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A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

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Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#141

Post by malyk »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #102
oneplane wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum wage isn't just "you have to pay workers enough to survive", it's also "you have to acknowledge that workers are worth amount X".

Alternatively, it's "you cannot hire employees who are less valuable to you than this arbitrary threshold." If someone wants to work for $1 / hour and someone else wants to hire them for $1 / hour... what right does a third party have to prevent them from doing business with each other?

Coercion, basically.

People need money to live. Some of them need money more desperately than others. Some are willing to work long hours under shitty conditions for almost anything.

So, if you have 1 job, and 2 people need to work to survive, then the salary for that job will approach zero because those people have no other choice.

We, as a society, realize that is a bad outcome for everyone, and so we say "Look, I know you /could/ hire someone to clean your toilet for $1 an hour, but that isn't the true cost of toilet cleaning because we don't live in a truly free market and there are larger factors that might force people to accept that wage against their will. Therefore, we're going to say that $X is the lowest you are allowed to pay to overcome the inherent coercion in jobs."

One of the beauties of UBI is that, at least theoretically, low wage jobs will have salaries that actually come closer to the true market clearing price of the job itself. To be clear, it is likely that the true cost of toilet cleaning is closer to $3 or $4 an hour, but people with no options would take the job for $1...and there are a ton of those people out there. Under UBI there might not be people that desperate any longer and so they would only take the toilet cleaning job if it paid more...closer to the true market value of having clean toilets.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#142

Post by arcticbull »

rbanffy wrote: post #48
arcticbull wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense, if you’re already wealthy then you pick where to live based on where you want to live. Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap, I’d imagine they’d rather solve that by making more money. Plus it’s not like US citizens have much choice, they have to pay the IRS no matter where you live in the world forever. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide haha.

> Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap Depends on the total amount of taxes paid. Some people dodge a couple billion every year by doing some clever tricks with their residence, citizenship and tax domicile.

Not if you're a US citizen :) even renouncing forces you to pay taxes to the IRS on your way out the door (the expatriation tax: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...)

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#143

Post by bmcusick »

malyk wrote: post #141
LyndsySimon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, it's "you cannot hire employees who are less valuable to you than this arbitrary threshold." If someone wants to work for $1 / hour and someone else wants to hire them for $1 / hour... what right does a third party have to prevent them from doing business with each other?

Coercion, basically. People need money to live. Some of them need money more desperately than others. Some are willing to work long hours under shitty conditions for almost anything. So, if you have 1 job, and 2 people need to work to survive, then the salary for that job will approach zero because those people have no other choice. We, as a society, realize that is a bad outcome for everyone, and so we say "Look, I…

Yup, good summary. The coercion angle is one more reason why maintaining "full employment" is a pro-labor policy. By keeping the number of job openings larger than the number of people looking for work, you create bargaining power for workers to increase wages.

The UBI angle works both for and against worker negotiating leverage. On the one hand, workers know that their entire income isn't on the line if they quit, so they have more leverage. On the other hand, they know that they're getting X from the government, and while they need Y to live, they'll accept work at Y-X.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#144

Post by vorotato »

e40 wrote: post #128
blunte wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The governments routinely implement plans without reasonable research to back up their claims, so why not try this? There have been some studies, and from my recollection the takeaway is that most people, once their basic needs are met, strive to actually do something "useful". People on average do not become drug-addled sloths. For many reasons it is difficult to do a comprehensive, long term study on this idea. The…

The governments routinely implement plans without reasonable research to back up their claims, so why not try this? Because it's a huge change to society and it might have unexpected consequences. I feel this way, even being on the pro BI side.

Right there's a pervasive "I'm fine so can we not rock the boat?" instead of a "fuck you got mine". BI could be real good, but I'd kinda like to see it implemented on a smaller scale first...

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#145

Post by vorotato »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #45
craftyguy wrote: post #4

At a cost of $24 trillion? Ha! 250m[1] * $1000 * 8 * 12 = $24,000,000,000,000 1. http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat...

The first rule of UBI is you don’t talk about how to pay for it.

Nah, it's taxes. Pretty transparent really. They want to raise taxes and stimulate the economy instead of the opposite which has never ever worked.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#146

Post by BatFastard »

openasocket wrote: post #131
BatFastard wrote: post #93

Here is what I calculate 250m[1] * $1000 * 12 = $3,000,000,000,000 Now take away the people on social security - 56m Now take away the people currently employed - 145m Give us around 50 million people, at a cost of around 600 billion per year. Wow, thats a lot BUT if we now look at cost for existing social welfare programs - 927 billion. Means we would save around 300 billion per year! Of course families would requir…

Except those social welfare programs would still be essential. If you're poor and get sick, or you're disabled, you get a lot more (and need a lot more) than $1000/mo from today's social welfare programs. Also, your math doesn't make sense. You say we currently spend $927B on social welfare programs and propose BI as a complete replacement for those programs. But that number includes Social Security, and you subtract…

Some good points. So what would you estimate and how?

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#147

Post by stretchwithme »

bunderbunder wrote: post #132
stretchwithme wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't consider selling products to people to be a crime.

It's generally an entry level position in a company that operates in the "organized crime" market sector.

Only where it is illegal.

If victimless crimes like gambling, high interest lending, drug use and adult prostitution were all legal, there be less of a reason for organized crime to exist.

My feeling is that this sort of things should be regulated at a neighborhood level, so that it is possible to not have them in some neighborhoods where they are unpopular, while still being accessible in other not-too-distant areas where people do want them.

In any case, such trade is not a crime that would go away with basic income. People will have MORE to spend on vices, actually.

I think there are plenty of people on disability who also use opioids. That would be a lot harder without that money.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#148

Post by ChuckMcM »

psadri wrote: post #96
ChuckMcM wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to point to the single concept that has to be re-examined to understand basic income it is this one: "Paying people to do **nothing** when there is **so much** to be done seems crazy to me." It speaks to the foundation question of value for capital that is pounded into our heads (in the US at least) from birth that if you want to make it you need to get a job that pays well. And it forces us to ask the ve…

Money represents value created. If you simply hand out money, say in the form of BI, without it being in exchange for value created, you are simply deflating the value of money. This will cause inflation. And you'll end up back where yo started - the recipients of BI have more money but its buying power has been reduced, canceling each other out. I'm with the parent comment. There is so much work to be done in this w…

I see it a bit differently, instead of thinking of it as 'money representing value created' I think of it as 'money represents value received.' I realize the difference may seem like semantic hoops but to illustrate how I see it, consider this scenario.

A dozen people erect tents and lean-to shelters out of ad-hoc materials on a city street to stay out of the weather while they sleep. They use the gutter (or not) as an open air latrine. If a BI system is providing them with some money which they can apply toward a system of shelters or temporary living space, I "receive" an environment where I'm more productive because I'm not worrying about the people living on my doorstep. That is worth a lot to me, and I can unilaterally start giving money to anyone sleeps in front of my house so that they can get a room at a hotel or shelter bed but it doesn't change the systemic reasons that person is sleeping on the street. Now if I give them a BI stipend and combined with wages they get from working they can find a shelter, then not only are they better off but I am better off as well and the economy as a whole is more productive.

That is achieved by capturing some of the excess wealth being generated by the economy and directing it toward the quality of life improvement for everyone (the homeless are housed and I don't have to dodge their encampments on the street and city services are more able to cope with people living in expected places and provide garbage and sewage services.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#149

Post by jacknews »

brookside wrote: post #36

I'm currently on an Amtrak train between Philadelphia and NYC. Especially in leafless winter, the sheer uglyness of this swath of in-disrepair America is almost shocking. Abandoned factories and houses. Lifeless downtowns. Trash along the tracks. Non-sweet graffiti. Paying people to do nothing when there is so much to be done seems crazy to me. It's not like we have figured out how to solve these problems with AI or…

We already pay people to do nothing, in the form of dividends and capital gains. And we pay them a lot.

I'm a fan of UBI in that I believe we have the ability to provide everyone with the basic necessities of life, and providing it without demeaning means-testing and the attendant labelling and stigma seems the right way to do it.

But I'm not a fan of only giving money. That money ultimately comes from the corporate economy, which owes a large debt to the common purse. For example, we pedestal google, amazon, etc, but they wouldn't exist without the DARPA (government) funding which created the internet, and even more basic research before that, law and order to protect it, education to allow people to even read it, a road network to allow it to spread, I could go on. And then there are what should be commonly-owned monopolies like land, radio spectrum, etc, etc. So I think corporations, rather than just paying this "common debt" in taxes (which they don't appear too keen to do), should be part-owned collectively.

So, we should have some kind of Universal Basic Income, but it should come in the form of dividends derived from Universal Basic Ownership, eg a system something like all companies should be 30% owned by a Universal wellfare fund which everyone gets a share of.

Re: A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion

#150

Post by openasocket »

BatFastard wrote: post #146
openasocket wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those social welfare programs would still be essential. If you're poor and get sick, or you're disabled, you get a lot more (and need a lot more) than $1000/mo from today's social welfare programs. Also, your math doesn't make sense. You say we currently spend $927B on social welfare programs and propose BI as a complete replacement for those programs. But that number includes Social Security, and you subtract…

Some good points. So what would you estimate and how?

Assume you give $1000/mo to all people below the poverty line as a replacement for all current social safety net programs (including ETC and SNAP and Social Security, but not or Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP). There are currently 43.1 million Americans living in poverty. But, keep in mind many Americans are only above the poverty line because of government assistance. According to the link I gave, without any government assistance it is estimated 79.1 million Americans would be in poverty.

You wind up with ~$949.2B, which is close to what we're paying currently.

It would also involve cuts to various groups. For instance, the average retiree gets ~$1,300/mo from Social Security.

There's actually a larger issue I forgot to mention: what you're talking about isn't actually BI. In your computation you assume we're only paying $1000/mo to those who are not on Social Security and are not employed. But the whole point of Basic Income is that it goes to everyone. What you're talking about is just a different form of welfare, and completely unrelated to what this system is proposing.

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