Seems like a good idea to me, lets do it. We can always change it back if it doesn't work out.
It Is Time For Basic Income
501–510 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...
Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there. Obviously, McDonalds wants to stay in business, so it has to offer up some incentive to get people to work for them. If they offer enough money, there will certainly be people who would work to flip burgers. The jobs' salaries match what they are actually worth, and can't be offered as minimum-wage jobs that people take because they don't have any money and can…
> Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there.
Which means burgers will cost much more than they currently do.
The same will be true for all domestic products/services where a significant part of the work force currently has low wages.
Which means that you and I will pay more for goods/services than previously. The effect will be similar to a significant sales tax, might as well try funding BI that way (at least imported goods will carry some of the tax burden) and look at published studies on the effects of sales taxes...
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#503I'm in favor of this. Do we have any examples where this has worked before?
You could argue the system in the UK provides similar payments and could be called a basic income system if you rebrand it. Basically the system comes out roughly as: Zero earned income. You get about £60-200 from the state per week so lets call this a £60 basic income. Typical unemployed. Annual income £12K. No tax and no subsidies. We could rebrand as £60/wk basic income = 3K/yr and and 25% tax on the 12K. Typical…
> The system kind of works.
Isn't it actually radically different in that you are not allowed to choose to stay unemployed, i.e. you have to be at least trying to look for work in order to be eligible for such benefits?
In other countries there are similar systems but before you get "basic income" like benefits, your property will have to be used up / sold.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
It costs more on a nominal basis but if implemented right nobody will have less money in their pocket even after taxes. If you didn't earn any money before you will get what was spend on you before + the saved overhead (+ a lot of wasted time and hassle). If you made a lot of money before you will still get a free handout but you also have to pay higher taxes so in the end you should have about the same amount. Obvio…
Numbers, please. And see my other comments on the disincentive to work - in the pilot projects, BI was a massive work disincentive.
Thanks for hammering this nail yummyfajitas.
I'm completely open to the idea of basic incomes but it seems that if it is possible, it should be easy enough to demonstrate the basic outline. This isn't something that can be discussed without arithmetic.
Excluding dynamic effects (more/fewer people will work), political necessities (program X must be excluded from the chopping block) is OK for a start. Picking and choosing countries is OK for a start.
The first question I would like to see answered is how much it would cost to bring every net recipient's income up to par with the biggest recipients'. Presumably the basic income needs to be set somewhere near this line or we'll have a situation where many current recipients are worse off.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#505I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having…
...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…
It's not about the immediate cost. It's about the fact that conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.
Listen to this investigation into Disability benefits.[1] Listen to how the people who receive these benefits genuinely need the stable income that they provide, but are then prohibited from working part-time, tutoring, even volunteering for their community, for fear of losing the only available form of security. Listen to how trapped they become by the system. For them, being trapped by a conditional benefits program is better than the alternative -- anything is better than starvation -- but it is still a dehumanising and self-perpetuating institution.
The flipside to making benefits conditional is that we require employers to provide social support (eg., via minimum wage, etc). By setting an expensive threshold below which employers cannot create jobs, we impose enormous costs on industry and minimize job creation. A basic income should go hand-in-hand with the elimination of minimum wage. By removing the requirement that jobs must provide base-level income support, we would enable the creation of more jobs.
Between eliminating the steep marginal tax rates on the poor, and removing the steep threshold to job creation due to minimum wage, we would eliminate the two biggest factors in chronic poverty traps. So if you want to do a real calculation on the costs of our current policies, be sure to include the cost to industry of the minimum wage, as well as the Net Present Value of the future costs of letting the current poverty-trap system continue to grow.
1: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't give them money. Stopped. How would you go about doing this? Who gets money and who doesn't? Is a single mother raising 3 kids lazy? Is an artist who works night and day and gets pennies in return lazy? There's a lot of overhead in deciding this. A lot . > That fact that other people won't buy their work is not a problem of other people. It's their problem. So, my point that art is only worth it's value to th…
>Who gets money and who doesn't? Easy question. Nobody. Stop all government welfare and redistribution. Sever the dependence of unproductive citizens on the productive. Return to each citizen their natural right to freely distribute their resources. End all perverse incentives. And force each citizen to provide for themselves through the value they can offer to other freely-choosing citizens in consensual trade relat…
Great, so just let people die if they can't afford health insurance and get bronchitis. Let people starve if the economy tanks. Ability/desire to work does not equal production. Sometimes there is a willing worker and no job to do.
Are you aware of the purpose of society in the first place? It's the idea that as a whole, we all do better when we're looking out for each other. So far it has worked surprisingly well. This whole notion of FREE MARKET EVERYTHING, PRODUCE OR DIE needs to go back to the stink hole it came out of. People, and society as a whole, are much more than their market value.
Also, there needs to be a distinction between productive and needy. They are not mutually exclusive, and not everything in this world that's worth producing can have a price tag slapped on it.
The libertarian utopia you describe is a pathetic excuse for a society.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
It costs more on a nominal basis but if implemented right nobody will have less money in their pocket even after taxes. If you didn't earn any money before you will get what was spend on you before + the saved overhead (+ a lot of wasted time and hassle). If you made a lot of money before you will still get a free handout but you also have to pay higher taxes so in the end you should have about the same amount. Obvio…
Numbers, please. And see my other comments on the disincentive to work - in the pilot projects, BI was a massive work disincentive.
Notice that work disincentive is a plus, not a minus, when there are millions of unemployed people.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so people who aren't doing it should start But they won't. It's safe to say that lazy people are good at being lazy and will find a way to be lazy no matter what system they're in. Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. It's better to accept the fact that a fixed percentage of people are only going to take while most others give (and take), and stop wasting the enormou…
>Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. Not at all. You know what eradicates laziness? Hunger.
I'd argue hunger promotes stealing more than eradicates laziness.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#509I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having…
> a sovereign state to experiment with?
some scandinavian countries are close to this, in some respects. some oil countries too
some native peoples, within nations, also (tho other issues complicate it)
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#510I think that digital currencies is the way to go to test this idea.