Interestingly, this appears to be motivated less by economic arguments than by the ease of administration. India has a notoriously corrupt bureaucracy, which has undermined existing welfare schemes by giving welfare to whoever pays the bribes rather than whatever criteria are specified in law. With the (very) recent national ID program, and associated electronic bank accounts, UBI can be administered on autopilot, with few bureaucrats available to bribe (and those isolated in central locations rather than on the ground near potential shakedown targets).
India floats the idea of a universal basic income
201–210 of 252 posts
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are ignoring some bad things that could come out of UBI. The greatest danger is that people may be comfortable near the BI level until they are about 30, and not really work or educate themselves much (lacking motivation). Then, they want to have a family, and all of a sudden their desires for consumption skyrocket. They can't just join the workforce then, because it will be 10 years before they advance e…
I think you hit on one of the biggest risks in my opinion. Right now there is a strong motive to educate yourself, because it will likely result in a more comfortable future. Having a highly educated population is hugely beneficial. I suppose if UBI provided just enough to keep you alive, then it might not be so bad.
It's not just education. Somebody who didn't get out of bed before noon until he was 30 will probably never be able to hold down a job.
This is the reason I think UBI will be disastrous, but it's going to take a generation or two for the rot to set in.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> b) the more work is done by machines, the richer the population as a whole will be True - as a whole . But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer. My concern is this. In ten years time, trucks and taxis will be automated, and vanishingly few truck drivers will be able to retrain as truck computer techs. Truck and taxi driving is the last bastio…
The US suicide rate has been pretty flat for about 50 years. There was a decent drop from the mid 80s until 2000 that has since reverted to norm but it's not historically high. Increasing automation of lower skilled jobs has been going on for a long time. It's hard to see that correlating with any increase in the suicide rate.
> The US suicide rate has been pretty flat for about 50 years. There was a decent drop from the mid 80s until 2000 that has since reverted to norm but it's not historically high.
I don't believe you are analyzing this considering the context. What that implies is that we have not made any significant advances in preventing suicides and treating the root causes despite the many resources being allocated to it.
In the last 50 years, there has been more total wealth and prosperity. Most importantly, there has been a revolution in how mental illness is viewed by not only medical professionals, but by society at large, and we have developed better treatments for it From suicide hotlines to modern police training that includes how to deal with the mentally ill.
The curve SHOULD be trending and that is isn't is a potential cause for worry.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point isn't to demand people not buy tvs with ubi, its just to make sure you can have the bare necessities and little else. If you can also buy a tv, good job. If done right, it should be hard to do that. Basically exactly like how welfare is now, just do that, but without any of the weird requirements that differ state to state. As fir medical care. All insurance should be made redundant. Universal healthcare wo…
Fine, I don't need healthcare for this argument. The weird requirements are there to satisfy impulses like yours: make sure that we only give welfare to the truly needy, and to make sure that their lives on welfare are not too good. The whole idea of UBI is to replace that with an unconditional transfer of a fixed amount of cash to every person. If it's a fixed amount per person, people who choose less desirable hous…
> what if I am cohabiting and want to stop? Do I need to justify to the state that it must now house me and my partner separately at twice the expense? What if I'm faking the separation in order to rent out "my" apartment on the black market and keep living with my partner?
In what way is this anyone's business? In a UBI system, you get, say, $600 a month. That's it. It's cash. No one is asking what you're spending it on. If you want to stop living with someone, you just... do it. Like you do currently. Can't manage it? Get a part-time job on the side to pad your wallet enough to do what you want.
Not trying to bash you, but I think you're misunderstanding the basic concept and assuming a level of government attention that isn't part of the equation.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you hit on one of the biggest risks in my opinion. Right now there is a strong motive to educate yourself, because it will likely result in a more comfortable future. Having a highly educated population is hugely beneficial. I suppose if UBI provided just enough to keep you alive, then it might not be so bad.
Mathematically, I can't imagine we could fund a UBI scheme that would even barely keep you housed and fed. At $1500/mo for everyone in the US, that comes to just shy of 6 trillion USD. For comparison, the total federal tax revenues for 2016 are going to be approximately 3.5 trillion USD, including payroll taxes. At $1500/mo/person, this one program would present 5/3rds of all federal tax revenues. A more realistic fi…
UBI isn't black hole spending like the military. A lot of money is moving through the fed in taxes but that money isn't going into a black hole or having a huge inefficiency quotient taken out of it, the vast majority of UBI checks will be immediately spent and recirculated without any overhead.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#206>But as things stand now, the owners of the machines get richer, and the displaced workers get significantly poorer. No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago. The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.
> No they don't. We've had 200 years of massive automation fueled job destruction, and wages and the demand for labour are massively greater now than 200 years ago.
This is different. In the past, technology has been a multiplier for the productivity of workers. The confluence of robotics and AI will mean the eventual evaporation of low-skill and/or laborious jobs as they are completely replaced by automated agents.
Unless we somehow go through a revolution in education in one generation, start augmenting humans, or place greater value and importance on artistic/creative endeavors, there simply won't be many things that humans are better/more cost-effective at than machines. Certainly not enough to make up for the displacement of jobs.
For example, there are ~3.5 million truck drivers in the US currently. Add those to the number of Lyft, Uber, taxi, etc. drivers. In less than 10 years, those jobs will most likely be completely gone except for bespoke, upscale professional drivers as a luxury. These people do not have a unique skill set they can apply to something else. Remember, low-hanging fruit jobs like working at fast food restaurants and jobs involving manual labor are also gone. That's not even mentioning jobs like customer service via phone or online chat, air traffic controllers, etc. which will be gone.
> The last 20 years in particular have overseen the most rapid wage growth in human history.
Globalization can only happen once.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The negative income tax is not a progressive idea. It was originally proposed by Milton Friedman as a way to dismantle the social safety net and get rid of the minimum wage, food stamps, social programs, pensions, and all those other programs previous generations have fought and died for. What do people get in exchange? Well, a bunch of money, but nowhere near enough to buy all the services they just lost from the fr…
"Subsidies take that into account, the negative income tax does not." In my country there are both subsidies, and tax breaks for such situations. Is anything I said implying we abolish that? I would suggest it translates to more negative tax for such situations. "It's a far right idea that, if executed, would have horrific consequences for the poor." It is wealth redistribution. Which is not a far right idea. Any kin…
Radical wealth redistribution from the needy to the rich is a far right idea, and that's what the negative income tax will boil down to in practice.
It's very simple. Not all people need the same amount of resources to live. A healthy college student needs very little, a sickly elderly person needs a lot. The complex social support system in place today attempts to redistribute the tax money allocated for social services in the most fair way possible. The negative income tax either replicates this complexity (but then what's the point) or the negative income tax seeks to abolish the social support system in order to redistribute money to the rich.
Now as a proponent of the negative income tax it should be on you to show how it could work, not on me. But whatever, I can do some numbers. Since you mentioned you wanted to get rid of social security the negative income tax has to be at least that (or the elderly will have to eat dog food like they did before FDR), and social security is about $30,000 in 2017. There are 240 million adults in the US, 240 million * 30k = 7.2 trillion. That's the same as all local, state, and federal government spending put together. Whoops! So clearly, there is not enough money to give every adult citizen the equivalent of social security. So what are we going to do now? Means test the negative income tax so the elderly get more and young healthy people get less? Means test it so disabled people get more? So that single parents get more? Is the negative income tax just going to replicate the entire social support system it has just senselessly abolished?
If you want to think clearly about the negative income tax think about which demographics end up paying more and which demographics end up getting more. If the goal is just to redistribute wealth from the rich to the needy, you can easily accomplish that by adjusting the income tax brackets. So clearly negative income tax proponents don't want that. Is the goal to increase efficiency? No, because social security has less than 1% in administrative overhead, and negative income tax supporters still want to get rid of it. So clearly that's not the goal either. Is perhaps the real goal to demolish the entire social safety net while giving tax cuts to the rich? Why yes, it is!
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mathematically, I can't imagine we could fund a UBI scheme that would even barely keep you housed and fed. At $1500/mo for everyone in the US, that comes to just shy of 6 trillion USD. For comparison, the total federal tax revenues for 2016 are going to be approximately 3.5 trillion USD, including payroll taxes. At $1500/mo/person, this one program would present 5/3rds of all federal tax revenues. A more realistic fi…
UBI isn't black hole spending like the military. A lot of money is moving through the fed in taxes but that money isn't going into a black hole or having a huge inefficiency quotient taken out of it, the vast majority of UBI checks will be immediately spent and recirculated without any overhead.
It is undeniably true that the majority of UBI checks will be spent as "fast money".
Nevertheless, the money is going to come from somewhere and that somewhere is taxes. It would be unreasonable to not calculate the total sum of taxes required for various levels of UBI funding, IMO.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
UBI isn't black hole spending like the military. A lot of money is moving through the fed in taxes but that money isn't going into a black hole or having a huge inefficiency quotient taken out of it, the vast majority of UBI checks will be immediately spent and recirculated without any overhead.
It is undeniably true that the majority of UBI checks will be spent as "fast money". Nevertheless, the money is going to come from somewhere and that somewhere is taxes. It would be unreasonable to not calculate the total sum of taxes required for various levels of UBI funding, IMO.
It depends on how you phrase it. If you treat it like an expense, people will balk at the proposal as unreasonable. And while a lot of tax revenue ends up being wasted and becomes effectively an expense, 6 trillion taxed to maintain a $1500/month UBI for all adults is not going to slow the economy the way 500Bn for the military does. At worst, the wealthy are getting a fraction of their tax money back in their UBI check and putting it right back where the tax revenue came from - investment accounts.
It is the same way infrastructure investment works. Nobody wants to do it because the upfront bill looks big. But the decades long projection of efficiency of most high-demand projects would eclipse the cost by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile special interests (mainly those who would not immediately benefit from the infrastructure themselves) keep phrasing the conversation around "how much it will cost" these projects never get done, and the national economy suffers as a whole for it.
Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income
#210India is very special, traditionalist society. As person who have spent a considerable time living in North India, I would say that people will turn this free money into gold and garments and other status symbols, like mobiles, which in turn, will cause inflation and soaring of prices of gold and other assets. The analogy could be a land in the great plains of US. In San Francisco or New York the value and the price…
Essentializing and exoticizing much?