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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

#251

Post by toast0 »

cm2187 wrote: post #68
janandonly wrote: post #6

Interesting 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…

I’d argue what is happening in the US is already a country wide test. People are taking the benefits rather than going to work for marginally more. It is not a good outcome for society. And high benefits countries like France know that very well. Lots of harder job openings there are never filled even though the country has a permanent large unemployment. I like the idea of UBI on paper but I feel it is counterproduc…

UBI is supposed to be universal. Under UBI the choice would be get the 'free money' and also work or just get the 'free money'. Under unemployment insurance, you generally can't keep getting benefits when you are working, so it's not the same choice.

This is a challenge with a lot of benefits programs; the change in income often doesn't seem to justify the change in labor. If you get the same UBI payment regardless of if you're working or not, the disincentive to work, because it ends your benefit isn't there; of course, the disincentive to work, because working is work is still there.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#252

Post by mc32 »

Drakim wrote: post #212
smaryjerry wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wages has roughly stagnated while inflation has driven up the price of goods for a long time in America, yet we didn't do anything to help those who had less and less buying power. They simply had to get another job, or if they couldn't, forgo good shelter and medicine. If you can't afford rent, you get thrown out on the street, that's just life. Meanwhile, despite this downwards trend that's been shrinking the middl…

Agreed that low skill labor wages have stagnated due to an oversupply of cheap labor and minimum wage lagging inflation...

But, regardless people are opting to stay home with government benefits over slightly better earnings via work. So they are okay with having less money if it means doing nothing.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#253

Post by zozbot234 »

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #237
ItsMonkk wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so you are looking at the pie and seeing a redistribution, and going "this is all equal". 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…

Yeah I'm not quite seeing how the pie gets bigger. You have a UBI at the cost of massive wealth destruction in the housing market. How does LVT favor dense housing? And why would people be building more now that they don't expect the price of homes to ever increase? I'm not seeing how the scenario you've outlined is the most likely to happen.

It's not wealth destruction, it's deflating paper wealth that's held at the expense of one's surrounding community. Your built structure will still be as valuable as it was, and quite possibly more.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#254

Post by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf »

zozbot234 wrote: post #245
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 idea of LVT is that it replaces some of your taxes. So you're paying the same as you would on a mortgage (except it would be less, because land use would be more efficient) but saving on what used to be your tax bill. And, sure, you can't really "pay it off" but that's true of any tax. This would also shift quite a bit of savings towards more productive endeavors than opportunistically betting on the future appre…

But if it's replacing my taxes then it can't be used to fund a UBI.

I guess I could be open to such a tax but only if I thought I would be able to sell my home before the massive price deflation. It seems like implementation of such a tax would have huge negative economic implications in the short term. Imagine taking out a mortgage on a property, then LVT is implemented and now your home is only worth 50% or less of what it was before. Now you suddenly owe twice the value of the house to the bank.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#255

Post by alephu5 »

chii wrote: post #227
growse wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i'm not saying the deserve to be poor, but they cannot be rich - and at best, society can keep them alive and provide the minimal, necessary sustenance for survival. While they wait for technological improvements to cure them of their illness (if such tech comes to pass). 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?

Some of the richest people in the world do no work at all. Their parents give them an immense fortune, which is moved around by employees in such a way that earns in a day what most people get in a year. They consume to their heart's content, without ever having to actually work. Breed, die, repeat.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#256

Post by lexicality »

chii wrote: post #241
lexicality wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the point of the market is that you need to pay for things based on how difficult it is to get them? 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…

> So why do we pay cleaners so little? I'll counter with an example which might illustrate. If you were at a desert, and dying of thirst, you would pay absolutely anything for water. You would not pay anything for diamonds at all. But in normal circumstances, water is cheap, so cheap, that it's almost not metered. Diamonds, however, is still fairly expensive (even artificial ones). Why do we pay so little for water,…

> Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential?

Because the government says water has to be cheap? There are quite a lot of places in the world where water is not cheap, but where I live there are laws that govern how much it can be sold for.

There are certain things that people will pay literally anything for, such as water, food, healthcare etc because they'll die otherwise. Usually the government will step in and set a maximum price for these things to try and make sure people don't die because overall that's bad for the economy.

No one's going to die from a dirty toilet though

> Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny?

I read a really interesting article about the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" advertising campaign but I can't find it now. The summary is "because the people that own the diamond mines say they're worth it and everyone just goes along with the lie because it makes them feel nice"

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#257

Post by alfiedotwtf »

bjarneh wrote: post #176
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.

We have this situation where I live (Norway). I.e. you will get payed pretty much the same for a low paying job as you get payed when unemployed by the government. Note that we don't have minimum wage here, but it's not easy to pay people less than they get in unemployment benefits. It still seems that people choose to work. Of course things could be different in other countries, there are clearly a number of factors…

> Note that we don't have minimum wage here

I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#258

Post by alan-crowe »

XorNot wrote: post #13
GordonS wrote: post #9

I'm going to assume it won't be "for life", but will instead be for some fixed period, such as 1 or 2 years. Scotland has been proposing doing a similar experiment too. But I'm not sure what these very small scale experiments are meant to tell us, especially since several such experiments have already been done. I can't help but be cynical and think this is governments offering platitudes to those in favour of UBI, r…

This has always been my problem. If we're going to test UBI, then we really need to run a test over a reasonable time-frame (20 years) or so and commit into it. So we move some people off the existing schemes we have, onto UBI and let that study run. I suspect the ideal candidate group would be older, poorer people (say, in there 40s) who we would otherwise expect to coast onto a pension later. It timeframes it nicel…

20 years is far too short.

The introduction of UBI divides society into the "pleasantry", who live modestly on the UBI, and the "workers" who aspire to a higher standard of living, study to get qualifications, and then work. Take home pay has to be high to get people to work at all, taxes have to be high to fund the UBI, therefore gross pay has to be very high. Let us assume major advances in automation, so that the sums work out.

In the next generation there is a class divide. Children of workers get brought up with a set of expectations about studying in school, getting qualifications, and working twenty hours a week at a very highly paid job (perhaps repairing broken down automated systems - endless one-off jobs that are ill suited to modern statistical artificial intelligence). Children of the pleasantry grow up with a different set of expectations around being thrifty and enjoying simple pleasures (simple is perhaps a euphemism for cheap, but there is also an aspect of living a gently paced life that passes copious spare time enjoyably).

I anticipate a two-way flow. Some of the children of the workers struggle academically and see no prospect of ever learning to trouble shoot a broken down robot. They give up and grow up to be members of the pleasantry. Other children of the workers just think that the pleasantry have the better deal and drop out of the working class. Meanwhile there is traffic the other way, as children of the pleasantry query why other children have expensive toys. The adult world is explained to them: the children with expensive toys are the children of workers. And so some children of the pleasantry learn to aspire to more, to study, work, and have luxuries.

The key issue is the numbers. If 50% of the children of the workers join the pleasantry and 10% of the children of the pleasantry join the workers, then the working class will shrink and the pleasantry grow.

For example, maybe the first generation sees an even split, 50% workers, 50% pleasantry. The proportion of workers falls to 30%, then 22% then 19%,..., solving for the equilibrium, we only have 17% workers, even though the 20 year trial had the proportion of workers holding up reasonably well, above 30%.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#259

Post by smaryjerry »

Drakim wrote: post #212
smaryjerry wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wages has roughly stagnated while inflation has driven up the price of goods for a long time in America, yet we didn't do anything to help those who had less and less buying power. They simply had to get another job, or if they couldn't, forgo good shelter and medicine. If you can't afford rent, you get thrown out on the street, that's just life. Meanwhile, despite this downwards trend that's been shrinking the middl…

That is false. Wages have increased significantly per the chart for median real weekly earnings from the fed. Real means it has been adjusted for inflation and median is the middle wages. Median is better than average because it accounts for uneven distribution of wealth that you claimed is occurring.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#260

Post by robotmay »

intricatedetail wrote: post #80

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.

The NHS isn't incompetent, at least here in Wales. It has however been hobbled by years of cuts and lack of investment by successive conservative governments in England. Here the government continue to invest in it and everyone I know receives great care. In that regard, yes maybe you should move to Wales, it's pretty nice here, and the NHS was a Welsh invention in the first place.

In reference to taxes, the English, frankly, owe the Welsh reparation. Hundreds of years of oppression and exploitation of the people and landscape of Wales, and they are repaid by killing entire industries and throwing a nation into poverty. Villages removed to flood valleys for English drinking water. Children beaten when they spoke Welsh. UBI might help repair some of the lasting damage that has been inflicted upon them. Or it might not. But they deserve the right to try.

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