131–140 of 540 posts
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How can trust be irrelevant? Why would anyone want pretenders and deceivers to have better families?
If you yourself alongside everyone else in your country benefits why should you care if you happen to dislike some of those people?
It's not an unmitigated positive, instead it's a transparent move to paper over the high cost of housing by getting both parents to work. Of course housing prices will adjust accordingly, the supply remains the same, and the demand side has more money to spend.
Land price will adjust accordingly in response to any positive economic news. If you want an unalloy good to come out of these programs, tax lands. Otherwise, any welfare program will just get some of its value captured by landlords.
Medicare should cover children. Then we'd be covering children and the elderly. I think that seems fair--children deserve healthcare (just like education) as a fundamental right. It shouldn't be dependent on their parents.
It should cover everyone. No body goes to the doctor because they want to. I'll dare say it would be a net positive to even expand this to the undocumented. Many of them have dependents, it's not going to be great if your dad can't afford his insulin and is thus unable to work to provide for you. This includes a large percentage of our farm workers who are literally getting sprayed with pesticides all day. That's ano…
I routinely go to specialists for things I don't need to, because I make enough money that it's better than waiting for the issue to go away on its own.
Now imagine expanding that to the entire country, when they don't have skin in the game.
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Yeah, it turns out that things like free health care, adequate food, good schools, and all that other socialist mumbo jumbo is actually good for productivity and the economy, too.
And yet every single socialist, European country is behind the US in terms of their economic output.
Not everything is measured in "economic output", not to mention that metric itself doesn't make any sense when comparing countries of vastly different size, population etc.
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Several of the UBI pilot studies included new venture creation (including solo self-employment, not just classic business creation) as part of their measurements. The last few I looked at had zero difference in new business creation between recipients and control group. A lot of the UBI trials have actually had disappointing results. The arguments usually claim that it’s not a valid test because it wasn’t guaranteed…
> Any UBI system that provided even poverty level wages would require significant tax increases to pay for it Or cutting other things to pay for it, in addition to smaller tax increases. And the costs go down once it's bootstrapped long enough to obtain the long-term economic benefits that grow the economy (which will take a while to materialize). Honestly, my biggest concern with it is that people will (rightfully)…
This is hypothetical, isn't it?
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Why? We don’t need tanks and planes. We have plenty.
Main battle tanks are probably less useful in the future of armed conflict due to the effectiveness of drones. Spending on childcare means we need to offset those debts with other revenues. We have close to full employment, so I'd argue that freeing up labor isn't as strategic as other categories of spending. It all depends on what you want to prioritize. For the long term health of the nation, these areas seem key f…
The government does not need to be run like a fucking business.
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Until very recently in human history 100% of childcare operations were unlicensed, and this was better in every way than a government bureaucracy run system.
Until recently in human history 100% of humans were illiterate.
btw analogy is not a good way to win arguments.
Given the negative world wide trend with birthrates, this should be a priority with every developed country even if it eventually comes at the expense of elderly socialized healthcare.
The arguments for more humans always sound like a Ponzi scheme to me: we need more people so we can support existing people. There’s plenty of downsides of having more people on the planet. And tech seems to be making it so there will be less and less a need for more people anyway, for better or worse
Japan already bet on it and the robots haven't materialized, so maybe it's a bad strategy or maybe they bet too soon or maybe it will turn out they did it at the right time.
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Our politicians are unpopular because they do nothing to help us, and when they explicitly help us it's framed as lazy poor people looking for handouts. It makes no sense.
Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.
If it’s free then you’re the product …
Although, you could also say the "product" are additional parents that can work.