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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

#271

Post by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf »

zozbot234 wrote: post #253
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Paper wealth is wealth. As long as there is a market price for something it can be turned into cash.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#272

Post by danShumway »

smaryjerry wrote: post #234
danShumway wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. > eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything This is a pretty big jump in logic. We've had a ransomware account that shut down a gas pipeline, we've had mass business shutdowns in multiple countries that affected the entire economy, we've had a large shipping block. It's pretty hard to blame the current chip shortage on the stimulus. I do not understand…

I’m not even talking about gas. I’m taking about chips, lumber, chicken, and much much more. All of them are having shortages and it has nothing to do with randomware but it is important to recognize that using stimulus is like using a budget, spending money in one spot means you can’t spend it in another, while we have gone all in on the pandemic we forget that other problems like ransomware and whatever else comes…

> All of them are having shortages and it has nothing to do with randomware

But also it's relatively unlikely that any of them have anything to do with the US stimulus. We import most of our chips.

I'm not even saying that shipping/factory shutdowns are the sole cause of inflation right now. But it's really overconfident to say that the stimulus is the cause of all of those increases, I think that's pretty unlikely to be the largest cause. It's just a pretty large oversimplification -- do people seriously believe that if a stimulus hadn't happened that shipping costs would have gone down during a pandemic?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#273

Post by smaryjerry »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #247
smaryjerry wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just employees but my close friends. They refuse to work because they will make more on unemployment. Making less by working means they are essentially paying someone to work. What is FIRE movement?

> Making less by working means they are essentially paying someone to work. Note that this is one of the benefits of the UBI. As it is universal, if you get a job you will keep getting your UBI. So there will never be a time where this occurs if we switch. Work would always be incentivized.

This would be true if it was actually universal, but as far as I can tell these UBI benefits are usually only for the poor.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#274

Post by imtringued »

Pfhreak wrote: post #190
anovikov wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>$272k per adult is $544k per family. If you paid it over one year that's $45k per month.

If it was paid out, you would lose your job.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#275

Post by helsinkiandrew »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #220
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #64

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…

A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. No one would allow a full scale experiment until they see some compelling evidence so we have to do what we can.

That’s the point, these small studies never give compelling evidence.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#276

Post by zozbot234 »

ryukafalz wrote: post #250
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

Although there's much we likely agree on (as you can see downthread), I downvoted this comment due to your use of "Democrat party" as an epithet. I think there's room for substantive conversations about these policies that cross partisan boundaries, but epithets are going to work against that. Even if you mean "Democratic politicians" and not "Democratic voters," that's not necessarily how Democratic voters are going…

See, this would be a reasonable point of view if only we weren't currently seeing far more strident rhetoric coming from the other side, routinely accusing Republicans, white folks, those who care about traditional values, etc. etc. of furthering "racism and white supremacy".

This kind of divisiveness does far more in practice to "reduc[e] the chance of communicating effectively across party lines" than a mere quip ("Democrat party") that's essentially intended to unambiguously convey the intention to say not-really-nice things about Democratic policymakers, and that I've also striven to reasonably back with facts unlike so much recent discourse about "the evils of white supremacy".

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#277

Post by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf »

ItsMonkk wrote: post #270
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hence why I said that the shift can be done slowly over 20 years. Say ramp up the taxes 5% per year until home prices reach equilibrium.

Current prices factor in the expected future value of a property. So, rolling out the tax over 20 years would still have a massive deflationary impact on prices today.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#278

Post by pessimizer »

pjc50 wrote: post #122
kebman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

The drive from this comes out of the right, who believe that work is the only valid route out of poverty. Regardless of actual capacity to work.

It's worse than that. The drive comes from people who employ labor who believe that poverty is the only way to keep wages low.

This attitude is very topical right now, playing out in US politics: https://theweek.com/articles/982343/republican-theory-unempl...

(Ignore the Republican part; most Democratic politicians would go in the same direction, but Republican belligerence gives them the cover to be silent, and to not alienate a portion of their base which would endanger their tiny majority.)

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#279

Post by NohatCoder »

dazc wrote: post #232
ktzar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is outrageous if that the UK prevents you from getting any benefit of you have any savings. It's basically encouraging you to not save any money.

Not true. Job Seeker's Allowance is not means-tested. https://www.gov.uk/jobseekers-allowance/eligibility If you are still unemployed whan that runs out your savings are taken into account but you can still have £16K. https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/eligibility

Not good, but at least that limit is better than the 10k DKK limit in Denmark, you basically can't even have a proper rainy day fund or own a car.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#280

Post by imtringued »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #101
sokoloff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>There is something deeply wrong with the financial and governamental systems if they can sustain me like that but they can't sustain most of the population.

No, that just means there are a lot of people below your living standard who are willing to work for you, in exchange for the resources you have accumulated over your life. You are also owning machines that make it possible to sustain yourself and some of the labor input is necessary but not the primary driver of value.

Think about how much a human tractor driver contributes to how much food is being produced vs how much the tractor contributes. Without the tractor the driver could have never possibly farmed that much food.

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