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I'm going to work full-time on free software

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Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#161

Post by AdrianB1 »

Ixio wrote: post #59
skrowl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About that "free" healthcare in Sweden, etc... If you make $60,000 here in the USA, you can expect to pay about 22% in taxes ( https://www.bankrate.com/finance/taxes/tax-brackets.aspx ) so ~$12,600. You move to Sweden and make that same $60K USD equivalent. Their tax rate is 61.85 percent ( https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/personal-income-tax-rate ) so ~$37,110. I bet you can stay here and buy some pretty great he…

Your 61.85% seems pretty weird. If you look at the same site they point to 37% in the US instead of your 22% ( https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-income-t... ) and that's for an individual with an income above $400K. I strongly doubt that someone winning $60K pays 61.85% in Sweden. Your source seems strongly geared towards rich people.

In most countries in Europe there are hidden taxes that don't appear in your payroll, but the company pays for you. It is called the "company contribution" that comes from the money you earn for the company. If you do $100,000, for example, and the company does not want any profit, the company will give you 75,000 and pay 25,000 as company part, then from your 75,000 you pay 30,000 (heavily rounded), so in total the government gets 55,000 in taxes and you get 45,000 home, but you thing the taxes are lower than in reality. In Romania one year ago the taxes were united in a single set, so now you see on the payroll that you pay double the taxes than a year before, but you take the same money home. The company part is just visible in the payroll, nothing else changed.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#162

Post by hexane360 »

tokyodude wrote: post #120
dllthomas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing that happens now when people who can't manage their money blow their salary on other things, except that it's marginally clearer what the problem is.

Right now those people get food stamps and welfare

hahahah what? Those are directly based on salary, not on "salary after you spend most of it". How would you even implement a system like that?

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#163

Post by mrkstu »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100
jecxjo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not about disincentivizing them, its about not providing them with applicable skills that would make their production worth more than basic hand outs. It can be demoralizing when you realize that flipping burger is worth $100 a week more than doing absolutely nothing, but we don't live in a world where a burger is worth $40 that would allow them to be paid more. Younger people tend to not have a real concept of m…

Maybe. In a world of increasing automation (explosive in the last 15 years) there's not much value in training for anything less than medicine or engineering. And US has 30 million flipping burgers. When that's automated too, there's not many that could retrain to be engineers. And we don't need 30M more engineers anyway. That's why UBI is a hot topic. Its a way out of a collapse.

A magnitude lower- its 3 actually:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/196630/number-of-employe...

Less than I would of thought- considering it used to be a rite of passage for many teenagers.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#165

Post by tom_ »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #155
tom_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payroll tax is not your salary - it's tax on their employment of you, of an amount due that's proportional to your salary. It's the company's money, not yours. (Would they pay you more if that tax wasn't due? Well, possibly, I suppose. Or they might just pay you the same, and then buy more stuff, employ more people, pay the company owners more money, that sort of thing.)

What are you smoking? Change it, it is bad for logic: any tax a company pays for you is from the money you bring in, not from the shareholders personal bank accounts. Nobody pays for the pleasure to have someone as an employee, but for the employee to deliver more than what is paid, otherwise you go under.

Reduce the payroll tax, and, what then? Same amount of money coming in, same going out on salaries, less going out on payroll tax. Now the business has options. It can buy more stuff; it can employ more people at similar salaries; it can give the owners more money.

But the argument being made appeared to be that it will give its existing employees pay rises, to each one in line with how much payroll tax it was paying for each of them previously - but this just strikes me as a bit unlikely.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#166

Post by SolaceQuantum »

onetimeusename wrote: post #79
RussianCow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people probably won't do nothing because that's boring. I think you underestimate the amount of people that are content with not doing anything.

yes, I am surprised this is overlooked. It may be that tech workers who like the idea of UBI imagine working on open source projects. I picture a large percentage of the population choosing to use drugs, drink, play video games, pick up a hobby that doesn't pay, watch TV, or even just do nothing. Then as a result of squandering their time, these people could become permanently unemployable or unskilled and would have…

Why would it be bad to pick up a hobby that doesn't pay? I'd love for an explosion of art and philosophy to occur out of UBI.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#167

Post by Verdex »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #152
skrowl wrote: post #18

Here's my best argument for why UBI can't work in the USA. Let me know where i went wrong: My TV told me a "living wage" is at least $15 (but probably higher in liberal controlled areas like NYC / most CA cities / etc due to high cost of living & taxation), but we'll start with $15 to make it easy. $15/hr at 40hr/week = $31,200 per year. $31,200 * 328,300,000 population of USA = $10,242,960,000,000 Written out (for e…

I can't believe there aren't more responses to you saying this, but obviously you need to increase taxes. UBI advocates need to admit that that is what they are advocating. I certainly am. ...but this increase of taxes would not harm average people, because they would basically receive the same back in UBI as the increase. Overhead would be lower than administering current welfare payments, since it's universal so th…

Concerns:

1) People will realize they can work less and still get paid the same. This results in less work than we require getting done.

2) We will still need welfare because some people will spend all of their UBI on non-food items. They will also spend their children's allocation OR trick their children into spending their allocation on non-food items. The option will be to either let children go hungry or create a welfare system that provides only food.

3) It turns out that some people will get bored without jobs and decide that the meaning to their lives is to cause trouble for society at large. Without the need to get up for work they can now stay up until 4am every day finding ways to make life miserable for people who actually do the work that the rest of us rely on. At this point society gets schismed into those who do work and those that don't.

4) In the long term people decide that they don't need education, the ability to socialize with anyone, or the need to participate on any level in a positive fashion towards civilization. We'll have generations of people who only know how to go to the food silos.

5) Maybe there's some problems with actually paying for everything.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#169

Post by Verdex »

thfuran wrote: post #35
skrowl wrote: post #18

Here's my best argument for why UBI can't work in the USA. Let me know where i went wrong: My TV told me a "living wage" is at least $15 (but probably higher in liberal controlled areas like NYC / most CA cities / etc due to high cost of living & taxation), but we'll start with $15 to make it easy. $15/hr at 40hr/week = $31,200 per year. $31,200 * 328,300,000 population of USA = $10,242,960,000,000 Written out (for e…

But people aren't paid to do nothing under UBI. They don't lose the pay if they do things. Most people probably won't do nothing because that's boring. And Counting money is a bit harder than that. When I tip waitstaff, that income for them was my income before that and my employer's income before that and hospitals' income before that and, just maybe, that same waiter's income before that. But if instead it was medi…

>Most people probably won't do nothing because that's boring.

I'm really not worried about the people who decide to do nothing (at least not in the first generation of UBI). I'm worried about the people who realize that now they can dress up as clowns and terrorize random people as a full time job because the food is coming regardless of what they do.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#170

Post by linuxftw »

danans wrote: post #151
linuxftw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI is meant to cover the very basics, like a food and varying amounts of housing (depending on the local housing market). For some, it operates as a dividend that helps make ends meet on top of their regular work, especially in high cost areas. This merely will keep wages low (what currently is happening) by subsidizing poor pay. Many cities have subsidized housing (and/or rent control). The net effect is these pe…

> Many cities have subsidized housing (and/or rent control). The net effect is these people can 'afford' to live in areas while making lower pay. Many wealthy people who live in rent-controlled or property-tax capped housing benefited handsomely from the huge tax break passed by the previous Congress. Some of them have normal income but large inherited wealthbheld in securities like stocks, which also appreciated due…

Anyone that is a net payer of taxes benefits from a tax cut.

> You will always find people who you can argue unfairly benefit from a redistribution scheme.

A redistribution scheme is inherently unfair.

> At least with subsidized housing the program is government administered so it can be accounted for when considering UBI.

Subsidized housing creates artificial housing demand, raising rents. Without subsidized housing, wages would need to raise in order for people to live in a given location or rents would need to fail. Failing rents make rental units less profitable, thus more people would be able to purchase homes and get out off the rent treadmill entirely.

Solving the affordable housing problem cannot be achieved by subsidizing low wages and high rents.

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