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A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

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Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#821

Post by ww520 »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #795
ww520 wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting does balance to zero. That doesn't negate the fact that money has been created in the system. Let me pose the question again. Your statement is since accounting balanced to 0, no money has been created. In that case, FOMC's account balance is also net zero when buying treasury or selling treasury. Therefore FOMC doesn't create or destroy money. So what is the purpose of FOMC again? Edit: Instead of arguing…

>Your statement is since accounting balanced to 0, no money has been created No. Nowhere have I written "no money". You have written it a few times. I have stated that the money is balanced by a matching debt. You also keep mixing fractional reserve and central bank purchases. These are entirely different things. And FOMC is also zero sum - the dollars they inject are backed by debts they hold. >look up Money creatio…

Let me quote what I've said: "Lending out loan creates money circulated in the system. Paying off debt destroys money from the system." There.

You were the one using the friend lending example to say there's no new money created when debt is created.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#822

Post by JDiculous »

MicroBerto wrote: post #740
JDiculous wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If basic income only provides enough to just get by - living in a crappy apartment, barely being able to afford basic groceries, and living paycheck to paycheck, do you really think everyone is just going to stop working and do nothing all day? People are still going to want money for buying gadgets, going out, a better living space, cars, clothes, vacations, impressing girls, buying toys for their kids, etc. Also I'…

> do you really think everyone is just going to stop working and do nothing all day? YES. That's exactly the point. Look at the welfare class currently collecting disability in American states like WV. They aren't doing anything productive!!! Maybe more drugs, though... sounds great for society. Let's expand that. Will Everyone drop out of the workforce? Of course not. But a substantial portion that will become an ev…

Well part of the reason for that is because of the Welfare Cliff and the fact that there just aren't enough jobs. Most people on welfare do not want to be on welfare.

We're ok with those who are born rich not having to work. Why should it be different for poor people? And if society can function perfectly fine without these people working, why does it matter if they don't work?

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#823

Post by tniswong »

undersuit wrote: post #604
tniswong wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind explaining how intentionally reducing the explicit tangible rewards of personal merit strengthens a meritocracy? Is critical thinking no longer a thing?

Would you mind explaining how you think anyone is "intentionally reducing the explicit tangible rewards of personal merit?"

In a meritocracy, people earn money by means reaping the rewards of their own personal merit.

The government has no money of its own. So, in order to fund these programs, it must first appropriate said money from the people who earned it in the first place.

This appropriation (taxation) is non-voluntary, and enforced by threat of violence (force of law).

When someone takes something from me by force that I would not otherwise be willing to give them, it is by definition theft.

Therefore, it would seem to me that taxation/theft is an intentional attempt by the government to reduce the rewards of my own personal merit.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#824

Post by MikeHolman »

dragonwriter wrote: post #522
brightball wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make it work you'd have to take whatever the amount is and extract it from all other government benefit programs. You get $700 / month from the government for basic income. Your social security, welfare, unemployment, disability, etc is reduced by $700 / month. Reducing all of those programs by the first $700 would effectively gut each of them enough to finally make some reforms without inducing panic in everyone…

> If you were to implement the Fair Tax, which includes a stipend for basic needs, you'd get bipartisan support as well. No, you wouldn't. Flat tax proposals and national sales tax proposals like the "FairTax", have support almost exclusively on the right (and each particular such proposal has minority support on the right.) You won't get bipartisan support for any of them.

Both flat tax and sales tax disproportionately tax the poor.

The very rich spend less money relative to how much they make, which puts higher burden on the poor than with our progressive tax.

Flat fax is bad, because 40% of the guy making 20k per year is going to severely change quality of like. 40% from the guy making $40 million has much less impact on his quality of life. This is the whole reason for having a progressive tax... Impact of money on quality of life doesn't work on a linear scale, so neither should our taxes.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#825

Post by zyxley »

marknutter wrote: post #744
zyxley wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Umm yeah, that's exactly what they gave to the mice. Yes, without any opportunity to get involved in anything more than that. "Here, live in this box forever, you get all the food pellets and water you want, but you can never leave and don't get anything entertaining to do" would drive any animal insane. Take a look at animals behaving pathologically in boring zoo enclosures, for example. A study actually analogous…

Wait, so the government is going to provide us with a the equivalent of a steady supply of wheels, toys, puzzles, mazes, tastier treats, etc?

What do you think a job is, in this analogy?

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#826

Post by ChrisLomont »

ww520 wrote: post #821
ChrisLomont wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your statement is since accounting balanced to 0, no money has been created No. Nowhere have I written "no money". You have written it a few times. I have stated that the money is balanced by a matching debt. You also keep mixing fractional reserve and central bank purchases. These are entirely different things. And FOMC is also zero sum - the dollars they inject are backed by debts they hold. >look up Money creatio…

Let me quote what I've said: "Lending out loan creates money circulated in the system. Paying off debt destroys money from the system." There. You were the one using the friend lending example to say there's no new money created when debt is created.

>You were the one using the friend lending example to say there's no new money created when debt is created.

You keep saying I wrote no money is created. I did not. From every single post in this thread:

My first post in this thread: "new money is added through asset purchases, not giveaways,"

My second: "if you think fractional reserve creates money (in the sense that the gain is not balanced by a matching debt), then paying it back "destroys" the exact same amount. Fractional reserve is zero sum"

Third: "Accounting does balance to zero. Debt and money are added, and they sum to zero"

Fourth: "I have stated that the money is balanced by a matching debt"

Literally every single post I wrote in this thread stated that money is added, and a matching debt is added.

Every. Single. One.

Have fun.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#827

Post by ChrisLomont »

Kenji wrote: post #451
ChrisLomont wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit is not given to the banks - the money is added through asset purchases on open market sales. The Fed owns more assets (usually Treasuries) and the bank has cash. If you want to get in on it, buy Treasuries. Next, the Fed avoid targeting zero inflation, because it's currently impossible to hit that number so exactly, and they desire to avoid deflationary spirals. The past 150 years has shown across hundred…

"The past 150 years has shown across hundreds of countries that the current solution is vastly better than the boom and bust cycles previous, and has also demonstrated the benefit of fiat over commodity (like gold)." Uh, no. Quite the contrary. Since the abolition of the gold standard, our economies were prone to fluctuations like they haven't been in decades. Because then the (central) banks can meddle with the quan…

List of recessions in the US [1]. Tell me when they were longer and more frequent - before or after central banking.

The Great Moderation [2], a period of such low economic volatility that even economists find it amazing. Did this happen before or after the gold standard was removed?

IGM poll of around 100 of the top economists in the US the following [3] "If the US replaced its discretionary monetary policy regime with a gold standard, defining a "dollar" as a specific number of ounces of gold, the price-stability and employment outcomes would be better for the average American."

Every single one either disagreed or strongly disagreed. 100%. Not a single dissenter.

Want to really see what a gold standard would have done over the past few decades? Here [4] is gold prices for the past 100 years.

The price was 220 in 1970, 2000 in 1980, 369 in 2000, 1600 in 2010, and now has dropped to 1200, with a lot of intermediate fluctuations. It's all over the map. These fluctuations are far larger than any business cycle or inflation over the same time period.

If gold were the standard (i.e., the fixed value), then, since the dollar has fairly small fluctuations and more important quite stable predictability, this graph is what living costs would have done as the rest of value fluctuated this wildly.

Simply put, gold is vastly more volatile than almost any economy, and certainly more volatile than the US economy. The gold standard is terrible.

Finally, here [5] is a paper that follows the gold standard across 24 countries around the Great Depression, and pretty conclusive shows a strong divergence in economic health (employment, wages, growth) between those countries on the gold standard and those off it. Such effects, seen at the time, pretty much killed the gold standard as the deflationary effects became clear.

Now, present your fluctuation metric before and after a gold standard and demonstrate your claimed increase. It simply is wrong. These multiple methods conclusively show it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

[3] http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...

[4] http://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-y...

[5] http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11482.pdf

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#828

Post by T2_t2 »

MikeHolman wrote: post #824
dragonwriter wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were to implement the Fair Tax, which includes a stipend for basic needs, you'd get bipartisan support as well. No, you wouldn't. Flat tax proposals and national sales tax proposals like the "FairTax", have support almost exclusively on the right (and each particular such proposal has minority support on the right.) You won't get bipartisan support for any of them.

Both flat tax and sales tax disproportionately tax the poor. The very rich spend less money relative to how much they make, which puts higher burden on the poor than with our progressive tax. Flat fax is bad, because 40% of the guy making 20k per year is going to severely change quality of like. 40% from the guy making $40 million has much less impact on his quality of life. This is the whole reason for having a prog…

If the rich paid taxes...

That's the missing element, not paying. As much as IN THEORY I agree with these ideas, in practice, rich people find all sorts of ways to not pay tax.

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#829

Post by gnaritas »

nkohari wrote: post #793
gnaritas wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible that there are enough people in the world passionate about garbage collection -- allocated perfectly across the correct geographic regions, mind you -- to fill all of the available positions. And you base this claim on what?

It's just my opinion, and I have no factual basis. It's an appeal to common sense, but I stand by it nonetheless.

Well, given that people right now tend to mostly do whatever makes them the most money, it's impossible to quantify how many people might like doing gargabe that aren't just because they're doing something else for the money. If no one had to work and only did what they wanted, no one has any idea how the numbers might play out for who wants to do what. It's entirely possible there's plenty of people who might like driving those big trucks enough to do it.

I'm not saying it's likely, but it's certainly not "impossible."

Re: A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

#830

Post by jhall1468 »

bane wrote: post #781
jhall1468 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't labor markets decrease? Isn't that the principle idea floating by UBI advocates entirely throughout this thread? They will, and I never said they wouldn't. The problem with your "theory" is that they are going to decrease at a 1:1 ratio with increase in labor costs from the UBI resulting in an overall "0 gain" from the UBI. > No, all money will devalue with the increase in supply and increase in labor…

> The problem with your "theory" is that they are going to decrease at a 1:1 ratio with increase in labor costs from the UBI Actually, I never said 1:1 ratio with UBI. I just claimed the labor markets would decrease and monetary supply would increase. > True, but that's not the argument you are making. No, that's exactly and precisely the argument I'm making. I'm not an opponent of UBI for wishy washy wealth redistri…

> Actually, I never said 1:1 ratio with UBI. I just claimed the labor markets would decrease and monetary supply would increase.

But that is what you said:

> In effect, nobody gets paid more because everybody gets paid more, which drives up prices, which is the definition of inflation.

Emphasis is mine. That's a pretty clear indication that they will entirely offset each other.

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