Universal basic income to be tested in Wales • Hacker News Board

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#71

Post by viraptor » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

trentnix wrote: post #43

Drakim wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the difficulty the service industry has now hiring people It's easy to hire people, you just have to offer better wages. The issue is that they can't find anybody willing to work for the wage they are offering, which is very different from not being able to find people to hire. > it’s not like they are using this time to pursue productive hobbies Any studies on this?

> It's easy to hire people, you just have to offer better wages. The issue is that they can't find anybody willing to work for the wage they are offering, which is very different from not being able to find people to hire. ...because the government is paying them not to work. That's the point. And that means no skills are being trained, no discipline is being developed, and no experience is being attained learning cu…

> no skills are being trained, no discipline is being developed, and no experience is being attained learning customer service and the basics of business economics.

You're saying that like people on unemployment are only those about to enter the job market. That's not going to be the case - there's lots of people with existing experience who lost jobs. And realistically only a small fragment of that group would advance so the whole missed experience is a bit sus.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#72

Post by shoo » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

kebman wrote: post #62

gandalfian wrote: post #40

In practice the UK already pays the price for a universal basic income. Most poor people get some sort of tax credit and/or housing benefit. What we don't do is allow people to use it to rise out of poverty. A disabled lady thought saving some of her disability was the responsible thing to do, despite further impoverishing herself, once she built up some savings she was prosecuted for fraudently claiming benefits whi…

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

do you have any hard data or research to back that up?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#73

Post by cutler » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

There's a lot of hypocrisy in the so-called moral objections to UBI. I don't hear of any comparable moral requirement for employers to offer a decent living wage and working conditions because under capitalism labour is merely another commodity to be bought at the lowest price.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#74

Post by mkoubaa » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

dnndev wrote: post #58

The root cause in the US being income inequality. Less people want to spread the wealth and more people expect a version of wealth. UBI is not the blanket solution I think most are expecting. It will open a can of worms. Give more people better opportunities. Folks don’t want a hand out. Companies are too big and although do provide some benefits such as lower price in some cases we end up paying for it with lower wa…

Asserting that UBI == pity says more about your own biases then the actual policy itself

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#75

Post by turbinerneiter » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #37

bjackman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason for this lack of interest in the actual outcome is that state benefits are one of the main battlegrounds in the UK's culture war. A lot of the Tories' base comes from the ideological position that poorer people don't deserve to receive aid at the expense (via taxes) of richer people. Whether or not UBI achieves any of its stated aims is totally irrelevant once you see things that way. All the argum…

I have significant sympathy for that base’s point of view. It’s one thing to say that we must provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable, whether temporarily or permanently so. It’s quite another to say “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”. I think you’ll find a few people who object to my 2nd paragraph, but extending the argument to the 3rd is…

> “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”

The answers to this are:

provocative: work is already optional for holders of large capital - if it works for them, why not the rest of us?

humanitarian: everyone deserves decency (and we have enough to go around)

utopian: we are/will be rich in everything we need, so we do not need to work for basics - we will only need to work for the betterment of ourselves, our culture and civilization

practical pessimist: if we don't give the poor enough to keep them on board of the system, they will oppose it and we will have civil war

practical optimist: if we give the poor what they need to live without a fight, they can focus on working on themselves to lift themselves up - it will be a win-win situation

practical realist: taxes (and exemptions) and benefits are so complex, it would be cheaper to use UBI and probably fairer as well

I'm in the practical optimism/realism camp, although my lizard brain sometimes gets angry at some of the "the poor deserve no better, it's a fair system - they just have to work"-people and will use the provocative argument.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#76

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

kebman wrote: post #62

gandalfian wrote: post #40

In practice the UK already pays the price for a universal basic income. Most poor people get some sort of tax credit and/or housing benefit. What we don't do is allow people to use it to rise out of poverty. A disabled lady thought saving some of her disability was the responsible thing to do, despite further impoverishing herself, once she built up some savings she was prosecuted for fraudently claiming benefits whi…

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

Yup, people who actually lift their way out of poverty are not a reliable votebank. You see this happen a lot in the U.S. where minority groups have been trapped for decades by the Democrat party especially. First with sharecropping and segregation then with class warfare, either way they're kept down on the farm.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#77

Post by smaryjerry » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

ssharp wrote: post #56

smaryjerry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the Oakland program which specifically excludes whites. Or basically every other program that only includes extremely low income people. I suppose it gets the results they want though, which is to show it helps the lives of the people, however as we have seen with this last year of unemployment checks, people just won’t go back to work if they can make almost as much for doing nothing. At our business getting pe…

UBI isn't unemployment. You could collect UBI and still work.

You could but no one would because they make more money not working. It equates to basically paying the company to work.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#78

Post by anovikov » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

gandalfian wrote: post #40

In practice the UK already pays the price for a universal basic income. Most poor people get some sort of tax credit and/or housing benefit. What we don't do is allow people to use it to rise out of poverty. A disabled lady thought saving some of her disability was the responsible thing to do, despite further impoverishing herself, once she built up some savings she was prosecuted for fraudently claiming benefits whi…

Except there is not enough redistributable capital around to let it happen. Even if all U.S. capital stock ($70T) was distributed to everyone evenly, it won't let people out of poverty (sustainable income derived from this will equal to about the minimum wage per adult). So even the most terribly unfair capital redistribution imaginable will ok, maybe pay for food stamps for everyone, but hardly much more.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#79

Post by nonomaybeyes » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

janandonly wrote: post #6

Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known. What happened to gathering evidence first and then making up one's mind? There have been other projects in Canada, Finland,Kenya and the Netherlands, all with “positive” results. It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI? * lift people out of poverty? * save money on other social schemes, like pe…

The results have been in for a long time now: If you pay people to stay at home and do nothing, people will stay at home and do nothing.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#80

Post by intricatedetail » Sat, May 15, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

That's where my taxes will go. And I have to pay almost a grand a month for private healthcare because of incompetent NHS. Maybe I should move to Wales to get some of my money back.