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Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

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Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#91
post #30

Give me $1000 a month and I'd be able to retire. I wouldn't be rich but with savings and so on I'd be able to manage. So it would cost perhaps $30000 more than that in lost income taxes too as well as lost productivity. I imagine very many people would do this. The whole whole idea is stupid.

The more of you who take this deal, the better I and everyone else is. You're so uninvested in what you do for a living you'd stop for $1K/mo? Good riddance. You're a drag on anyone who's actually trying to get shit done. The rest of us will be more productive, and happier, not fucking with you. We'll happily pay higher taxes to get you out of our way.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#92
There are basically just two important sides to this: In an expansive welfare state (say a Nordic country) there are large transfers tax money between people. Some of these transfers are unconditional, for example every child (parent) is given around $150/month, regardless of family income. These transfers are pretty expensive. The reasoning behind giving it to every child is that it is supposed to be directed to the child, and there shouldn't be any stigma associated with it. You could argue that if this money was directed only to parents below a certain income , the same amount of money could do a lot more good

This is the core of this issue: unconditional basic income is a very expensive kind of transfer. Even the vast bureaucracy required to ensure money goes to those who need it in a regular welfare state is a lot less expensive than a basic income reform.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#93

If you'd told me ten years ago I would ever support a basic income, I would have laughed. My thought would have been, "People getting paid without doing anything? Absurd!" But, in the past few years I've thoroughly changed my mind on this, and a number of other fronts. I now fully support a basic income (though I think a debate needs to happen about how much that basic income ought to be and how it ought to be funded…

I agree with you, but how do you propose going about giving this underclass the leverage they need to make this happen? Short of encouraging them to kill rich people of course, which anyway would get you killed or neutralized long before you had any hope of success. Our system is simply not set up to reliably make changes for the benefit of people with no leverage over it in the first place.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#94
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people work at non entry-level jobs now?

I'm not looking at it from that point of view, people need to obviously get good jobs. Take away all those 'entry level jobs' and this will decrease GDP no? If the GDP decreases this will decrease tax revenue? And will this not decrease resources available for next years BI? If they have less BI next year there's less spending & less GDP next year too.. and it continues spiralling down. This is far from the claim tha…

There's no way to answer these questions through thought experiments, you have to look at the available data. There have been several direct basic income experiments, and many other situations that provide relevant data (Native American casino profit distributions for example).

Obviously we need more experiments, but the data we have shows that unemployment tends to go down not up.

>Take away all those 'entry level jobs' and this will decrease GDP no?

Most of the entry level jobs your talking about are being automated away regardless of whether we have a basic income. But lets remove automation from the equation and assume no increased automation over the next few decades.

You're ignoring the second order effects of a basic income. People who make less than $12,000 a year will definitely make more money, and people who make less than $50,000 or so (whatever the break even point is) who keep working the same amount will also make more money. People in lower income brackets tend to spend their money directly on consumption--this will directly increase GDP.

The data shows that the increase in GDP due to increased spending among the lower income people who make more money each month will likely offset any decreased spending from people who are making less money each month as a result of a basic income plan (either as a result of working less, or paying higher taxes).

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#95
post #78

If you'd told me ten years ago I would ever support a basic income, I would have laughed. My thought would have been, "People getting paid without doing anything? Absurd!" But, in the past few years I've thoroughly changed my mind on this, and a number of other fronts. I now fully support a basic income (though I think a debate needs to happen about how much that basic income ought to be and how it ought to be funded…

> The increased cost for extending that type of benefit to everyone, while removing the bureaucracy of maintaining the existing programs (eligibility compliance and case workers, etc.), is actually not as dramatic as it first seems. You are missing one part, though. If you start giving cash for everyone, it's very likely this will result in raising prices for all commodities. And there you go for a another downward s…

The economy is more dynamic than that. Sure, there will be short-term effects as the policy is rolled out, but new producers will enter the market to meet the increase the quantity demanded in the medium term.

Also for pure commodities, producers are all price-takers. That means that price doesn't necessarily get driven upwards.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ever heard of minimum wage? Yeah, that one did not work as expected either (and created massive unemployment when the threshold was set too high as well)." Citation needed. Your assertions do not match my understanding of the facts about the result of the minimum wage. (Though I would have agreed with you ten years ago, a better understanding of it has altered my opinion significantly.)

Or perhaps you read a bunch of pretty words that seem to make sense? They got citations and proper syllogisms and all that jazz. Communist rhetoric always makes sense. It makes sense to your feelings, at least.

Don't equate communism with a minimum wage, that's just intellectually dishonest.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The increased cost for extending that type of benefit to everyone, while removing the bureaucracy of maintaining the existing programs (eligibility compliance and case workers, etc.), is actually not as dramatic as it first seems. You are missing one part, though. If you start giving cash for everyone, it's very likely this will result in raising prices for all commodities. And there you go for a another downward s…

"Ever heard of minimum wage? Yeah, that one did not work as expected either (and created massive unemployment when the threshold was set too high as well)." Citation needed. Your assertions do not match my understanding of the facts about the result of the minimum wage. (Though I would have agreed with you ten years ago, a better understanding of it has altered my opinion significantly.)

You should not need a citation for anything here. Look at what unions do in general when they get powerful enough in a specific company - they enforce high salaries, protect jobs and protest against any reduction of personnel, making it very expensive for the management to keep the current staff, and very hesitant to hire more (increased costs vs fixed returns, and lack of flexibility to adjust the workforce vs the ups and downs of the company's economic activity).

There's enough case studies out there about the pernicious effects of such policies - they should serve as a warning that you don't solve ANY economic issue with a single bullet.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#98

There are basically just two important sides to this: In an expansive welfare state (say a Nordic country) there are large transfers tax money between people. Some of these transfers are unconditional, for example every child (parent) is given around $150/month, regardless of family income. These transfers are pretty expensive. The reasoning behind giving it to every child is that it is supposed to be directed to the…

I thought it was actually relatively cheap intervention as there is only a minor admin overhead. Do you have links to more detailed analysis? Am interested in learning more.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#100
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we can claim that distributing money amongst people would definitely decrease spending on goods and services.

GDP is value added. If there are less people working, I'd hope that value added would go down.

What about a situation where fewer people are working more productively?
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