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Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
151–160 of 337 posts
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#152Interesting 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…
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…
There's more to it. The biggest problems,in my opinion,is not the fact that poor Joe is benefiting from not to so poor Jack's tax payments via benefits. The problem starts when there's no end to the support. For instance, you can be on housing benefits for years and that's wrong. The system is poorly implemented and some deeply structural problems never get addressed ( e.g. long term unemployment in a family, single mothers with children and their ability to work+ raise children, etc). Most of these issues require a wide spectrum of solutions,often interlinking with each other,but nobody really want to change anything apart from add/remove a few quid off the benefits payments.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I get enough money with ubi I won't waste my life working on something I don't care about. The amount of people who would continue their job if it wasn't for the money it's slim I definitely wouldn't waste my time building someone else product and creating value for society. I'd likely build something fun I want to build which is unlikely to be useful for society or make money. A large part of the populatin on wou…
You'll still get paid for your normal job. It's not like that money would be thrown away, you're not working for free. You go to your job and work because you want more money . I think UBI is largely untested and its proponents should proceed with caution. But I also think people are overconfident in assuming that people wouldn't work; the reality is that we don't have a ton of data in either direction. If the 20th-2…
> If the 20th-21st century has taught us anything, it's that consumerism is a very powerful motivator.
Or, perhaps, that there is much attention on consumers who spend significantly as they have “louder” lifestyles that are easy to show.
Poverty rates are high with 14% of the US under the poverty line [0] and I don’t think consumerism is motivating them very much.
And I think it’s risky to equate considering as a large scale motivator based on extrapolating mass consumer behavior to all.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#154Earlier 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?
For unemployment at least in our state you don’t even have to show you are looking for a job. Anyone hiring can tell you how hard it was to get people back to work, we’re talking people making $25 per hour refusing to work because unemployment was 60% of their salary plus $600 a week. A person making $30,000 per year was making the equivalent of $49,000 per year instead, and didn’t have to do anything for it. Now it…
A lot of this is because there has traditionally been an imbalance between employer and employee, where if they stop exchanging labor for money the employer suffers a mild inconvenience while getting a new person hired, while the employee faces the possibility of losing access to food, shelter and medicine for them and their family.
This power imbalance means that the employee will often not complain about having wages stolen, complain about safety violations, or even be able to bargain fairly for the value of their labor. It's real hard to strike a fair business exchange with somebody who has a metaphorical gun pointed at your head.
Due to these unemployment benefits, that gun is gone for a lot of people, and they can push back harder and say that "no, the terms you are offering me for my labor is not good, I will not take this job" and the industries and businesses are losing their shit over this. Economical trouble and turmoil is for the "small people" to suffer, they shouldn't have to offer better wages to navigate a shifting economical landscape, they are entitled to cheap labor.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 advan…
> 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.
Well of course, but that's not what we're talking about. There are a huge number of service industry jobs that were filled prior to the pandemic that are no longer filled. It appears those people are largely unemployed and apparently happy to stay that way. Such is the expected consequence of paying people not to work.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#156In 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
Yes, it absolutely is that sophisticated and malicious. Have you seen the political environment in the UK?
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#157Housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. The price of a home should therefore equal its replacement cost. If the market value of the home with the land is $1 million, but the cost to build the home is $200k, raise taxes on the land until the new market value is $200k. Tada, Land Value Tax. Why am I mentioning LVT in a Universal Basic Income thread? What should we do with the money we earn through a LVT…
>Housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. The price of a home should therefore equal its replacement cost.
I read this as "not (A and B), therefore C", where A, B, and C are logically independent propositions, and not (A and B) is unproven and highly doubtful. Your argument is missing a few steps there.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#158Is 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.
> 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.
This is pretty naive. By the same logic, an unemployment rate of 0 would also cause a lot of inflation and still lead to poverty. Everyone's now earning a wage, so prices will just rise, right?
UBI creates no money. It just redistributes it a little. It doesn't devalue the currency, and isn't inflationary.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#159Earlier 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.
In case you haven't noticed, segregation has made a huge come back, and it's mostly supported by Democrats.
I'm talking the "everything but white people spaces", militant groups like NFAC, etc. We're also now segregating federal aid based on race, with federal aid for farmers being initially restricted to all groups except white men as well as federal aid for restaurants with the same requirements. If you are a white male restaurant owner, you cannot apply for federal aid due to covid-19 restrictions until they are sure enough minority/female owned businesses get aid. There is a finite limit to aid available.
It's also a cultural segregation that's being pushed. I identified as black for a long time. All my life in fact. My mother is black, my skin is white. I have been told on a number of occasions that my identification is not valid, that I don't have a right to speak on certain topics, and that I don't belong in certain spaces due to the color of my skin.
I experience way more racism in the north than in the south fwiw.
Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the last year 33.8% of all personal income in the US came from the government. It’s crazy to think that number could go much higher but no wonder we are experiencing shortages of just about everything and inflation.
That is incredible, do you have a link by chance?