The quote:
I agree with this criticism. There are quite a few people apparently living with family and not working (and not paying rent). Some of them are unpaid caregivers, some are mentally or physically ill, but others are just leeches. They wouldn’t qualify for welfare, but they are still tolerated.
Why would she put that in her press release? That’s the thing people pay more attention to. This is political malpractice. Next time she needs to hire an editor.
Maybe it was not an accident? You may not be entirely in touch with the popularity of such a proposal. One potential cite: https://www.thenation.com/article/universal-basic-income-become-political-reality/
You may notice the overwhelming support from African American voters and fair support from working-class whites.
A progressive and populist agenda may be exactly the thing Democrats are looking for in 2020. It will give college-educated whites and fiscal conservatives the willies (myself included in many cases), but it’s possible Trump has burned his bridges with suburban college-educated whites to the point that this kind of platform can win nation-wide.
I could see this being a sort of trial-balloon by including it in the press release. Something that can easily be walked back or refuted by Harris, Booker, Warren et al (who have signed up for the GND resolution) but if it catches on could be picked up as well.
Here is a data point, so to speak:
Housing the homeless is cheaper than not doing so
Why waste money in order to make people suffer?
Don’t think so. How can I be wrong about my own anecdote? You mean to tell me that in a terribly depressed neighborhood people weren’t wasting time getting drunk and high and were actually unrealized Mozart’s and Tchaikovsky’s that just needed a grant? That girls weren’t having 2 or 3 children by the age of 18? What slum did you live in? Sounds like a nice place.
Now nowhere in my post did I say everyone who was poor was unwilling to work. But to think that that attitude is rare in those environments is naive or myopic.
Clearly you are not a conservative.
Work is highly overrated.
Preach!
That link does not work, here is one that goes to the point:
Here is another data point:
It would make sense for people who did hard, dirty work not to be motivated to do it.
A couple questions.
How did you (or someone like you if you don’t want to share personal information) take a different path than the people who no longer have dreams? That might give lessons on how others could do it.
What would be wrong with those people fishing on a boat or watching TV and drinking beers all day? (You may have partially answered in the next post I’m quoting. Is that the total answer?) I’m not saying they should. I’m just wondering about the downside if they did.
OK, how is this a negative to society?
Would a jobs guarantee program, along with free job training or free education help to solve that problem?
I’m still learning about UBI, so I’ve only seen people talk about a few studies. But one guy I saw talked about how giving money to everyone made UBI better than other systems of distribution even if that meant giving money back to millionaires and billionaires because if it was equal to everyone then the people at the bottom still had their dignity, which is one of the big problems of handout programs, which leave people stigmatized. UBI was seen as just pushing the level of subsistence up a notch.
Might that solve at least some of the problems in your examples?
Dammit, I have to pay attention to what I am doing. this was what I meant to link to. I have heard that Vox has a LW bias, not sure about phys•org.
Finland ran a two-year UBI experiment and the preliminary results of the first year are in.
The people in the experiment did not find more paid employment than the control group but neither did they find less. The former was a disappointment to some but the latter indicates that UBI does not make people lazy, either. Plus this only looked at official, government-reported paid work. It did not consider whether the people took more care of relatives, stayed with their children, helped their neighbours, volunteered, cooked and cleaned their homes better…
The other reported preliminary result was that the people in the experiment felt happier and healthier. I think the percentage difference was rather small. But surely a good and important (if obvious) outcome, too.
I think the survey didn’t ask whether the participants sat on their sofas watching TV more. Would have been interesting if they had asked.
A couple of RW sites are saying that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has removed the faq from her official HoR website – but they are just showing a hastily assemble image of a 404, with no link to the missing page.
Panhandlers with lotsa bling. 
Hmm, if society offers full economic security, why would there be panhandlers?
Just more evidence that reality has a liberal bias. 
More seriously, I know enough history to know that being closer to reality now is just a happy coincidence; eventually, some day, a political party other than the Democratic one will have more evidence to support most of their policies, it is just that right now the Republicans in power are running with the idiot ball and the idiot in chief.
Oh my gosh, it might mean that employers would have to start paying people a living wage to retain their staff! That would be tragic!
So, I’m a career retail worker. I do it because I mostly enjoy what I do, I’m good at it and feel like I make an impact on the quality of my customers’ experiences, and I find it’s less stressful and more rewarding on a personal level. When our company did a wage adjustment to account for the fast-paced rise of cost-of-living vs. income, my wage went up slightly, but my hours went down significantly. This means I actually make less now after the raise than I did before. Still I’m told that if I want more hours, I have to keep my availability open. For those who try to juggle a second job with the same expectations, it’s balancing act that often fails in some critical way. I haven’t found a way to make it work yet.
We have no appreciable savings that doesn’t routinely get tapped to cover bills or minor unexpected expenses. I get by but I can’t afford a car, because when it broke down I couldn’t afford to fix it or replace it. I have bikes to get around. I take cheap vacations backpacking in nearby forests. Though I’m insured, my credit is crap because medical care is costly after insurance pays. I have no consumer debt, all medical and I’m relatively healthy when we don’t have to rely on food assistance. Because I’m not dirt poor, I still pay taxes, but I don’t own a home and rent and utilities is near 65-70% of our income. We don’t live in a hovel, but it’s a meager space. Either one of us losing our job would be catastrophic. I went back to college (community) for awhile but did not complete because the financial stress on our household of a reduced income was too much to handle. I’m dumping as much as I can manage into my 401(k) because I’m scared about what my aged future looks like.
I have strong work ethic. I strive to make do my job as professionally and effectively as I can because I take pride in my efforts. But yeah, if I could earn the same amount of money I’m making now and spend my time on other pursuits like my volunteer work on trails or my efforts to advocate for safer bicycling infrastructure and improving livability in my community or going back to school to expand my knowledge and skills, I would leave my job in a heartbeat. But if they offered me more money to stay, so that my quality of life improved and I could afford to establish a nest egg for my future or maybe visit another country, that would probably be enough incentive to stay because again, I actually like my job. But just because I don’t have a college degree and I’m not in a “professional” job, I’m not working out of the kindness of my heart. I don’t owe my employer anymore loyalty than they owe me. The reality of life is that I have bills to pay that I can’t avoid without being a homeless vagabond. I should at least be able to reap some reward for my hard work and dedication to doing a job well.
Few are. But that does not mean that they are not paid what they are worth based on what they are able to produce for their company
As a business owner, I find myself cleaning the bathroom nearly every night, and I’ve moved out of food service, but I did quite a number of dishes in my time.
What an employer is willing to pay is also related to what a customer is willing to pay for the product or service produced.
That’s because you were there, with them, sitting around on sofas, smoking, drinking, and watching TV. You were not there with the other people who were not doing these things.
This is called sampling bias.
I don’t see why. I know a number of people who are writing books or short stories or poems or screenplays who do not have the time to devote to doing them well, as they spend 40-60 hours a week in a poor paying job that completely drains them of energy, both physically and mentally.
Which means raising prices.
So, what you are saying is that with a UBI, an employee and an employer are coming together in the labor market as equals, rather than the employer having the majority of the negotiating power? That’s not a bad thing, IMHO.
Right, but what you are saying is that if we implement it poorly, then it will be poorly implemented.
Even without UBI, I am against most of the cliffs that exist. I have employees complain about making “too much” money, as that will cause them to be disqualified from benefits, and the amount of money that I am paying them over that doesn’t make up for it.
I see no reason to have “claw backs” at all.
The would only be unemployable if they lost skills. Your first complaint is that everyone will stop working, leaving the work force empty, then you complain that if people come back to work, then they will not be hireable because they have a gap in their resume.
If it comes to pass as you say, that the labor market is devastated by people laying about collecting UBI, then a gap in a resume will not prevent an employer from hiring a desperately needed employee.
A gap in a resume is a black mark to some employers now because it is not common. If it is common that people take a year or two off from time to time, then such a gap would not be remarkable.
So here’s something weird.
https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1094238690782646272
And AOC responds:
So… That’s interesting. It seems like this isn’t actually in the text of the bill (ctrl+f “work” and “economic security” both came up with nothing like what the articles describe).
I’d like to think the multiple news outlets who reported on this were going off of something, but this particular controversial proposal is not in the bill itself, and has been disavowed by AOC, so… definitely not something to actually be concerned about.
This is purely anecdotal evidence. Now, in my hometown, I did not see this. I saw that most people were raised to work their asses off too, including my mom, and my Dad, who literally never called in sick a day of his life. Also anecdotal evidence.