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UBI as a productivity dividend

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Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#201

Post by t0bia_s »

EGG_CREAM wrote: post #195
t0bia_s wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obey to state. You'll always vote for your breadwinners. Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed ans killed millions people many times in history, not just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI sounds really like an ugly idea.

UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it. As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.

So why UBI from involuntary collected money of taxpayers, instead of lowering taxes? Whats the benefit of it and for whom?

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#202

Post by jdejean »

scarmig wrote: post #188
randerson wrote: post #8

I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (uncondit…

Inflation isn't inevitable, especially in the long term. But of course it depends on implementation. The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an accounting trick: t…

I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to cash won’t result in inflation. It’s about accessibility and how liquid the assistance is. It’s also about how evenly that’s distributed.

To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of UBI.

Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income buyers, cheap products wouldn’t even exist in a freely capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.

It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world that wasn’t subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in a freely capitalistic system.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#203

Post by rangestransform »

gruez wrote: post #114
ciwchris wrote: post #20

I recently came across the idea of Universal Basic Capital (UBC): "granting every person a meaningful ownership stake in productive assets from birth." UBC would be enormously difficult to implement, as well as have its own weaknesses. It doesn't seem realistic, but introduces a new idea into the conversation. https://www.digitalistpapers.com/vol2/autorthompson#:~:text=...

How do you prevent people from being swindled and selling their stake off? If it can't be sold off, how's that any different than a corporation tax?

Part of living in a free society is being able to destroy your own life by various means

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#205

Post by scarmig »

jdejean wrote: post #202
scarmig wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation isn't inevitable, especially in the long term. But of course it depends on implementation. The goal of a UBI is to make sure people get their essentials to live. Right now, people get those essentials, one way or another (otherwise, they'd be dead; and to the extent people starve to death in the developed world, it's issues of distribution, not production or money). This makes the UBI an accounting trick: t…

I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to cash won’t result in inflation. It’s about accessibility and how liquid the assistance is. It’s also about how evenly that’s distributed. To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts…

The point is that, if limited to a level that just covers essential goods, it won't change their distribution, just their payer. If it did change the distribution of the good, then it wasn't essential (because it's the floor; without it, the consumer of the good would be dead; above it, and the vast majority of people immediately spend their income on luxury substitutes).

That is, to be clear, a much lower floor than what many people mean by "essential," which has undergone a kind of concept creep in modern discussion that, depending on the person, might be a cell phone, to an education at a private university, to owning a condo in San Francisco. My essential here means enough to afford enough caloric and nutrient intake to maintain a livable body mass; a couple sets of plain tee shirts and jeans; and a minimal shared living space in a low cost of living area. That's quite below what the US considers the current poverty line and a quite bleak existence (and most people would wonder what's even the point of it).

Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the short term.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#206

Post by advael »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #102
advael wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions. Most unions exist to equalize labor negotiation through collective bargaining, and police unions tend to include and align with the leadership in the organization that a union would traditionally be negotiating with. In practice they're a lot more like a military contractor than a union (in that their role is to prevent public accountability)

> Police unions aren't the same thing as other unions What about California teachers’ unions? European notaries?

I'm sure there are other things that call themselves unions but don't serve the same function we expect of organizations using that word. I'm not really knowledgeable about either of the things you mention, so I don't know if I'd view them as fitting this description or not. Both seem unlikely to have the kind of broad negative impact police unions have, which is particularly egregious because they effectively make public oversight of a government function with a lot of potential to do harm impossible, which has the knock-on effect of making that harm more able to propagate, to the point where it's both quite severe and commonplace

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#207

Post by zozbot234 »

neilwilson wrote: post #199
zozbot234 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government already does this by subsidizing low income earners via the EITC. It just outsources the actual job provision to the private sector, which is an effective alternative to wasteful make-work.

Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer. The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility. If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.

An income subsidy does the same thing at lesser cost. Whether that subsidy is a UBI or a wage supplement is to some extent a political choice: we got the EITC instead of a proper UBI (managed as a "negative" income tax bill for low-earning folks) largely due to political objections to the notion of getting money "for doing nothing".

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#208

Post by zozbot234 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #189
elevatortrim wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you say is still the idea and I agree but where does the idea that progressive taxation would go away coming from? What does it have to do with UBI?

A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying different marginal rates. Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each oth…

It turns out that a theoretically optimal non-linear taxation schedule features a UBI plus varying marginal tax rates (i.e. continuous tax brackets) that start out quite high (but sub-100%) in the UBI-clawback range (to manage the UBI break-even point while still offering a high subsidy to the very lowest earners) become very low for low-to-middle income earners and rise gradually for middle- and high-income earners. That's quite redistributive in intent, but the tax brackets themselves are neither "progressive" nor "regressive". Nevertheless, middle- and high-income earners do face moderately progressive rates.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#209

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zozbot234 wrote: post #208
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying different marginal rates. Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each oth…

It turns out that a theoretically optimal non-linear taxation schedule features a UBI plus varying marginal tax rates (i.e. continuous tax brackets) that start out quite high (but sub-100%) in the UBI-clawback range (to manage the UBI break-even point while still offering a high subsidy to the very lowest earners) become very low for low-to-middle income earners and rise gradually for middle- and high-income earners.…

That seems like a lot of added complexity just to make sure the lower middle class gets screwed out of receiving the UBI.

Re: UBI as a productivity dividend

#210

Post by readthenotes1 »

jltsiren wrote: post #136
randerson wrote: post #8

I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year? Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it. Obviously if you're living in poverty, anything is better than nothing, but would the average middle class person be better off? As far as I can tell no country has ever tested true UBI (uncondit…

Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have? ~20 years ago, when UBI was a popular idea in my country, it was understood as a technical fix to the welfare and tax systems. It was supposed to simplify the systems and make them easier to understand. It was supposed to fix the perverse incentives people with low wages face, such as the ex…

"Is that what UBI has become these days? That everyone is supposed to get some extra money on top of whatever they already have?"

You do know that the I in UBI stands for Universal, don't you?

What the people in your country were talking about is a Guaranteed Minimum Income. Related but different

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