Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#351

Post by paulddraper » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

hbarka wrote: post #281

paulddraper wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private sector is simply never going to find a job for everyone who needs to survive. You're technically correct that unemployment will never be 0%. But it's been < 4% for almost all of 2019.

Talking about the unemployment rate without mentioning the labor force participation rate is painting an incomplete picture.

Isn't the labor participation rate irrelevant here though for talking about "job for everyone who needs to survive"?

In the perfect world technology and economics improve so much that no one has to work to survive.

In that sense, the ideal labor participation rate is 0%.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#352

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #345

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing . If you have one you, ipso facto , have the other. They're not. If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing . It doesn't matter how much money people have because whoever has the most would just bid up housi…

> If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing. California has several times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless people. California doesn't have a hard shortage of housing units, certain people that need housing in California have insufficient material means to convince the people that own existing uno…

Measuring by occupancy rate isn't accounting for landlords withholding units from the market in the expectation that they'll find a tenant/buyer willing to pay more for them later, which is an allocation of supply the same as if someone was living there, and is caused by overall supply constraints creating the expectation of continued high rents.

It also fails on the other end because there are many alternatives to local housing other than homelessness, like selecting less local housing with an unreasonably long commute or living in units designed for fewer occupants in violation of the fire code. You essentially have unaccounted for over-occupancy. People having more money doesn't solve any of those problems without more housing for the money to buy, and interferes with solving homelessness as well because higher wages in general could cause people in those situations to move to existing unoccupied units before the existing homeless do.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#353

Post by nixpulvis » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #348

nixpulvis wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sun still requires space to harvest, much like anything.

Well if we can't agree that each person gets enough [space for enough] sunlight for free just because of birth and gravity, then what is there to talk about? Keep in mind that, if we can beat gravity just a little bit , there's a lot of space, eh? I mean, nothing but, really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

Um, no I don't think we all agree about how much space birth entitles you to...

But there are some fundamental rights. I'd rather address those directly, rather than give everyone $1,000 and hope for the best.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#354

Post by aeternum » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

lidHanteyk wrote: post #297

ScottBurson wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because high-income people still have to be net payers. Otherwise, where does the money come from?

It is not a problem if rich people resent having to pay money into the government in order to keep the system running. Rich people are only rich because the government maintains the monetary system. Being so rich that one resents the very government that establishes their riches is a feature, not a bug. Edit: As usual for rapid downvotes on polite posts, do downvoters care to explain themselves? Or is today a day for…

It is generally not the rich that resent it. The rich simply see taxes as a cost of doing business that they should attempt to minimize as they would any cost.

If you look at welfare, those that resent it most are the people that are just over the threshold to receive it. They see themselves as significantly better than those on welfare who are lazy and gaming the system.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#355

Post by nixpulvis » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

Reedx wrote: post #279

nixpulvis wrote: post #223

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Welfare is a tax, and a much needed one since the alternative costs even more. I don't really see how a universal basic income (UBI) solves much of anything that other welfare programs couldn't solve more effectively. If the argument is that it's easier to just give everyone $1,000, then I think you're a lazy policymaker.

Giving people the money directly, for them to use where it's needed in their particular case, is far more efficient than any program could ever possibly be. It's just the math and physics of it. Programs have all sorts of overhead and need to be generalized. They introduce inefficiency by default. And the larger it is, the more inefficient it becomes. That's just how it works with any organization. Even in the privat…

I'd love to know exactly how you figure it's more efficient. Sure, it's more efficient for the bureaucrats, but for the market as a whole? If you give me $1,000 a month, I can promise you I won't just be spending it on my needs every month. Even people in massive debt don't always spend towards their needs effectively.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#356

Post by hanniabu » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #349

hanniabu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a personal anecdote, I would love volunteering with building homes, helping elderly, or helping animal conservation and rehabilitation efforts. I would also like to work on some inventions (I'm a mechanical engineer). However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my…

> However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner). I often wonder how many people feel this. I don't feel quite as dire about it, but…

> my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord

This is pretty much the essence I was getting at and what the goal is to solve

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#357

Post by hacknat » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #347

hacknat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that VAT by itself is regressive, but coupled with UBI it is not even close. Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you? I agree with you that money is power, but you are not going to stop the existence of Billionaires and Trillionaires. That would need to be a coordinated global effort…

> Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you? Where are you getting this information? From what I can find, the top 20% of Americans pay 87% of income taxes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87...

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else. Progressives think that a progressive income tax is progressive, because they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.

Why stop at 20%? Map peoples’ wealth on a normal curve and then look at which parts of the curve pay the bulk of income tax. Saying the top 20% of income earners pay 87% of income taxes says very little, actually, about who, exactly is paying the bulk of income tax relative to wealth. I mean probably most people on hacker news are in the top 20% income earners in the US for crying out loud. Are most of us wealthy? Not relative to how much wealth is out there.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#358

Post by babycake » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

What's to stop companies from just upping their prices to absorb the $1k given to us? We need a real UBI scheme, this policy won't solve anything.

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#359

Post by manfredo » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

hacknat wrote: post #357

manfredo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you? Where are you getting this information? From what I can find, the top 20% of Americans pay 87% of income taxes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87...

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else. Progressives think that a progressive income tax is progressive, because they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property. Why stop at 20%? Map peoples’ wealth on a normal curve and t…

> I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else.

Income tax is collected as a percentage of people's income, I'm not sure why you're referencing wealth here. And judging tax as a percentage of wealth is not a very sound approach:

* You have someone that makes $50,000 and has lived frugally and saved up $500,000 over the span of decades.

* You have someone that makes $250,000 a year and spends nearly all of their money as they earn it, and so only has $50,000 saved.

The former will pay $4,342 in federal income taxes (filing as single) and thus pay under 1% of their wealth in income taxes. The latter will pay $58,424 in federal income tax and thus pay over 100% of their wealth in income taxes. Am I to understand that this situation is unfair because the former is paying a smaller percentage of their wealth as compared to the latter, and that the former should be paying more than the latter?

Judging taxes as a function of people's wealth is not a sound approach because people's wealth has much more to do with their financial decisions than their income. Why should frugal people who save more be taxed more heavily than someone who makes as much (or even more) but spends their money?

This portion of your comment seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of income vs. assets:

> ...they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.

Property (in other words, the assets people own minus their debt) is wealth. Talking about how the source of wealth is derived from property is nonsensical - wealth and property are two words for the same thing: net assets.

Income is the delta of people's wealth. If you have an annual income of $X then your wealth is increasing by at most $X each year. Gains from increased value of assets (capital gains) are another source of wealth. These are taxed, too, but at the time that the assets are sold rather than immediately. Inheritance is another source of wealth and that is taxed as well.

Income is taxed because income, not property, is the source of people's wealth. It's valid to think of "income" as short for "incoming property".

Re: Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

#360

Post by Reedx » Wed, Jan 01, 2020, 8:14 PM UTC

intuitionist wrote: post #26

Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during…

Even if that is the case, jobs now change at much more rapid pace than in the past. It used to be that if you trained and worked as a blacksmith (or whatever), you could die a blacksmith. It was their kids that would have to do something else. Which isn't too much of a shock to the system.

This is no longer the case. Now someone within a single lifetime can go through multiple job creation and destruction cycles. So it'd be helpful to have a floor to help deal with the transitions and provide a buffer.