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Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

bbc.co.uk

311–320 of 337 posts

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#311
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>ideal candidate group would be older, poorer people (say, in there 40s) Perhaps. That helps determine if older people who don't make a lot of money anyway will just decide to stop working. However, perhaps the bigger question is if it's offered to younger people, will a lot of them simply never get a job after school and, by the time they realize they need more than UBI, it's too late.

This website is filled with 30 and 40 year olds who rerolled the life dice into successful tech careers so it’s not too late. Obviously a large part of that is the boom in tech so I don’t know how reasonably those people could have become doctors or air traffic controllers with their famously long start up time and forced retirement ages respectively. The more interesting cohort for me would be 25-35 year olds (with…

> This website is filled with 30 and 40 year olds who rerolled the life dice into successful tech careers so it’s not too late.

I'm not a 30 year old restarting my career but I restarted my programming career at 27 after pausing it for military service. A couple of notes:

- I have not met very many people in tech that have lateral moved careers. I mainly sight them online.

- This path was not easy and I would 100% not recommend it, especially if you cannot handle years on years of failure and insecurity in your face.

- I would call tech a young person's game. Company behaviors, attitudes, and hiring practices reward youth and the energy that goes with it.

Those considerations in mind, counting on rolling the dice on tech is not a good idea. For every one of these people you meet, I suspect there's a long line of people who didn't make it or couldn't tolerate the journey, and I don't blame them.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm not quite seeing how the pie gets bigger. You have a UBI at the cost of massive wealth destruction in the housing market. How does LVT favor dense housing? And why would people be building more now that they don't expect the price of homes to ever increase? I'm not seeing how the scenario you've outlined is the most likely to happen.

>You have a UBI at the cost of massive wealth destruction in the housing market. Have you played monopoly? It's literally like that. It's a board game where if you land on a square with a house owned by another player you have to pay "rent" but technically it's a tax because landing on a square that is not owned by a player costs you nothing. In other words, owning the house essentially gives you the right to "rob so…

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Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have this situation where I live (Norway). I.e. you will get payed pretty much the same for a low paying job as you get payed when unemployed by the government. Note that we don't have minimum wage here, but it's not easy to pay people less than they get in unemployment benefits. It still seems that people choose to work. Of course things could be different in other countries, there are clearly a number of factors…

> Note that we don't have minimum wage here I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?

Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed.

If you have been employed lately you will get 62% of your regular salary up to ~70.000 USD, for up to 1 year I think. There's a number of programs if you haven't recently been employed. You can also get free housing. But the sum of all the different programs is that you will end up with roughly the same monthly payment as a low paying job, like retail or something like that. At present probably somewhere around 2000 USD after taxes I would guess. If you consider that a normal salary is probably around 3000 USD after taxes, it's not so bad.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#314
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can there be social mobility that is independent of social social status, or does "social mobility" have a literal definition where if someone gains social status someone else must by definition be lower on the social ladder. If one follows that definition it seems not too strange logic that social support should go towards those at the bottom of the social ladder, and if you change the social ordering then who recei…

Yes it's a left vs right issue here. This interpretation will seem very biased, since I am very left wing, but it really is this way: The left see benefits or welfare as a right, and as a very important way to help people who have found themselves in difficult situations. Here in the UK, left wing people often view those on benefits as victims of their situation or upbringing. They do not think of them as of low soci…

We do have a somewhat similar problem where depending on where you live you get slightly different social support, but this comes as a consequence of local government. Local government need to have a balanced book where those that pay more local taxes than the resources they consumes from local government matches those that consume more than they pay.

If a local region has an influx of citizens that consume more of local resources than they pay in local taxes, the local government then only really has one primary option: reducing who get support and how much support. Health clinics can as a result vary greatly between regions, but since there much fewer hospitals, multiple regions have to join up to a single one and thus the difference get more smoothed out.

With covid-19 pandemic there has been one political change where the right has gone out with the goal of fully nationalizing healthcare, which is a bit odd in terms of left vs right.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#315
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have to. The treatment is not available on NHS and I would be dead without it.

I sympathise. Do you think the reason the treatment isn't available on the NHS is incompetence?

Yes, combined with corruption. The treatment is not available because if more people had access to it, that would eat big pharma profits which some people on advisory panels are shareholders or otherwise have conflict of interest. I am talking about medical cannabis for chronic pain. You can only get it on private prescription.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#316

Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.

> Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.

If you have UBI instead of a minimimum income guarantee, it stacks with income from other sources, so the incentive is doubling your income.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that we don't have minimum wage here I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?

Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed. If you have been employed lately you will get 62% of your regular salary up to ~70.000 USD, for up to 1 year I think. There's a number of programs if you haven't recently been employed. You can also get free housing. But the sum of all t…

> Our "UBI" will be based on a number of factors. It should be noted that we do not officially have an UBI, but unofficially we do in the form of different programs for the unemployed.

That sounds like means-tested welfare which doesn’t stack with earned income. That’s literally the problem UBI sets out to solve, not effectively the same thing as UBI.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#318
post #121

Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.

I don't see anyone one here talking about this. It is already happening with the furlough scheme. Isn't that the experiment already run already? If the furlough scheme meant (some) people don't want to go back to work because they are already earning enough to live comfortably whilst doing nothing, then why would we want UBI? Another problem is the risk of inflation. If everyone in the country has a certain amount of…

The furlough scheme is conceptually very different as the furlough system explicitly disincentivises going back to work as you lose the furlough money if you do so.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#319
post #15

Is it actually going to be universal? Because if it's not, don't call it "universal". I see a lot of articles stating that "universal basic income was tested with massive success" when there was nothing universal about it. There's a big difference.

Perhaps it would be appropriate too label the experiment as unconditional basic income / UBI.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#320
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> find nothing wrong with the FIRE movement. because those that get onto FIRE earned it themselves, rather than off the backs of taxpayers like in UBI.

Well at least we both agree to 100% inheritance taxes.

inheritance is already taxed when the income of the parents was taxed! So i'm 100% against inheritance tax. After all, the parents earned that inheritance at some point (or their parents did, if they inherited it).

Inheritance isn't a handout from the taxpayer to private entities.

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