Earlier quoted context omitted.
this guy: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2568109/Unemployed-b...
anecdotes != data
The 47 millions food-stamp recipients disagree with you.
It Is Time For Basic Income
111–120 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Child support Presumably, Child Support would no longer exist for anyone. Children are people, with no income, they would essentially get a child-version of basic income, paid to their parents, to raise them, regardless of all other circumstances. (Similar to US taxes today, where the government effectively pays you some a small amount of money simply for having a child) If a couple conceives a child, and one paren…
That seems like it would create a perverse incentive to breed unnecessarily.
Government workers in Sweden get 13 months paid maternity leave. That's a pretty good incentive. But they rank 187th in the world by birth rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#113Providing a basic income for all people, regardless of their merit to the society as a whole, is problematic. It's not enough to just hand over a couple hundred dollars to someone and say "have fun". We need to ensure everyone is getting the proper basic services, first. I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribu…
What you describe seems like the status quo system: the state distributes food and shelter to people directly (through food stamps and council housing). The idea of basic income is that it is much more efficient if the state redistributes _money_, and then everyone can buy food and shelter using money.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#114If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended. The value and meaning of citizenship will rapidly change and tolerance for outsiders taking a slice of the pie will rapidly plunge. I think there will be a lot of ramifications like this that most people probably aren't considering.
There is an underlying premise that only the US will have a basic income. If robots/AI do most of the labor there is no (long term) reason why all countries can't offer basic income to their citizens.
> If robots/AI do most of the labor
Exactly. But we're not there yet, and possibly not very close.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#115People becoming "unemployable" because of robots is one of the most common arguments in favor of this, and that argument is nonsense because actual skilled jobs are not going away. Will a robot fix your car when it breaks? Will it be designing new and better cars? Will it even design the automation systems that let those new cars be built more efficiently? Will those robots provide legal advice to the companies that…
But the number of people that want / need to do those visionary / human-centric jobs (though I would not consider all of those jobs as necessarily human) is lower than the number of people that would be seeking employment without a system for basic income; and, as long as it's pennies to get a person to do those low-income jobs, they're not likely to be automated away
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together So, rationing? I wonder if that's been tried before. Money is a repesentation of resources. And resources cannot be allocated efficiently by central authority, because of the calculation problem[1]. But maybe some college dorm discussions will bear some other solution. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculatio…
"Resource-managed economy" does not imply a centralized authority, which is where your snide rejoinder comes off the rails.
How the hell do you allocate resources with maximal efficiency, without either a central authority or trade?
Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but those two are "I tell you what you want" and "You tell me what you want", and I don't see the third option.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#117Aside: I don't know how I feel about all these new TLDs...
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#118So let's assume this was implemented. Some citizens, with their guaranteed basic income, will spend it wisely to cover their needs...as envisioned by proponents of this approach. Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs. What then? Simply increase the amount of basic income awarded, and hope that by throwing more money at the symptoms of povert…
>Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.
You can do this now at least under the UK system.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#119If a basic income was implemented, would we also be comfortable getting rid of minimum wage?
And, if we attempted to go for this in the US, how much struggle would there be to both implement the minimum wage and also remove all of the other programs such as welfare, food stamps, disability?
The system is very well established and you couldn't just remove each part in a single step. Each program that gets removed would need to be eliminated one by one.
Overall, I think that a basic income is the cleanest, fairest, least game-able way to help the lower class. I just don't see it happening in our current political climate.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.
>someone needs a job I don't know that we necessarily need to have jobs. We could fund it by taxation of revenue and wages, rather than just wages. A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. That profit could be taxed at something like 60%. The owner(s) of the business still see windfall from the cost savings of laying everyone off, and the ba…
> A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead.
Where is their revenue coming from?