This article seems really out of touch, and anybody mentioning the 'UBI' experiment in Manitoba Canada as a success or in a positive light I can hardly trust about the experiments I haven't read about. When we Canadians did an experiment it failed!
Why we should all have a basic income
21–30 of 492 posts
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#22This article seems really out of touch, and anybody mentioning the 'UBI' experiment in Manitoba Canada as a success or in a positive light I can hardly trust about the experiments I haven't read about. When we Canadians did an experiment it failed!
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#23UBI is attempting to cloak itself in free market rhetoric, but it's bullshit.
Yes it may "incentivize" some individuals to work, but only by disincentivizing others. It takes money from top wealth producers, discouraging their labor, and gives it to people who aren't producing as much wealth, effectively subsidizing unproductive work. This will make everyone poorer in the long run.
The struggling artist meme is an appeal to emotion. The struggling artists and entrepreneurs are struggling for a reason -- the market does not want their goods or services! They should fail as quickly as possible, not continue to drag on producing things people don't want.
I'll concede that the welfare state has perverse incentives which trap people in poverty, but there are better ways to address it other than doubling down on the mother of all wealth redistribution schemes.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#24If everyone gets $1000 every month guaranteed for "basic needs", the prices for those basic needs will increase accordingly. And independently. So you'll end up spending that $1k on either housing, bills or food. So you will still need a job if you want all three of those things, not sit around and contemplate what you should do with your life. It's sort of like how the ACA raised the overall price of insurance. Givi…
A UBI would end up selectively helping those who need it and not putting money in the pocket of those who don't (in general). The UBI would have to be paid by taxes -- more than $1000 per month would come from those who are well off and less than $1000 per month would come from those in need.
Your theory that the cost of food would go up if people had more money is out of whack.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#25>>>Basic income guarantees you a monthly starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life If the poverty line stayed constant, basic income is a no-brainer. But basic income makes the cost of goods rise. Demand for goods increases, but supply diminishes. Nobody will do the crap jobs without higher pay, raising the price of everything. Basic income is impossible.
Claims are misleading, wrong, and unsupported. > Demand for goods increases. Citation needed. Demand for some goods will possibly decrease: like payday loans or bankruptcy law. Demand for luxury goods won't change at all: yachts, private jets. But even the demand for Big Macs probably won't change all that much. Apply the same exercise to a bunch of other sundry cases: buying a house, life-saving medication, buying a…
More people buying stuff increases demand - econ 101. If more people aren't buying stuff, why bother giving them the money? Of course prices will rise.
The only way this isn't equivalent to the government printing money is the money comes out some rich people/company's savings accounts where it wasn't being spent anyway.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#26UBI is attempting to cloak itself in free market rhetoric, but it's bullshit. Yes it may "incentivize" some individuals to work, but only by disincentivizing others. It takes money from top wealth producers, discouraging their labor, and gives it to people who aren't producing as much wealth, effectively subsidizing unproductive work. This will make everyone poorer in the long run. The struggling artist meme is an ap…
> This will make everyone poorer in the long run.
I think that's unlikely, though it depends on a lot of factors (UBI is a pretty general concept, and the specific implementation and numbers matter). It may reduce aggregate GDP, but that's not the same as making everyone poorer, since distribution matters when determining that. If, to take an exaggerated example, the top 10% of earners have their income multiplied by 10x and everyone else's goes down by 5%, "everyone has gotten richer" according to some kind of aggregate metric, but in reality 90% of actual people have gotten poorer. Most economists no longer believe that these kinds of situations are automatically self-correcting through "trickle-down economics", in which just getting out of the way of wealth-creation at the top inevitably lifts all boats.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, I, programmer, will be forced to work 12 hours per day to keep robots firmware up to date, while everybody else will enjoy free ride? Sorry, it will not work: I will chose free ride too. Why not just decrease number of working hours to say 2 per day, but for everybody, instead?
If basic income is good enough for you, you may stop working. Some people need more than basic income.
Thank you, captain. I already said that.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, it will not work: I will chose free ride too. Maybe you would, but I think most people would rather have a job and be fabulously wealthy relative to those surviving on UBI alone. See: all the people who work 60h a week in SF making $200k instead of chilling at a bank working 35h for $80k.
Politics will tell people that they will raise basic income to win election. To raise income, they will raise taxes, so I will work 80h for $20K instead of $200K. It's not a joke: post-USSR countries already have exactly this problem.
I don't think any countries have successfully automated most of their economies yet so it's apples and oranges.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, I, programmer, will be forced to work 12 hours per day to keep robots firmware up to date, while everybody else will enjoy free ride? Sorry, it will not work: I will chose free ride too. Why not just decrease number of working hours to say 2 per day, but for everybody, instead?
Alternatively - under UBI - you may decide to work 6 hours per day, and enjoy the earned income in addition to the regular Basic Income payment, all the while knowing that you can leave (or switch employer) any time without fear of destitution.
Difference between $X for 0hpd and $Y for 6hpd is too steep.
Re: Why we should all have a basic income
#30Here is the same author in 2014 attempting to explain how basic income won't lead to massive inflation:
https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...
>>>It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.*
There is no sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar then to redistribute it to people that didn't work for it. The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value.