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Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

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Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#221

Post by ben_w »

Izkata wrote: post #198
dfxm12 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alaska has had UBI for a while. It has been studied up and down. Studies show since implementing it, poverty has been reduced, crime is down. I haven't seen anything suggesting it encourages greedflation. You are making this claim about UBI, but the difference is you aren't qualifying it beyond with what appears to be your personal thoughts on the matter.

If you mean the Alaska Permanent Fund, according to wikipedia: > The amount of each payment is based upon a five-year average of the Permanent Fund's performance and varies widely depending on the stock market and many other factors. > The lowest individual dividend payout was $331.29 in 1984 and the highest was $3,284 in 2022. That's not what people are generally talking about with "basic income" - it's not anywhere…

I agree with you on this, and I think the best reference point on the question of greedflation specifically would be that pensions exist and yet pensioners often get discounts.

It still isn't universal, merely suggestive.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#222

Post by jstummbillig »

psunavy03 wrote: post #192
jstummbillig wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are actually, right now, "printing money" out of thin air. The process is called "fractional reserve banking" and is a cornerstone of modern economics systems. You can of course read up on it, but, suffice to say, if we did not do it, financial systems would be extremely unergonomic. Hyperinflation is one of the things that could happen, when you do it badly, I suppose, but there is a lot of ways to get hyperinfla…

Thank you for insulting my intelligence by assuming I don't understand fractional reserve banking. My point remains. A government does not have carte blanche to inject money into an economy without hyperinflation beyond a certain point.

If you were a little more honest and a little less into making a point of being offended, you would probably find it fairly easy to concede that the statements you made in both comments are substantially different.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#224

Post by ajross »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #219
ajross wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm saying that when someone says "printing money" they're engaging in demagoguery instead of discussing the issue on merits. Which is fine , if you're making a political point about your enemies within the in-group that understands your shorthand[1]. But this subthread is an actual point about economics and public financing. You can't demagogue that. [1] c.f. ACAB, etc... Every partisan subculture has its jargon…

Okay, since you're apparently never going to respond to the actual issue about why (e.g.) jacking up the money supply by pushing buttons at the Fed and Treasury doesn't have the same effect as running the printing presses (more so, in fact; as I pointed out there's a limit on how fast presses can run), I think we're done. First you tried to deflect by going off on my mistake about why M1 increased so much, even thoug…

> although it DID increase massively, just not as much

It's shrinking very rapidly as we have this silly argument, even as you'd admit that no action was taken to reduce spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

About 60% of the increase over the pandemic has disappeared, as people spend down the accumulated wealth. That's not "massive", and just not consistent with the idea of "money printing"; the analysis is complicated, and has as much to do with supply effects (not as much stuff to buy due to impeded production/shipping) as it does with pandemic relief aid.

I'm happy to have this discussion and to educate you about these issues. But not if you insist on painting things with ridiculous smears like "printing money" (and especially when you start with outrageous claims that are clearly lies you picked up from partisan media).

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#225

Post by RetroTechie »

Ignored often: $$ at the lower end make a much bigger difference than same $$ at the higher end.

Tax wealthy individuals a few hundred $/month extra, and it'll hardly be a blip on their radar (although they might make a stink politically).

Give poor people a few hundred $/month extra, and it could transform their lives.

In short: those $$ have a much higher ROI if spent on the lower end of the population. And thus a much higher bang-for-buck when trying to maximize a population's overall well-being.

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#226

Post by beej71 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #124
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #45

Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment. The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems: 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to…

> Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich. This is not actually that hard because they're only expensive on paper. Right now you have a slew of means tested programs with phase outs that amount to high marginal tax rates on the poor. Meanwhile we try to do the opposite with…

> you can use a flat tax system

Maybe you could help me with this because I never understood it. It seems like the tiered rates of our tax is the least of our worries.

I can see an argument that mathematically it's more complicated than flat, but it's just arithmetic. And practically speaking, nobody does it anyway. The computer figures it out, or they look in the tax table. And that's the same thing they're going to be doing if we have a flat tax, right?

You mentioned the additional complexities of the tax code, which I agree are titanic, but doing away with those doesn't mean we need to do away with tiered tax rates.

I guess in my mind, flat tax isn't really much of a gain. And we have to be extra careful to not make it regressive (with something like, as you suggest, UBI.)

Am I missing something?

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#227

Post by beej71 »

Izkata wrote: post #198
dfxm12 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alaska has had UBI for a while. It has been studied up and down. Studies show since implementing it, poverty has been reduced, crime is down. I haven't seen anything suggesting it encourages greedflation. You are making this claim about UBI, but the difference is you aren't qualifying it beyond with what appears to be your personal thoughts on the matter.

If you mean the Alaska Permanent Fund, according to wikipedia: > The amount of each payment is based upon a five-year average of the Permanent Fund's performance and varies widely depending on the stock market and many other factors. > The lowest individual dividend payout was $331.29 in 1984 and the highest was $3,284 in 2022. That's not what people are generally talking about with "basic income" - it's not anywhere…

But... It looks like it's safe, right? Nothing imploded in Alaska because of it?

So how far can we push it before something implodes?

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#228

Post by Turing_Machine »

ajross wrote: post #224
Turing_Machine wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, since you're apparently never going to respond to the actual issue about why (e.g.) jacking up the money supply by pushing buttons at the Fed and Treasury doesn't have the same effect as running the printing presses (more so, in fact; as I pointed out there's a limit on how fast presses can run), I think we're done. First you tried to deflect by going off on my mistake about why M1 increased so much, even thoug…

> although it DID increase massively, just not as much It's shrinking very rapidly as we have this silly argument, even as you'd admit that no action was taken to reduce spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL About 60% of the increase over the pandemic has disappeared, as people spend down the accumulated wealth. That's not "massive", and just not consistent with the idea of "money printing"; the analysis…

> It's shrinking very rapidly as we have this silly argument, even as you'd admit that no action was taken to reduce spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

That's not answering the question.

> educate you about these issues.

Oh, DO be quiet. You could "educate" me by actually answering the question, but (once again) you haven't.

Bye again!

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#229

Post by smitty1e »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #45

Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment. The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems: 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to…

> at scale

Therein lies the rub.

Above Dunbar's Number[1], we require vast bureaucratic scaffolding. The purest example is the military. Ranks; uniforms; courts martial. People at scale tend toward tyranny. Every. Single. Time.

Our purported globalist saviors are not our friends, and ideas like UBI end in tears.

Decentralize. Empower individuals. Minimize the number of people whose job it is to boss everyone else around. And then ensure those bosses are traded out at a regular frequency.

Aristocracy in its explicit and implicit forms is an idea that is really no longer needed, so let's break the habit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Re: Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time

#230

Post by ajross »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #228
ajross wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> although it DID increase massively, just not as much It's shrinking very rapidly as we have this silly argument, even as you'd admit that no action was taken to reduce spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL About 60% of the increase over the pandemic has disappeared, as people spend down the accumulated wealth. That's not "massive", and just not consistent with the idea of "money printing"; the analysis…

> It's shrinking very rapidly as we have this silly argument, even as you'd admit that no action was taken to reduce spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL That's not answering the question. > educate you about these issues. Oh, DO be quiet. You could "educate" me by actually answering the question, but (once again) you haven't. Bye again!

What's your question, exactly? "Can inflation[1] be caused by other means than literally printing money?" Of course it can. That's not a license to call things like supply shocks or trade wars "printing money" though. Your hyperfocus on this one gotcha point is betraying your ignorance about the actual economics, which is my point you seem to be trying to ignore.

[1] Actually you started with money supply expansion, which isn't really the same thing. But I think you're really talking about inflation.

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