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It Is Time For Basic Income
201–210 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#202I have a proposal. Those who favor basic income should pick one or two recipients who are deserving of assistance, and open their own pockets and provide the money. The recipients will be glad and thankful, the donors will feel they have moved society toward utopia, and the rest of us can just get on with our lives without suffering the burdens that an additional entitlement would impose. I say this not to incite a f…
Macro-economic policies are not accurately represented at a small scale.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#203I haven't read much on BI, so I'm sure this has already been answered already, but: how do the numbers add up? The US poverty line for a single person is $11k. For simplicity, let's say BI gives everyone in the US $10k per year. Times 313.9 million, that's $3.1 trillion per year. The US government spent, overall, $3.45 trillion in 2013. How would we be able to afford basic income?
You increase the taxes by an average of $10K
which means nothing at the low end (people below the poverty line) and more than that at the high end
but ideally the middle class breaks even on the idea, they pay $10K to the basic income fund and get about $10K at the start of the year as a prebate on the next year's basic income tax
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#204It Is Time For Basic Economic Literacy
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#205I haven't read much on BI, so I'm sure this has already been answered already, but: how do the numbers add up? The US poverty line for a single person is $11k. For simplicity, let's say BI gives everyone in the US $10k per year. Times 313.9 million, that's $3.1 trillion per year. The US government spent, overall, $3.45 trillion in 2013. How would we be able to afford basic income?
Think "working-age adult" (perhaps even "household") not "individual". Also, assume that taxes will reclaim that basic income from folks making significantly more than the poverty line.
According to Wikipedia, only the bottom quartile of the US population earns less than $22500 per household; if you assume that BI isn't simply added on tax-free to higher-earning households' net income, that makes it more like 1/4 of the 80% of the population over age 14 would be eligible for full BI benefits. So, call it 20% of your original population estimate.
That makes it roughly $600 billion, with the potential chance of largely replacing welfare ($532 billion* in 2013) and federal disability ($166 billion), not to mention some portion of Social Security and other programs.
Sounds like a reasonable idea to at least explore IMHO.
* per charts at usgovernmentspending.com
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not convinced that Basic income would necessarily deal with edge cases all that much better. A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want. But there are problems in that not everyone can live off the same amount of money. This is especially true with disabled or very i…
In the mystical future world where a GBI has been implemented charity still exists, and much of the capital once dedicated to assisting those in poverty-absent-illness can now be directed to those who need help in addition to the GBI.
But if charity were reliable enough to rely on for livelihood wouldn't it make sense to remove any form of welfare or basic income?
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#207Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society, which accounts for inherent human limitations and behaviors. Evolution is an extremely feckless game, and thus far we've been trapped by its whims, endlessly struggling in a free-for-all battle for survival. In order to transcend and escape our evolutionary origins, we will first and foremost need to understand ourselves. How we came to be, what behavi…
> Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities? If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income. Then you know what would happen next... people…
Free from wage slavery, citizens receiving basic income could spend time producing their own commodities. They could learn trades not to use in a career, but to reduce their dependency on others.
I also think the premise that prices would rise and create a GBI death-spiral is far from guaranteed. With a GBI behind them, citizens could potentially be more likely to start their own businesses, increasing competition and productivity and keeping prices well within reasonable range.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#208Earlier 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.
I the think that we should add a single requirement to the basic income. logging on into a national library 5 days a week for a minimum of 1 hour a day. do vr classes. force them to complete and pass standard mathematics and physics. it might take them 10 years to reach calc 2 but at that point we'll have someone who can contribute. you could even teach material from patent applications.
what if I want to be an artist? or write the greatest epic ever?
Everybody can contribute or not, in their terms, I guess that's the magic.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#209Obviously 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…
> The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power. A major source of trouble now is that money is tightly coupled with politics. It boggles the mind how it's not universally understood that politics should be entirely de-coupled from private money. All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund. Unless this is done, very few things of true substance will be fixed. > The…
100% on a public fund? So I should be paying for the elections of Republicans and Democrats even though they are private parties that may for no reason exclude me?
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#210So 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…
I think in that case you would be justified in telling the irresponsible person tough luck and maybe they would spend it more wisely the next time around. If they die of starvation that's their problem. I have a hard time believing that would be a wide spread problem though.
Exactly, and it isn't like this is the ONLY form of income. This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line. If you are living below the poverty line and go out and buy yourself a car you can't afford, guess what, you'll have to sell the car, and you'll have learned your lesson that next year, you can't go waste your BI.