211–220 of 337 posts
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That is incredible, do you have a link by chance?
I'm guessing it's a cherry picked statistic that is using covid relief to paint some broader picture that doesn't exist. Of course I'd expect government assistance to increase during the worst pandemic in a generation.
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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 wag…
Businesses aren’t worried about paying better wages, they are worried about being unable to produce their goods or services. Sure they can give better wages but now what they are producing has to cost more. Have that happen across all industries and it is inflation. With inflation no one ends up better than where they started, particularly the lowest wage employees will be the hardest hit by inflation.
Meanwhile, despite this downwards trend that's been shrinking the middle class in America, American industry has actually been booming the last ten years. America is richer than ever before, but it's workers are paid (due to inflation) less than they were.
So it's real hard to emphasize with the businesses who are seeing thinner margins because of higher labor costs.
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…
???
So if I earn £100k/year, and I choose to save all of my income then I am impoverishing myself. Do you understand what saving is?
The UK has this terrible habit, like the US, where people are infinitely jealous of other people. Any benefit that someone else is getting, I want it. You get tax credits, I want them too (even though I am making £50k/year). The result of this situation was/is a "welfare" state that primarily gives money to those who don't need help.
Yes, if you have £18k in savings...you don't need help. Do you understand what being poor is? You are not poor if you have £18k in savings.
In the pandemic, it was utterly appalling to see middle-class people who earn substantial amounts of money complain about not being able to claim benefits. How greedy can you possibly get? And then the Tories bring out a huge wage subsidy scheme that lavishes support on the middle-class support, not five or so years after they tried to squeeze £100/week out of people dying of cancer or who literally cannot work to feed themselves. £4000/month to a middle-class person on hard times...no problem. £70/week to someone dying of cancer or someone is homeless...what a scrounger, unbelievable scrounging, greed.
I am British but Britain is a truly amazing place. In the US, everyone seems to think they are middle-class, even if they are in a two-person household earning $400k/year, they seem to resent being forced to pay for anything. The UK is heading this way quickly but from the other way: Blair introduced universal benefits, everyone has their hand out now, no matter how wealthy.
Also, the purpose of benefits is not to get someone out of poverty. It is to help people who need help. The system has been totally debauched by middle-class people who think it is their "leg up". It is not. Spending should be focused entirely upon people who cannot help themselves (for whatever reason).
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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…
I imagine this is an uncomfortable thought for many people on HN. How many folks are essentially creating CRUD apps of dubious value all day long and lying to themselves that what they provide is of great value to society simply because it is compensated well? IMO modern society can easily support the needs (and wants, for that matter) of ourselves with just a fraction of the workers we have. So we create busywork fo…
high compensation doesn't require that it is valuable to society - only that it's valuable to the person paying the compensation!
And whether the person paying (aka, an employer) is getting value for money is irrelevant. If they are not getting value for money, they will eventually bankrupt. The invisible hand and all that.
> easily support the needs ... with just a fraction of the workers we have
so you would usurp the labour of those fraction of workers, so that the rest can live off it, work-free? Why would those fraction of workers agree to such exploitation? What's in it for them?
Housing 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.
Housing is more affordable the lower its price. It's unreasonable to price housing below the cost to manufacture that housing. (I disagree with this assertion, but it's implied in the parent comment.)
Therefore, housing is most affordable when closest to the replacement cost.
If a house will never sell for greater than the replacement cost, then it is no longer a good investment. If speculators can push housing above the minimum cost, it is no longer maximally affordable. Therefore not (A and B).
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You'd get both the UBI + wage/salary, I'm not quite sure how that translates to "basically paying the company to work".
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…
A really free labor market would be one where your life is not at risk if you refuse the job offer (as with UBI). In that situation, how much money would convince someone to accept your job? That's the real value of your job.
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No matter what you’ll run into a situation where more people want to live in a place than there is space. So an auction must take place. If you raise the property taxes you aren’t making it more inclusive but really more exclusive. The person hurt by this is the person holding the land when the tax change goes into effect. In most markets the cost of a home is a factor of interest rates, property taxes, and what’s “l…
"There isn't enough space anyway" is not an argument for letting housing prices run rampant. With our current trajectory, housing is going to create a new class system, in which people with housing can afford housing, and those without are left with no alternative but to rent for life. Saying "this is good" to such a future is sick.
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You could but no one would because they make more money not working. It equates to basically paying the company to work.
I find it fascinating that this community can both have this stance and find nothing wrong with the FIRE movement. What is a $1000/month UBI? Using the 4% rule, it's equivalent to having investments worth $300000. I have a feeling that a lot of people on HN have a portfolio worth $300000. Are you still working?
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do you have any hard data or research to back that up?
Well, if you're willing to look for it, there does exist research within political science that shows that "the elites" are systematically favoured in representational democracies, as far as policy implementation goes. In short, these analysis show that policies that has the favour of the elites gets voted in far more often than policies that only has the favour of the regular population. Two great outliers here are…
You see this a lot in immigration policy BTW. Why do we have so many uneducated and unskilled immigrants with no legal recognition whatsoever, and so little immigration of skilled workers and business-oriented people, much of it hobbled by restrictions on firm-level mobility (like those around the H1B visa)? Follow the money.
The trouble with these pilot schemes is that they involve too few people and are too short to make any firm conclusions. Elections and different politicians with different viewpoints can be elected half way through and other financial implications arise - like COVID, or in the case of the Finnish pilot a change to the unemployment benefits system that made making comparisons difficult. The true benefits and costs of…
No one would allow a full scale experiment until they see some compelling evidence so we have to do what we can.