If 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.
It Is Time For Basic Income
131–140 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.
> 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.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#133Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today. If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guarantee…
Not even close. Do the math and also keep in mind that just recently our government was operating at a trillion dollar deficit (almost 30% of their entire budget) and even if you could operate at extreme deficits forever, that still wouldn't be enough.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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
#135* 2014 total US gov't spending: $6.3T (36.4% of GDP)
* # of Americans: 314m (2012)
* Cost to provide $10,000 per year to everyone: $3.14T
* Current US military spending: $0.8T
* Current US education spending: $1T
* Basic income + education + mil = $4.94T
* $4.94T vs $6.3T
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#136Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Of course, I'm aware that whyme said "eliminates money all together" so this might not be what he meant.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#138Earlier 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.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#139Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today. If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guarantee…
...that eliminates money all together You can't eliminate money. It's a natural creation of human interaction. Even prisoners have money.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twenty years ago a lot of people couldn't see themselves using a cellphone or an Internet.
I think this is different, though. They did not have any moral objections to cellphones or Internet. They simply lacked imagination.