131–140 of 337 posts
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.
I am going to conduct my own personal experiment starting February 2022. I will be gifted €1.000 per month for 48 months... and I am thinking about maybe blogging or vlogging or instagramming about my experiences.... Any suggestions from the HN crowd?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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…
It's not up to you to decide what to do with other people's money. Feel free to donate all your money to the poor who deserve better; if you will use threat of violence to get someone else money (no matter the cause) I'll call you immoral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 gentrifica…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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…
It's not up to you to decide what to do with other people's money. Feel free to donate all your money to the poor who deserve better; if you will use threat of violence to get someone else money (no matter the cause) I'll call you immoral.
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.
The math does seem to stack up. The problem is distribution, not total wealth it seems
Edit: Ok this is skewed as US stock markets are really a global stock market, but if you took for example global GDP (~115 Trn) and divided by 8 bn people or 4 person households you end up with 60k per household globally.
Here's a trick I was explaining to my son earlier. We really do live in the Matrix. An announcement comes on and they are resetting - everyone gets a new life starting tomorrow - but randomly allocated over the 8 billion possible "players". We can keep the current social order or we can design a new one.
Do you hope the 8 billion sided dice rolls in your favour and you land in Jeff Bezos body? Or do you think maybe we should redesign society ?
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?
> The issue is that they can't find anybody willing to work for the wage they are offering While this is accurate, it ignores OP's point that they were willing to work for those wages pre-pandemic, but now the government is paying them something equivalent to 'sit around' (per OPs point). Is it the job of the employer to raise wages or the government's job to pay people to work vs sitting? Maybe we should bring back…
But when the situation is flipped around, and there is a shortage of labor instead? Suddenly the same rules don't apply, "supply and demand" isn't what should rule the price point for labor, instead, these companies are entitled to cheap labor. If people are unwilling to work for the wages offered, it's the people who are defect, not the wages offered.
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.
> That's where my taxes will go. The welfare state already receives the largest fraction of your taxes. Personally, I'm in favour of things that make the welfare state more cost-effective. > 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. You don't have to, you choose to.
They didn't do any tests when presenting symptoms of a stomach ulcer after queueing for 3 hours (I had to do a private test to find out). Statistically I was unlikely t have it because of my age.
The first pregnancy went ok (albeit nowhere close to the level of instrumentation you see in the states), for the second one they delayed epidural until it was too late to administer and my wife gave birth on a sofa without pain relief.
My son had teeth problems since birth and they wanted to remove 4 front teeth saying an abscess was inevitable. Luckily we have dentists abroad who advised otherwise and it turned out removing teeth was not needed (and it would have been years of pain, spacers and ruined roots).
All in all, considering all the money I paid over the years to the government, it was a pretty shoddy deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very interesting way of phrasing that question. Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently?
> Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently? So you want to pay your cleaning personnel the same wage as a heart surgeon? Don’t you think that such high wages will eventually just raise prices?
Contrived example.
Say you have some toilets you want cleaning and you decide to offer the job for $5 an hour + tips from toilet goers. The only person that agrees to do it is some homeless dude. You're not very happy about this, but no one else showed up so you go with it.
Then two weeks later the city offers $5/hr UBI and the homeless guy immediately quits.
"But wait, if you were scrubbing the toilets you get $10/hr + tips!" you say to him, and he says "ok cool but I'd rather beg on the street" and walks out
This means that $10/hr is actually significantly too low for cleaning toilets and the only reason this guy agreed to do it for $5/hr is he would have literally died otherwise
You can say "hey, a guy scrubbing toilets should definitely not make more than me, a big important programmer! My job's way harder" but would you scrub toilets for your current salary? I don't think I'd want to. Equally my company could probably give me a 10% pay cut and I'd complain about it but keep doing my job. I like programming.
However, the sad truth is society needs people to clean toilets and sweep the streets significantly more than it needs me to write React code for some website. If every cleaner in the world quit simultaneously, it'd be utter chaos. If every frontend dev in the world quit it'd be annoying but no one would die.
So why do we pay cleaners so little?