eBay Founder Pledges $500,000 To Test Universal Basic Income Program In Kenya (mashable.com) 399
"Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept [of universal basic income]," reports Mashable. "His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wednesday that it will give nearly half a million dollars to a group testing the policy in Kenya." The money will come from the Omidyar Network and be doled out to people living in Kenya through a program called GiveDirectly. Mashable reports: Universal basic income is the notion that a government should guarantee every citizen a yearly sum of money, no strings attached. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor. Theories along these lines have existed for centuries, but their proponents have never had much luck convincing governments to give them a shot. Thus, the only data on real-world effects come from a few scattered experiments throughout the years. GiveDirectly is looking to add to that knowledge with one of the biggest trials of a basic income system in history. The group recently launched a 12-year pilot program in which it plans to give 6,000 Kenyans regular stipends for the entire duration. Around 20,000 more will receive at least some form of cash transfer. The Omidyar Network is hoping the study will help advance the debate around basic income from broad theoretical terms to more practical considerations. "While the discussion has generated a lot of heat, it hasn't produced very much light," wrote the Omidyar Network's Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams in a blog post announcing the pledge. "There is very little research and empirical evidence on how and when UBI could best be used."
Will create more poverty in the long (Score:2, Insightful)
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
More income does not increase birth rates (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Lowering birth rates doesn't make anyone of those who are already born less poor.
2. Kenya's birthrate is still significantly above average, but steadily decreasing since the nineteen-seventies.
3. Higher civilization standards correlate with lower birth rates. To increase civilization standards is the best way to lower birth rates.
3. Enabling more people to do other things than just struggling to get their food for the day is the best way, in the long run, to help increasing civilization standards, together with education and infrastructure, to which to contribute is one of the things more people will be enabled to through a basic income, too.
"Birth control instead of money" is just racist hogwash. "More money leads to more births, so give them even less money" may seem logical for some, but is a completely unsubstantiated assumption. In the long run, the facts give much reason to assume the exact opposite.
What is the objective of UBI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
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Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
I think it is both -- presumably, given UBI, people would separate themselves into these two categories.
Plus there is the bonus for removing administrative overheads of unemployment benefit coordination.
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It's pretty much both. The basic idea of a UBI is that you can somehow survive on it. You want more than survival? Go get some work.
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Read Manna for an overview (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna [marshallbrain.com], a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.
Not right now, 50 years ago (Score:3)
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now* ...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of proce
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Seriously, UBI is fine, if the rich folk voluntarily hand over their money to support it. But, it's not like they all have a hoard of cash - the vast majority of wealth is invested in ownership of productive companies. Force them to sell it all, and watch the markets tank, taking the 401(k)/pension/etc. investments of productive people with it.
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Wow, ironic. R&D and reinvestments are a cost. So if you think taxing corporate profits eats into R&D or reinvestment, you need an education.
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Unemployment payment, old age, war veterans, education compliance and reporting is not needed.
You can get an education, work, work part time, see if a hobby can be a job or use the universal basic income to part fund a start up hobby/job/trade. Buy ebooks, pay for online support to code apps.
Thats great you get cash the UBI every month
Over time the UBI will go digital. Accept it and stra
Reduce burocracy! (READ THIS FINLAND SITUATION) (Score:3)
Trying it in kenya seems strange.
But, the idea of universal income is that you can do away with all the other social security mechanisms and give people enough that they can survive. This means that then you CAN take extra jobs for a little less money.
Basically in Finland now you CAN NOT take a job that pays under a certain amount in the month because then you will be out of other benefits and you can't survive! but if you would have universal income then you COULD do another job for even 5 bucks / hour, ma
Testing it in Kenya (Score:5, Interesting)
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He was born in Kenya, Hawaii.
walk a mile (Score:2)
$USD500,000 in Kenya? (Score:2)
Color me skeptical (Score:2)
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That is like saying if you make $2000 a month at your job you have no reason to work a side job on the weekends because it only pays $500.
If you are being given enough to survive, why would you want to work a weekend job? Unless the money means something to you, it won't be a reward for working. And we've too much history that shows that when you give people stuff for free it loses value to them.
It's still $500 more than you had before.
But I have exchange my labor for it, where the other money I get I don't. Is it worth $500 to me to turn control of my life over to someone else? And if you think this won't be a problem when UBI is first implemented, think ahead to when the next gen
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If you are being given enough to survive, why would you want to work a weekend job?
Because there's more to living than just surviving.
If you already make the median income of around $25k/yr, which must surely be enough to survive, why would you ever take any steps to try to earn any more than that? Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
Where do you think the money will come from to implement UBI?
Where does any money the government ever spends come from? Taxes. Around the mean income the tax and the UBI cancel out, so average people see no different. But at every other income level, the post-tax-and-UBI in
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Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
For some people, better = sitting on the couch.
Yes, but those people are already not exactly going to be doctors, engineers or billionaire entrepreneurs, so what does it matter unless you have some philosophical/ethical objection to laziness?
I'm sure you could survive now by working 15 hours a week at minimum wage, never going out and eating cold baked beans out of a can in some shitty little room every night, most people want a bit more out of life than that, and that doesn't mean buying Ferraris.
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I don't know why we can't blend UBI with some kind of large-scale project that would roll in some kind of jobs tied to a larger purpose or project, sort of like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the WPA organizations.
Maybe it's a bad example, but couldn't something like the space program be greatly expanded with the idea that low level labor positions could be UBI-program jobs? It would be more than just providing an income, it would be a productive long-range project.
And a lot of the people who would pot
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What happens when the grant runs out? (Score:2)
The government creates no money. None. What happens when they run out? Who will pay the taxes? What happens when the govt needs more money than the amount they have to pay more citizens? What is going to stop more citizens from working, paying taxes, and just taking money?
This is nothing but a step to communism.
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Quasi-socialism (Score:2)
But it all falls apart when the neighbors are the wrong color, or religion, or accent, or we don't have the same great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
In summary: people in aggregate, suck.
It WORKS ! (Score:2)
Unemployment insurance? (Score:2)
How is this functionally different from unemployment insurance?
Would the stipends continue if the person is employed?
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Yes. That is precisely how it differs from unemployment insurance.
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Unemployment payouts require you to be actively looking for work and only continue for a limited amount of time. UBI stipends would continue if the person is employed and would continue for a person's entire life. Though in this test the payout will only continue for 12 years.
cut full time down and have an X2 OT at 60-80 hour (Score:2)
cut full time down and have an X2 OT at 60-80 hours a week well salary as well
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Reducing full time will help the underemployed at the expense of only the middle class, rather than the expense of the capitalist class who really need to shoulder the burden. That in turn only further widens the gap between rich and poor, makes it harder and harder for someone to escape from dependency on the capitalists.
Re:cut full time down and have an X2 OT at 60-80 h (Score:5, Informative)
Reducing full time will help the underemployed
Reducing full time employment does NOT help the underemployed. That is the Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. There is not a fixed amount of labor to be divvied up. Real economies just don't work that way. When someone is employed, they spend their earnings on goods and services, thus creating demand for more labor.
When France reduced standard working hours to 35 hours per week, proponents of the change were sure it would reduce France's persistently high unemployment. That didn't happen. Economists were not surprised.
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That would be fine, except that it's much harder (if possible at all) to mandate a one-time but permanent doubling of all wages, than it is to mandate fewer hours punishable by higher pay requirements at longer hours.
E.g. if you drop full time from 40 to 20 hours, and demand that everyone already working be paid twice as much, then the employers are going to replace everyone already working with two new hires getting paid "half as much" (i.e. what the old pay used to be) as quickly as possible.
About the onl
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Make full time 32 -35 hours a week also put a cap on OT so you don't jay working 80 hours a week to cover for jack and bill.
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Nope. You have to feed and shelter slaves. Try that on a single low-level income in the US.
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They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax,
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This. They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
The UBI is what you get IN ADDITION to your wages or salary.
The whole point of a UBI is EVERYONE GETS IT and there is no means test.
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Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if
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They're more afraid that the have-nots find out that pulling a gun trigger isn't that hard to do and that they may be on the receiving end. So keeping them busy working in salt mines is sure a good idea.
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Either way, the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves, and we've already seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.) Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods.
Where I think UBI is really going to sting (if implemented) is housing costs. San Francisco is a per
Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
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Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
It's still increasing the money supply just the same.
Think about it: If you were strapped for cash, would you be more inclined to move to a more expensive house? Of course not, you'd be more inclined to either stay where you are, or find a less expensive house. Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession. Bill Gates isn't likely to sell
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Sorry I messed that up; ten thousand people rather.
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Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, you take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
That is exactly what UBI is. It is redistribution of wealth. In a world where the rich are getting richer, and goods and services will (supposedly) get cheaper and cheaper to produce because of robots and AI, yet require less and less labor, them some sort of redistribution will likely be needed to maintain social harmony.
India is probably most serious about UBI [economist.com]. They already have a huge welfare system that is badly corrupted, so they would benefit from just wiping it out and replacing it with something simpler.
UBI would be much harder to implement in America. There is little political support for redistribution, and there would be enormous resistance from people currently receiving entitlements that would be drastically reduced under any plausible UBI system.
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Good luck wiping out the corruption.
Corruption is not something that "just happens". Corrupt systems are usually designed to be corruptible. In America, when I go to the city to pay my business license, I do it at a counter in full view of other customers. When I did the same in Shanghai, I was always escorted to a private office, where various "facilitation fees" were discussed.
Those most corrupt tend to be the ones in power who stand to lose the most by wiping out said corruption.
This is not always true. In America, most corruption is at the top, with the revolving door system between government and corporations, and lobbyists funding camp
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We can do it without taking more money from the rich than now, though.
In total, welfare services cost 55% of all income tax taken. That 39.6% the richest of rich pay? 21.78% of that is welfare. Do note that the welfare services procedurally account for their sources differently; if we pile all of the money together and take a count of what pays for those services, it amounts to 55% of all taxes taken as income taxes. That means if we change the accounting--if we get rid of those other procedural sour
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The reason why is because if you suddenly give people more money, they'll start to outbid one another for the same real estate, and no amount of automation will solve that.
The solution is easy, to build more housing. San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing. That's why it's so expensive to find a place here.
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The solution is easy, to build more housing. San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing. That's why it's so expensive to find a place here.
I've got an even easier solution: Live about 100 miles away and commute.
Though honestly, that's not realistic. Sure, SF can alleviate the housing problem by building more dense housing, but that isn't going to solve the problem of one person wanting to live in the same place at the same time as somebody else. You can build more houses, and you might even be able to build houses on top of houses, but you just can't build more land.
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That isn't the point; in fact, add another zero to that figure if you'd like.
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San Francisco and the surrounding region is extremely anti-new-housing.
If you make more housing in SF then more people will just move there and then make it suck more.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Insightful)
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This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone wants to live in San Francisco.
This may come as a shock to you, but there's enough humans on the planet that only a small percentage of them have to try to move there before it becomes a problem. In fact, it's already a problem.
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Turning have-nots into haves is by no means the goal of UBI. Cannot even sensibly be achieved by a program that aims at providing a basic general income because that basic income can by its very definition not be higher than what is absolutely necessary to enable someone to survive. That's the fundamental flaw in your train of thought. You think about accumulation of wealth when essentially, all that will enable is consumption.
Your assumption seems to be that everyone just gets, say, 1000 bucks and that eve
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That's the fundamental flaw in your train of thought. You think about accumulation of wealth when essentially, all that will enable is consumption.
You don't understand my train of thought at all. See my previous post.
Our current main problem is certainly not a shortage of goods or services.
Until you increase the demand for both while reducing the supply of both, which is definitely possible under UBI.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well no, not at least in the models currently being tested/speculated about. It depends on how the BI is arranged. I wrote about the BI experiment going on here in Finland in an earlier story here [slashdot.org], quoting the relevant part:
Because in most models of BI the income is essentially created as a negative tax-bracket it means that not everyone will get a blank increase of X dollars which would lower wages. For me example under such a model my tax-rate would go down 5 %. meaning my pay could be cut by that amount without it affecting my level of income at all. Cutting any more than that would start to reduce the net income I get.
No, it wouldn't. If I was offered 200 instead of my current pay, my net income would drop 63 % under this model. People are not going to go "oh cool, you want me to keep doing what I've always been doing and get less than half the money I used to because they tweaked the taxation system slightly, I'm fine with this."
Besides, doing this would destroy the consumer base entirely. If the net incomes of the vast majority of people drop by over half, domestic consumption would come crashing down, in turn causing major issues for companies,
BIs are at their core tax-reforms which are meant to ensure people can accept part time and short-term jobs more flexibly without having to worry about the problems that causes for their benefits and the hassle of re-applying for them and in the process losing any source of income for the time that their application is reprocessed. The current bI models being discussed in western economies are not such that they could be used for massive pay-cuts. The models assume that pays stay the same, as the BI itself requires heavy taxation of income to be funded. Cut pays across the board and the tax-revenue will collapse, making the system immediately unsustainable.
In the long term, if and when automation proceeds to a stage in which nearly everyone is on BI, then the situation is different and the amount of BI will have to be increased to maintain domestic demand, but in that scenario, since nearly no-one will be generating income tax-revenue, the money for the higher BI will need to come from somewhere, which means corporate taxes and capital gains taxes will have to be tweaked to fund the higher BI.
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Interesting. Personally I think that the "obsolete human" has been predicted since the dawn of the industrial revolution but has yet to come to pass. For every innovation, several other new industries seem to pop up. Switchboard operators are (mostly) gone but now there's an army of people taking calls from irate telecom customers. Bank tellers are just about obsolete but now there's a bank of people manning customer service help lines, and on top of this is all the people providing the online services that
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Think about this, if robots do all the work, who will buy your products? You can't maintain factories with robots with no money and if no one works no one has money to buy your stuff.
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Why do the factory-owners need money to maintain their factories when they own robots who will maintain the factories for them for free? And other robots who maintain the robots. The goal is to have robots just take care of everything for you, including mowing down the angry starving hordes storming your mansion, so you don't need money, because money is just a tool you use to get things out of other people, and who needs people when you've got robots.
You're absolutely right that in the process the whole ec
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Replacement parts are made by robots. From raw materials mined by robots, from mines owned by the same people who own the robots. And robots will put hackers out of a job sooner or later too, just like everyone else.
Tribal conflict (Score:2, Insightful)
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
I emboldened one of your words to draw attention to it.
Curiously, as a group Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. Apparently Republicans are more caring and giving than Democrats in general on that score, so long as the giving is voluntary and not mandated.
Also curiously, the party with "free speech" as one of its core values has no problem smashing the venues of a controversial speaker.
This is my way of saying that there's evil on both sides of the aisle. Saying it's one side or the other is a
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You'll note I conspicuously did not mention Republicans in my reply, but instead spoke of what people in general want. Nobody (i.e. not anybody) wants to make other people work, instead what they (i.e. anybody) wants is to not have to work themselves, etc.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
That's an incredibly cynical point of view. It's also completely and frankly rather obviously bullshit. The increase of technology and the rise of human civilization has done nothing but vastly increase the dependency each human has on each other. It used to be every couple fed themselves and their children. Then humans banded into tribes and the hunter/gatherers did the feeding, and the others took care of the children/old/weak. Then we made cities, and one farmer fed three or four. Now we have combine harvesters, and one farmer feeds a hundred. There is maybe a few dozen humans alive today in the US who are truly self-sufficient, who do and could continue to survive with the help of no others, while even a few hundred years ago half or more of the human population could do so (at least for a few years). Technology has made specialization a requirement, and with that has come a level of interdependence unrivaled in human history, and that interdependence is if anything getting stronger (now entire countries rely on other countries, in a hundred years that could become entire planets).
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Without being too cynical (although one has to be given the long history of mankind):
- For the vast majority of people and during the majority of human history, work is a burden, not a pleasure
- People tend to love the output production of work more than work itself
- Humans working for other humans is a way of enjoying the output without the burden of working by yourself, if you are potent enough to afford that
- Everyone want to be at that position where you get the benefit without doing much for it, that's
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Nobody really wants other people to have to work.
Really? You Americans seem to have this rather ridiculous religious shibboleth (if that's not a pleonasm in modern usage of that word) of "Protestant work ethics" that seems to be correlated with numerous right-leaning groups.
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Like all religion, it's just an irrational cover over the real motive. What people want is to not have to work and not have to give anybody else anything. Placing moral value on work gives them an excuse not to give anybody else anything unless those somebody else's work to deserve it, which in turn fulfills the desire to not have to work themselves (since they got someone else to do it). It's hard to fulfill both of those wants (until we get the robots working at least), but moralizing work lets the 'haves
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How did you jump from not wanting to have to work to not deserving to live? I think that is a horrible revelation of your mind and nothing else. (See what I did there?)
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Or social status and power (and with it sexual desirability) will just become ossified into whatever arrangement it happens to be in, with only inheritance shifting the wealth = power = status = sex around. Just like the way things used to be in old feudal aristocracies, where the nobles owned hordes of flesh-bots (called "peasants" in Ye Olde Englishe) to do all the work for them.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
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As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
Re:The republicans will... (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
I think OP meant "how can my non-criminal mother on welfare get a nice car". Otherwise, you might just as well say "become a crystal meth dealer".
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Still waiting on instructions rather than unsubstantiated anecdotes. How does someone living on welfare or in the projects leverage that into a big TV or a nice car?
(Possibly relevant: around where I live, "the projects" -- government-subsidized housing -- are a goddamn luxury in such short supply that most people who would qualify for them, destitute disabled veterans and mothers and the like, are on decade-long waitlists for them. Most of the poor people aren't lucky enough to live in "the projects", and
Re:Skeptic (Score:5, Insightful)
No, if there is more money the money loses it's value.
If it's merely distributed differently, it retains the same value.
If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
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Wrong. Taking money from the rich reduces their incentive to produce. The more you take, the more effort they'll put into protecting themselves from governmental theft, leaving less effort available for producing.
Poverty doesn't just pop up like mushrooms; people are poor because they're doing something wrong. Give them money, and they'll have no reason to do anyth
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Wrong. There is almost no evidence that people change their labor market supply in response to taxes. They will move money around if you change the tax system (e.g. owners will pay themselves more this year if taxes go up next year) but they don't change their actual work.
Admittedly, at 100% taxes you have problems. But when taxes were 92% prior to Kennedy the ultra rich were asked if they would work more or less if taxes were increased (yes, increased from 92%) and they answered more. So, we've got some he
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If a town of 10,000 has about 300 people willing to buy pizza on any given night, that is the job creator right there. If one rich guy does not want to "create the job" by our rules, move along buddy, there are other rich people who would. The world is sloshing with 2 trillion dollars of money looking for a place to invest. There are no good investment opportunities anymore, I did not say it, CNBC is blaring it almost every quarter
Re:Skeptic (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
Re:Skeptic (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
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So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? I suppose we're going to outlaw private ownership of land too? All those copper mines and gravel pits are now belong to the State? This sounds like a good thing to you?
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You're going to have to spell out for me how vertically scaling the income distribution curve (which is all an UBI does in effect, move all points on that curve closer to the mean value, squashing it a bit in the y-axis) suddenly means nobody does any work and everything is free, and furthermore why that would entail the end of private property, and where I said anything about that sounding good to me.
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So we have no one doing any work? Robots perform all jobs from the menial to the complex? Everything is free? [...] This sounds like a good thing to you?
Does it matter whether it sounds like a good thing to me, or not? That appears to be the direction we are headed in, unless we are going to outlaw the development of robotics and AI. The only question is, what how are we going to adapt? If we do nothing and just retain the current system, then we still end up with robots doing all the jobs, but also with all of the humans starving (or perhaps living on welfare, if it's available).
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as the poor immediately spend all that money
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Remember this: Every dollar spent/wasted/squandered by someone is a dollar earned by someone else. Where would the poor people spend their money? On food? We, the rich, own the grocery stores and the agri business.
Would they squander it in beer and cigarettes? We, the rich, own brewing companies, distribution networks, and tobacco companies
Would they smoke themselves to emphazema and end up in
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Not sure if you think you're arguing against me, but all of that was exactly my point. Moving the money around into the hands of the poor accelerates the flow of money (and consequently economic activity). Money flows to the rich the way that water flows downhill, but when all the water has flowed down the waterfall stops turning the watermill. Redistributing money back to the poor is like pumping water uphill; it just makes more water flow back down more quickly.
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What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity because they spend it and then some of it winds up in their community, paying wages. And if you have UBI then you not only don't need welfare or food stamps or social security but you also don't need a minimum wage.
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Except people don't have more money "on average", for the usual sense of average (mean). Same amount of money, same number of people, same amount of money per person on average.
Doing an UBI the sane way (give everyone some x% of the GDP per capita, fund it by a flat x% income tax) doesn't even move where (i.e. what percentile) that mean income falls. Right now the mean income is about the 75th percentile. Do a basic income the aforementioned way and the mean income will still/em? be the 75th percentile, and
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The only key to boost economy is to LOWER TAXES, not give handouts.
Lowering taxes has never boosted the economy by a measurable amount.
High taxes = less money in the hands of people, regardless of who they are, and as a result they buy less goods and do fewer investments.
Actually, that's wrong. What do think happens to money collected as taxes? The government spends it on people. They either give it to people or pay other people to do things for the government. So, usually high taxes (assuming a graduated system) means more money in the hands of a lot of people and less money in the hands of a few people. Generally, this results in a net gain for the economy because people with less wealth almost alway
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What is this heresy you talk about! Don't make me bring in the Texan Inquisition!
Rich having less money, isn't that outlawed yet?
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Because cost?
They're trying to fund 6000 people for 12 years. That's 864k months. If you tried to give everyone a thousand bucks a month, this project would need a billion to be funded.
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If I read the article right then those 500k is just part of the whole project and there's actually other funding as well. Which makes me wonder why those 500k are apparently the story hook instead of the project itself.
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