No surprise there. Who are the rich? The politicians and bureaucrats who implemented these ideas, along with their buddies who fund their campaigns and junkets, and offer cushy board positions and lobbying gigs if they ever do leave their government posts.
America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
241–250 of 433 posts
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this argument justify stopping ANY spending that is not R&D? For example, a dollar spent on healthcare keeping a chronically sick person alive is a dollar that could instead have improved the welfare of all future generations. Is there a version of this argument that doesn't throw grandpa under the bus?
Yes, for any given time preference there exist capital allocations with equilibrated marginal returns between consumption vs capital investment. I'd argue we're not in one of those allocations, and if we are it must be associated with an extremely high time preference, and UBI would make it worse.
I agree your statement is logically correct from a utilitarian standpoint.
There's a little bit of "spherical cow" involved though. A more detailed model would recognise that R&D spend is not pure investment, and UBI would not be pure consumption.
Whether non-zero UBI today would good policy or not depends on an enormous number of facts about the world that I think it would be very difficult to come to an agreement on.
For example, at what level diminishing returns from R&D spending kick in, and whether UBI apart from increasing immediate welfare has any compounding benefits (human capital, civil cohesion, education, business starts, citizen science) vs mostly benefiting landlords and netflix.
I expect our priors are quite different.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#243Every single one of the richest people I know got a 6+ figure handout on PPP.
I'm only upper middle class so I only got $15k.
I'm guessing most of the people who could have eaten more food if they got a bit more from the program got one less zero than I got.
It's as if the program was designed to be as regressive as possible.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills Common sense. Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI will use additional marginal cash to do things like smoke weed and watch cartoons. Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). > whi…
> Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI > Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary. > I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting…
> The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary.
If I get a check for $1,000 every month and I lose $5,000 on taxes every month, I'm not really a beneficiary.
This is a wealth redistribution scheme. The wealth is being redistributed from people who are self-evidently efficient capital allocators to people who are self-evidently not. (That's a Bayesian judgement, not an absolute one.)
> The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically
Please, I'd love to hear how "organized society" is synonymous with "welfare programs".
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please enlighten us what proud plan that is brazenly American would you have enacted to keep the country from collapsing when everything was closing?
Well, the best option at the time would have been to not lock down at all and just carry on as usual: lockdowns appear to have had almost no effect on Covid deaths ( https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... )
A ltierature review by economists is possibly the least-valuable class of paper you could cite short of actual blog posts.
This specific paper throws out anything that even mentions any effect but mortality, any paper that compares real-world results to predictive models, and includes papers from various dumping grounds an non-peer-reviewed outlets. Any paper which attempts to introduce rigor is dismissed. Some of the papers cited are actual blog posts. This paper itself is self-published by one of the authors. The second figure disagrees with its own source (it cites six specific weeks early in the outbreak, during which time the stringency index did not change, but the x axis is a range of unsourced claims). It cites the GRADE handbook to support its hyperfocus on mortality rates (to the exclusion of literally all other considerations) but fails to note that the GRADE handbook is a health care guide and healthcare institutions were in the process of being overrun during the period they investigate, basically making the now-classic "but it only has an x% death rate" misdirection we're accustomed to hearing from Facebook propagandists.
In short, this document is almost but not entirely worthless. It is worthless as a public policy resource, but it is highly valuable if you want to make noise about how the Danes should have followed Sweden's example in 2020.
It's just as well they don't seem to have bothered minting a DOI for this, because web forum comments are the only places it's going to be cited. It's sloppy work, basically cherry-picking datasets, and then using them to affirm the consequent. I'm embarassed for the authors.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#246Anything other than direct cash transfers to individual humans is likely to have this effect. Institutions are simply always going to be able to navigate and take advantage of complex government programs better than real human beings. UBI or stfu. Time to try some trickle up economics. Also, for the love of god, let's stop prioritizing saving "jobs" that may or may not be necessary for civilization and start prioriti…
Saudi Arabia have the closest thing to an UBI and Saudi nationals notorious for having bad work ethics and low skills. The economy is pretty much run by foreign workers. The country will be completely doomed if it continues this path and the oil runs out. The government is trying all kind of policies to prevent this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudization
This is a bad example with many compounding factors, not just the one variable being UBI. There are many differences between Saudi culture and ours here in the US, many differences in the way in this proposed, etc. Also important to note that this essentially applies to men of Saudi decent only. It is not UBI, it's missing the U.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#247And no one was worried about "socialism" when the tax payers gave tons of cash to the rich. Certain people only seem to worry about "socialism" when it helps regular people.
I know plenty of people who got fat checks and were quite open about pointing out that it was socialism, and a complete waste of money.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#248This is generally how socialist govt programs work. Give money to the rich and advertise it as helping the poor.
Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. They make discussion more predictable and therefore more tedious. Also, they evoke pushback from people with opposite passions, and the result is usually nasty and boring. We're trying for something different here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#249Anything other than direct cash transfers to individual humans is likely to have this effect. Institutions are simply always going to be able to navigate and take advantage of complex government programs better than real human beings. UBI or stfu. Time to try some trickle up economics. Also, for the love of god, let's stop prioritizing saving "jobs" that may or may not be necessary for civilization and start prioriti…
Please don't post ideological flamewar comments to HN. They make threads predictable, tedious, and usually nasty. We're trying for something different here: thoughtful, curious conversation. To the extent possible on the public internet.
Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich
#250No surprise there. Who are the rich? The politicians and bureaucrats who implemented these ideas, along with their buddies who fund their campaigns and junkets, and offer cushy board positions and lobbying gigs if they ever do leave their government posts.
Were there countries that did a better job than the US in regards to the economic response the pandemic, particularly with respect to fiscal stimulus? Is any other country as close the the US to prepandemic GDP trendlines?
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are but I’m honestly not aware of them.