going to retire on $600 a month in America, or $875/mo for 2 people. But take the lowest of the UBI proposals of 1k/person/mo - aka give a young couple 24 grand a year, guaranteed by the federal government in perpetuity - and I could definitely see them dropping out of the workforce. I just took a look and found plenty of entire houses for rent in the Midwest for $800/mo or even less. That leaves 1200 a month for food, transportation, and entertainment in a low COL state. You could totally make that work (ha ha.)
You increase that UBI even further, to what some congresspeople proposed recently of $2000/mo, and that young couple is now making $48,000.00 a year sitting on their couch. Assuming that's tax free, as most UBI proposals are, now your average couple is now making more than the median US household income. Now, you don't even have to live in flyover country; that's enough to live on for two people in nearly all of the country, minus a few cities. Keep in mind that the costs of working also evaporate when you don't work: commute, time to cook and find deals, flexibility in booking things etc. In the median household, everyone could quit their jobs and enjoy an _increased_ standard of living.
People like to dismiss the UBI attack of "people won't work" by citing Mincome and a slew of other experiments from the Alaskan Permanent Fund of $1200/yr to Iran's $40/mo. But giving $1000 - $2000 a month, permanently, over an entire society? The $24-48k/yr that a couple would receive would blow away the $10k that they would have gotten in Mincome.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170126003728/http://public.eco...
[1] https://books.google.ca/books?id=L4lBLrMaNkIC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA...
[2] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculat...
I definitely need to research this topic more, but after reading everyone's arguments for and against UBI, I think maybe the right solution is somewhere right in the middle. Instead of giving everyone $X,000 a month, what if there was some sort of secondary currency or credits that all Americans receive (call them Patriot bucks or whatever) that could be used for necessities like food, public transportation, etc. I d…
Shadow currencies never work. If doesn’t work for food stamps and it doesn’t work for WoW gold. There’s no reason to tell people what to spend their money on. Generally, folks are better at determining how to spend money for themselves.
I'm sure there are issues with welfare coupons, but being able to go into a grocery store and buy items you need without having to apply for anything has to be an improvement. Like I said though I need to research more so I could be wrong.
Kind of like in sports, you need to reset the seasons once in a while. Otherwise last year's winner starts with too much of an advantage and the competition degenerates.
Now maybe you have to reset this throughout someone's lifetime, or maybe only at their death on inheritance I'm not sure. Like maybe you tax people for how long they've had their money for. If you've been sitting on that billion for X year, then you get taxed Y times X amount on it where X is the number of years you've had it. This would include asset holdings.
And maybe this tax goes to pay UBI.
What I like about this is, it retains the capitalist idea of having the right to enjoy your profits. If you've earned yourself the best of steaks, you are allowed to eat it. But you can't just get out of the game and continue to earn. If you are so self made, you should be able to make it again next season, starting from the same footing as everyone else.
I think it would require getting the right weights and equation in place. Like obviously you want to allow for retirement. And you don't necessarily want to reset things too often, people should be allowed longer period to acquire momentum and succeed. And maybe you want something more complex than just a multiplier of years. And the reset over one's life doesn't need to be to zero, same for the inheritance, though I'd imagine the inheritance one honestly could get close to zero.
Thoughts? This isn't something I'm clamoring for, still thinking about it, but I found the idea interesting. If you acrue a billion dollars, good for you, but why should your children get to start with that money? Unlike you, they didn't provide value to society. Why can't others have an equal footing with them? And even you, do you just get to sit on the company you setup for the rest of your life just taking money from it? Seems ridiculous, the amount of risk taking and effort being put year over year no longer corresponds with the reward. Why not let someone else a chance to shine, prove yourself that you're still this valuable ten year after?