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Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

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Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#121

Post by HideousKojima »

gamepsys wrote: post #71
sodality2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen proponents suggest we take the money from other welfare programs, as paradoxically the means-testing overhead costs so much that we can afford to pay everyone $X instead of thousands of workers to process thousands of welfare applications. I haven’t seen specific numbers about this though. Edit: I'm failing to find numbers to support this now.

Warning: Ballpark numbers ahead The 2022 budget was $1.2T across all welfare programs[0]. This includes programs people don't normally consider welfare such as the Child Tax Credit and parts of the Pell Grant. There are currently 350M people in the USA [1]. $1.2T / 350M People is $3,428/person/year. Please note that while significantly less, there will still be some overhead in the UBI program so the actual number is…

Meanwhile, the median social security recipient gets about $1,700 per month. I don't think most people are going to get behind a "Rob grandma's pension so a bunch of college socialists can write poetry instead of working (and even then actually can't because they're bad at math)" program.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#122

Post by dilyevsky »

criddell wrote: post #88
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #45

Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment. The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems: 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to…

> The USA did this during the COVID era. Japan has being doing this for decades now and, AFAIK, there hasn't been any terrible consequences. What are they doing differently? imf.org says Japan's dept to GDP ratio is 214% and the US' is 110%.

Perhaps not the best example to pick - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#123

Post by lazyasciiart »

tuututututu wrote: post #14

I'd like to make food stamps automatic for everyone. It makes pretty good sense to me. Everyone who has a driver's license or is enrolled in school or is registered to vote gets food stamps. The most hateful southern baptists in my family who are still screaming about Obama's death panels can still agree that donating to food banks is a good idea. I can understand people who say "I don't want to pay higher taxes to s…

> The most hateful southern baptists in my family who are still screaming about Obama's death panels can still agree that donating to food banks is a good idea.

I expect they would argue that a) they don’t agree that being required to donate is a good idea and b) the food bank can turn people away if they’re not deserving and has its own stigma, which are both part of the goal

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#124

Post by AnthonyMouse »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #45

Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment. The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems: 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to…

> Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.

This is not actually that hard because they're only expensive on paper.

Right now you have a slew of means tested programs with phase outs that amount to high marginal tax rates on the poor. Meanwhile we try to do the opposite with the tax system and have higher marginal rates on the rich. These largely cancel out, if not impose higher marginal rates on the poor than the rich.

With a UBI you can use a flat tax system because the UBI rather than the tax system is what makes it progressive, which has the added benefit of simplifying the tax system. Then everyone is paying the same tax rate, which puts a higher "tax rate" on low and middle income people but only on paper, because you've eliminated the benefits phase outs and they get to keep the UBI, which more than offsets it.

The result is that you have a small tax increase on the rich and a small increase in transfer payments to the poor/middle class, but the main benefit is the dramatic increase in simplicity and the reduction in bureaucracy and administrative overhead for administering all of the separate programs it would replace.

> Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.

Except that the average person doesn't actually have any more money, since it's all transfer payments. Someone making $30,000 got some additional money but someone making $70,000, even though they do receive the UBI, has still received less money than they paid in tax to fund it.

And this is what already happens, but much less efficiently, through various existing means-tested programs that would no longer be needed.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#125

Post by [deleted] »

monero-xmr wrote: post #12

In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic. Worker shortages in low-skill labor resulted and inflation hit 10%. I think that's the major flaw - young, childless people without responsibility see no reason to work, when they can watch Netflix all day, either paying their mom some token rent or sharing a flop house with a bunch of friends.

[deleted]

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#126

Post by orangecat »

monero-xmr wrote: post #12

In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic. Worker shortages in low-skill labor resulted and inflation hit 10%. I think that's the major flaw - young, childless people without responsibility see no reason to work, when they can watch Netflix all day, either paying their mom some token rent or sharing a flop house with a bunch of friends.

In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic.

We increased unemployment benefits to the point where for many people it was more than their previous income. Of course people weren't going to be excited to effectively lose money by taking a job. That's not at all a UBI which pays whether or not you're working.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#127

Post by tnel77 »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #95
tnel77 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with many of your points, I feel like blaming item shortages on COVID payments is ignoring the massive impacts that panic buying and shutting down ports and factories had on the situation. Yes there was more money floating around, but people were purchasing items like it was the end of days and we had factories worldwide shuttering randomly due to COVID outbreaks and various government mandates which th…

You're right, the problem in the US was multi-causal. I mention that case because it is probably the best large-scale deployment of a UBI-like program any country has ever done. While we can't completely untangle the exact contribution magnitude, I think we can deduce that at least some meaningful % of the shortage/inflation situation was caused by the UBI-like program.

I would agree with that. I wish there was a way to know how much though. There was an undeniable impact of giving people “free money,” but it doesn’t seem like most Americans received very much. Most of the people I know of received their 2-3 checks and that’s it. You’d see news articles two years into the pandemic saying things like “Americans finally running out of stimulus money.” It made me laugh because it seemed like most people spent that money crazy fast on their bills and very few people were able to actually pocket that cash.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#128

Post by criddell »

jimbokun wrote: post #115
criddell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The USA did this during the COVID era. Japan has being doing this for decades now and, AFAIK, there hasn't been any terrible consequences. What are they doing differently? imf.org says Japan's dept to GDP ratio is 214% and the US' is 110%.

Japan's GDP today is roughly the same as it was in 1995: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263578/gross-domestic-pr...

That's pretty remarkable considering their aging population.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#129

Post by logicfiction »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #45

Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment. The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems: 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to…

> If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens

We may have different definitions of "rich" here. I don't think you can call them the most productive citizens. I think most extractive would be the more accurate label.

And the stimulus checks were short lived, not universally distributed, and came in under $1T. The majority of the money spent was on other sources, even if you want to include the boosts to unemployment in the "UBI" category. As others mentioned it's also conflated with other factors like supply chain failures and massive business loan fraud.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#130

Post by TrackerFF »

Living in poverty is expensive and stressful, and can trap you into staying in poverty.

You become desperate, and make very suboptimal decisions. You get rewarded for short-term rewards.

A good example would be jobs. If you could dedicate all your time to applying for jobs, you could maximize your salary - but what poor people can afford that? So you take the first and best job you can find, as you need the money now. 6 months without pay is an eternity. If you're poor, you can't really go longer than 2 weeks without pay.

And when you're shit out of luck, not a single cent in the bank (negative balance, even, with the overdue fees running) you start to look for expensive loans to float you. Payday loans, expensive credit card loans, and what not.

You get hit with late fees for every bill you can't pay on time. Things which are somewhat affordable early on - like getting cavities in your teeth fixed, become horribly expensive down the road.

Those are just one of many, many things. And we haven't even considered the physical and mental stress - the first and last thing you think about, is money.

At least UBI, or some similar system, can remove some of those stressors.

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