Imagine how much we will suffer during a Skynet or Matrix style ACTUAL robot holocaust!
Taking all the poor people and grinding them up into mulch is also “merely politically impossible”.
Could you explain this further then? That’s different than impractically expensive, and I’m curious where you where going with it. It seems clear to me that most serious advocates of a UBI are talking about wealth redistribution, not wealth creation.
I actually cited the low percentages of the reduction of work effect from the Minicome experiment a few posts ago. Did you read it? Do you have any information that indicates otherwise?
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No, I don’t mind if you want to do all my work for me.
Work isn’t about “morality”. It’s about creating wealth. Real shit that has value to people - homes, cars, clothes, food, whatever - even if your contribution is indirect. Maybe your value to society is serving some banker his lunch so he can spend that time talking to a client about how to finance his industry-changing startup?
I do believe there is something inherently immoral about taking the fruits of one person’s labor and giving it to someone else without their permission or consent, except for cases where it is some shared service that benefits society as a whole (like roads and schools).
It’s one thing to provide a temporary safety net so people don’t lose their homes if they get laid off. But if you are going to pay half the population a living wage for doing nothing all day, who do you think is going to do all the work in society? Everything is just “magically” going to get done?
Absolutely. Why should the guy serving hot dogs at Yankee Stadium get compensated as much as Derek Jeter?
There is enough variety of work in our society that most people should be able to find something that provides them the right mix of compensation and lifestyle for their particular interest and abilities.
People get paid more fore “being better at working” is because their work is creating more economic value for society.
You’re asking the wrong questions. Really what should you be asking is:
-What are the barriers that keep smart, talented people from reaching their full potential, regardless of their situation and how do we remove those barriers?
and
-What should society do with those people who can’t contribute (or won’t)?
Considering a make a lot more than $70k a year, yes. I would also quit at the earliest opportunity.
Those of us with actual responsibilities also do stuff because it needs to get done. I’m fine with everyone just getting paid to enjoy life. Just tell me who will grow and prepare the food, fix the cars, build the homes, weave (or however they make) the clothes, build the iPods, drive the trucks, and perform all the other work that needs doing?
How each person uses their check is up to them. If they want food/housing/etc. they can buy it and can’t complain they have no money for it. If they want to forego those and blow it elsewhere, that’s up to them. They’ll get another check next month (or 2 weeks, or whatever).
I would also subsidize drug rehab such that it is available to anyone who wants it for the cost of the basic income check.
I don’t understand why people talk about certain policies “taking away people’s incentive to work” when we already don’t have enough jobs for those who want to work, and there are plenty of people that only work because they absolutely have to in order to survive. Wealth isn’t created by a human doing a job that a machine could do better, so why are we forcing humans to prostrate themselves in such a manner just to survive? We can create real societal wealth at the same time we provide everyone with acceptable food and other necessities because of our technology level. The only scarcity should be that not everyone can have filet mignon every night for dinner; actual poverty and hunger should be entirely wiped out, but aren’t because people are unwilling to give others stuff that they “don’t deserve”.
But why do kids deserve a free education? Why do we deserve to have police protection? Why shouldn’t citizens have to pay for their own children’s education along with their own private security force? I suspect that it’s because we as a society recognize that we are all better off if we manage to provide an even playing field in some areas. It’s just a question at this point whether we are better off providing basic necessities to everyone, the answer to which is apparently heavily debated. But I believe it should never be an acceptable argument to say “because I deserve what I have, and you deserve your lack of having”, because it could be used to justify denying those things like public education and police protection. If you’re willing to actually argue that poor people don’t deserve an education or police protection, then I’m willing to accept that. But I don’t think anyone is actually making such an argument in those cases, but they are for the possibility that we just give everyone enough free stuff to survive.
So focus on whether we would become better or worse off as a society if everyone could get by without contributing anything. As I’ve noted, it’s an open question to me whether dis-incentivizing people from working is actually a bad thing in our current state of society. Societal enrichment in the long run some from significant technological advances and cultural events that come from a small number of great thinkers and artists, not from the great unwashed masses who sweep the floor for them. As long as we continue to incentivize creating new technology and culture, any disincentive we give to work for those that are completely incapable of actually making a difference in the long run is totally irrelevant.
One thing I do dispute is that a basic income would allow us to do away with the massive bureaucracy regarding eligibility. We would still need that, because we would need to verify the living existence of those claiming benefits and making sure that everyone who is who they say they are. I would imagine identity theft/forgery would become even more lucrative. People would cease to legally die, always having someone claim to be them. DNA tests could be used, but are expensive and not 100% reliable due to chimerism.
I think it would be much easier and simpler if we just had free basic necessities available that would be provided only on the premises. They would have to be somewhat comprehensive in order to get around “the government doesn’t know what I really need” problem, including a decent range of health (including mental health) services as well as clothing along with food and shelter. I suspect providing small doses of recreational drugs to addicts might even be included if it was truly a problem.
But you say “they don’t deserve that”? So what? Go back to the public school and police argument. No one says that the poor don’t deserve those. No one says that just because you can’t pay the police that they won’t help you deal with someone that’s causing you trouble. No one says that no one who can’t pay for a high school education deserves one. It’s not a matter of deserving, but a matter of “Can we actually do this?”, and a large part of that is going to be political, and it might take a long time to happen, but I suspect it inevitably will have to be done as technology continues to displace people from the work force.
Nope. That’s not what basic income means. The idea has been around for awhile.
We don’t have the jobs because the economic value of tens of millions of Americans is not worth minimum wage.
At some point in time the economic value of some lower percentile of intellect is going to be lower than the energy costs to keep them alive. Especially as robotics and AI improve so rapidly. What does society do with those folks? I propose no minimum wage so they can find something to do for a pittance and a guaranteed universal income so they can buy the necessities. Productivity increases, demand increases, idleness decreases, people aren’t shut out of the (legitimate) work force due to a wage floor, and the money flows right back to the capitalist class anyways. The right should be 100% behind the idea.
I agree that with a minimum income, we can severely reduce the minimum wage, but we shouldn’t eliminate it, more as a worker protection measure than as a social program. With no minimum wage at all there could be a lot of he said/they said situations where the worker claims they were offered $2 an hour but the employer said they offered nothing at all. This way the employer would still be on the hook for a minimal amount of money.
You could recapture the money via rejiggering the tax system rather than from means testing the income per se. So, tax the first 70K or so of income at an extra %25 or so so that after 70K the benefit disappears. This would of course be only at the beginning and could be changed later, but I think it would be necessary to avoid inflation in the low end in places such as apartments.
I disagree. One of the advantages of a guaranteed income is being able to get rid of economic regulations like minimum wage. A GI would give workers some leverage in salary negotiations because they don’t required the job to survive, which would tend to raise salaries at the low end.
Is this a problem for the 70+ million workers who earn above the MW today? I’ve never accepted a job without a written offer with a written wage. Maybe I’m missing something.
I’d argue that as a country we’ve done a very impressive job of wiping out actual hunger. Virtually no one in America starves to death, or is in any danger of starving to death. The “plight of the poor” in America is more myth and exaggeration than fact. There aren’t 40 million Americans living a “gutter level of existence”.
I’m going to pretend I wrote a correct number here. 150+ million.
I’m on a deadline and will try to respond further later. This just bothered me so much I had to reply now.
Are you fucking kidding me? You don’t see any moral difference between the two actions? You are seriously arguing that giving poor people a check and killing them all and grinding them to mulch is a reasonable analogy? If so, we can take that argument to the pit.
BTW, learn how to quote. Preview is your friend.
No, it’s not. Mulch actually has economic value.
The conventional economic argument against “basic income” is like any other form of socialism. That it creates disincentives to work, particularly the sort of low level jobs that it would replace that still need doing. It creates inflation as labor cost have to increase to compete with “doing nothing”. It creates a “moral hazard” where it removes the consequences of being incompetent or negligent at your job. It penalizes the professional and middle classes as they must disproportionately bear the cost of such an expensive scheme. And, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s too damn expensive, as it would equal or even dwarf our currently bloated Federal budget.
Oh, and not to mention the economic disincentives such a system creates for people who actually create businesses and generate wealth.
I’ll learn to quote on a message board when you lean basic econ.
I think the major arguments have been hashed out back and forth already so I’m going to nitpick this. At the very most expensive, without any sort of phase-out for income at all, and counting children as adults, it would cost around $3.5 trillion, which is around the size of the budget. And even then, it would replace unemployment insurance, welfare to the poor besides health, and almost entirely replace Social Security, and count children much less than adults, so it would cost much less than $3.5 trillion. Which doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be too expensive, at at least $1 trillion even including the above programs, but it would be significantly less than our current federal budget.
And don’t forget taxes. Even if you don’t fiddle with the brackets and rates, some of that is coming directly back.
Although I think the average marginal rate is only 15%.
I don’t know about the UAE, but Social Security might not be a valid analogy because until the Boomers came of age to qualify, which was quite recently, the aged were a small part fo the US populace and would not have affected housing markets much. And the housing markets are so fucked up as it is that it’s hard to draw any conclusions, except that the greed of real estate owners and speculators knows no bounds.
According to one site I found, the US government currently spends about a trillion on welfare, including Medicaid. That’s only enough to give each person around $3000. Or about $8000 per household. It seems to me to do what people expect this program to do, it would need to cost a fair bit more.
I’ll have to go back and re-read the thread. But I don’t think anyone actually made a point as to why the basic income approach is better than the current method of targeted welfare.