621–630 of 786 posts
Pay me enough to live without working and I will quit my job and work on a moonshot startup/interesting tech all day. Most likely nothing will come of it, but I won’t be working
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Or they just cease to be done , and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.
Often cheap labor is the thing holding back the automation of particular tasks. The greeks and romans seem to have been technologically capable of creating an industrial civilisation, but they simply never had the incentives. Imagine what would have happened if they had voted to outlaw slavery? If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage…
This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity.
> quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate
What about the rest of it?
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Capitalistic societies still have taxes. Any realistic UBI proposal would have to funnel some of the efficiency gains from automation toward constructing a strong social safety net.
For a one-sentence policy proposal, that sounds almost perfect… but how do you quantify “efficiency gains from automation”?
Really, you'd just want to tax corporations over a certain size that are both highly automated (i.e. high revenue per employee), and have lopsided compensation structures (which could be measured by CEO to median worker pay). If a company successfully automates a bunch of jobs, and then makes that money rain equally on all their remaining employees, I'd have no problem with it. I only think they should be taxed if they try to distribute those gains exclusively to the executives and shareholders.
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Look up and demonstrate this "ton of bureaucratic overhead". All US programs have efficiency ratings you can find. There is not the overhead you (and UBI people in general) claim. Pick the system you think is most inefficient, then look up to find admin budget versus money paid out. I've done all this, under the same initial belief you have, and it's simply not true. And UBI will also require the same overhead to col…
You're confusing federal programs (like Medicare and Social Security) which tend to be transparent, efficient, and universal with state run programs (like Medicaid, SNAP) that make up the bulk of welfare spending. You're not going to find a straightforward answer about to the administrative budgets of SNAP or Medicaid.
From that link:
> Eight percent of total federal- and state-funded costs went for administration, less than 2 percent went for services for beneficiaries, and about 90 percent went for food that beneficiaries purchased.
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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.
> McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen. Who's pouring the drinks at your McDonalds? Over the past five or so years, the robots have taken that over. McDonalds has never been a stranger to labor savings, although I don't think they use burger conveyors like other chains, they do lots of little things. They've also been putting in two lane ordering all over the…
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UBI might cover your food and rent, but it won't cover much past that. So if you want some beer money or a new videogame or whatever, you'll need to work. And since after UBI every dollar after taxes goes to luxuries, a low income provides a lot more luxuries than it does before UBI, so it's actually a lot more appealing to work -- you see the benefits directly.
What if the landlord and food companies just raise the prices now that they know people have at least X dollars a month to spend on rent and food. Then people start advocating for universal housing and universal food.
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Inflation would rise if UBI is paid with newly printed money and deficit (e.g. covid checks). If it's paid with taxes, nothing should change in terms of inflation. Surely, prices close to the consumption should rise, and price of capital goods should fall, but overall it stay the same.
We don't have a balanced budget. Programs like UBI would most likely not be paid by taxes (which would be better used for education/trade programs that I mentioned) but by increasing the deficit. There is no undo button. Millions of people would be dependent on it. You will have no choice but to print money. I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.
> I suspect California will try UBI anyways and fail spectacularly. It will be a canary in the coal mine.
We've already discussed Richmond, CA before.
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You're confusing federal programs (like Medicare and Social Security) which tend to be transparent, efficient, and universal with state run programs (like Medicaid, SNAP) that make up the bulk of welfare spending. You're not going to find a straightforward answer about to the administrative budgets of SNAP or Medicaid.
The person you replied to posted a link in a sibling comment that shows 90% of combined Federal and State SNAP money is spend on food. From that link: > Eight percent of total federal- and state-funded costs went for administration, less than 2 percent went for services for beneficiaries, and about 90 percent went for food that beneficiaries purchased.
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> why tax all of us Because it impacts all of us. Imagine the impact on crime and homelessness if there were UBI. Quality of life would improve for everyone . I'm happy to pay my taxes if it goes to that.
The problem is that it takes a strict authoritarian governmental control because you need to regulate the prizes of everything that's deemed necessary to prevent subsidizing controlling third parties. Take housing for instance: rent would rise a lot when people suddenly get x more. People pay because they have no choice so the x transfers directly to the controlling third party in the end, completely negating any pos…
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…until ~40 years ago[0] 0: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/wage-stagna...
1. Thats very american-centric 2. Even in America, the trend of inflation adjusted wages has gone up and up https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q