441–450 of 786 posts
I personally know several people who received sizable pandemic aid and have said, explicitly, that they are not bothering to look for work until their savings from the received aid runs low.
This is just very basic common sense. Work is often not fun or easy. So, if you’ve got free, no strings attached money coming in, why bother working?
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Not for the other group who will have products of their labor "redistributed" to pay for other's leisure time?
If those people aren't getting paid a very high wage, they can reduce their working hours too. If they are getting paid a very high wage, then they already had the leverage needed to reduce their working hours, and they were choosing not to. They'll still make plenty of money.
The problem, apparently, is that you want to force the latter into the former lifestyle. To that, I say no. In fact, you’re not going to get that world.
I do wonder whether UBI will be feasible once the US loses its ability to print trillions of dollars. Whether it’s China or Crypto, it seems like the reign of the PetroDollar is coming to an end, and with it the easy access to money printing. Also any debates on UBI typically start with a country-centric view (US in this case), but what will be the implications for the rest of Earth citizens who live in countries wit…
It takes a relatively small slice of a billionaire's power to destabilize national leadership, a process that I assume isn't just happening in the US butt around the world. This doesn't even include the fact that Facebook is a near-optimal propaganda tool in protecting the wealth of the people who rule over changes to the way it runs.
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Believe it or not, poor people generally don't buy football tickets. If their TVs were made by UBI workers, then they wouldn't be able to afford those either. Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour. You're basically rewinding all of the gains in productivity we've made by imposing a high floor. CEOs aren't paid a lot because the assume risk, they're paid a lot becaus…
> Material things would become scarce again due to the artificially inflated cost of labour. A UBI would be more efficient than the extensive patch-work of policies and regulations that we use today to artificially redistribute income. There would be a lot more work happening on material things, not less - especially when adjusted for productivity. Minimum wage work today is some of the least productive.
Who will do all the hard, unpleasant work then? Who will pick strawberries, work retail, or do hard labour, for anything less than a fortune? What substitute to the current "don't starve/end up homeless" incentive structure will motivate people to do these jobs?
Productivity improvements aren't universal, they're specific. We've not improved productivity for strawberry pickers because we've not come up with a way to automate the picking of strawberries. The least productive work tends to pay minimum wage.
You are earning $4000/month after taxes and begin to receive $1000/month. What do you do? Some fraction of people will reduce their workload so their earnings are $3000/month, bringing their total income back to $4000. Some fraction of people will not reduce their workload at all and inflate their lifestyle to depend on $5000/month. The overwhelming majority of people will choose the latter; we already know this, it'…
In the U.S. that would be a very good outcome. 15% of American households experience food insecurity. We absolutely want these people to spend it, not save it. Even stimulus checks that were small and arrived irregularly had a huge impact on hunger in America. $1000/mo on the regular would be revolutionary.
In the case of rent in particular, there would be no reason for any landlord to take less than $UBI if there was a guaranteed monthly payment from the government.
Unexpected or unpredictable cash influx almost always makes things better because people know they can’t “count on it” and they use it for savings or to fix problems they had been unable to fix, rather than “live off it.”
To put that differently: what most people really need is margin to handle the unexpected problems in life. But living below your means to create margin is hard, even for high-income people! Doubly hard when you are low income. So unexpected cash is more beneficial than expected cash, precisely because it is unexpected and therefore inherently “margin.”
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I've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated. For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming. Then they cut their hour…
> Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power. This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be…
You have that luxury because of savings.
Also give ppl free money the a good majority will not work ... I'm sure there's a lot of ppl who got free money from the govt during covid and have yet to go back to work when there's lots of jobs as well wage increases. We can argue that $15 an hour to work at a convenience store isn't great but every human if not mistaken can go to school and educate themselves ...work hard to better themselves. Some it's harder then others and that's where social ideologies need to be most focused on! Not giving free money or ignoring criminal activity... some images of the US as of late are starting to look like Venezuela.
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I've also seen within the same organization how such people are treated. For example janitorial workers. At an old workplace of mine there were three shifts of at least two workers three during the day. Then they were cut to just one worker per day and evening no nights. One person frantically running from bathroom to bathroom not even getting to the other tasks that had to do like vacuuming. Then they cut their hour…
> Guaranteed income (GI) would at least buffer some of the anxiety. I could also see businesses knowing it existed would cut worker hours to part-time. But if part-time plus GI was enough then the worker has the power. This is the biggest advantage I see, and shows why you wouldn't even need a living wage. You need a sufficient amount of money so that if a worker is being abused they can say "fuck it, I quit" and be…
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> If my job requires menial labor or involves getting berated by customers (many retail jobs), personally I would absolutely not work. Maybe that's a good thing. It's insane how people in service industries are treated - like they're less than human. Shifting some power to them and giving the job a little more of an air of dignity or status would probably help a lot. And the pay would obviously go up. People would be…
So labour costs would go up, things get more expensive, and there are still no incentives to be civil because that cost is spread amongst all customers.
If the worker gets X from the state, they employer can pay them X less for status quo, which obviously was an amount of money that worked out earlier.
I.e. the cost of living in cities is what prevent workers from undercutting each other in cities.
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If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
Well, not common. However, I wouldn't say 'nowhere'. https://misorobotics.com/flippy-2/ Looks like it's a work in progress.