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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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191–200 of 446 posts

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically not possible to do that without making those things cheaper somehow. Convert the entire US federal budget to UBI and it is around 10k per person. Healthcare alone per person is already 9k. Housing is maybe another 5k. And this is before those things get more expensive as people consume more of them.

Ubi goes hand in hand with taxing the rich

The US federal budget is 3.8 Trillion. Using parent's numbers, you would need $5.3 Trillion to just cover healthcare + housing, assuming zero inflation.

What tax rate are you proposing will genenerate $5.3 Trillion off of taxing the rich?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#192
post #92
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Alaska which has a long-term state-run form of UBI. It's about $100 per person per month. Even at such a low amount, to your point, it creates some measurable inflation and other distortions in the market. UBI may only work as a low, supplemental amount to start, so it could be a fair analog. The idea that we'll start with UBI that's enough for each individual to rent a studio, cover transportation costs, and…

Distortions in the Alaskan market happen because everything in the far north costs a lot more labour/energy. This is due to economies of scale, the inhospitable environment, and the need to ship in pretty much everything necessary for human life. Government handaouts are not why a head of lettuce in a small town in Nunavut can cost ~$15.

Yes, that's true. There are other Government subsidies (e.g. increased payments to medicare providers) meant to offset the costs of operating in that environment. What I meant was that within these "permanent distortions" of the market, there are short-term observable trends around the time of the APF dividend (an annual payment) is distributed, e.g. I believe something like 30% of all sales in certain (rural) areas occur in the 30 days following distributions. My larger point was simply that 1) the APF is an important source of income for many cash-poor Alaskan families, 2) Alaskans generally seem to have faith in it's sustainability, 3) there's 30+ years of good data around distributions and economic activity, and 4) as such, it seems like both the best proxy we have for UBI and its potential effects.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Ubi does fix that. If ubi isn't enough to cover those then it's not high enough.

UBI is not guaranteed to make the majority of people better off. Its effects and consequences are highly dependent upon the source of revenue from which it is financed. You have to know the source of revenue for UBI and how other prices in the economy react to it in order to determine if it will make the majority of people wealthier or poorer.

If UBI is funded via taxes on labor and capital rather than taxes on land, it will subsidize landowners and banks and allow them to charge higher rent and make more from mortgages. If the price which a family pays for shelter, rent, and mortagages increases in proportion to the rate which their income increases from UBI, then will not actually be any wealthier.

Society will actually be much poorer, as we would be redistributing money from productive workers and entrepreneurs to unproductive landholders and lenders who were able to capture the increased public spending through higher land prices and rent.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#194
Right now, in the U.S., I'd settle for guaranteed basic/effective health care.

If you aren't going to outright kill people, and if you expect them to "bootstrap" and move on to the next job, you should put some effort into making sure they are healthy enough to do so.

Not to mention basic morality.

Nor that problems treated early are smaller and cost less. And that society pays that cost, whether through cost spreading by private healthcare (hospital critical care -- the last line of defense); Medicaid and government programs; or prison.

Unless you really are going to just bury them, and spring for a pauper's grave.

Sounds rhetorical? Look at Jeff Sessions' latest mandate to prosecutors: 'Lock them up! For as long as possible!'

Look at the widening gaps in longevity.

Follow the money (to the top).

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

There's inflation that the CPI tracks. And then there's inflation in a given sector, or product group. Basically inflation happens any time you shift the money supply around, be it with government regulation, or with economic booms or "gold rushes" (just look at what happened in the shale boom town economies). I can guarantee that there will be inflation in areas of the market that cater to poorer people. There is a…

> basic food stuffs

Very few people are actively starving. A lot of people have food stamps already, and UBI eliminates them. With a UBI, and the hopeful cultural normalization of utilizing resources over being "poor", you can better optimize the use of excess foodstuffs that end up in food trucks and banks that not enough people can use all the time.

Food prices are always in a balancing act. Premium goods like beef and lobster fluctuate based both on the amount of money in the market for them, that can spur investment in increasing supply, or in the amount available, that can vary significantly depending on seasonal yield (moreso in lobster than cows). If a UBI increases the food spending budgets of the poor, they start buying more lobster and sirloin, and the prices go up. Then the market is up on those goods and more will be produced because the cost of manufacture probably didn't go up - the poor weren't suddenly demanding tractors or rural farmland or grain feed - meaning you still have the same net cost to manufacture, so the supply side pressure is there to increase the supply to meet the demand. Prices normalize again as a result of that, and they would not be dramatically higher. It depends on the total sum of social desire for these products relative to their competitors. If people start eating more beef, the price of chicken might drop in response and pressure people into maintaining the natural balances and optimizations around what the market can best provide at the cheapest prices.

> Rents will go up... about work income as much.

Housing is in balance now between rural and urban, and it would be after UBI. If rents get too high in cities (or just more generally, wherever the poor want to be) there is a cost ceiling where they will start inhabiting the dirt cheap rural towns that have been abandoned for decades because it is infeasible to live there without an income. Overnight, millions of unoccupied and unlivable houses become usable again.

> Alcohol and tobacco will likely get more expensive as well.

Luxury goods go up in price. The world isn't hurt at all for this.

> you'll still have higher prices in the long term

UBI has an economic effect you can see in food stamps now. The market treats food stamps as a price floor - they know that the worst their customers can be is on food stamps, so they price accordingly because the amount of money in the food stamps system is huge. As long as they can make any profit at the prices food stamp recipients can afford, they will compete in the market for their money.

The exact same would happen with UBI. Suddenly even the poorest person has a market voice, and there are still enough poor people - the median US income right now is only about 4k a year over the poverty line - to influence markets with their size, if not their density of money per person.

Inflation is not magic. The inflation in the US right now is from expanding the monetary base. If the federal reserve stopped printing money entirely, inflation would slow or stop. You would certainly see inflation immediately after instituting UBI - because suddenly billions of dollars effectively frozen in the stock market and trading in economic circles outside of the general consumer market are moved back into it - but it would not cause sustained inflation if you are just moving around funds in the economy that already had velocity. And even then, it would not be a severe jolt - billionaires don't just hoard benjamins under their mattresses. They invest them in companies that spend the money. Unless you are Apple or hoard billions overseas, but those are generally the exception to the standard rule of money in your pocket is money lost. The velocity would go up, but not tremendously, in ways that can destabilize an economy.

And that price floor that UBI sets puts tremendous pressure on businesses to meet demand at the price level. Properties would be built and refurbished to accommodate that income bracket. Food production would insure that food is available at that bracket. And of course vice and luxury will try to price themselves into that bracket. Because it would be billions of dollars of demand - you can't just ignore it - but because the UBI income puts an effective ceiling on costs that people can pay if they have no other income, that pressure fixes prices to that income threshold. It wouldn't respond instantaneously - you could and would see examples of people not being able to afford living off UBI in isolated years - but those are from market variability. The prices will either drop to get their money, or they will move where they can. And the US is big enough that we won't have a shortage of places to go, like we do right now where the limiter is a drying up pool of job offers.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#196
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it's a matter of trusting the person behind the counter over your smartphone.

Why trust one random person (who may not have even seen the movie you are interested in, share your preferences, or be particular insightful) when you can have the aggregate wisdom of everyone who has seen the movie and cared enough to rate it?

Because, frankly, I don't give a shit about aggregate "wisdom". (It's aggregate opinions, no wisdom to be found there).

Many movies are polarizing. In aggregate, they're OK. Talking to a single person whose opinion I trust is much more helpful than getting an average from 1,000s. Look at Yelp ratings - everything is pretty good by now, and the recommendations are mostly meaningless. They don't fit my needs, if my needs go beyond "I need edible food in a certain price category".

It turns out experts trump the crowd when it comes to opinions, because the opinion of a crowd is almost always indifferent.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technology shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever. This rebuttal suffers from the same problem, it extrapolates "yesterday" into "tomorrow". A computer isn't the same sort of thing as a steam-powered mill or a printing press. A robot isn't a tractor. When we create machines that are simply better at work than humans both physically and ment…

I accept your point if you show me the evidence that supports your claim that we are eliminating jobs at a rate faster than before. To give an example for you to think about, the machine gun eliminated more jobs for infantry than we have for cashiers. As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a s…

The share of U.S. economic output that's paid out in wages in at the lowest point since the government started keeping track of it. In 1964 AT&T was worth $267 billion in today's dollars and employed 758,611 people. Google is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000 employees -- less than a tenth the size of AT&T's workforce in its heyday.

We're going to get self-driving cars in our lifetimes and the number one job in most states is "truck driver". My job as a software developer is to eliminate jobs (or simply prevent new ones from being required). I'm personally responsible for the loss of more jobs that I have.

> As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size.

Of course, they transitioned into a world where all the other major countries had their manufacturing industries destroyed by war. Again, extrapolating from the past has it's issues; you cannot simply say "training" was the only, or even the most significant, factor. If you had a functional body, you could get a good job.

> using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who needs it to take a job that could use them.

I think right now we have an absolute glut of educated people; no time in history have you needed to be as educated as you are right now to get an entry level position. People are literally taking jobs that don't pay anything. The number of recent collage grads that are underemployed (employed in jobs that don't require their degree) is at the highest level in 20 years.

> What I categorically reject is the notion that there is any solid reasoning for trying to artificially create jobs that happen to meet existing skill sets.

Absolutely; it's a terrible practice. And the thing is, you don't even have to artificially create it. We already have "bullshit jobs"[1] that fill this vacuum already.

[1] http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-d...

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would keep Amazon from adjusting to this or Acquiring the company if it got big enough? Those are tiny tweaks that they could make easily. Plus Amazon is much more than just a place to buy. They are data services, logistics, analytics, seller services, infrastructure etc...

> What would keep Amazon from adjusting to this Obviously not much. The point I was trying to make was that a small player probably can't compete with Amazon on price, but they may be able to compete some other way.

Is it even a problem if they can't compete with Amazon on price? Generally the reason to fear monopolies is abuse of market capture for profit. If you own all the corn, you can set the price. But Amazon doesn't own all the commerce - it just undercuts everyone. But that is a win for consumers until Amazon tries to exploit its position.

But the moment they do that, right there is where you can undercut Amazon. If they are abusing their competitive advantage by the nature of abusing it they are giving it up.

At worse, they raise prices circumstantially to maximize profit, but that is more the benefits of winning the market than of exploiting a monopoly, because they would still be overall cheaper than any competitor could manage.

As long as Amazon is cheaper (and not exploiting employees) than what a competitor could do, the consumer is winning.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#199
post #11
post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…

It's like the (independent) bookstore employee. They probably make minimum wage but they are interesting to talk to, are up to date on the latest great books, and really do add to the value of the store.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some numbers: Current US population: 324 million people, 250 million adults. Poverty line income: $22,000 for the family of four (it is hard to estimate individual poverty line income, but it's more than $22,000 / 4. Let's say $12,000, which is $1000 / month). Total cost of universal basic income of $1,000/month for the US: $3 trillion per year. Total US income tax revenue: $1.8 trillion for personal income tax, $0.4…

You are making the case that it's currently impractical. That is very different from "as inevitable as [the] CAP theorem". For instance, if the cost of "basic life necessities" was somehow $5/yr, but incomes (and tax revenues) similar to today (... presumably people are spending an awful lot on luxury goods?), it could certainly be all three of those things. It may be the case that that is somehow impossible, but tha…

Yes, the luxuries like rent, education and healthcare. And yes, "somehow" is a word that appears very often in every discussion about UBI.
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