81–90 of 337 posts
Progressives seem to have lost all understanding of the concept of money. It is a means of trade. The spending power of the basic income will ultimately reflect the value its recipients produced in order to obtain it - zero in this case.
1. Premise: "Basic income of X units of money is sent to everyone in population".
2. Basic income comes from where? Either from taxes, or from printed money. Either way, purchasing power is being taken from some people in proportion to their savings/income.
3. There's always a difference in income and amount of savings. If everyone was making the same amount of money, doing "basic income" wouldn't change much (except feed some bureaucrats in the process).
4. Therefore, some people will be taxed less than "basic income" they receive. And some people will be taxed more that the income they receive.
5. Therefore, some people do not really receive any extra income. They are getting deprived of a portion of their purchasing power instead.
6. Therefore promoting it as "everyone gets it, no strings attached" is a total lie.
If they said "we want to take from some people and give to others" it would be honest and true. But it doesn't sound as fair as "everyone gets", isn't it?
Note: I'm not debating taxation itself. Even if you think it's okay to tax and redistribute wealth, the description of this law is a total lie.
EDIT: I guess downvoting folks are too busy redistributing people's wealth to point out a logical flaw in my comment.
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Good. Immigration contributes to overpopulation, both by importing new people and causing replacement breeding in the emigrant nation.
But there is no overpopulation in Europe in terms of land availability or food supply (Europe's population density is 72 person/sqkm, the last famine was during WWII and not even then widespread). Sure, population density is very high in urban centers but there is still plenty of space in the country side. It just needs more incentives to be settled. So 'importing new people' really isn't a problem. I cannot find any…
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That's 42% combined. They have more wealth than 42% of the rest of the population combined.
120 million people at, say, -$1000 in net worth == big negative number. Anyone with $1 of net worth is wealthier than them.
I'm not sure what the optimal tax schedule (pre-tax vs post-tax and welfare) should look like, but my intuition is that a high effective marginal tax rate for people on welfare is not bad, as the disincentive to work that it produces affects fewer people, than if we had a flat tax (e.g. VAT) plus basic income.
The disincentive to work produced by a higher effective marginal tax rate is also offset by the fact that welfare isn't a lot of money, and the longer you are on welfare the stricter enforcement becomes.
I also don't see the moral reason for a true basic income, except perhaps for men, who should be compensated for the possibility of being conscripted.
Rather than these posts discussing universal basic income in abstract, I would like to see someone go through a back of the envelope scenario for a real country that might try it. Switzerland or some other European country. Presumably there would need to be major changes to income tax brackets (especially for the lower income tiers) & dismantling of various existing welfare programs in order to fund a basic income. I…
Progressives seem to have lost all understanding of the concept of money. It is a means of trade. The spending power of the basic income will ultimately reflect the value its recipients produced in order to obtain it - zero in this case.
But, to be pedantic, 1000 times zero is still zero, so you are saying that any income will be worth zero.
The thing I genuinely don't understand regarding the basic income for all argument is that surely it just moves the goal posts rather than solves the problem at hand? In the current system, you can go stay at home and get income support, which should provide you with the basics i.e. a home, food, electricity etc. If you would like more than this, you can go and get a job and hopefully earn more (have a better lifesty…
If you give every person in Vietnam $1, then the poor people have a relatively higher percentage of all the money to spend than they had before. Hence the percentage of all goods and services going to the poor will also be a higher percentage of the total goods and services. This becomes even more apparent if you exaggerate the amount. What if you give all people on earth $1 trillion dollars? Now everyone is basically equally rich. Even though prices will rise massively, the total supply of goods and services going to the people who were previously poor increases a lot. (of course in practice such a massive basic income may completely destabilize a society)
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120 million people at, say, -$1000 in net worth == big negative number. Anyone with $1 of net worth is wealthier than them.
It is ridiculous to suggest that someone with a dollar but no access to credit is weathier than someone who is able to borrow the cost of a house.
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I agree, for this to work, everyone would have to receive that amount of money. Or at least say, everyone receiving under $100,000 a year in salary. Otherwise, you might feel cheated if you replace your $12,000 free money for a $20,000 job . You'd still have to receive the free money, so you'd then earn $32,000 a year.
I would hate to be the person who earns just over that arbitrary 100k line.