Universal basic income to be tested in Wales • Hacker News Board

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#181

Post by ryukafalz » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

enkid wrote: post #143

zozbot234 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who supported segregation mostly abandoned the Democratic Party decades ago because of the civil rights issue. Yup, that's what people like to tell themselves but much of it is wishful thinking. Look at how long people like Robert Byrd stayed around. Look at who actually supports, e.g. extreme NIMBY policies in urban areas to keep undesirable "demographics" out of the neighborhood, and "fights gentrifica…

Senators from West Virginia do not represent the mainstream Democrat views, so let's not cherry pick an example that ended over a decade ago. Instead, let's have a substantive conversation about policy. What specific policies are you referring to as NIMBY?

Not GP, but: single-family-exclusive zoning for one, which props up home values and is the norm in almost all US suburbs. Who benefits when home prices are high? Who benefits when they're affordable?

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#182

Post by Pfhreak » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #160

smaryjerry wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last year 33.8% of all personal income in the US came from the government. It’s crazy to think that number could go much higher but no wonder we are experiencing shortages of just about everything and inflation.

That is incredible, do you have a link by chance?

I'm guessing it's a cherry picked statistic that is using covid relief to paint some broader picture that doesn't exist. Of course I'd expect government assistance to increase during the worst pandemic in a generation.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#183

Post by smaryjerry » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

Drakim wrote: post #154

smaryjerry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For unemployment at least in our state you don’t even have to show you are looking for a job. Anyone hiring can tell you how hard it was to get people back to work, we’re talking people making $25 per hour refusing to work because unemployment was 60% of their salary plus $600 a week. A person making $30,000 per year was making the equivalent of $49,000 per year instead, and didn’t have to do anything for it. Now it…

A lot of this is because there has traditionally been an imbalance between employer and employee, where if they stop exchanging labor for money the employer suffers a mild inconvenience while getting a new person hired, while the employee faces the possibility of losing access to food, shelter and medicine for them and their family. This power imbalance means that the employee will often not complain about having wag…

Businesses aren’t worried about paying better wages, they are worried about being unable to produce their goods or services. Sure they can give better wages but now what they are producing has to cost more. Have that happen across all industries and it is inflation. With inflation no one ends up better than where they started, particularly the lowest wage employees will be the hardest hit by inflation.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#184

Post by danShumway » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

smaryjerry wrote: post #165

danShumway wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll still get paid for your normal job. It's not like that money would be thrown away, you're not working for free. You go to your job and work because you want more money . I think UBI is largely untested and its proponents should proceed with caution. But I also think people are overconfident in assuming that people wouldn't work; the reality is that we don't have a ton of data in either direction. If the 20th-2…

Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI. 33.8% of all personal income in the last year came from the government. It results in everyone having more money to spend but eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything, those shortages cause prices to rise and soon even though everyone has more money, everything costs more. The market settles prices in the end and trying to control the market by pumping…

> Today’s stimulus is a perfect example of UBI.

> eventually as we see now shortages in just about everything

This is a pretty big jump in logic. We've had a ransomware account that shut down a gas pipeline, we've had mass business shutdowns in multiple countries that affected the entire economy, we've had a large shipping block. It's pretty hard to blame the current chip shortage on the stimulus.

I do not understand how people get so wildly confident about this stuff whenever UBI comes up. I would not be so confident to claim that supply shortages for materials/foods from other countries are being caused by a stimulus in the US, particularly during a period where our government policy was to specifically tell people that the responsible, social thing to do not to go into their jobs.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#185

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

ryukafalz wrote: post #181

enkid wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senators from West Virginia do not represent the mainstream Democrat views, so let's not cherry pick an example that ended over a decade ago. Instead, let's have a substantive conversation about policy. What specific policies are you referring to as NIMBY?

Not GP, but: single-family-exclusive zoning for one, which props up home values and is the norm in almost all US suburbs. Who benefits when home prices are high? Who benefits when they're affordable?

Single family exclusive zoning also drives urban sprawl and the apparent "white flight" from areas that could be host to vibrant diversity. It's amazing how much of what we sometimes take for granted is actually the result of policy failure.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#186

Post by hhjinks » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #124

ItsMonkk wrote: post #63

Housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. The price of a home should therefore equal its replacement cost. If the market value of the home with the land is $1 million, but the cost to build the home is $200k, raise taxes on the land until the new market value is $200k. Tada, Land Value Tax. Why am I mentioning LVT in a Universal Basic Income thread? What should we do with the money we earn through a LVT…

No matter what you’ll run into a situation where more people want to live in a place than there is space. So an auction must take place. If you raise the property taxes you aren’t making it more inclusive but really more exclusive. The person hurt by this is the person holding the land when the tax change goes into effect. In most markets the cost of a home is a factor of interest rates, property taxes, and what’s “l…

"There isn't enough space anyway" is not an argument for letting housing prices run rampant. With our current trajectory, housing is going to create a new class system, in which people with housing can afford housing, and those without are left with no alternative but to rent for life.

Saying "this is good" to such a future is sick.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#187

Post by jxidjhdhdhdhfhf » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #9

I'm going to assume it won't be "for life", but will instead be for some fixed period, such as 1 or 2 years. Scotland has been proposing doing a similar experiment too. But I'm not sure what these very small scale experiments are meant to tell us, especially since several such experiments have already been done. I can't help but be cynical and think this is governments offering platitudes to those in favour of UBI, r…

Realistically, you also need to simultaneously test out the extra taxes to pay for the UBI as well so that you can measure the full economic effect.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#188

Post by usrusr » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #122

kebman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

The drive from this comes out of the right, who believe that work is the only valid route out of poverty. Regardless of actual capacity to work.

Actually you can find strong feelings in favor of strictly demand-based transfer on both sides, that's the one thing they agree on. On one side it's "the money should be given to someone who needs it even more" and on the other it is "the money doesn't need to be transferred at all", but the result is the same. Effective tax rate in the vicinity of 100% (sometimes higher!) for people at the threshold and all that (like the lady who dared to save).

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#189

Post by sonograph » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

Drakim wrote: post #138

sonograph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that they can't find anybody willing to work for the wage they are offering While this is accurate, it ignores OP's point that they were willing to work for those wages pre-pandemic, but now the government is paying them something equivalent to 'sit around' (per OPs point). Is it the job of the employer to raise wages or the government's job to pay people to work vs sitting? Maybe we should bring back…

When people are paid starvation wages and have to have multiple jobs, that's brushed off as "supply and demand" of labor. You get paid what the market is willing to pay for your labor, and it's your own fault if you can't offer anything more compelling to demand a higher wage. But when the situation is flipped around, and there is a shortage of labor instead? Suddenly the same rules don't apply, "supply and demand" i…

I don't have the 'correct' answer here, but I think I understand what you're saying. Except the shortage of labor in this case is artificially created. I agree that companies should not be entitled to cheap labor, and I do wish they are paid better though

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#190

Post by Pfhreak » Sat, May 15, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

anovikov wrote: post #166

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some back of the envelope work - with 70 million million divided amoung 300 million people, that's 233,333 per person. Assume 4 people per household that's about a million per household. Avg s&p dividend is 2.3% - That's minimum wage per 2 working adult household. The math does seem to stack up. The problem is distribution, not total wealth it seems Edit: Ok this is skewed as US stock markets are really a global…

Yes but that way of splitting would very quickly destroy for the very very obvious reason - no money must be given to children... And dividing by adults, say over-15s, it's 70T per 257M, $272K per adult or $1044 per month for that family of 4 with 2 adults in it... That hardly solves any questions. And you can't divide all of it, because it means destroying capitalism, taking the bottom out of society. Only a small f…

> $272k per adult or $1044 per month for that family of 4 with 2 adults in it

Something fishy about your math here.

$272k per adult is $544k per family. If you paid it over one year that's $45k per month.

Edit: oh, I see, you are only giving people the interest on the capital and assuming a growth rate of ~2%. Both of which seem quite silly to me, but whatever.