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A universal income is not such a silly idea

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Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#151

Post by jonknee »

downandout wrote: post #140
jonknee wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absurd, of course people will work. Why does anyone work right now when there are already welfare programs? By your logic there would be no sense in companies paying bonuses--if you already have a guaranteed salary why would you do anything more than the minimum?

This is not welfare. This is giving money to every single person, and you cannot do that without negatively impacting the value of the currency. Reality sucks, but we still have to live in it.

How is it not welfare in your estimations? It's nearly the dictionary definition of welfare.

Why would it negatively impact the value of the currency and how is that any different than the current state of welfare (where only some people receive it)?

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#152

Post by jonknee »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #121
gnaritas wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always shocked how otherwise very rational and logical people tend think every socialist idea is communist and don't seem to know what communist actually means. > Ever heard of inflation? Yes, have you? > If you give basic income to everyone what happens to the prices of everything? I don't think you know how inflation works. Basic income doesn't increase the money supply, it's income redistribution, not money pr…

money printing is inflation.

And? No one is suggesting that money would be printed.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#153

Post by brazzy »

muyuu wrote: post #120
belorn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the confusion, but its mostly there thanks to misconception about how things works now, > If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working. Staying home and not working today is not actually an option in most places in the world. The reason is why this new model is called unconditional basic income. The current s…

The problem with making it unconditional is that it will completely break the ceteris paribus calculations as to what is good enough, making a lot of collateral damage on its way while being largely ineffective. Showering money to everybody is very likely to make more harm than good to real people's economies. A transition to Friedman's proposal on a "moderate" negative income tax (it's not what the name suggests) ma…

You're making a lot of completely unsupported predictions there...

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#154

Post by downandout »

jonknee wrote: post #151
downandout wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not welfare. This is giving money to every single person, and you cannot do that without negatively impacting the value of the currency. Reality sucks, but we still have to live in it.

How is it not welfare in your estimations? It's nearly the dictionary definition of welfare. Why would it negatively impact the value of the currency and how is that any different than the current state of welfare (where only some people receive it)?

Because welfare, being given to only a small percentage of the population, can be funded out of taxes from the much larger pool of people not receiving welfare. But if everyone were suddenly on welfare, the system would quickly run out of money. We would then have to print more money.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#156

Post by sjtrny »

ansimionescu wrote: post #27
netcan wrote: post #11

Rather than these posts discussing universal basic income in abstract, I would like to see someone go through a back of the envelope scenario for a real country that might try it. Switzerland or some other European country. Presumably there would need to be major changes to income tax brackets (especially for the lower income tiers) & dismantling of various existing welfare programs in order to fund a basic income. I…

Very good point. After all, we all know how sometimes wonderful ideas can turn out badly [1]. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

It's only turned out badly when countries tried to leap from agricultural to communism without the capitalist/industrial intermediary stage.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#157

Post by JonnieCache »

agilebyte wrote: post #100
PaulJoslin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incorrect, London is not like that today. London is an extremely multi cultural city, with both rich and poor living side by side in the same boroughs. A lot of people argue that most of London's unique culture in places like Brixton came from the poor and that's what made London in a lot of ways great. If you say, everyone in London will need a job, then you are then moving the poor / unemployed on mass out…

Hmm, London still needs the services of those poor that you speak of. If people are willing to pay the exorbitant prices for having a home there, I don't see why they can't be prepared to pay more to get the basic services running. The further London moves away from the UK, the more are cities like Brighton, Cambridge etc. looking more attractive. More attractive to people willing to live in a more mixed area too.

Come to brighton! We have a nice little tech hub style arrangement going on, it just lacks a fancy silicon-related name because it isn't built on billions in government funding.

BTW,

>You would end up with a 'walled garden' of elite living in London and the poor / unemployed living outside. The city would lose it's unique cultures, become even more gentrified / elite than it currently is and social unrest could start to occur.

This is already happening/has already happened, unfortunately.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#158

Post by judk »

levosmetalo wrote: post #111
cynusx wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hiring managers would use it to convince people to take sub-100k wages. This pretty much happens already in progressive taxation countries(e.g. belgium) where you can actually make less money by having a higher salary because your tax-rate increases.

I have yet to see an example about net pay decreasing with marginal tax rate increase. When you earn 120k, only those 20k over 100k will be taxed with the higher rate, not the amount below 100k, so every increase in gross salary leads to increase to net salary.

The US AMT can have that punitive effect, because AMT is an alternative calculation, not a marginal calculation. Yeah, not marginal, but it is a common tax system.

And there are some programs that don't have marginal phaseouts. Each one is trifilingly small, but they may add up.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#159

Post by driverdan »

LogicalBorg wrote: post #4
twoodfin wrote: post #2

Can we stop putting these "universal income" posts on the front page until someone has something genuinely new to say about the idea or there's some news about an actual implementation?

I had a genuinely new idea this morning. Paying people for idleness increases idleness, which isn't necessarily good for the recipient. Why not pay them instead for doing things that make their life individually or collectively better? * Pay them for taking and passing college classes. * Pay them for losing weight and getting their BMI to an acceptable level that reduces collective health care costs. * Pay them for g…

Now we have someone thinking. Economics 101: people respond to incentives. If you incentivize them to do nothing they will do nothing. If you incentivize positive behavior you'll get positive behavior.

Of course this is an over simplification because it's easy to overlook the real incentives and impact of such actions. Still, incentivizing positive actions is far better than incentivizing idleness.

Re: A universal income is not such a silly idea

#160

Post by bausson »

downandout wrote: post #127
rycho wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes? I'm not proposing anything by the way, just explaining that mincome isn't a proposal to print a bunch of new money. I think the idea is that it replaces current welfare programs.

Whom would you tax? It isn't possible that taxes would cover all of it.

Because people will get bored?

People won't accept full-time low-wage shitty-manager jobs, because they won't accept their lives being poisoned by shitty managers, and they will have the choice.

But most shitty managers are shitty because they have power over their low-education personal (which can be easily replaced, and job market is not good these day). Those workers will take part-time ok-manager jobs, mostly because they want to contribute to society, also because they might get bored.

Also, in most of Europe, University cost is quite low (like, less than 1k€ / year, instead a life-long debt like 'some' country can pull out), so universal income could bring interesting trends in education. Not everyone would go back to school, maybe almost no one at first, but I would expect views to change rather quickly on that subject.

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