And a serious non-understanding of what poverty does to a person, their outlook, their ability to conceive of a future (let alone plan for one) and a whole host of other related issues.
Interesting turn of events over the last 24 hours.
AOC puts up a FAQ on her website describing economic security for those “unwilling to work”.
They change this pretty much overnight to say simply, “Economic security for all”, removing the “unwilling to work” line. Policy Adviser to AOC comes on to Tucker Carlson to pretend it never existed, and suggests Republicans doctored the document. Finally, AOC herself says it was just an early draft that accidentally got posted.
Credit to @AG_Conservative for pointing this out, but this is not unlike Trump’s Muslim Ban that was unpalatable at first, then was changed to something more defensible, and afterwards they tried to pretend like the first version never happened. The only difference is in how the media will cover it.
Odd, though. When you use the web archive site, it does show up, but there is no link-path to it from anywhere else on her subdomain. Someone must have been watching her verrrry closely.
…No…? Not at all? This is yet another extremely misguided comparison between AOC and Trump that makes no sense. There’s a difference between “we’re still unsure about what goes in the draft of our law’s PR page and the wrong version went up for a few minutes” and “we want to ban Muslims, our legal strategy is predicated on pretending that this isn’t actually what we want to do, let’s keep modifying it bit by bit until the courts can’t strike it down”.
Why are people so eager to force this bizarre comparison? AOC is not actually a whole lot like Trump.
I have no idea why folks are comparing Universal Basic Income, a relatively mainstream Democratic Socialist policy that is being testing in the real world right now (and is very similar to a Negative Income Tax which was supported by Milton F’in Friedman) to something like the Muslim Ban.
I get that many fiscal conservatives and especially Libertarians don’t like UBI (and I’m not sure I’m 100% sold on it either), but it’s not completely whack-a-doodle either. And it is rather popular across the political spectrum, particularly in some of the white working class areas that Trump swung away from the Democrats in 2016. Economic populism will always sell.
It seems pretty clear that AOC, and likely a few others in the progressive caucus support UBI. It also seems like she (or her staffers) tried to shoe-horn it in the GND and it got yanked. But this idea that UBI somehow paints AOC as crazy is absurd.
Sometimes I wished I knew what this meant.
There’s a big difference between thinking of people as a commodity, and recognizing that people’s (in the aggregate) labor behaves much as any other good with respect to market forces.
All this stuff about dignity, etc… is kind of orthogonal to whether or not labor behaves as a market (which it definitely does).
It means that you would have to know the exact url of the page in order to see it. Its presence was advertised nowhere.
Here is the archive of the page that was taken down. You can see that it is significantly different from the pdf that was being circulated.
Sam Stone, could you clarify for me? It seems as though you’re pretty badly misrepresenting what was in the bill. Was this because: 1) the bit you claimed was in the bill actually is in the bill, but in a different area (and if so, could you quote it); 2) you honestly thought the bit you claimed was in the bill was in the bill, you just didn’t understand it; or 3) you deliberately misrepresented what was in the bill?
Is there another alternative explanation I’m missing?
Universal Basic Income strikes me as a lazy, unengaged and wasteful method of trying to lift people out of/prevent poverty without really ever having to understand why those people are in poverty in the first place, what keeps them in poverty and what such lifelong predicaments have influenced outside of the crunchable numbers and dollar figures.
A really basic cause of poverty is people unable to find work that pays a living wage. That part of it isn’t rocket science. It might stem from living in an economically depressed area, or having skills that, while adequate for a decade or two, are now obsolete due to outsourcing and/or automation. Additional factors are things like physical or mental disabilities that make getting and keeping a job much harder.
Why people are poor, and how long they’re poor, aren’t really deep unfathomable mysteries.
I can’t speak for Sam Stone, but my favorite part about the bill is that we’ve apparently collectively forgotten (well, okay, some of us have forgotten) that over the past decade or two, there has been a consistent drive by those against action on climate change to intentionally misinform the public. To intentionally downplay the costs and consequences of climate change (when not outright denying that it’s happening at all) while dismissing any attempt to mitigate or address the issue as impossibly expensive, laughable, socialism, et cetera. They have no compulsion to be honest, no interest in honest debate, and are absolutely willing to lie their asses off in defense of their financial interests.
And we’re seeing that again here. The right-wing line on the Green New Deal is… I think it’s fair to say mostly bullshit. There may be the odd real critique in there, but for the most part? Expect a ton of intentional misinformation and propaganda surrounding this - just like there was for every single other proposal we’ve ever seen having to do with climate change. Because this is how they work. Oil companies know what they’re doing, and they’re good at it. So if you can’t personally validate any given negative take on this law (by, say, citing the actual text of the article), you should take it as a given that it’s probably bullshit.
Just like this thread - the premise of this thread was based on an unpublished PR blurb that was retracted, had nothing to do with the actual proposed text, and which everyone from CNBC to Tucker Carlson picked up and fucking ran with as though it was the most important thing about this resolution. It’s not. It’s not even in the text, so it’s probably not the most important thing here.
On a side note, while I was looking up articles about this, I came across this little piece of absolute fucking dog shit.
Top Democrats running for president in 2020 have jumped on and endorsed Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical Green New Deal that aims, among other things, to eliminate air travel.
But the elimination of air travel strikes particularly close to the homes of Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris – all of whom extensively used air travel, including private jets – throughout the years in office.
So we take the lie that the bill wants to eliminate air travel as a given, and then add an extra helping of noxious bullshit in the typical “You want to improve society? But you LIVE in society! Checkmate, socialist!” canard that for some reason people find convincing. And its just so fucking stupid.
Yet Harris herself is far from following what she preaches. Since 2015, her campaign has spent around $300,000 on air travel.
Harris’ FEC records also show that she spent less than $7,000 on trains, even though the Green New Deal proposes making trains the main means of transport “at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
If you cannot figure out what’s wrong with the above two paragraphs, please, do us all a favor, don’t vote. Or breed. I mean… Yikes. “Gosh, I can’t imagine why a politician endorsing a bill to massively upgrade our rail system would have spent much more money on air travel than on our shitty, basically non-existent trains!” It boggles the mind, truly.
It’s our job to, collectively, not fall for this shit. We have 12 years to do something about climate change before the more extreme effects become inescapable. The cost of climate change is calculated in the trillions. Is the Green New Deal perfect? Probably not. It’s not binding legislation, either - rather, it’s a resolution for things for the house to address with legislation, with many of the details to be ironed out. It is, however, the first thing even approaching a real attempt to grapple with the problem. It is the first attempt at legislation that even comes close to recognizing the scope of the problem. And if we don’t deal with the problem… Well, fuck everyone younger than 40, I guess.
I think that UBI is a lazy ineffective approach because I dont see it being proposed as part of a comprehensive plan to combat poverty but as more of a stand-alone idea. I cam see it being a positive tool when used as as one facet of a larger vision for ending poverty. But I never really hear much of substance about that larger vision.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by a larger vision? Or maybe who is proposing it as a standalone idea?
Your question is in a thread on the Green New Deal which is a plan to add more jobs to the economy to help combat poverty. That’s more comprehensive than straight UBI.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think that one of the most fundamental causes of poverty is, to be blunt, lack of money. When folks have to work multiple minimum-wage jobs just to make ends meet they often lack both time and mental capacity to expand their skills. Then you add in knock-on effects of poverty (physical health, mental health, social stigma, educational gaps) and it’s not hard to see how it snowballs.
There is some merit, I think, in the idea that when very basic needs are met (a place to live, some clothes, and subsistence food) then we open opportunities for actually disrupting the poverty cycle. It also can reduce wasteful duplication and bureaucratic overhead of the various slap-dash anti-poverty programs we have (and those funds can be used either for UBI or meeting other higher-level needs).
Again, I’m not 100% sold on UBI or the Negative Income Tax, but it’s not a psychotic idea and using it to poke fun at AOC seems very incorrect. Especially as an attack on the Green New Deal since it’s not even in that resolution.
Part of the point of the economic security clause in the Resolution (it is not a bill for an act, so passing et would not carry the weight of legally binding legislation) is that taking the extreme steps needed to brake or mitigate climate change would also involve reshaping our economy in order to make the changes mean something. As it is, our economy is not sustainable, so just “going green” would be pointless if its end result adds up to the same thing as what we are doing right now anyway.
And that is a problem. Labor does act as a market, but the labor market is made of human beings. The labor market does not treat these human beings any different than it treats a barrel of oil or an apple.
We need to accept that, when people are treated as commodities, then some of them will be treated inhumanely, and we should do our best to reduce and ultimately eliminate that.
And that is best done with targeted direct assistance and not strategically counterproductive wage floors.
So UBI becomes a subsidy for employers. If they want to hire me, they have to pay me enough to make it worth my while to work for them, but I already get $30K/year for being a citizen, so they can get by paying me $30K for what would have been a $60K job – and I can easily say fuck this shit because I can get by on the $30K, so they have to be decent to me.
Now, if the distribution of the UBI becomes part of your paycheck, as in your employer collects your income credit from the government and puts it into your pay, I could see some seriously bad shit developing from that.