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India floats the idea of a universal basic income

economist.com

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Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#231

Post by dang »

aminok wrote: post #71

Forcibly redistributing income from low resource generators to high resource generators creates an incentive for people with fewer resources to have more children than they are capable of supporting. This dynamic will in the long run lead to more people that produce fewer resources. Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers): http://cepr.net/publications/report…

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Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#232

Post by dang »

aminok wrote: post #74

>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.

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Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#233

Post by mkaziz »

gizmo wrote: post #207
ozy wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 serv…

forgive me if I misunderstand, but isn't negative income tax only negative until you hit a certain amount of income (let's say the federal poverty level) and then start getting taxed normally via the brackets?

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#234

Post by neffy »

aminok wrote: post #91
neffy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument (Malthusian) goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. But since pretty much every technologist, scientist and engineer currently working can trace their lineage in less than 4 generations back to the working class, I think I'll go with greater and better distributed wealth and education solving more problems than it creates. The fundamental issue addressed by positive incomes is simply t…

The Malthusian argument has never been tested for an extended period in a situation where resource usage has been decoupled from resource generation. From the brief experiment we've had with massive forcible income redistribution (social democracy), we've seen the following: * slow down in wage growth and improvements in life expectancy * slow down in productivity growth * explosion in the rate of single parenthood (…

I'm not sure why you think the extraordinary increase in world wide prosperity, general living conditions, health, and access to information that the last 40 years has ushered in is a "failed experiment in social democracy".

And if there's an explosion in single parenthood due to woman having more choice, because of these benefits - well maybe their partners should think about that a little.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#235

Post by gizmo »

mkaziz wrote: post #233
gizmo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serv…

forgive me if I misunderstand, but isn't negative income tax only negative until you hit a certain amount of income (let's say the federal poverty level) and then start getting taxed normally via the brackets?

That's correct.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#236

Post by ozy »

gizmo wrote: post #229
ozy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." The term wealth redistribution is generally understood as wealth going from the rich to the poor and is a "left" idea[1]. And even it it is not, I cannot think of a (sane) negative income tax system that can be described as wealth going from the poor to the rich. But y…

> cannot think of a (sane) negative income tax system that can be described as wealth going from the poor to the rich. Neither can I, but that's because I think all plans are either (a) mathematically impossible or (b) intended to distribute wealth upwards by dismantling the social welfare state as we know it. > Sure there is, because a 125[2] of the 240 have a job, those who earn little, might still get some money f…

Perhaps because 30k (your number) is a bit much, as the GDP/C of USA is only 53k.

As I said, wealth redistribution is knob, currently set to around 5% (my guess) in the USA. I think 20% should be the aim over time, which translates to ~15k income in some form of UBI, and +15% tax for the rich.

That would mean a 30k income for an average 4 person household.

"Even with the highest tax bracket at 100% I don't see how it could work."

That is entirely lack of imagination on your side ... just add up all the money the top 10% makes. And it must work mathematically, because 30k is lower than average income at 51k.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#237

Post by Tiksi »

gizmo wrote: post #207
ozy wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 serv…

>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.

Hmm, where have I heard that before?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#238

Post by suraj »

ouid wrote: post #72
f_allwein wrote: post #51

From the longer (paywalled) version: "Over a fifth of its population lives below the poverty line. The scheme outlined this week by the chief economic adviser to the Indian government, Arvind Subramanian, would cut that figure to less than 0.5% by transferring about $9 a month to all adult Indians. If doled out to everyone, that would cost around 6-7% of GDP; the 950 welfare schemes soak up 5% of GDP." http://www.eco…

This is only tangentially related, but I remember there was a problem some time ago where India simply did not have the infrastructure to count all of its citizens. How is Aadhaar sure of its 99% figure?

Adhar relies on biometric data. Iris & fingerprint scanning is done when you get your Adhar card.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#239

Post by jjoonathan »

winstonewert wrote: post #113
jjoonathan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human desire may be infinite, but that doesn't mean there is an infinite source of jobs if we just try hard enough. Problem 1: the economic notion of value is weighted by wealth, but the notion of "human desire" you discuss is not. Entertaining a king is valuable, in the economic sense, but feeding and housing a poor is not. It doesn't matter if there are plenty of things that people want to be done, it matters if th…

>Entertaining a king is valuable, in the economic sense, but feeding and housing a poor is not. No, actually. The economic notion of value is subjective. Economic thought, despite popular perception, does not view value in purely monetary terms. Instead, value is seen as subjective: something is valuable because humans value it. Human desire is the very definition of what makes something valuable.

According to who? Googling "economic value" returns a litany of definitions in terms of money (or, more generally, exchange).

I don't deny that there is a notion of value apart from the economic one, in fact I would even go so far as to argue that the terms "economic value" (and "market value" etc) give markets entirely too much credit by suggesting that economic value and market value do a halfway decent job of approximating or approaching the philosophical notion of value, which is the term I'd ascribe to your definition and to general use of the word "value" without additional qualifiers.

Re: India floats the idea of a universal basic income

#240

Post by jjoonathan »

tn13 wrote: post #150
jjoonathan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about jobs existing, it's about jobs existing at . We're far from that point now, so how am I supposed to take comfort in a technical argument that it won't get worse than ?

> good enough pay That term is meaningless. An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage. If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem. The bottom 5% in USA today are living lives much better than middle class Americans of 1917. There will always be bottom 5% but what matters…

> That term is meaningless.

Precision of the sort you seem to be after would come at the cost of inviting people to bicker over where exactly the line should be drawn, when the precise location of the line is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making.

> An Indian would be happy to get $12 per day when Americans complain about it being minimum wage.

Looks like you didn't need an invitation. Don't let me stop you. The rabbit hole of defining "good enough pay to survive and thrive" goes much deeper than conditioning on geography.

> If your point is that some people will earn significantly less that others then I think you are true but I dont see why that is a problem.

You're still just putting words in my mouth.

> There will always be bottom 5% but what matters is how they compare with the bottom 5% of 100 years back. As long as that is positive I think thats a very good outcome.

Quite right. The problem is that while the news is positive in aggregate, a large pocket of people have experienced a severe regression in the quality of their social contract, and we have good reason to fear that the phenomenon will spread. History counts in the market's favor, but past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

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