Universal Basic Income

[Husky_Khan]

So the idea of Universal Basic Income is the main policy of upstart contender Andrew Yang who espouses giving a thousand dollars a month to every American above the age of eighteen. Yang's entire campaign is exceptionally progressive on ideas and on spending but he's banking a lot of his presidential aspirations on attracting disaffected Trump voters and so on. Andrew Yang was first seriously featured on the Joe Rogan Experience and since then has been on the Rubin Report, David Pakman Show, H3 Podcast and other extremist independent media. The first two especially are considered havens of extremist right wing thought. Yang did bring up on JRE however that UBI was an idea that Milton Friedman put forward.

The obvious question is cost and he says that simplification of the welfare system by replacing dozens of programs with one of them (at least below a thousand dollar monthly threshold) would simplify things, also UBI would increase consumer spending and increase things like charity donations and have as he calls it "trickle up" effects and the main way he'll generate revenue is via taxing Big Tech and other companies who avoid paying taxes, in his words taking a chunk of every Amazon purchase, Uber mile and Facebook ad. He also cites the example of how popular Alaska's payments are from Big Oil as another and says his will be funded by Big Tech.

A Rule for Conservative Anti-Poverty Plans: Keep It Simple

Today's byzantine set of assistance programs is enough to baffle a policy specialist, much less the intended beneficiaries. Reformers need to streamline the system.

www.theatlantic.com

What is your all opinion of UBI?

 

[Battlegrinder]

As a replacement for the current welfare bureaucratic nightmare, it sounds good.

As some kind of specific anti-big tech measure, no. I've never liked "tax X to pay for Y" stuff.

As an idea in and of itself....maybe, it would heavily, heavily depend on the exact setup, how much per person per month, how hard it is to tamper with so we don't get the "vote for me and everyone gets more free money" candidate, etc. But I'm not inherently opposed.

 

[CurtisLemay]

To me, UBI is just DOA. I see Battlegrinder's point, but doing away with the older legacy welfare programs? The left will not let that happen, kids. Mark my words.

 

[FriedCFour]

My biggest issue with it is you start with UBI at a subsistence level, sure. Its enough that if you absolutely needed to you can live off it for awhile, if you are poor and working it can add a lot to your income thus allowing for more menial and low wage jobs to be filled. The problem is that when you are campaigning on free money and you already give out free money, I dont see whats to stop a political bidding race with how much more free money can we give, until it loses that equilibrium of being helpful in filling jobs to now making people not work at all and being a net drain on taxes of people who do work to provide for those who dont.

 

[Battlegrinder]

To me, UBI is just DOA. I see Battlegrinder's point, but doing away with the older legacy welfare programs? The left will not let that happen, kids. Mark my words.

I don't quite agree with that. Sure, bits of the left don't like any cuts or removal of any government program (much like bits of the right are opposed to any cut to defense spending at any point), but I think rolling everything under one umbrella appeals a lot to the silicone valley technocrat types.

 

[FriedCFour]

I don't quite agree with that. Sure, bits of the left don't like any cuts or removal of any government program (much like bits of the right are opposed to any cut to defense spending at any point), but I think rolling everything under one umbrella appeals a lot to the silicone valley technocrat types.

I dont think being the backbone of paying for it does. Amazon will support a $15 minimum wage because they can afford it while it puts a far tighter squeeze on the rest of the market, especially on retail stores. I doubt they'd like to be the ones fronting the cash on this.

 

[Emperor Tippy]

That it is a horribly stupid idea at the moment, although something like it will become an inevitability as time passes.

We are going to reach the point where jobs simply do not exist for the vast majority of the population as the workforce is automated. In addition, the cost of providing the necessities (and even comforts) is going to drop to the point where they are essentially free.

Ideas are the one thing that can't really be automated away (even if going from an idea to a marketable product can be) and most people will have at least one in their lives. So we will mostly likely transition from a labor based economy to an idea based economy, and that will bring with it some variant of UBI.

At the moment though it is a pretty horrible idea for a lot of reasons (starting with costs, continuing onto political impossibility, and smashing into the brick wall of reality).

 

[Deleted member 1]

It is yet another idea which sacrifices the dignity of work and the value of hand-crafted items and of craftsmanship and creativity before the alter of bean-counting optimisation functions. At some point, we must ask ourselves if it is worth being human in a society which denies us rewarding work. To me the answer is very clearly no; it would be better to start Jehanne Butler's Jihad and burn it all down -- to restore control, Will, and agency to humans, not machines. It is absurd to think that economic optimisation is worth enslaving us all to a dole produced by robots.

 

[Battlegrinder]

I dont think being the backbone of paying for it does. Amazon will support a $15 minimum wage because they can afford it while it puts a far tighter squeeze on the rest of the market, especially on retail stores. I doubt they'd like to be the ones fronting the cash on this.

I mean more in terms of the workforce and culture of the valley, not the specific people who run it.

It is yet another idea which sacrifices the dignity of work and the value of hand-crafted items and of craftsmanship and creativity before the alter of bean-counting optimisation functions. At some point, we must ask ourselves if it is worth being human in a society which denies us rewarding work. To me the answer is very clearly no; it would be better to start Jehanne Butler's Jihad and burn it all down -- to restore control, Will, and agency to humans, not machines. It is absurd to think that economic optimisation is worth enslaving us all to a dole produced by robots.

Ok, question. Let's say we have the fully automated star trek future where everything, or at least the basics, are provided by the government or hyperefficient robots or whatever, and no one has to work anymore, which based on your post here you seem not to like the idea of.

Would that not mean that hand crafted items are more valuable now, because someone choose to spend their time and energy making them simply because they enjoy doing so and decided to devote thier time to that of their own free will, vs them doing so because they have to do something to put food on the table (I don't imagine the people who make such items today hate what they do, of course, but there is an element of finical motive rather than doing so purely for the artistic value of it).

 

[Deleted member 1]

That assumes you could actually build a society, considering the nature of humans. I think there is a self-corrective mechanism in human nature--that if we try to implement post-scarcity, we shall destroy ourselves in the process and set ourselves back to a level before it. That is because our psychology (to use a scientific term, rather than soul) craves meaning, identity, purpose, and meaning and purpose are lost without contributing to society, and so madness (we see the first stages of it, with the era of the modern mass shooter) and disorder follow. Observe here for a very sobering look at this process.

only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. ... Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked.

 

[Lightershoulders]

I can support the idea, as long as it's not a replacement for the necessity of a job. Sometimes hard working folk who enjoy their work get screwed, look at those coal miners in Virginia. They certainly could have used the money to get by.

Like, enough money to give you some breathing room in the case of bad luck but not enough to make a long term living. Perhaps use the same method of determining payment as the Post 9/11 G.I. bill, where living money given is based on where the college you attend, but instead of college it would use your local workforce commission.

I would also want it to be not available to certain tax brackets, as it would be spare change in the sofa compared to their funds and would accomplish nothing.

 

[FriedCFour]

I mean more in terms of the workforce and culture of the valley, not the specific people who run it.

Thats true enough given Yang is its big proponent.

 

[Battlegrinder]

That assumes you could actually build a society, considering the nature of humans. I think there is a self-corrective mechanism in human nature--that if we try to implement post-scarcity, we shall destroy ourselves in the process and set ourselves back to a level before it. That is because our psychology (to use a scientific term, rather than soul) craves meaning, identity, purpose, and meaning and purpose are lost without contributing to society, and so madness (we see the first stages of it, with the era of the modern mass shooter) and disorder follow. Observe here for a very sobering look at this process.

I'm generally leery of assuming too much of a correlation between what happens with mice and what happens with humans, particularly because we've, in part, replicated a lot of that experiment and the opposite has happened. First world countries enjoy abundant resources, food, water, etc, and birth rates are declining, not rising (also, we have the capacity to build and expand our living space, which those mice did not).

And while I do agree with you that the human soul craves meaning and purpose, I don't believe that the ultimate example of either is a paycheck.

 

[Deleted member 1]

I very much like the idea, @Lightershoulders , of the way food stamps were originally implemented in the 1930s. It involved making it so you actually went and bought a stamp with your own money--that stamp doubled your buying power. So each dollar you bought in food stamps netted you $2 in actual value of food stamps, so you could buy twice as much food. My ideal social support network would be a system in which we eliminate the minimum wage entirely and instead have stamps available for a wide range of things (utilities, rent, food, healthcare) which can be bought with a face value much greater than their cost in dollars. This means that even casual day-laborer employment for a few dollars an hour would allow you to meet the basic needs of a life with dignity--but if you don't work, you get nothing, and starve in the street. The only exceptions would be for the profoundly disabled.

 

[Lightershoulders]

I very much like the idea, @Lightershoulders , of the way food stamps were originally implemented in the 1930s. It involved making it so you actually went and bought a stamp with your own money--that stamp doubled your buying power. So each dollar you bought in food stamps netted you $2 in actual value of food stamps, so you could buy twice as much food. My ideal social support network would be a system in which we eliminate the minimum wage entirely and instead have stamps available for a wide range of things (utilities, rent, food, healthcare) which can be bought with a face value much greater than their cost in dollars. This means that even casual day-laborer employment for a few dollars an hour would allow you to meet the basic needs of a life with dignity--but if you don't work, you get nothing, and starve in the street. The only exceptions would be for the profoundly disabled.

While versatile, this is not an ideal solution. It was not a good solution even in WW2. The government was only able to pay the dollar for dollar of the stamp due to an outrageous amount of borrowed money. The government was basically paying for half their food, and stores had to turn the stamps in for payment. Secondly food rationing was severe enough where the government had to endorse "Freedom gardens", clearly the stamps were not enough.

All creating stamps today for various thing (Food, utilities, healthcare) is create multiple currencies that are not as liquid as normal casand subject to both government regulations and local regulations, where cash is universally accepted. While it would undoubtedly help make cash streach further, I can not see how it would be acceptable from a funding point of view.

Assuming everyone does this, and they buy stamps rationally with a proper budget (not happening) effectively doubling their spending power....

The government is basically paying half of their living wage. Or more if shoppers are smart and can combine the stamps with coupons (in regards to goods and food.).

A universal basic income would be less taxing on the US government, create less red tape / new laws, and incentivize going and looking for work.

 

[Marduk]

That it is a horribly stupid idea at the moment, although something like it will become an inevitability as time passes.

We are going to reach the point where jobs simply do not exist for the vast majority of the population as the workforce is automated. In addition, the cost of providing the necessities (and even comforts) is going to drop to the point where they are essentially free.

I would not be so optimistic. Until we are going to make a meaningful move up on the Kardashev scale, personal energy needs of "first world working class" level lifestyle alone will continue to have a non-negligible cost (heating, clean water, common electric and electronic devices, personal and goods transportation, production of all aforementioned).

Overall, the optimistic scenario is that the windfall of automation produces such amount of prosperity and wealth that paying some liveable stipend for most citizens will become not too hard for a half competent government's budget before the same automation crashes the labor market...
But i think it's more likely to happen the other way around, perhaps even with a considerable time gap, creating the proverbial interesting times.

Ideas are the one thing that can't really be automated away (even if going from an idea to a marketable product can be) and most people will have at least one in their lives. So we will mostly likely transition from a labor based economy to an idea based economy, and that will bring with it some variant of UBI.

Yeah. The problems with that are: is that someone's idea so good that it will get a bunch of people to spend money on it instead of spending money on the ideas of one of billions other people who also have at least one, didn't someone else think of it and patent it already, and is that idea any good anyway?
Those criteria make the proportion of population with any realistic chance of living off their ideas disturbingly small.

It is yet another idea which sacrifices the dignity of work and the value of hand-crafted items and of craftsmanship and creativity before the alter of bean-counting optimisation functions. At some point, we must ask ourselves if it is worth being human in a society which denies us rewarding work. To me the answer is very clearly no; it would be better to start Jehanne Butler's Jihad and burn it all down -- to restore control, Will, and agency to humans, not machines. It is absurd to think that economic optimisation is worth enslaving us all to a dole produced by robots.

I think it's a noble sentiment but unfortunately one that neither human nature nor economic reality are willing to play along with.
In fact our very own internet social circle is a great demonstration of the point i'm about to make - yes, plenty of people (and unfortunately far from "all" that's another issue) are willing and able to do things that more or less resemble work and derive satisfaction from doing them. However, for various reasons majority of those people will be lucky to make any money off that, and an even smaller portion of them - enough to support themselves fully off of it. These activities are generally called hobbies rather than work, and it does seem to me that they are exploding in popularity, sometimes the line between these terms can also get blurry depending on one's talent, popularity, and ability to monetize those in general; a quite interesting puzzle piece in the debate about automation, more and less rewarding work, labor market and UBI.

Meanwhile back in the work world, the sad truth is that millions of people want to be musicians of this or that popular sort, "footballers" or some other kind of celebrities (and those are only the meme and stereotype grade ones) and would probably find that rewarding, however only a fraction of a percent of them have any real chance of making a living out of that dream.
On the other hand, the labor market has plenty of jobs to offer for construction workers and customer service, but one does not hear of people with these kinds of jobs finding them rewarding often. That economic reality forces big proportion of crafts or creative inclined people to put the kind of work they find rewarding into the "hobby" category, sometimes hobby/side income if they are good at it. For such people, i think a life in UBI-land, however unlikely, would be no worse, in fact probably better than the current setup.
People like that would be relatively ok there.
On the other hand, some of the other people, those who would spend their newfound free time doing more questionable things than fairly conventional hobbies, that's where the Calhoun experiment may be more of a close hitting cautionary tale.

 

[Belinda]

Yang's plan is bad. Not because UBI is bad.

So Yang's UBI is $1000/month.
It's not tied to inflation, which means the average hard working American is going to see less every year.
Second, any state benefits comes out of that. So the poor man in like rural Kentucky after accounting for welfare may not see a dime depending on how much they get. Whereas the crooked elite like Soros and Killary are going to get an extra $12k on the white working class' dime.
Third, that's right it's on the white working class' dime: it's paid for by a VAT which means goods prices will go up. Inverse utility means we pay more while the coastal elites reap the benefits.
Fourth, remember how I mentioned inflation? There's gonna be a lot of it, this isn't actually a redistribution from the liberal elites to Real America, it's not being tied to a tax revenue increase, it's not being tied to a production increase. This money has to come from somewhere so that means just printing it. Which means both the $1000 and wages are going to be worth less.

There's other reasons, but Yang's against the wall and the Muslim ban so I'm sure a bunch of invaders are going to be getting OUR money anyways.

 

[Porkchopper]

Anyone who uses the phase "dignity of work" has obviously never had to work a shitty soul crushing job just to make ends meet. A strong social safety net of which food stamps and the theoretical UBI are part of mean that the people working at McDonald's or as Walmart clerks will be kids and people fresh out of school as rhey build up a little work history. The actual workers would be able to be more picky over their actual jobs when the options arent work or starve immediately. Such a system is abuseable but I'm sure people craving "the dignity of work" wont just lay around all day waiting for their Yangcheck to cash. They'll find something productive to do. Surely.

 

[Battlegrinder]

So Yang's UBI is $1000/month.
It's not tied to inflation, which means the average hard working American is going to see less every year.

I assume the plan is to adjust the payouts periodically, rather than running this like social security and other long term benefits programs, perhaps on a state by state level to account for different costs of living.

Second, any state benefits comes out of that. So the poor man in like rural Kentucky after accounting for welfare may not see a dime depending on how much they get. Whereas the crooked elite like Soros and Killary are going to get an extra $12k on the white working class' dime.

What do you mean state benefits come out of this?

crooked elite like Soros and Killary

....really?

Third, that's right it's on the white working class' dime: it's paid for by a VAT which means goods prices will go up. Inverse utility means we pay more while the coastal elites reap the benefits.

I thought this was paid for by a tax on the tech industry, per the OP. Where are you getting this?

Also, why do you keep saying "white working class", instead of just "working class"? I'm fairly sure there's no "get whitey" clause in either Yang's bill or the tax code.

Fourth, remember how I mentioned inflation? There's gonna be a lot of it, this isn't actually a redistribution from the liberal elites to Real America, it's not being tied to a tax revenue increase, it's not being tied to a production increase. This money has to come from somewhere so that means just printing it. Which means both the $1000 and wages are going to be worth less.

You just said the UBI was funded by a VAT, now they're just printing more money to fund it and it's not being eaided via tax revenue. You do know what the T in VAT means, right?

Anyone who uses the phase "dignity of work" has obviously never had to work a shitty soul crushing job just to make ends meet. A strong social safety net of which food stamps and the theoretical UBI are part of mean that the people working at McDonald's or as Walmart clerks will be kids and people fresh out of school as rhey build up a little work history. The actual workers would be able to be more picky over their actual jobs when the options arent work or starve immediately. Such a system is abuseable but I'm sure people craving "the dignity of work" wont just lay around all day waiting for their Yangcheck to cash. They'll find something productive to do. Surely.

I feel like that's not necessarily true, I've worked shitty retail jobs (shitty retail jobs at Kmart, where a palatable sense of imminent doom hung over the entire store), and I still enjoyed a lot of ot and took pride in my work and my job.

 

[The Original Sixth]

I think Yang's plan will fail due to the basic fundamental concept of money.

Money is about the good you do for society. The idea that people should get a thousand dollars a month for merely having existed past the age of 18 is batshit insane. Especially because I'm sure more than a handful of people will eventually just work less because they can get by on that thousand and twenty hours at a local job.

I just don't trust that concept.

We may one day move towards an existence where humans don't pay each other to perform menial tasks. I don't think the answer is just to pay people to exist and buttfuck each other in trashy bathroom stalls. The idea of pushing for an evolution in our workforce was not a bad idea. It was tainted by the fact that politicians were using it to keep Gen Y out of the workforce longer, the leftists were using it to push their poison, and the colleges were using it for free checks from kids who didn't know better and parents who were desperate.

And maybe sometime in the far future, each human will be so wealthy and powerful, that even the poorest will command the wealth of nations.