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Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#111

Post by woko »

neom wrote: post #93
leadingthenet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. Only a small minority of people are on Universal Credit. I don’t get how this follows, at all.

If you take out pensions(~100b gbp), the UK spends (very) approx. 100 billion pounds a year on social assistance. I think OP is suggesting taking that 100 billion and dividing it evenly among the people of the UK vs specifically to the folks who have applied.

> specifically to the folks who have applied

I like how you distinguish between the people who are eligible and the people who have applied, because some eligible people do not know they are and therefore do not apply.

It is brought up in the press [1] from time to time, and the percentage in France is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the eligible people, which is huge!

[1] in French: https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/votre-argent/aides-social...

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#112

Post by jokethrowaway »

BigJono wrote: post #100
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…

Half the problem with politics these days is that people still see welfare as "pity and a hand out". Welfare is one tool in a bag of economic tricks to keep a country prospering. A country without welfare is one that has most of it's smartest minds packing boxes in a factory somewhere because they can't afford to try and fail.

The problem with politics is that people see welfare as anything but theft.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#113

Post by zozbot234 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #102
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. It’s one of the prime reasons the south used to be solidly Democratic and is now solidly Republican. Neither party is the same as it was in the nineteenth century.

> The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue.

Yup, that's what people like to tell themselves but much of it is wishful thinking. Look at how long people like Robert Byrd stayed around. Look at who actually supports, e.g. extreme NIMBY policies in urban areas to keep undesirable "demographics" out of the neighborhood, and "fights gentrification" to keep them boxed in with substandard amenities. How is that not modern segregation?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#114

Post by miltondts »

sokoloff wrote: post #84
miltondts wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do we do when automation reaches most jobs? Create artificial jobs to keep people busy? Now that I think about it, that seems to be what we have been doing for some 30-40 years now. By artificial jobs, I mean jobs that if they disappeared, life would go on pretty much the same. This was in fact quite visible during all the lock-downs. Many many people no longer worked and all the essential and many non-essential…

Probably the same thing we did when agriculture went from 70% of the workforce to under 1.5%. People will adapt to fill new demands. If it comes to pass at some future time that machines can do all the work and everyone can live a Garden of Eden existence, goods and services will be so cheap due to their natural abundance, that UBI might be feasible but food and essentials might be almost not worth the trouble of met…

But why are we forcing people to work for the essentials when the essentials (water, food, shelter) require a tiny fraction of the population and resources?

Is this the kind of society that we want to live in? Where trough automation and first mover advantage we allow people to be ridiculously rich while the rest of the population struggles to get by?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#115

Post by jokethrowaway »

brink wrote: post #15

Is it actually going to be universal? Because if it's not, don't call it "universal". I see a lot of articles stating that "universal basic income was tested with massive success" when there was nothing universal about it. There's a big difference.

This. If it were universal, companies could just start charging everyday products much more. Boom, all people getting ubi suddenly need to start working again and they need to pay more in taxes to support all the money going in ubi.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#116

Post by pbronez »

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…

Do you think it’s honestly that sophisticated and malicious? Public policy is hard. Adjusting benefits appropriately as people climb out of poverty is a known challenge. It’s called a “welfare trap” and has its own Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#117

Post by mycologos »

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.

There's a weird chicken-and-egg quality to these arguments where the pro-state party wants to expand benefits, the anti-state party wants to limit them, and we end up at this equilibrium where benefits are good enough for some people to cobble together lives based on them, but not good enough for most of those people to build better lives and get off them. I think it's overly simplistic to put all of the blame on one party (as a sibling comment about Democrats does).

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#118

Post by vageli »

neom wrote: post #93
leadingthenet wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, no. Only a small minority of people are on Universal Credit. I don’t get how this follows, at all.

If you take out pensions(~100b gbp), the UK spends (very) approx. 100 billion pounds a year on social assistance. I think OP is suggesting taking that 100 billion and dividing it evenly among the people of the UK vs specifically to the folks who have applied.

Is there surplus in these social assistance budgets going unused? How could you expect to spread the same budget over the entire population while maintaining the quality of benefits?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#119

Post by sokoloff »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #95
sokoloff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think both three and two are similar statements: you already decided it's ok to forcefully get money from people, you may as well make it clear without hiding behind being charitable to poor people. It's a basic psychological trick.

Of course they’re similar in part. That’s why I introduced them together: to explore the spectrum.

I’ve decided that it’s ok for me to wait hand and foot and serve the every need (as best I can understand it) of my child when they’re under 1 year old but that it’s not okay to do the same when they’re 10, 20, and 30 years old.

A similar thing can be obviously reasonable in one scenario and unreasonable in another without representing a rift in cosmic consistency.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#120

Post by cbmuser »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #70

Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.

The incentive for such jobs will be higher wages which in return means higher prices which eventually compensates for the whole UBI in the first place.

Money _cannot_ have any value if it’s not backed by any goods or labor.

If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive?

Or why would anyone want to sell you anything when the money isn’t actually a „credit“ for any goods or labor.

Money is just a convenient method for exchanging goods and labor. If you just give out money to anyone for free without exchanging it for labor, it eventually doesn’t have any value and people will find another currency or go back to exchange goods and labor directly.

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