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It Is Time For Basic Income

hawkins.ventures

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Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#461

Post by bcheung »

ende wrote: post #385

Replace income tax with land value tax. Then it's not redistribution of income. The argument for a land value tax is Georgist: land is not property because it is not the product of one's own labor. Therefore land 'owners' should pay rent to society in the form of the land value tax (though not on the property built on the land). That rent is then paid to society as a universal basic income. (And to preempt those who…

I didn't know it was called that. I was actually thinking along the same lines. Make that the only tax. Everything else could be optional fees for services or premiums for insurance products.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#462

Post by bcheung »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #281
ekianjo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where did you get the idea that disposable income increases for everyone? How could that be even possible? The government could be printing money to make that possible, as well, instead of financing it through taxes only.

Printing money causes inflation, which is effectively a wealth tax.

It depends on how that wealth is stored. Most wealthy people invest in things that are resilient or that even perform better under inflation. It's really the middle class that gets hit and the poor the worst because minimum wage doesn't go up that fast but prices definitely do.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#463

Post by TheLegace »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #247
saraid216 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy? Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

> Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold. It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.) You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in questio…

But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast).

I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years.

The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#464

Post by CamperBob2 »

bcheung wrote: post #433
CamperBob2 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly we'll learn what governments are better at taking over others.

"There are no governments. Only corporations." ;)

Or my favorite phrasing, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government."

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#465

Post by ahomescu1 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #373
ahomescu1 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day. That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others. > If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society. So…

"There are differences in productivity even among farmers." Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera. "So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%" Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard…

> Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.

I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.

> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.

Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.

> But much less so than "taxation is theft".

Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).

Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#466

Post by conanbatt »

atom-morgan wrote: post #127
whyme wrote: post #48

Obviously 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.

It is a powerful assertion to say you cant do something ever. There are many "natural creations of human interaction" to be discovered, and many that died or we definitely wish they died with a really strong consensus.

And prisons having currency could be a model example of how money is an arbitrary and unfair element of trade and distribution.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#467

Post by TheLegace »

wozniacki wrote: post #366
adekok wrote: post #229

I'm reading the comments, and surprised at what's missing. What happened to the business approach? The US government is delivering a large number of products with wildly varying costs, efficiencies, and price points. e.g. unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc. There is a proposal is to replace those products with only one. The new product fills (mostly) the same need as the existing ones. It will do so at less cost…

Let us not delude ourselves into thinking any healthcare system is self-contained and self-sustaining, equipped to deal with all the needs of its citizenry. Most European nations ( and Canada, Australia & New Zealand ) are great at dispensing - what can be termed as - "subsistence medicine." Most ailments, procedures and surgeries are handled quite well, although - it has to be said - a tad frugally. ( It is not unco…

I think you need to see what Dr. Danielle Martin[1] a Canadian doctor had to say when she testified to the U.S. Senate defending the Canadian system.

The reference was to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ controversial 2010 decision to undergo heart surgery at a Miami hospital.

“It’s actually interesting,” replied Dr. Martin, “because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery … are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.”

She then hinted that Mr. Williams was of the mistaken belief that simply paying more for something “necessarily makes it better.”[2]

[1] http://youtu.be/iYOf6hXGx6M?t=1m22s

[2] http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/12/toronto-doctor-smack...

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#468

Post by yummyfajitas »

dojomouse wrote: post #449
yummyfajitas wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,... Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone. Consider a…

You're assuming that the remaining $4trillion is lost. It's not. It goes to other people who will spend it on other things worth, in total, $4tril... even though some of them may need it less. The benefit they derive from the increased flexibility that $20k could easily exceed $20k by itself - you've probably seen the research on how people make bad decisions when they are financially unstable. And all that benefit i…

I don't understand. Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation to explain your thoughts?

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive.

You mean like a 10% reduction in work hours? https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#470

Post by buzaga41 »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #368
buzaga41 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.

What box is that? I can't contradict or agree with you unless you're actually making an argument.

The discussion, and the topic, talks about a change that isn't so radical but that could improve things in society as a whole. But you're still talking in 'me' vs 'they' terms, and 'the criminals' and 'threats', mocking 'the unfortunate'...

This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it

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