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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#81

Post by qntty »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

My understanding is that NIT is a particular implementation of UBI.

Alternatively, you could say that--even with non-NIT UBI--since we have a progressive tax structure, the net change in taxes for people above some income level will be exactly the same net change in taxes as NIT is proposing. The money has to come from somewhere after all.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#82

Post by adamsea »

cbanek wrote: post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

You kinda missed the whole point of the OP, which was, if people don't add value to a business, how will said valueless people put food on the table and participate in society?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#83

Post by drxzcl »

devrandomguy wrote: post #51
drxzcl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is usually value/worker or value/hour worked. There's no indication, as far as I'm aware, that value (inflation adjusted money) is a conserved quantity. In fact, most of the productivity increases are in industries where the value produced is not directly coupled to the resourced consumed. The software industry is a great example.

The relationship between value produced and resources consumed may not be linear, but that does not mean that it is possible to have infinite production, or to produce a change in value from zero resources. If production is not limited, then we can instantly transform our solar system into a Dyson sphere, right now. What am I not understanding, of this theory?

You'd be right, if all value production was in utilitarian, physical stuff. Increasingly however we're spending a smaller percentage of our income on stuff, and more on services and immaterial goods.

To produce a two ton truck, you need to use more than two tons of resource, that much is obvious. But how many resources go into the production of my copy of GTAV? Or my blue-ray of The Lord of the Rings? Or my viewing of a show on Netflix? The marginal resource usage is pretty much nil, just some electricity, paper of plastic. The resources expended in producing the work itself can be significant, but they are amortized among the many millions of copies.

Now obviously there are limits. Humans need physical stuff to survive, that's not going to change any time soon. There's a limit on the amount of actual stuff we can make. But there's no clear limit on the value of that stuff. We keep finding new ways to make little pieces of plastic or bunches of electrons in wires valuable all the time.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#84

Post by massysett »

I have no idea why this is getting upvoted. A blog post that simply observes a bunch of self-serve kiosk machines, has a bait title, and is used on HN for an uninformative rehash of a UBI discussion that has taken place here over and over. I was hoping at least for a piece that made an argument or said something informative, not for some photos of a movie theater lobby and a restaurant.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#85

Post by scarmig »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

The issue with negative income taxes is that they create steep effective marginal tax rates. Suppose you set the floor at 12k, and suppose someone has an existing job at 12k. They immediately lose all incentive to work, because they could make the same amount by not working at all. Your effective marginal tax rate is 100%. There are ways to make this effect less pronounced, but those ways end up morphing a negative income tax to be closer to a basic income. If you get rid of the effect altogether, you get... A basic income.

Even if you make twice as much as the negative income tax floor, you're still facing really high marginal rates. Enough people would drop out of the market economy to make the negative income equivalent to a basic income in financial cost, but more inefficient both because low income jobs would be obliterated and because it'd be (a bit) more complicated to administer and more prone to fraud.

Compare that to a basic income. There, as a first order effect there's no reason for the person to quit the 12k job, because they're now making 24k.

It might seem silly to give someone making 500k 12k a year, but economically and fiscally it doesn't matter: they're taxed at a rate that covers their own basic income and plenty more.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#86

Post by grasshopperpurp »

CJKinni wrote: post #66
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

> All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people I'm not very educated in this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that while UBI doesn't create money, but it can move money from people with a lower ratio of money-spent to money-made, to people with a higher ratio. If that's the case, the money that's actively being used should increase.

Yes, that's one of the problems we're already facing, as I understand it. Too much of the money is in too few hands, and it's not being circulated back into the economy the way that it would be if that money was spread out among more individuals.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#87

Post by choward »

cbanek wrote: post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

> On the other hand, the fancy waiter will make recommendations. Will tell you about other things, and is generally part of the ambiance and experience of eating out.

I only need the waiter to tell me this because I have no idea what the food with end up looking like. Just put pictures of items on the menu. Problem solved. Now it get to order what looks best.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#88

Post by adamsea »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #68
maverick_iceman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big companies get blindsided by new tech all the time. Think IBM vs Microsoft.

More accurate to say "Big companies have traditionally been blind sided by new tech..." I'm not aware of any major example of this since the introduction of the iPhone.

...which was really not all that long ago. Give it time ;)

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#89

Post by vkou »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #57
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

There is no law of economics that says the latter two have to be supply limited, to the grotesque extent that they are.

I'll give you housing though. One of the reasons housing is expensive, though, is because it is closely tied to job opportunities.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#90

Post by WalterBright »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

> pays the difference

Then there's no reason to work at the lower end of the wage scale, because you'd be working for free.

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