111–120 of 188 posts
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That doesn't mean you're contributing, at least positively.
It does if he has a job. Which he must since he says he pays taxes. Having a job means you are producing something that's of enough value to others that people will pay you for it. That's contributing to society.
I'm actually amazed at how little basic income helps people. The study had a control group which only received $50/month in aid (vs treatment groups that got $1000 a month or $6500 upfront and then $500 a month). The control group improved nearly as much as either of the treatment groups! In terms of housing, the $1000 a month group only improved by 6% more than the $50 group. That is to say, even if you just give pe…
> the extra $950 per month does surprisingly little in this population. It makes sense - housing tends to cost just a bit more than that. Just two or three times more. It can often be better spent on things that matter more than housing, especially if one doesn't want to live with a roommate. I wouldn't think this way personally, I would want somewhere to live at the bare minimum. But homeless is an entire spectrum.
Of course Basic Universal Income works in experiments. You select a group of people and give them money for some time. To be honest, it’s no longer basic nor universal. It’s just income.
Wow, interesting that just $50/month did almost just as well as $1000/month.
It's just a band aid on a bleeding wound. UBI needs to be implemented as a large scale bureaucracy. A network of subsidizations that ensure citizens have social housing, rent payed, and enough to sustain themselves. Like it or not, it requires government regulation. Because otherwise renters will never accept social housing, or tenant who's rent is being subsidized. You can't just hand out money to people.
Somewhat counterintuitively, UBI reduces bureaucracy. It's far simpler to just give everyone the same basic income than having government agencies checking who should or shouldn't get welfare, which saves vast amounts of wasted money. In some studies it's been suggested that UBI would actually be cheaper to fund that all government social welfare - in other words, under a system of UBI, taxes could go down .
That's a huge [citation needed]. You're funding a program that would cost trillions of dollars per year — e.g., $10k/year (less than I pay in rent for a 1 bed…) would cost ~$3T/year. You're talking about a yearly expense that would outweigh all of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, combined. There's no plausible way that that lowers taxes.
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I don't think UBI is a politically stable idea. It will be diluted by different initiatives to favour certain groups over others, and the actual UBI income will soon be eaten by inflation. Fast forward 10 years and the same problems will remain.
> Fast forward 10 years and the same problems will remain. I don’t have a strong opinion on UBI, but I want to challenge you on this. If everyone gets $20k per year, let’s say the median earner goes from $40k to $60k. An increase of 50%. And let’s assume that we don’t increase taxes, even though it would definitely play a role. Pretty soon, inflation kicks in and everything goes up 50% in price. But a low income earn…
It's just a band aid on a bleeding wound. UBI needs to be implemented as a large scale bureaucracy. A network of subsidizations that ensure citizens have social housing, rent payed, and enough to sustain themselves. Like it or not, it requires government regulation. Because otherwise renters will never accept social housing, or tenant who's rent is being subsidized. You can't just hand out money to people.
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This is only because we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin. It says a lot about our society when we say that no, poor people should not get more money, it would just be gobbled up by increased rents. Things like socialized housing, medicine, transportation, communication, education, as well as food, would do a lot to solve this, but since we've decided that these essent…
> we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin First, profit margins on things like groceries are pretty small. That's why grocery store chains are heavily consolidated: the only way to make a decent overall income in this business is with volume. Second, both basic economics and all human history teach us that the best way to maximize the quantity and quality of "life's neces…
Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unnecessary luxuries like packaged foods and off-season produce to undercut local grocers who had otherwise been profitable selling seasonal produce and regional meat.
“But clearly, consumers end up ahead if the necessities are cheaper at the supermarket!” you say.
But of course, with a supermarket organized to maximize profit rather than contribute to a community, they do everything they can to empty the consumers wallet. The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise.
Then, instead of the money folding back back into the local community and local farmers/ranchers, it goes to investors at Nestle and Mars and to industrial farming operations in some distant hemisphere. Given the importance of food and it’s affordability, everything about highly consolidated supermarkets is bad.
Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
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> I think someone, soon will try to use this project as an argument in favor of UBI, which is ridiculous. Why's that ridiculous? Testing a small scale trial on the people most likely to be effected by a larger scale program seems pretty reasonable to me.
> Why's that ridiculous? Because drawing conclusions about what happens if you guarantee income to everyone , based on studying a project that only guaranteed income to homeless people, is ridiculous. > a small scale trial Is not what this is. You can't have a "small scale trial" of universal basic income. That's the whole point.
Basic Income is part of Universal Basic Income, and I think it's pretty reasonable to expect some conclusions apply to each.