221–230 of 337 posts
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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?
because those that get onto FIRE earned it themselves, rather than off the backs of taxpayers like in UBI.
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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…
Well, in some sense you could also follow the labour organizations. Look, if you're a poor migrant who just got a hold of a job, would you love the idea of ten others standing in line for that same job, ensuring that you can't ever ask for a raise? No. If you were a rational human being, you'd start voting for the populist anti-migrant parties in your country of residence, like many immigrants are these days. This is proven by the wages in immigration heavy professions, that have been all but standing still for decades now.
Some people even call this effect reverse colonialism. It's when you're not allowed to earn money off colonialism anymore, so you simply invite the impoverished people for similar jobs in your own country instead. What's worse is that many Labour Party equivalents across the West have even been welcoming this change, since they hoped it would make more people vote for them. But now most of them see that this stance has backfired badly for them. Hence many of them are now experiencing the lowest approval ratings in decades, as many now view them as the direct cause for many of the problems Western countries are now experiencing.
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Yes but that way of splitting would very quickly destroy for the very very obvious reason - no money must be given to children... And dividing by adults, say over-15s, it's 70T per 257M, $272K per adult or $1044 per month for that family of 4 with 2 adults in it... That hardly solves any questions. And you can't divide all of it, because it means destroying capitalism, taking the bottom out of society. Only a small f…
> $272k per adult or $1044 per month for that family of 4 with 2 adults in it Something fishy about your math here. $272k per adult is $544k per family. If you paid it over one year that's $45k per month. Edit: oh, I see, you are only giving people the interest on the capital and assuming a growth rate of ~2%. Both of which seem quite silly to me, but whatever.
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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 would be all for the 3rd paragraph. I'm a programmer living in a first world country (spent the first two and a half decades of my life in a third world shit hole) . I have a modicum of financial responsibility. This means before I reach my 40s I'll have more than enough to live indefinitely off my investments. While gaining money. I am not that smart. I am not incredibly hard working. And yet with less than 20 yea…
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What is the functional difference then? Your comment elides the point that almost everyone who wants UBI views at this mythical source of extra money from nowhere. The UK already has a welfare state, we have Universal Credit which is basically a consolidated welfare payment to people who need money, and the main complaint (justified if we consider housing costs) is that this isn't enough. I am not exactly sure how pa…
> I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it I mean one obvious benefit is the monumental amount of savings in government services caused by getting rid of all of the bureaucracy involved in making sure only people who "need" the payment get it. You can get rid of all the job centres, all the review boards, all the DWP depart…
The Tories also had an obsession with "work coaches", these contracts cost an absolute bomb, and had no effect on unemployment going to 3% whatsoever (the issue in the early 2010s was jobs not being there).
But my counter-point would be that part of the problem has been that definition of "need" and the quantum of that "need" has changed. The Tories assumed that everyone was on the take (and to be clear, Labour did this too around 2002-2004, they managed to reduce disability spending by 20% by just removing people from the benefit and telling them they weren't disabled anymore...even Duncan-Smith wasn't this thick) which meant they invested very heavily in pointless things.
It is actually fairly easy to determine whether someone needs money or not...look at their income, look at their savings...it actually isn't hard.
My concern is that the universal benefits brought in by Blair precipitated a situation where we have massive subsidies for the middle class whilst the govt is trying to take money from everyone who actually needs it (how can we spend more, we spend so much on in-work benefits). This is basically what happened in the pandemic.
Maybe the solution to bad admin is good admin (the system that the DWP has with disability is patently ludicrous, they ignore GPs, they hire doctors who can't get work anywhere else, they rely on "examinations" by non-doctors, I had a relative with a chronic neuro issue...she had her benefits removed once, under Labour, by a non-doctor and the re-assessment was done by a physio...tbf, the Tories pulled back once they realised what was happening with early assessments, they never went as far as Labour...but it is an insane system).
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> only valid route out of poverty well, what other routes are there?
If you can't think of any, do you think that means that those who can't work (disability, illness, dependents) deserve to be poor forever?
What would be a viable alternative? If this had happened in the jungle pre-historic times, they'd just be dead. So is it not an improvement?
I'm curious, can we determine from small scale tests like this whether the data we get from them is scale independent?
If you implement income guarantees in one part of a fixed exchange rate area, then the unemployment simply moves to the part that doesn't have the income guarantee.
The USA may get away with it because of the number of countries that peg to the US dollar. That is where the unemployment will get exported to.
That doesn't apply in the UK.
An income guarantee in UK terms is one of two things. It is either equivalent to allowing an individual to obtain their retirement pension at age 18 rather than 68. This is despite the age of that pension increasing from 60/65 to 68 over the last few years because of an unsustainable 'dependency ratio'.
Or it is equivalent to removing the age cap on Child Benefit so that it is paid to supposed Adults. Child Benefit is the original 'basic income' and the value of it has been run down over the decades as usual with income guarantees of all types. It has also been curtailed for 'high rate taxpayers'.
UBI doesn't work because it doesn't add to the sum total of production. It is a way of transferring real output from workers to those that don't want to work, while trying to hide such people in a crowd of worthy causes.
Ordinary people tend to see straight through it.
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…
I don't quite understand. The land reduces in price because of LVT, requiring a smaller mortgage. But wouldn't we expect the smaller mortgage + LVT to be equal to the old higher priced mortgage? After all the intrinsic value associated with owning the property hasn't changed. My point is how is a buyer better off under this scenario if they would have to pay the same amount per year in order to have a home? In fact t…
The key you are missing is that this fixes the incentives. Currently NIMBY's(No in my back yard) say no to new housing so that their home prices appreciate in values. Currently companies buy empty lots and leave them empty for 30 years.
What happens when you have a UBI funded through a LVT? Well, exclusivity drives market values up which drives taxes up. As a result of a LVT you will end up having YIMBY's making sure that there is enough housing in the area, and LVT naturally favors dense apartments over single family homes. That will drive the market price down, and as the market price drops the tax will drop in response to keep the market cost at replacement cost.
The pie gets bigger.
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The threat of violence enforced the system that let them get the money (with a democratic government's name printed on it, mind you) to begin with. Was violence immoral when it enforced a system that shaped wages and the returns of capital in such-and-such way?
violence only enforces contracts, which are formal promises. Violence doesn't enforce market rates for wages, demand and supply and other market forces.