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Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

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Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#961

Post by umvi »

rzwitserloot wrote: post #273
jtlienwis wrote: post #258

I am opposed to UBI. I want smart people to have more money. I want less smart people to have less money, provided they have enough to live on. A smart person might invest in books, study and self improvement. Then those industries that create these will be stimulated. That is what you want. Less smart people might spend their money on lottery tickets, junk food, booze etc. Those industries would be stimulated by UBI…

> provided they have enough to live on. That's what UBI does. > running out with the winnings and buying expensive sports cars, drinks etc. I'm not entirely sure if you know what UBI is. It is not giving everybody enough money to buy a sports car. By a long shot. > Less smart people might spend their money on lottery tickets, junk food, booze etc. That's an incredibly narrow minded view. It is also irrelevant, unless…

> I'm not entirely sure if you know what UBI is. It is not giving everybody enough money to buy a sports car. By a long shot.

Really? Because according to this[0] I can make loan payments on a Tesla for $1000 per month. If I started getting an extra $1000/month, why not drive a Model S?

[0] https://www.tesla.com/support/tesla-leasing

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#962

Post by peterpeppers »

bmitc wrote: post #652
onion2k wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. One aspect of UBI is that poor people would be less at the mercy of the rich. If you're a poor person now you absolutely have to try to keep your horrible job else you'll lost the ability to pay rent and buy food. You have to take all the cra…

> One aspect of UBI is that poor people would be less at the mercy of the rich. That is a very strong statement that I don't think can be claimed at this point. In my opinion, I feel things will simply shift under UBI. People will receive UBI, but then other things, like rent, food, etc. will all just magically get more expensive. I cannot see any implementation of UBI working any better than things now unless the pr…

This is a damn good point.

Bankers are the first one that will eventually support UBI legislation in the US.

Because they understand that UBI will be a profit center for them without some sort of limitation on predatory pricing and lending.

1. The increase in demand will first short-circuit the supply of basic essentials.

2. Banks will be the first ones to step in the gap to finance companies working to meet UBI demand

3. Then eventually over time, banks will begin extending credit to overextended UBI-powered citizens. The citizen is the conduit for government-to-bank revenue exchange.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#963

Post by lvs »

carabiner wrote: post #903
lvs wrote: post #339

Let's say I'm a landlord. If you give my tenant $1000/month, I'll just take it. Their rent is now R+1000 next year. You could tax the $1000 back away from me, but that doesn't stop the price from rising. It actually just boosts my incentive to take every last cent of the $1000 that I can extract. I think you all need to think more about the economics. You have to be willing, on rational grounds, to step away from fre…

Let's say I'm a different landlord. If the other landlords are raising their rents, I know that by not raising mine, I can attract more tenants and increase my occupancy rate. Maybe I'm at 70%, and I need 80% to cover my costs. I know that if I raised my rents by $1,000/month, I would lose tenants to the landlords who didn't.

Maybe if you're a landlord in an empty town. But if you're a landlord operating at 70% occupancy, then you're not in a major city of most advanced economies. Cities have demand-driven pricing. 80% of Americans live in an urban area, according to the Census Bureau. There is constant and ever-growing demand, so there is no downward pricing pressure in cities -- Corona aside. I, as a landlord, can take any price the income levels will bear. That is why urban incomes and housing costs must, in tandem, rise unbounded.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#964

Post by jpindar »

AdamHede wrote: post #539
habosa wrote: post #526

I like the simple argument made here about UBI enabling efficient consumption. I worry about three things with UBI though and they're more social than economic. 1. Power Divide - society will be easily divided into two groups: those who depend on the UBI to live and those who don't. The former will be absolutely at the mercy of the latter. We can see this a little bit with the coronavirus relief packages. 2. Predator…

I especially buy into your third concern. Where I live, if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today, hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?). This tells me the utopian ideas of replacing the entire complex system with a simple UBI isn't feasible. You'll end u…

>hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?)

How is the likelihood of this connected to the source of their money? Is hunger not a problem for people who work for a living and blow their money early in the month (or get robbed?)

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#965

Post by foxrob92 »

stjo wrote: post #940
wiz21c wrote: post #861

FTA : "To reverse this trend of stagnating growth, we must put more capital in the hands of lower income consumers, who will then spend it on things they desire and increase GDP." Why on earth should be reversing the trend ? Why not just accept zero-growth and organize the society accordingly ?

For the same reason I don't "just accept" that I'm going to die, or that there is no justice in the universe. I want to live longer than my parents, possibly forever. I want to impose my sense of order and justice in the world, because I don't like chaos. I want live more comfortably than my parents and my kids more than me (and thus growth). Of course I accept anything, but why should I? Isn't being human making sur…

>I don't "just accept" that I'm going to die

But you are going to die. This[1] is a very thorough walkthrough. Wanting to live longer than your parents is one thing, but "forever" is a long time. I'd go as far as to say that if you think you can live forever, you don't understand forever.

>no justice in the universe.

Justice is an idea created by humans.

Wanting to improve yourself and the world around you is a central human trait imo, but there are some things we will never completely fix. One of them is death.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1dn43v/i_rema...

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#966

Post by MuffinFlavored »

christiansakai wrote: post #207

I know these are anecdotes but I already heard several cases from my circle of friends and families where they just chose not to work because of unemployment checks. Instead of practicing music or learning programming or doing something productive during their period of unemployment, they decided to watch Netflix and play games all day. Creating is hard work, studying is hard work. Just like having information and on…

Why do some people have inner desire to succeed and some do not? What is that attributable to? Is it random/luck of the draw?

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#967

Post by nextlevelwizard »

mattm wrote: post #839
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with UBI is that why would giving out "free money" change the world? Say I'm your landlord and you pay me $100/mo for rent. Now you start getting UBI thats $500/mo. Why wouldn't I increase my rent to $200/mo, $300/mo, or even $400/mo? I know that now you can afford the increase. So you'd still have to earn income if you wanted to stay in that place. All I see is prices going up for anything and everything…

My landlord knows my salary as I needed to provide it on the application. My takehome pay is more than what I pay in rent. Why didn't my landlord say to me "You know instead of paying $X, I see you can afford to pay more so I'm going to ask you to pay $Y"?

Because he can't alone arbitrarily raise the rent and lose you to another landlord, but if across the board people suddenly had $XXX more money per month it would be stupid not to increase the current rents for that amount (assuming they aren't a slumlord). Most people don't want to move away from large population centers (where most rent payers live).

Also when the experiment begins there are exactly zero guarantees that it will last more than one election cycle, so would you by immediately quitting your job and moving to a cheaper city to enjoy couple years of UBI or would just pay the extra cost in rent from the "free money" you get from the government and wait out if the experiment continues or not?

I can easily see that increase to be permanent if the program is seen as a success and then people are left with the same decision of moving out of the cities where they have their lives established in favor of not having to work for a living.

I grant you that I have a very pessimistic view of the future and it sure would be wonderful if I could just dick around playing WoW all day without having to worry about bills, but the little devil on my shoulder is constantly whispering scenarios where all attempts at making world better through charity just end up with us in a worst place than where we started.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#968

Post by nextlevelwizard »

triceratops wrote: post #956
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with UBI is that why would giving out "free money" change the world? Say I'm your landlord and you pay me $100/mo for rent. Now you start getting UBI thats $500/mo. Why wouldn't I increase my rent to $200/mo, $300/mo, or even $400/mo? I know that now you can afford the increase. So you'd still have to earn income if you wanted to stay in that place. All I see is prices going up for anything and everything…

Because the price of rent is based on housing supply and housing demand. Neither of those change significantly with UBI. At best people will upgrade their housing.

If I can now pay say $100/mo for rent and after UBI I get $100/mo more. If I don't want to quit working I can now pay $200/mo for rent. This means that I would be looking for a bigger place to rent.

Now multiply this across the whole society and it becomes really apparent that landlords who do not increase their rents at all are just leaving money on the table that they could easily get.

Because if my hypothetical landlord would increase my rent say 1/2 of the new UBI increase I would get on top of my salary it would be really silly to start looking for a new place with same price as my old rent since those would all now be worst in one way or another.

Supply and demand it the main driver obviously, but just look at the Silicon Valley and neighboring areas. The rents are absurd partly because of demand, but mostly because the tech companies are paying ridiculous amount of money for the people to work there. If the pay would go down the rents would have to come down even if the demand stayed the same, since no one could afford them anymore. With UBI it would be the opposite. The demand would stay the same, but suddenly everyone could pay more for the same place.

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#969

Post by poutrathor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #140
alexmingoia wrote: post #82

Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government... Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs. Essentially, people below a certain income threshold would receive money which scales to a maximum the closer their income approaches zero. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax I do think people radically…

> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government... The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check. The rich person will pay more in taxes than the amount of their check, so it doesn't matter. Indeed, the arguments that we should do otherwise are to the benefit of the rich, because the proposed cutoff invariably comes somewhere in the middle income r…

> The answer is that it's much simpler to send everyone a check.

I am always shocked by the general lack of awareness people have about world intricacies.

Social welfare, fiscality and related issue in modern developped countries is one of the most complex systems I know of. I am 100% serious. It's a huge mess of rules, exceptions, directives, conflicting aspirations, unforceable & not unforceable || not unforced rules, outdated scheme, 0,1% population targeting welfare, federal, state, regional, city size rules and much more.

It crosses to healthcare, food, housing, education and more.

This whole mess was built bit by bit, step by step, over decades.

Thinking "we could send everyone a check" is right down heresy to anyone having truly worked aroung these fields.

* Else the check amount is the same for everyone and good luck to 4 kids families in high rent area

* Else the check is calculated depending on all the above factors and this system will never roll out (check Obamacare implementation issues)

Re: Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0

#970

Post by miguelmota »

UBI will really take off once automation has completely replaced all the essential grunt work jobs which would make food and shelter abundant. Once that happens then everyone can do whatever they want and not worry about trying to have enough money for groceries or pay rent. We're not there yet but maybe in the next decade or two. My concerns with UBI right now is that it'll incentivize businesses to raise their prices and make people more dependent on government.
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