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Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

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Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#591

Post by eecc »

WheatMillington wrote: post #307
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks…

You haven't met enough deadbeats in your life. Trust me, there's a virtually limitless number of them, and they very much do not want to work.

And so what? I'm ok subsidising 100 deadbeats scraping by if I can score a couple performers with stellar ROI.

This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#592

Post by pydry »

constantcrying wrote: post #561
pydry wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income. This very rarely ever happens by accident. It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushing for a pay raise. This way they can leech more of the surplus value of their labor.

This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work, because more people working depresses wages and more people working allows growing the economy. If people don't want to work, they have to pay the leeches and they have to pay more to get people willing to work. Your economics are insane. >It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushi…

>This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work

These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages.

Have you never met any of these "leeches" taking benefits?

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#593

Post by anticensor »

altruios wrote: post #20
legitster wrote: post #5

This is a pretty generous reading of the study. One result they are missing out is that the income actually reduced overall employment compared to the control group, and ended up decreasing household earnings: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719 Even with a generous reading, it was an extremely expensive study. And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented…

YES!!!! Not every job is moral, essential or needed, the idea that 'everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone' needs to die.

At least America doesn't have an explicit "duty to work" clause in their constitution like Turkey has. It could've been worse.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#594

Post by gwd »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #583
gwd wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way. If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance…

I don't agree with cutting mental health services and don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people. > they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners This is trivially avoidable in both cases. The Offspring have a song that comes to mind.

> I... don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people.

And I hope two things are clear:

1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)

2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.

What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.

If that's the case, then our options are:

1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders

2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.

If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.

Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#595

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Majromax wrote: post #435
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transaction…

> Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit. True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax deb…

> True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.

But that's just an accounting sham to claim you're taxing them less than you are and you no longer actually have a negative marginal tax rate.

> However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign

Well that's mainly because they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week and were less desperate to take a low-quality job.

You might also notice that the effect you're referring to isn't net of the payments, and is also probably invalidated by the period the study was done -- it started during COVID. Between the first and last year of the study, the household income for the control group increased by $20,000 -- on a $30,000 base! The experiment group increased by almost as much before the payments and were ahead by more than $6000/year including them.

In any event, you don't have to use a different rate structure to do what you suggest, you get the same effect without the complexity by increasing the flat tax rate and adding the money to the UBI.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#596

Post by constantcrying »

pydry wrote: post #592
constantcrying wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work, because more people working depresses wages and more people working allows growing the economy. If people don't want to work, they have to pay the leeches and they have to pay more to get people willing to work. Your economics are insane. >It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushi…

>This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages. Have you never met any of these "leeches" taking benefits?

I meet them every day of my life.

>These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages.

Usually dealing drugs.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#597

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pineaux wrote: post #389
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transaction…

Doesn't a flat tax rate lower the income that a state has?

Suppose Alice makes $100,000 and Bob makes $20,000.

In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, the state gets a total of $18,500 from Alice and Bob.

In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 40% thereafter, the state gets $23,500 from Alice and Bob.

In a system that taxes everyone uniformly at 25%, the state gets $30,000 from Alice and Bob. This is not a smaller number and 5/6ths of it is from Alice. In fact, you can use that money to give them each a $12,000 UBI, leaving Bob with an effective tax rate of -35%, delete all of the transfer programs that obsoletes and still have some left over for transit and uniforms.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#598

Post by pydry »

constantcrying wrote: post #596
pydry wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages. Have you never met any of these "leeches" taking benefits?

I meet them every day of my life. >These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages. Usually dealing drugs.

Evidently not.

I've read plenty about how every working family struggling on benefits is a crack dealer too, written in media that is exclusively owned by the economic leeches who contribute little to no economic value but "who pay millions in taxes" on their unearned income:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2260633/Drug-dealer...

The propaganda that underpins your belief system was designed to foster exactly your kind of resentment against the underclass.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#599

Post by AnthonyMouse »

BytesAndGears wrote: post #421
speed_spread wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and it makes it even easier for the rich to become richer, which is why they're the ones advocating for it.

You could keep it flat up to a high threshold, like top ~5% of salary, then transition to marginal tax

You don't need it, it's already built in. The flat tax rate needed to serve as the implicit benefits phase out is already in the range as what you'd use in the high tax brackets in a progressive tax system with separate benefits phase outs.

If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.

Re: Unconditional Cash Study: first findings available

#600

Post by anticensor »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #372
geor9e wrote: post #56

I am not sure how small studies can account for the inflation wide rollout could cause. Consider this hypothetical: If you give 1 of 1000 renters $100, 1 landlord will leave the rent alone because they don't know. If you give 1000 of 1000 renters $100, word will get to 1000 landlords, who will all increase rent $100, because the market will bear it. I'm not saying this will happen, just that a small study enjoys the…

There are places in the US that have vacant homes but no jobs. A UBI would let people move there.

Vacant owned home tax could also serve a similar purpose, in addition to financing (actually balancing) the UBI.
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