Overall govt has increased steadily, prob since the beginning of time. Certain areas may change due to political priorities but overall it will grow. While the IRS shrinks so they don’t have to pay taxes or the dept of Ag because republicans decreased food stamp spending, other areas increased like defense, homeland security etc. No govt employees were ever laid off the shrink was by natural decreases.
If you do UBI the govt employees, federal and state/local would lose their jobs, tens if not hundreds of thousands of them. About 30% of workers work directly for the govt at various levels so no chance of getting them to vote themselves out of a job. In fact they now control the govt and it is impossible to rein them in. Govt pay raises used to be debated now they are automatic and minor debate is given to how big a bonus they get.
Based on … what?
The UBI authority will need employees.
Government services like the armed forces, IRS, all the health-related ones, and so forth, will continue to exist.
The various DMV/BMV’s will continue to exist and work.
Please provide some rationale for your claims that “hundreds of thousands” will lose their jobs.
Easy. I said tens of thousands maybe hundreds. Even in a small rural county I can think of several jobs that will go away. Each school has people that administer the free and reduced lunch program, the county has a county coordinator, large counties would have several. I believe there are 3000 plus counties in the U.S., you get over ten thousand on that one small program alone. There is a large number of these programs. Housing, economic development, food stamp, rural development, urban development, etc. There are people in every county and city and state who administer these programs, they aren’t needed anymore. Then of coarse are the federal employees who administer them. I would bet that you would exceed a hundred thousand just in federal employees alone.
What people don’t realize that the real purpose of these programs isn’t to help people but to employee people by the govt. In fact I suspect that in a lot of these programs the actual number of people employed by the govt far exceeds the number of actual recipients of the program.
I thought one of the arguments for UBI was that it would replace many (most? all?) existing social programs and would be much cheaper to administer because you wouldn’t have to deal with (many) applications, eligibility determinations, monitoring, operational costs, etc. If that didn’t result in a (significant) net loss of government jobs, then it would really undermine the “ease of administration” argument. (I have no idea how many government employees work in administering those programs, so I have no idea if tens of thousands is remotely realistic).
The subsidized lunch programs are very popular - those could be folded into school lunch programs which will also need to be administered.
Or those folks could go work for the UBI program, which will need employees.
Why would UBI eliminate “housing and economic development”? Those programs are not at all restricted to the poor, or even the working poor. All sorts of potential for helping first time home owners, rehab, urban renewal, zoning compliance staff, code enforcement, etc. that has nothing to do with UBI.
Same for “rural development” and “urban development”. You seem to have rather strange notions that somehow no one above the poverty line ever has need of or contact with any governmental agency when that is absolutely not the case.
UBI is most certainly NOT going to cure all the ills of society or render government superfluous.
Subsidized programs won’t be folded into anything. There isn’t a separate lunch program. All the kids eat together. Most kids pay a few dollars a week for theirs. There is a federal program that pays for the low income kids. Thousands of people are working for that program that does nothing but decide which kids get it and then pay the money to the schools. With the UBI you give the money to the parents and they pay for the kids lunches just like everyone else so you can do away with all the people that administer the program. It has no effect on the actual serving of lunches.
UBI would likely be administered by the social security admin. It would require some increase in staffing but nothing compared to the large number of programs that could be eliminated. SS already sends money to a large percentage of the population.
I think all of these programs are (at least in theory) restricted to poor or lower income areas. All would have some sort of income restriction to qualify. Zoning and Code enforcement are local and usually don’t exist in rural areas.
It comes down to what most people would want UBI to do. IT could just be added onto everything that currently exists but I think that would be a hard sell. The only way I would support it is a more efficient replacement for social programs.
That study also notes that giving basic items instead of cash depressed the price of similar items; specifically, that giving food instead of cash depressed the cost of food.
The article appears to think this is a good thing, in that it makes food cheaper for everybody. But that ignores the fact that among those in poverty in the areas studied are undoubtedly people who are growing food and trying to sell some of it – who will be pushed further into poverty by making it difficult to sell food and depressing the price of it, while the price of other items they need is not similarly affected. So giving cash seems to me to be preferable in that way also; it doesn’t skew the market by making some goods cheaper than others, and more importantly doesn’t disadvantage the people who are producing those goods.
While I generally agree with what you’re trying to say this isn’t really true or at least isn’t true outside of Missouri. Each city, county and state have different ways of adopting building codes and the only state I know that has not elected a minimum building code state wide is Missouri and there it is only cities that have building codes. The other extreme is New York State which has a statewide building code or california which has written its own building code for the most part. Building code and zoning aren’t federal issues though and have nothing to do with HUD that I know of.
I think a selling point of UBI is the lack of means testing and the elimination of a lot of jobs at the state, federal and local level. It is difficult to say who would be eliminated but certainly whole departments could go just like if we implemented UHC we could eliminate most of the VA. At a minimum social security would go away and we could probably pick out a lot of other departments that would be gone too.
Although the codes exist no one actually enforces them. WV suscribes to the national code but doesn’t have anyone actually enforcing it. Contractors have to build to it for liability reasons but there is no one inspecting the work like in the cities.
Housing and Urban development programs send money to local areas for things. They don’t actually do anything themselves. They have large rule sets that require specialists to interpret.
If I were to remodel my house I could just do it. I don’t have to get any permits etc from anyone. If I were to get some sort of govt loan or subsidy for the remodel I would have to get all kinds of inspections and permits and approvals. Asbestos, wiring, plumbing, etc. Not necessarily bad in theory but in practice insanely expensive and usually corrupt.
With UBI people can spend the money as if it was their own and not need big brother.
Is the point of Universal Basic Income to give people the option to opt out of “menial” work? One of the supposed benefits of UBI that I’ve read about is that it’s supposed to correct market distortions based on poverty. The idea is that, currently, people who clean toilets are paid the lowest possible wage because their choice is to clean toilets or starve. Remove the starvation “choice” and they would demand higher wages to clean toilets with a new higher equilibrium wage representing the actual value of the toilet cleaning labour. That’s inflationary, regardless of whether anyone thinks UBI is a good idea or not.
UBI would also mean across the board payments to all members of society. Possibly it would be paid for by taxing the well off, who would reduce their future savings and investments… Regardless, lower-income recipients of UBI payments would be more likely to spend their new income save it. That increased ability to spend represents increased demand which pushes prices up, so again UBI has an inflationary effect.
So you’re saying that the federal retirement pension that the elderly have paid for for decades will be replaced by a common entitlement benefit that all citizens/residents/adults? will receive without a need to pay into? I’m sceptical the elderly population of the US will buy into that idea.
I think you’re trying to make the point that some social welfare programs which require government administration would disappear if Universal Basic Income was implemented, as they would be replaced by UBI. Therefore the jobs of the people employed to administer those programs would also be eliminated. Free school lunches would likely fall into the category of administered programs that would be eliminated. However, I think you need to offer a better argument for why zoning laws and building codes would also be eliminated under UBI.
I understand where you’re coming from but the libertarian in me takes exception to people’s worth being tied to how much as components they drive the economy. Otherwise we’re back to setting old people out on an ice floe.
What I’d like to see is UBI allowing a decent living but one with no frills. Yeah, you’ll probably wind up with half of them doing nothing but watching football (of either variety) while drinking cheap beer because they can’t afford any better. The other half would go crazy (I know I would) and take the jobs that are left to earn some more coin.
I’ve posted it before but this Kurzgesagt on UBI, talking mainly about the $1,000 per month variety seems pretty even handed to me.
You get my point. UBI would not directly impact zoning/building codes. I was responding to an aside from another poster. I think that poster thought I was referring to codes when I mentioned it would eliminate Urban/rural development. Those are loan/grant programs that have nothing to do with codes.
The truth is we just don’t need everyone to work. With automation we need far fewer workers than ever before.
UBI eliminates the need for the people who can’t/won’t work from murdering the people the people who do.
Right now if you make less than $30k a year you are better off on social services. It is not fair to the people that work.
We can either eliminate social services which leaves millions in desperate circumstances or we continue the patchwork system we have.
UBI is a fairer way to do it. Everyone gets UBI. Those who want to work can do so and enjoy a higher living standard and those that don’t want to work don’t have to.
I do not think “debunk” means what you think it means. Not only is this an example in an entirely different country with different economic relationships and forces at play, but also:
- This was an experiment focused on food-aid specifically.
- The context was poor, rural, villages.
- The “control” was against villages receiving in-kind food donations vs. money of equal value.
- None of the observed outcomes for aid to small local communities can reasonably be used to extrapolate about economic impact of a national UBI.
That said, I’m all for some sort of UBI, or some sort of Economy 2.0 that is able to turn the massive amount of productivity we are capable of into universal ease, leisure by choice, and security.
To me one of the biggest challenges to an effective UBI is that property ownership and the landlord/tenant relationship around finite residential resources spells, to me, a re-direction of UBI to landlords’ pockets.
I look at what happened this past year with stimulus. At least here, landlords were by in large isolated from the economic crisis. People and small businesses (which I’m less concerned about) who saw incomes drop were scrambling to find money to pay for the roof over their heads. Stimulus money? That’s rent money.
I don’t think UBI is going to inflate the whole economy, at least not in the short term, but I think it is likely to raise rents and property values pretty immediately.
I don’t think that this is really true:
Because the job still has a maximum value to the employer too. If their basic needs were met and someone wanted to scrub toilets for extra money then the question becomes how much do they value the extra dollars vs how much does their employer value the job. I would expect to see many of our minimum wage jobs currently paying much less than the minimum wage and I would expect to see an increase in part time jobs. Scrubbing toilets one day a week for $50 to have some fun on the weekend may make more sense then doing it all week for $250.
Sure they are but one group that will need to be convinced. On the other hand people will see their pay checks go up since they won’t have to pay into ss any more. Of all the constituencies that have to be appeased to make this work I think the old people are the easiest to ignore.
Based on the conversations we’ve had on this before I agree that $1,000 per adult is probably the right level but that is a level that a lot of people have told me doesn’t allow for dignity. I’m OK with that. You’re correct that people have to be able to completely survive on UBI or it doesn’t do its job.
I will put the caviot that it needs to be paired with UHC to work effectively.