311–320 of 761 posts
Question for the liberals who support this. Would you honestly be willing to get rid of social security, welfare, unemployment, earned income tax credit, food stamps, student loans, pell grants, and all the other entitlement programs? If so, I might support it, even if it cost more, just to get rid of all the government social engineering.
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you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you... in the same vein, your job only exist because there's people with enough buying power to keep the business you're at existing, so again you depend on people, and you could be punished or rewarded depending on how society as a entire organ…
> you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you... I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that ste…
I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having…
Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone.
Consider a BI paying 300M people $20k. Cost is $6 trillion.
Consider a targeted program paying 50M people $20k, no overhead. Cost is $1 trillion.
You need an overhead cost of 500% of benefits for a basic income to be cost competitive.
Can any BI proponents provide even a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how BI could possibly be competitive?
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Free from wage slavery? Technology is so much further along than it was 1000 years ago people barely have to work to have the same living standard as they had then. People generally only work for 8 hours a day. They can't spend the rest of their time doing that right now? Everyone is free to start a business. Tons of people do it while working a full time job. Tons of people go to college while they have a full time…
This is the type of attitude that hinders progress, and for no apparent reason. News flash: you're already rewarding people who sit around doing nothing with your tax dollars. GBI does the same, but at reduced overhead. Starting a business is hard. Starting a business while working full time is near impossible. It's not about laziness or incompetence. You just don't get the same business opportunities you do when wor…
No, in the 50s (in the US) basically every working age man who survived fighting in the war had been given the opportunity to get a free education and probably even a discount mortgage[1] on a house while the government was building what might have been the biggest and most extensive road system[2] since the roman empire.
And then was born one of the most productive eras in American history. Funny that.
> While people could theoretically survive off the charity of others, advanced artificial intelligence and robotics are likely to increase the portion of the population who are unemployable. We've been hearing this kind of arguments for literally centuries (the steam engine is going to put people out of work, cars and trucks will create unemployment, oh no Silicon valley is going to kill all manual work out there thr…
Maybe not immediately, but 10, 20, 50 years? Good luck.
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It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.
> However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.
Someone needs income that is taxed. That doesn't require a job, though in the short term (e.g., until we've reached a very advanced level of automation where most market income goes to capitalists who own completely automated firms), yes, it relies on lots of people still working -- its a replacement for poverty support programs which removes the disincentive for work that many of those contain in the eligibility criteria, and the administrative overhead that enforcing eligibility rules creates, not a replacement for work.
Most people, even if they aren't starving in the street, are willing to work more to get more. That certainly tails off at some level of combined work and income (as work has an increasing marginal cost and income a decreasing marginal value), but for the vast majority of the population, that's far above the level BI could conceivably be set at without vast technological progress.
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It was successful when trialed in Canada so I'd say its viable. But ya, I don't trust our politicians to be sensible and cut spending to pay for a new program. [e.g. Use this to remove the most inefficient $ for $ welfare related programs so more of it ends up in the hands of the people that need it]
It's important to note that the "Mincome" experiment provided a Guaranteed Minimum income , not a Basic Income . The distinction being that the former started to drop off if the recipients earned more than some threshold (at a rate of $0.50 less per $1 earned, so as not to serve as a disincentive).
Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today. If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guarantee…
And where will the source for the Guaranteed Income come from? It will surely be taxes - income, sales, other. All taxes in some way or the other depend on the state of the economy. What if the economy goes into a recession or has severe fluctuations from year to year? Will "Guaranteed Income" be continued if there isn't sufficient wealth and production to pay for it? Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other…
I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless? Wouldn't the fixed income become the new zero income? Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage? Do they d…
Minimum income is enough for a room and some food. If you want anything better such work either full or part time. There are a lot of things people could do without: car, cell phone, internet, restaurants...
Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items (inheritance is the biggest game breaker in a fair system), another very practical and fair idea would be no VAT/sales tax (disproportionately affects the poor) and vastly reduced business taxes; however Progressive personal income taxation that works like the effects of relativity on the speed of light (no tiny group of bands that end a…
A more plausible (less confiscatory, but recognizing that inheritance is income and that untaxed inheritances fail to reflect this) alternative would probably be taxing inheritances as income to the recipient and allowing them to be split over a set period of years (say, 5-10) for tax purposes.