I agree with that. Make the cut off something like 250k per household.
Universal Basic Income
- Thread starter esmufc07
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No. You would get taxed more and also receive the UBI. Read the wikipedia page for an overview.
For me a better solution is to close all the corporate tax loopholes, have a truly progressive tax system. Outlaw offshore accounts for income or revenue generated within a country’s borders. Tax investment income same as regular income, and introduce a UBI limited to household incomes <250k.
Someone in the poverty trap has very little ability to be self-reliant so you are suggesting we introduce a policy that makes them less self-reliant in order to make them more self-reliant.Right wing rhetoric 101.
Someone in the poverty trap has very little ability to be more self reliant.
Nailed it.
Genius.
Then it isn't a UBI. That would be a negative income tax or a minimum guaranteed income.
All related (ish) but different.
Yep, I read that on the wiki page. Both look better than a UBI, which looks a bit daft tbh.
Here in the US the variations in the tax code is just ridiculous. State income tax for example. If I lived in Nevada I’d pay federal, social security, Medicare etc, but no state. Living in Illinois, I paid an extra $12k last year in just state income tax. People with greater resources have addresses in other states and avoid that.
UBI is welfare. All you're doing is giving people money in both cases. Why does calling it UBI or welfare change the behaviour of recipients?
It sounds the most sensible solution for the changes to changes to the demand for physical labor that are inevitably coming. To me the hard bit is the transition which would be very difficult. Especially given the current lurch to the right the world is taking.
No it isn't.
And it changes the behaviour of recipients because everybody gets it without a means test. No penalies for casual or part time work. No disincentive to study, retrain or start a small business. No stigma.
How does it work for families? I'm thinking of a couple with seven kids compared to a couple with none. Would they get UBI for each child too? I can't see how they'd manage otherwise.
I think that it (universal income) will have a lot of merit once technology, and robotics in particular, has reached a point where it has replaced the majority of the manual labour market.
Once it hits that point then there would be so many people out of work, which will cause so many social issues. Especially with the population of the planet increasing dramatically each year.
I imagine that the company's that employ such technologies and robots will pay a tax, fee, or something to contribute to the wage pool - which can be used to form the base of the universal income which can be distributed by the government's.
Once it hits that point then there would be so many people out of work, which will cause so many social issues. Especially with the population of the planet increasing dramatically each year.
I imagine that the company's that employ such technologies and robots will pay a tax, fee, or something to contribute to the wage pool - which can be used to form the base of the universal income which can be distributed by the government's.
A couple with 7 kids might want to get one of those adults out to work and make additional income... Don't you think?
I think so too...
Most people obviously would but some don't, or can't, for a variety of reasons, which is the point of UBI isn't it?
In any case it's a whole different topic, my question is to those who propose UBI, again, how does it allow for children?
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Heard a very interesting stat the other day.
Every 1% the unemployment rate goes up, an average of 40 thousand people die. (Not sure if it is from an average population of 2 million or something like that)
It's been studied over 40 years.
Every 1% the unemployment rate goes up, an average of 40 thousand people die. (Not sure if it is from an average population of 2 million or something like that)
It's been studied over 40 years.
There is a disincentive - you've stated previously that taxation would need to be high enough to make this a viable option. There is no disincentive to study or retrain right now so what makes you think if you pay people even more money they'll be more willing to learn new skills or start a new business? Taking this to it's logical conclusion, why don't we give everyone a million quid each, like lottery winners, and then see if that translates to more 'studying, retraining or new businesses'?
I used to be a big fan of the UBI, but it's based on two logical mistakes:
1) that technology is going to make humans redundant;
2) the reason some people are unproductive is because they don't have the money.
The first one is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works. Unless you are saying that almost every human need/want is going to be satisfied within 20 years, there will always be jobs for people to do. Go back a hundred years and you'll see similar views spreading around about cars and automation in factories ending the manual labour, leading to civil unrest etc etc. None of that happened because there will always be things that people need services for.
Those exact same arguments are now being recycled for the mystical 'AI'. If the world ever got to the point where we were so wealthy that robots were doing everything and all humans needed to do was get fat and enjoy themselves, that's a great thing! Alas, I very much doubt that will ever happen, there will always be problems than need solving.
The second mistake is one that everyone seems to hold to some extent: "if only the poor had more money, then they would make better decisions about their lives." Which is quite frankly nonsensical. You do not solve an issue like generational poverty by simply handing out money, it becomes an almost cultural thing - just like how free education hasn't solved the academic achievement gap between more affluent areas and less affluent areas.
In many circumstances in the UK you can't claim housing benefit or social security if you are studying. How is that not a disincentive?
The incentive is that UBI isn't a million dollars, far from it. It is usually suggested that it is set at just over poverty level. So the incentive is there because you can try to better your circumstances without totally endangering your ability to subsist. Of course not everyone will take the opportunity but you would never do anything if 100% buy in was the standard.
You do like your straw men.
Nobody is saying that every human need will be met without human intervention or that all jobs will disappear. What is virtually certain is that anywhere near full employment - 40 hrs or more per week - for everyone will be even more unattainable. Including the underemployed, the unemployed and those excluded from unemployment figures by government slight of hand we are already well under full employment and it isn't going to get better. At least not in the developed world.
You think AI is some shiny robot doing everything for you by the sound of it. AI, AR and similar technologies are already impacting us and they will accelerate very quickly from here on in. Certainly in my lifetime.
Good job that UBI isn't just handing out loads of money then.
And education is hardly free any more.
And you won't change the culture that you say is the issue by simply reinforcing what already exists, where social mobility is declining at an alarming rate, from a not very good base.
Giving free money will only risen the prices and wont be sustainable. That money comes from somewhere.
If everyone suddenly gets 1k per week minimum you can be sure the prices of goods will exceeds the current prices. Those that are paid 1k per week to work 8 hours per day would demand 2k or they'd rather stay at home
If everyone suddenly gets 1k per week minimum you can be sure the prices of goods will exceeds the current prices. Those that are paid 1k per week to work 8 hours per day would demand 2k or they'd rather stay at home
It isn't free money. And I don't think you understand UBI if you think everyone is getting 50k pa.
20-30 years from now i doubt there will be any Bin men.
Loads of countries already have automated bin lorries that pick up and empty the bins. Theres only a driver and he'll probably not even be needed in the future.
Can you try to rationalise that position a bit more, because all you’ve done really is use buzz words that have very little or no bearing on reality unless used to pin point your philosophical ideology.
“I don’t believe UBI would solve anything” well using some economic theory and future projections it absolutely could solve the major problems that will arise in the job market in the coming years.
“The longer term solution should be to reduce benefits” you’ve used *should* here as a normative claim, where is the moral reasoning for this? When wealth inequality has done nothing but continue to rise why is it an imperitive to remove more of the systems designed to ensure an equaliser at the very bottom?
“The focus should be to improve self reliance and provide the opportunity for everyone to earn their own keep” - this sounds amazing if only it was that easy. so from this I take it you believe that people have a large amount of agency over their lives? disagreeing with that principle is the hill I would die on because it’s just not true. The problem is it’s totally unrealistic in the current system and economic environment. Self reliance is essentially impossible for those in low income brackets, the income levels don’t support it, and there are essays long responses about the realities and negative influences on being poor that impact your decision making.(I’d disagree we make any truly free choices anyway) I also disagree with the notion we should be more individually isolationist, cooperation is a wonderful thing.
The opportunity for everyone to earn their own keep is also, kind of the point, of UBI. As it stands, as things continue, the labour market is going to be wiped out in the future, in favour of cheaper, more efficient and productive automation and ai. A huge portion of the population will be unemployed.
“Increased wages./less automation” so your argument is that we should cripple our societies advancement in order to keep people in low skilled labour and even the higher skilled labour in some sectors that will be replaced? For 0 net difference?
For example John owns a factory that makes shoes (or insert anything) in the near future. He employes 5 people to work on the floor 20k a year each, he has a revenue of 200k so a employee burden of 100k leaves him a 100k surplus. A new wave of autonomous machines and ai is available to replace the employees at a marginal cost compared to wages. Over the life of the machine it works out to about 50k a year and output increases. (I’ll fully admit this analogy is unsubstantiated as it’s impossible to know exact figures, but it does illustrate the ideological differences and fallacies between the 2 arguments.)
The 2 scenarios are A the increased surplus through taxation is redistributed to his replaced workforce giving them 10-15k a year each with no work required and they are free to pursue whatever they want in life. John is still making a higher profit than when he employed the staff. The system keeps churning but quality of life increases for everyone. UBI
Scenario B John Owns a factory with 5 staff earning 20k a year each. He replaces them with ai/automation. There is no new taxation/system to take into account the new surplus. John makes obsurd new amounts of surplus, workers are unemployed and don’t have the financial security to do anything and there aren’t any jobs. no UBI.
Scenario Edgar - John factory etc, John is not allowed to make more money because he can’t use automation, his staff have to continue working 50 hours a week to maintain output in a job they hate and would rather be doing something else.
There is no net difference between the first 2 positions but one allows people a base level of income to pursue their life interests the way the want without indentured servitude, and the business the ability to continue making their profit. The second completely destroys the labour market and leaves a huge majority of the working class unemployed with no reimbursement, and essentially the whole system collapses anyway.
The third situation continues the status quo, but drastically reduces everyone’s quality of life compared to what it could easily be. doesn’t allow owners to improve their efficiency, and generate a bigger surplus. Workers have to work 50 hours a week on minimum wage even though they would rather be doing something else. Everyone loses.
That's a common right-wing myth that isn't borne out by decades of experimental economics.
That's not the theory at all.
This is not true.
There are massive disincentives to "study or retrain" right now. First is the health care trap. You want to talk about incentive problems you have to begin with the mess of US privatized health care that is packed with fecked up incentive structures. If anyone manages to get a corporate/government job with health care provided (usually categorized as worth an extra 20-35K a year) most people are sop afraid of what might happen if they lose that health care since its tied to their job they don't feel they can change career.
Then there is the wage earner trap. Its easy to "get a job". Its hard to get a good job that can cover all the expenses. When 78% of Americans don't have 400 dollars in savings and can't afford even a minor medical emergency, most people can't afford to just quit their job and go back to school to study or retrain.
Your first objection is also a logical mistake. You are claiming that because X happened hundreds of years ago, X will happen again in the next 30-50 years. That's not sound logic.
The only mistake is you asserting that 'Everyone' holds this idea that I have literally seen no one in any of these threads espouse. Not only that but many people like myself have consistently argued against these ideas. This is just a massive strawman.
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That said I don't fully accept the automation arguments from some people but from a very different perspective than the neo-classical assumptions you make. Personally I simply believe there will be a window to evolve into a post-scarcity economy. That won't be work if the current .1% elites maintain the amount of political power they control now though but there are still believers in that like Ray Kurzweil (or Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway is just one of many potentialities of how the n ext 50 years might evolve).
There were charts presented that income inequality and social mobility trends are correlated. For me the fundamental problem is social mobility. Income inequality exists because of flaws in social mobility, not vice versa. People should ideally have a better way to improve their income and move up the chain for a better future. Not everyone is born equal but available opportunities should be the same irrespective of existing social strata. A daily wage workers son should find it as easy or difficult to become a doctor as Jeff Bezos's son.
Once we tackle social mobility and people are able to move up the wealth chain more easily than current, income inequality should even out automatically. I'd rather increase minimum wages into a living wages and encourage employment than pay out UBI as a freebie.
The poor and middle class gave hundreds of billions in wealth to the top .1% in the form of free money and government support over the last 40 years of corporate and bank bailouts. Here is a good graph to illustrate of this wealth stripping compared to the successful government programs. Just in response to the Great Recession
"It includes the total outlay for all the bailouts to date. In just about one short year (March 2008 – March 2009), the bailouts managed to spend far in excess of nearly every major one time expenditure of the USA, including WW1&2 (omitted from graphic), the moon shot, the New Deal, total NASA budgets (omitted from graphic), Iraq, Viet Nam and Korean wars — COMBINED."
Social welfare programs are not the problem. Out of control laissez-faire money grabs are.
That wasn't the conclusion of all those articles I linked to you. Nowhere did it imply this one-way direction was the way the causal chain works. income inequality also inhibits social mobility. That's plain to see here and here
I think most of the data implies its a negative feedback loop not a one-way causal chain either way. In other words both sides of the problem need to be addressed.
I just said the articles indicates correlation. It was my opinion that by we should fix social mobility and that inequality will even out on its own. It's also my opinion that vice versa won't work. Unless social mobility is fixed just wealth redistribution is plastering paper over cracks.
Thing is, we already have systems designed for this in the UK in the form of Universal Credit, which is basically a negative income tax made more nuanced to account for real world pressures, like variable housing costs.
The problem with universal credit is that a) the implementation has been a total disaster because both the IT and people's lives turned out to be really complicated and b) it became an easy politcal target for a Government trying to save money in the budget. I dont see how UBI inherantly solves the problems we already face with our current system, or more to the point, what advantages a fully working UBI would offer over a totally fixed version of the current system.
First you stated it as if it was a fact that the causal works in one direction and that isn't true. As I said the articles clearly provide plenty of data points that income inequality also inhibits social mobility so in order to "fix" social mobility as you put it, we also need to change the structure to fix income and wealth inequality.
Second, you keep throwing around that buzzword "wealth redistribution" as if it means anything. The top .1% don't get to redistribute wealth upward for 40 years of bad policy and bailouts and then whine and whine about "redistributing" that wealth again back to where it belongs in the first place.
Higher taxes on the rich is adjusting the system to actually get the richest and biggest corporations to pay their fair share of taxes in the first place. When you factor in sales tax, government fees and the lower limit of Unearned Income (investment income) tax then you see the richest don't even pay the most percentage wise.
The status quo system built up over the last 40 years gives massive benefits to the richest .1% and most powerful corporations while straddling the bottom 90% with the lion's share of the costs and risk of the system. They already benefit much more from the status quo than they pay into the status quo.
Here is a quote from a business owner I know that agrees with me that paying higher taxes is getting things back to "fair share" levels,
US business owner said:
So how do we fix social mobility? @Edgar Allan Pillow
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I've never been against taxing the rich. I was just against ridiculous 100% tax suggestions. There just needs to be a balance.
What I'm arguing is how to spend the money gained by taxing the rich. I believe it should not be spent on UBI type benefit schemes.
You are right, it's silly to defend that side of the debate by including massive numbers like that. A UBI would cover groceries, travel to work and at a stretch a phone bill. You will still need to work for a roof over you're head and other necessities.
That's also why the "incentive to work" excuse holds no water. The vast majority of people like to work but a lot stay in jobs they don't like just to get by. If the bare necessities are met that leaves more time for family, community volunteering and in a lot of cases a happier more productive workforce.
Wouldnt the benefit be the lack of political interference? If UBI is just a base benefit that everyone gets, then theres no complication in how its distributed. Theres no "you dont qualify based on very limited information". Theres no means testing, theres no "you must do this, if you want that!". Theres no demands, and thus theres no fear. No fear means theres better mental health and better mental health means theres better drive to do things that benefit society. Even if its not paid work, volunteer work can be every bit as important to our society. IMO.
We know for a fact that trickle down bullshit doesn't work. So the most important thing is stopping the continuation of those broken market fundamentalist ideas the power elites have convinced people are a good thing since the 1980s. The most important thing is consistently debunking laissez-faire myths as soon as they arise because those policies are the worst for the bottom 90%. No more "stakeholders in the room" Democrats.
The Government would still have to set the amount to be paid, budget for it each year and decide how much it should go up year on year.
Again, I've never argued for a trickle down economics.
- For starters enhance the minimum wage to a living wage and subsidize that. For example, rather than the $10 or $15 per hour that is the norm, make it $30 and use the tax money to subsidie half of it. So employers pay $15 and Govt pays $15. This is far better incentive and productive use of money than paying out unemployment benefits.
- Enhance the Earned Tax Credit scheme.
- Improve Education and Housing sectors to ensure they are more accessible to low income strata than current.
- Look into corporate tax avoidance schemes. Figure out the loopholes that help corporates avoid tax and close them out.
These are the fundamental structure changes that must be done.Without tackling any of these just taxing the rich and giving it to poor won't really resolve anything.
Depends where and when. Switzerland had a referendum about it a couple of years back, and around 2/3 of people voted against UBI.
Without saying how you would go about implementing those things it's all a bit hollow. Will those things be easier to implement even? If you're going to argue that this is a better alternatively you could try and explain why? We could argue from our ideological positions all day long but at some point that gets boring. Sell me on your ideas...
Not really, since its supposed to be on or slightly above the poverty level. Budget for it, yes, decide how much it should be, not in the way they do now.
So who decides if it’s at or slightly above, and if it’s above, who decides by how much?