251–260 of 552 posts
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That's why we have money - so people can say things like "No it isn't, because if it were people would have given you billions for it."
Money is not a panacea for valuation. If it were, then ending climate change would be much more profitable.
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+1. And whence the money for the share? Taxes. So this is just a UBI. This, like all UBI proposals, seems like a way to dress up a massive tax hike: "but you'll be getting your share of GDP!". The only way to get me to like a UBI is to have UBI replace absolutely all (and I do mean all) welfare programs so that we can just haggle at every election over one headline UBI number + necessary taxes. And the initial UBI an…
There are wealth taxes in Switzerland, Norway, France, and the Netherlands, amongst others in Europe. They've been repealed in countries like Sweden and Austria, not because they were disasters, but because exceedingly wealthy people have a lot of influence. That's the only story. As such your claim that no such taxes exist is wrong; and your claim that they've been a disaster is also fallacious. p.s. your "ready for…
He could start with his companies giving out a much larger share of equity to their employees. I always find it fascinating when VCs advocate for things like UBI or this American Equity plan while at the same time being a major contributor to income equality. They could do a lot right now bit instead they make some vague proposals while keeping their money.
A UBI is just a round about way of distributing the wealth generated by automation when the real fix should be having broader societal ownership of those productive assets.
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Indeed. And saving/investing is important! It's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution happened in a country with a secure established rule of law such that people could make investments without worrying about losing them at the whim of a dictator. Much better to tax consumption .
More importantly, it happened in a country which forced people off their land at gunpoint, into urban poverty, where they provided a huge supply of cheap, fungible, and utterly disposable factory labor. But that would run counter to the neo-liberal narrative... After all, the rule of law serves to protect investments , not the peasant forced off his land. Where was the rule of law to protect said peasants? Perhaps th…
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Indeed. And saving/investing is important! It's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution happened in a country with a secure established rule of law such that people could make investments without worrying about losing them at the whim of a dictator. Much better to tax consumption .
More importantly, it happened in a country which forced people off their land at gunpoint, into urban poverty, where they provided a huge supply of cheap, fungible, and utterly disposable factory labor. But that would run counter to the neo-liberal narrative... After all, the rule of law serves to protect investments , not the peasant forced off his land. Where was the rule of law to protect said peasants? Perhaps th…
I agree that the rule of law didn't protect peasants who were forced off their hereditary lands. You'll note that it wasn't the peasants who led the industrial revolution.
> The annual earnings for a full-time minimum-wage worker is $15,080 at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. Full-time work means working 2,080 hours each year, which is 40 hours each week. [1]
GDP per capita 2016 = 57K [2]
10% GDP per capita = 5.7K
20% GDP per capita = 11.4K
15K - 11.4K = 3.6K
So my options are:
- no work + ubi = Gain 40 hours of personal time per week; lose out on 3.6K if we didn't have UBI.
- work + no ubi = Better off by 3.6K without UBI, but at the cost of 40 hours working a shitty job.
[1]: https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-ful...
[2]: https://www.google.de/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...
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> This idea is basically UBI couched in capitalist terms "Universal Basic Income" is already a radically capitalist idea. It's often discussed using terminology borrowed from Marxism and socialism, but it couldn't be any more capitalist of a construct. We're just not used to hearing it discussed with that language.
Could you clarify what you mean? a UBI seems like pretty straight forward wealth re-distribution which I generally don't see described in most capitalist philosophies. Everyone gets $10k. Obviously not everyone is going to pay $10k in taxes otherwise the system would be pointless and we could instead just eliminate taxes altogether. Those at the bottom would benefit, those at the top would pay more in taxes, and some…
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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, worked hard, and yet he still gave his hard work to the public.
Did he? I thought he was working for CERN at the time, meaning the public (or the European public, anyway) already owned the protocol he produced.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
[1]https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
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In the long run, every dollar of wealth gets spent. As a practical matter, consumption taxes can be made progressive by combining them with a low-income tax credit or a universal basic income.
> In the long run, every dollar of wealth gets spent. Not necessarily. "Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Oracle (ORCL) are sitting on $504 billion, or 30%, of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015, according to an analysis released Friday by ratings agency Moody's Investors Service. That's even more cash concentration than…
But the foreign assets issue is a peculiarly US problem, resulting from the US being almost unique in the world in the extent to which it imposes taxes on income earned in other countries. (The other such country is Eritrea, and the US voted in favour of a UN security council resolution condemning the Eritrean tax regime.)