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Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

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Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#211

If you'd told me ten years ago I would ever support a basic income, I would have laughed. My thought would have been, "People getting paid without doing anything? Absurd!" But, in the past few years I've thoroughly changed my mind on this, and a number of other fronts. I now fully support a basic income (though I think a debate needs to happen about how much that basic income ought to be and how it ought to be funded…

I agree with you, but how do you propose going about giving this underclass the leverage they need to make this happen? Short of encouraging them to kill rich people of course, which anyway would get you killed or neutralized long before you had any hope of success. Our system is simply not set up to reliably make changes for the benefit of people with no leverage over it in the first place.

One idea is to make S&P as a company and every citizen under a certain (family) income bracket are allocated non-tradeable equal share in that company. Every listed company is to pay an amount equal to some formula derived from its share price and market value. The money collected every year in the pool is then divided among all shareholders equally.

- Mandate all entities to get listed and traded. Otherwise tax at a punishable rate. - Simplify reporting obligations so listing is not painful. - Reduce corporate tax to a fixed amount under-20 percent and income-tax under-15 percent so companies and individuals have incentive to register and get listed.

This would ties the single most important metric of capitalism, share price, to the democracy that makes capitalism possible at first place. Also all derivatives or executive compensation, investor returns are related to share price.

The division is periodically reassessed as people join or leave pool.

Re: Why Should We Support the Idea of an Unconditional Basic Income?

#212
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ever heard of minimum wage? Yeah, that one did not work as expected either (and created massive unemployment when the threshold was set too high as well)." Citation needed. Your assertions do not match my understanding of the facts about the result of the minimum wage. (Though I would have agreed with you ten years ago, a better understanding of it has altered my opinion significantly.)

When you raise the minimum wage, you don't change any of the other aspects of the business affected by it. So, say you have 15 employees making $10 an hour to keep your company afloat. (Just to keep things simple ,this is about the logic of it.) Now the minimum wage goes up to $15. What are you going to do? You would be losing money with a %50 increase in your costs. Most likely what you will do is lay off 5 employee…

Re: edit

This is the irony of this. You are writing well thought out explanations, but since it's not leftist enough, you get downvoted at a community which spent non-trivial amount of time trying to raise "quality of discussion", and even more time talking about "quality of discussion".

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