231–240 of 337 posts
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Progressives? Did you know that Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman supported the idea?
Friedman supported a negative income tax. While somewhat similar, it is not the same thing.
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> because there is nowhere else to get it. Why that? Nobody's talking about abolishing taxes. Note also that the basic income would replace many other forms of social subsidies that already exist and have harmful side effects.
Why that? Because you can't tax enough to fund a basic income for every single person.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...
It is an outright fraud. 1. Premise: "Basic income of X units of money is sent to everyone in population". 2. Basic income comes from where? Either from taxes, or from printed money. Either way, purchasing power is being taken from some people in proportion to their savings/income. 3. There's always a difference in income and amount of savings. If everyone was making the same amount of money, doing "basic income" wou…
Everyone of consequence understands it has to be paid for, and thus it's not a net income win for everyone. So you're refuting an obtuse interpretation of "everyone gets it" that only the very naive might believe. The point of "everyone gets it" is to simplify administration, soften the stigma, and eliminate the sort of marginal-disincentive cliffs that patchwork 'progressive' benefits often create.
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For some people this "mincome" would be theirs to spend, but for others it'd just be a minor reduction in income taxes. What's somewhat clever about this is how it essentially balances out. The billionaire won't even notice the extra amount in their bank account, but there aren't many billionaires. Meanwhile the three jobs four kids single mom will be greatly impacted by this, which is the whole point.
The billionaire won't notice it because it won't exist; the billionaire will be taxed way above mincome, because otherwise how are you going to pay for it?
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I think it is not just about moving goalposts. What is different is that it frees you from the worry that you need to eat and have an abode. And the hope is that this comfort will make you engage in work you really want to do , rather then turn you into a couch potato.
In my region, there are a lot of able-bodied man in their forties and fifties who, thanks to the state policy, are already retired. The sad fact is that, due to a ton of free time that's suddenly appeared in their lives, a lot of them have become drunks. I fear that for every person doing something meaningful with the freedom given to them via basic income, there'll be 10 or 20 who become couch poatoes or worse, self…
Well there's your problem, fear is not the proper state of mind with which to make good decisions.
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Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage. This is silly. If that were the motivation, then minimum wage would be a few dollars/day. Here is a list of countries by GDP per capita, after adjusting for purchasing power . Lots of countries (e.g. Venezuela, Georgia, India) have a GDP/capita below the…
I don't think you read what I wrote carefully enough. Here it is again. Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage. The key points being that liberals don't want to see it (they don't see other countries), and it is the liberals defining what seems acceptable. As for your "after adjusting for purc…
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It's already worse than that. There are many products which have a smaller size of that's more expensive than the larger size because the smaller one is WIC-approved. There's targeted price-gouging for people who are forced by the government to buy specific products. There are also ridiculous loopholes. People buy soda and milk with returnable bottles, walk outside, pour it out, return the bottles for cash, and buy a…
Who cares? The government pays for WIC, so the only people being defrauded in this circumstance are the government. There's no "price gouging" involved here; WIC recipients get a voucher that pays full price for the items on the voucher, no matter what they are or how much that is.
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The problem with making it unconditional is that it will completely break the ceteris paribus calculations as to what is good enough, making a lot of collateral damage on its way while being largely ineffective. Showering money to everybody is very likely to make more harm than good to real people's economies. A transition to Friedman's proposal on a "moderate" negative income tax (it's not what the name suggests) ma…
You're making a lot of completely unsupported predictions there...
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I understand the confusion, but its mostly there thanks to misconception about how things works now, > If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifestyle) than staying at home not working. Staying home and not working today is not actually an option in most places in the world. The reason is why this new model is called unconditional basic income. The current s…
Your reasoning is severely flawed. Nobody today wants to accept an income below what you need to survive because..you need to survive. Liberals don't want to see other people accepting an income below what is needed for them to survive in a way that we can accept, so pass rules about a minimum wage. With this proposal, there is wage that it too low. As long as you make enough to afford something nice that you want th…
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> The system is broken, but the equality of pay and living standards is not to blame with the government, it's to blame with greedy corporations, share holders insisting they need to do anything for profit and wages being pinned down to the minimum they can be that the work force will stand for (to maximise profits). Let me ask you something... If you start a new business, and let's say you take out a huge loan to pa…
> Corporations pay market value for wages, to increase wages you need to either increase the number of jobs, or decrease the number of workers. To a large degree the market value for wages is such only because of a government subsidy to the employers. Take Wal-Mart for example, they go as far as helping their employees enroll in all sorts of government poverty programs because even though they are full-time workers t…
Think about what would happen if they weren't able to do this. Prices would go up and who would this hurt the most? Their customers. Who are their customers, generally? Poor people.