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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

#131

Post by BitwiseFool »

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…

>"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."

I've never seen a UBI experiment which demands that the participants pay more in taxes and forfeit all other welfare benefits in exchange for the payment. Every "experiment" so far has been measuring the happiness impact of the upsides without any of the downsides that would be necessary to make the program work.

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

#132

Post by mrbgty »

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…

Yeah. The easier money is to get, the more willing people are to pay higher prices.

There might be a 0 to 1 issue (people stuck at 0 need some kind of traction) that is at least improved in a practical sense with a small UBI although we still need productivity to continue increasing in order to drive prices down

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

#133

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

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…

> 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.

universal basic dividends.

a % of shares in all companies should go into a public equity fund.

dividends from this fund are then distributed to everyone equally.

we already contribute to the wealth of these companies, if we search on Google or post on Twitter, why should we not get a share in the success of those companies?

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

#134

Post by deepsummer »

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…

As pointed out by others, supermarkets will then raise their prices to grab that extra money. Happens every time you subsidise something.

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

#135

Post by ajross »

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 easiest place to take it is via the money printer

FWIW: the easiest way to get people to throw you into a "junk economics" bin is to use terms like this. "Printing money" is, at best, an inside-the-echo-chamber shorthand for macroeconomic finance policy that is only going to confuse real economists trying to understand what you're talking about. Most of the time, though, it's just a signal that you don't know what you're talking about.

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

#136

Post by exe34 »

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…

How much of the 14T was in stimulus checks and how much was corporate welfare?

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

#137

Post by beaeglebeached »

febeling wrote: post #109

UBI is the weirdest thing. I'm certainly no fan of an economic system which casually threatens each of it's member with starvation and homelessness if personal misfortune strikes. But universal basic income is something different than support for someone in need. It has to be paid by someone, but this someone isn't ever mentioned. It's somehow the government. But government needs to be funded, too. So ultimately it's…

Government should be forced to compete in the free market like the plebs if they want money for their programs and salaries, rather than sending men with machine guns to prey on victims. Hope the fucks in office are good at flipping burgers and can cut out the avocado toast.

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

#138

Post by tsbinz »

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…

> We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way.

This is often quoted and either comes out of ignorance or is intentionally misleading. Assuming it's the former, M1 in the US is not a good measure over the time span you are quoting, because there has been an accounting change that significantly expands of what kind of accounts are considered to be in M1.

See the description below the graph of https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL and the notification in https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/h6.html#2746 (the item from December 17, 2020 in case the anchor doesn't work properly).

If you want to make arguments about monetary supply in that time period, it's better to use M2.

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

#139

Post by FredPret »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #101
FredPret wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. This is bad for the middle-class consumer because they'll have less to buy, and fewer places to work at. Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entire wealth of all the billionaires, that's only $12T [1…

> 70% corporate tax rate will get you another Reagan. What do you mean? We still have Reagans, they never went away. > It's a fast track to destroying entrepreneurship, reducing competition to introduce new, better products or lower prices of existing products. Right America wasn’t even remotely an economic power until the 80’s. How could I forget? > Furthermore, even if you went full Stalin and confiscated the entir…

They'll get elected in 49-state blowouts like he did, and for the same reason.

America's economy went from nowhere to #1 under a regime of almost no tax and regulation at all during the 1800's until 1914.

Even then, corpo's aren't actually paying 70%; there's a ton of loopholes and deductions. A high tax rate like that just favors the large incumbents and makes it hard for small businesses with no tax lawyers to get off the ground.

Also, oh my god, if you tax the wealth of all the billionaires at 100%:

a) it's confiscation

b) they won't magically keep churning out 12T in assets every time you confiscate it. Its wealth, not income.

c) the money isn't locked up in anything; how can you possibly believe this. It's invested in the economy. It's lent out to businesses and governments in the form of bonds. It's deployed capital in the form of stock.

Economic literacy is in an absolute shambles. We need to urgently improve the teaching of economics to kids. Between this, the common misconceptions about inflation, supply and demand, and people not knowing the difference between net worth and income, I'm getting more and more worried.

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

#140

Post by DonaldFisk »

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…

> 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere.

Depends on the level it's set at, but as it's "Basic" it would just cover basic needs. It would replace unemployment benefit, the non-contributory portion of old age pensions, child benefit, and maybe a few other things. It would also simplify bureaucracy - no need to assess people's circumstances. There have been pilot programmes which showed other benefits, e.g. the Dauphin experiment resulted in improvements in people's health, and a recent experiment in Kenya resulted in people setting up businesses, boosting the local economy. Yes, rich people would get it too, but that would be paid for through increases in higher rates of income tax.

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