Canada's Ontario Government Ends Basic Income Project (www.cbc.ca) 575
Lisa MacLeod, Progressive Conservative member and Children, Community and Social Services Minister of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, said Tuesday that she would end the city's basic income pilot project, calling it expensive and "clearly not the answer for Ontario families." Few details are available as to how the project will come to an end, but MacLeod said her government will end the program "ethically" for anyone who is currently enrolled. Slashdot reader kenh shares an excerpt from a CBC.ca report: Close to 4,000 people were enrolled in the basic income pilot program in Thunder Bay, Lindsay, Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. The pilot project started in April 2017. It was originally set to last three years, and explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income to those living on low incomes -- whether they were working or not. Under the project, a single person could have received up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earned. "A couple could have received up to $24,000 per year." People with disabilities could have received an additional $6,000.
Translation. (Score:3, Insightful)
We ran out of other people's money.
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Translation: we can afford to create a leisure society but it hurts people's egos.
Re:Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet we never run out of other people's money to bail out banks, GM, or get new toys for the military.... (eyeroll)
Re: Translation. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course the politicians love the finger pointing because both sides can continue to get away with bad behavior as the citizens anger will be focused on the other side rather than the newest example of bad behavior.
Re: Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a justification, it's a question: How comes that there's always money to save the rich from having to go a year with less than a million bucks to blow on shits and giggles, but never any to save those that actually need it to survive?
Re: Translation. (Score:4, Insightful)
That "you-want-fries-with-that" job isn't meant to be a career unless one chooses it to be. It's meant to develop a work ethic, learn new skills and begin the process of career advancement.
Re: Translation. (Score:4, Informative)
The sad fact is that our economy hasn't worked like that in a very long time. Even 30 years ago I can remember seeing plenty of older people working low pay, hourly, menial jobs. There simply are not enough better jobs for workers to move up to. So you end up with over qualified mature workers filling a lot of those crap jobs because they usually have responsibilities and will simply accept what they can get to keep from becoming homeless. And frankly these kind of jobs have never been meant for any purpose other than to wring what profitable work can be gotten out of a person to the advantage of the employer. The only time when what you say would have been true would be when apprentice systems were in place for most professions. Sure people might tell themselves those things but that is more about making the work palatable, because management past the front line supervisor sure as hell doesn't care one whit about their minions career.
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I've been in that EXACT situation.
Fought my way through community college, and then a BS degree, while supporting a wife and two children.
You are a whiney little apologist bitch. Grow a pair, get off of your ass, improve your skills, and quit your bitchin'. It's lame, and we don't want to hear it.
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âoeBut Billy hit me firstâ is not a good argument if you want to be taken seriously.
Are you sure about that? [wikipedia.org]
Re: Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
The bank bailout was paid back, with interest. So not doing it would have saved nothing.
Military boondoggles like the F-35 may be stupid, but they are in no way whatsoever an "alternative" to UBI.
Each spending proposal should be justified on its own merits, not on a scale of relative stupidity.
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https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
"Detailed Breakdown $627.4B Outflows " "$713.4B Inflows"
Go make up numbers elsewhere, we can actually do math and quote sources here (for the most part).
Re: Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those numbers represent a small subset of the overall bailouts. The nat'l debt was about $8 trillion before the crash in 2008. It increased to $18 trillion by 2016 as a direct result of the bailout(s). Most of that money then went to reinflating the equities bubble, mainly stocks instead of housing this time. That's where the money came from that was used to "repay" TARP.
Long story short, you were lied to and believed it.
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QE inflated the stock market instead of allowing it to correct. It reinflated the bubble. That's how the nat'l debt went from $8 trillion to $18 trillion in 8 years.
There really is no point in having a discussion about economics with a group who believe in UBI anyways, so carry on.
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Not bailing them out would have been the better way. It would have restored moral hazard.
We tried that in 1929. It didn't work out so well.
Re: Translation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not at all. It's just the people making up or exaggerating stories about them have moved on to Trump.
The Tea Party is alive and doing well.
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Or perhaps you think itâ(TM)s easier to get all iPhone users to change their behaviour than it is to get /. to fix their shitty code?
Clearly the former is true. It's been 11 years.
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Re:Translation. (Score:4, Informative)
Where did bank bailouts work that way? You know what happened here? Banks needed bailouts. So they needed money, from the state. The state did not have that money, so what did the state do? Lend it of course. Where? Well, banks.
What REALLY happened here is that the state stood as guarantor for banks' liabilities, usually paying more for interest and fees than they got from the banks that needed the bailout. In the end, I don't know of a single state or country that went away with a plus from the deal.
You don't have a clue. Try reading this for a start:
https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/... [cnn.com]
Or this if you want more depth
https://business.cch.com/banki... [cch.com]
They realised.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation:
'We realised that UBI reduces governments ability to grow its control over peoples lives, grow is bureaucracy, and make small changes every electoral round therefore trumpeting how we have fixed everything this time. With this in mind we have dropped this like a hot potato, because its not best for US'
Totalitarianist governments, left and right, HATE UBI because it reduces their power, hence it will never happen.
Re:They realised.. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you can say many things about Doug Ford [wikipedia.org] but he's definitely not a Totalitarian. He's closer to a small government conservative. He ordered the program cut because it was doing the unthinkable, it was giving money to poor people and it appears that it was actually working.
It had to be shut down before it produced conclusive results that the new Ontario Progressive Conservative government would have to cover up because it doesn't fit into their preferred narrative that the government can never help anybody for any reason.
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It's worth noting that this pilot was not UBI; there was a means test for getting the money, and the amount of money received directly corresponded to income. It was basically a welfare reform pilot using the hot trendy words of the day: https://www.ontario.ca/page/on... [ontario.ca]
Also it was killed because there was an election, a different party got in, and said different party has been killing every program the previous government instituted on principal.
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Or, you know, give everyone $1000/mo and tax the average (mean) person that much back, and everyone else proportional to their relationship to the mean. So poor people keep more than they pay and rich people vice versa.
Re:They realised.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A flat tax plus a UBI creates an automatic progressive tax curve, so you wouldn't be raising the tax to fund the UBI on the normal tax curve.
If you want to give everyone $1000/mo, calculate what is $1000/mo divided by the mean income. Fund that UBI by taxing everyone that resulting fraction of their income, flat, everyone pays the same percent. If you do that, people making the mean income pay nothing and get nothing in net; everyone below the mean income benefits some in net (the more the further below the mean their income); and everyone above the mean costs some (the more the further above the mean you are). In the US, around 75% of people make below the mean income, because of how incomes are right-skewed, and the bulk of the 25% above it don't make very much above it, so an UBI funded this way benefits more than a supermajority of people, and costs most of the remainder fairly little. Because the vast majority of wealth is held by a tiny tiny fraction of the populace, who are the ones who drag the mean so far above the median (creating that skew), and so are the ones most affected by it.
Re:They realised.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Put some numbers to it. Mean per capita income in 2017 was $50,392. So to fund a $12K per year UBI you have to add a 24% flat tax (ideally you should be able to offset that by cutting the progressive tax because of the other welfare programs you can cut, but let's ignore that -- particularly because this program wouldn't replace all of them.).
Assuming two-adult households, no UBI for kids, and no change to earnings (which would not be true, see below), here are some numbers for pre-UBI income and net UBI income (income plus UBI less UBI taxes).
$0 -- $24K
$10K -- $32K
$20K -- $40K
$30K -- $47K
$40K -- $54K
$50K -- $62K
$60K -- $70K
$80K -- $85K
$90K -- $93K
$100K -- $100K
$110K -- $107K
$120K -- $115K
$150K -- $138K
$180K -- $161K
$200K -- $176K
$250K -- $214K
$300K -- $253K
$400K -- $329K
$500K -- $405K
$800K -- $633K
$1M -- $786K
$2M -- $1.55M
$3M -- $2.3M
$5M -- $3.8M
$10M -- $7.6M
$20M -- $15M
$50M -- $38M
Not bad. Of course, the big wildcard is the assumption that people stick with their current jobs / incomes. We don't really know what would happen there.
We're probably safe to assume that in the short term some people would stop working and live on their UBI while they go to school to move themselves up the income ladder. Others might quit their current jobs and start businesses. It seems likely that there would be some changes at the bottom of the pay scales (I'm assuming that the minimum wage would be abolished with enactment of a UBI) as employers might be able to pay less because their employees would need less... but maybe not too much less because employees would feel more freedom to walk away from jobs they dislike.
Some percentage of the low-income population might well decide that the UBI is enough for them and just choose not to work any more. I don't think this group would be large, but we can't really know.
Assuming UBI is not available to unemancipated teens, it would have some interesting effects on teen employment, since young adults eligible for UBI would in many cases be willing to work for less than ineligible teens. I assume teens would still be paying the UBI tax.
We really need some large-scale, long-term UBI tests to find out how people really respond, what decisions they make. And these tests need to be performed in different areas, in different cultures, because there's no reason to believe that every culture will react the same.
Re:Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ontario ran out of other peoples' money over 400 billion dollars and nearly 30 years ago.
What they ran out now of was people willing to vote for the Liberals.
Re:Translation. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that Ontario's deficit went from 100B(2000) to 340B(2018) under a single party who threw the money at any social program that they thought would keep them elected. Threw money at whatever any environmentalist group dangled before their eyes. Ignored low income housing, ignored people on disability, ignored the gigantic scandal at workmans comp.
People are so angry that when a person running for I think it was mayor or counselor claimed that Toronto should be it's own province, people started cheering for it. Oh it wasn't the people in Toronto, they have this idea that us rednecks will starve to death without them. It was rural, and rural-urban voters who were cheering this idea on, after nearly a generation of being literally fucked over by a single city getting all the money they wanted because it's such a gigantic voting block.
Clearly not the answer? (Score:4, Insightful)
"clearly not the answer for Ontario families."
Except it isn't clear that this isn't the answer. That's why this was a pilot project in the first place. Ontario should just spend the money (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget) and prove whether this works or not. If it fails then move on and try something else.
... Unless of course you don't care if UBI works or not you just oppose it on philosophical grounds. Then the best thing to do is cancel the pilot.
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Re: Clearly not the answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't work because you wanted it to fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
50% income tax (Score:5, Insightful)
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One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.
That you receive a rotten deal doesn't mean others should also
.
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Re:50% income tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you get this through your skull? I want to be useful. I want to be closer to self-sufficiency, and to pay back into the system which has graciously allowed me to live in frightening poverty for the past decade, because I genuinely do see how good that is compared to not eating or sleeping inside. The problem is that the way the program works is completely idiotic, seemingly designed to keep people with problems exactly where they are. I haven't been avoiding work because it's hard, I've been avoiding it because it's not worth the risk. That risk is now manifesting itself before me, even worse than I predicted. This system is shit.
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it was also my point
really confused about how people got confused about this
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Don't go recruiting your mob of homeless people just yet. Your anger is directed at a minister who just walked into the job, and she is killing a project that you disagree with. Perhaps you should let her live.
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Exactly, this was not even distantly related to UBI, it was simply being labeled that for political reasons.
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minus half of any income he or she earned. (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't "minus half of any income he or she earned" replicate the biggest problem with existing welfare programs, and defeat any purpose of the trial?
This is not basic income.
50% marginal tax rate for a minimum-wage worker is a massive disincentive for formal work.
It is a huge incentive for cash-in-hand work. Or for using your time for non-taxable work.
Minimum wage in Ontario is only $14/hour, so this drops it to $7.
Do you work for $7/hr, or use that time to find clothes in thrift stores, do all your own repairs and maintenance, etc. ?
You can save a lot of money buying quality second hand goods, and DIY, at the expense of time.
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No. Existing welfare systems actually cause you to get less money if you work, either by completely killing income or getting rid of other benefits like free dental / vision / childcare / all the other things we do for people on welfare. Getting to keep half of what you make on top of the UBI means it's actually worthwhile to work, at least up to a certain point where it would make more sense to get off the welfare completely.
Re: minus half of any income he or she earned. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: minus half of any income he or she earned. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's Expensive..? (Score:2)
Who thought just handing out money was cheap?
What about the data? (Score:2)
Ontario is... (Score:2)
...not a city
Run out of tax money? (Score:2)
Means test people and support them. "Social programs in Canada" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Support people who are not working.
The amount of people who then need support is kept low and a normal advance nation with a set number of people needing gov support can be covered by a normal tax rate.
Citizens who cant work, doing education. Retired citizens.
The rest of a nations citizens work and pay tax. No new payments needed for them as they are "working", pay ta
Nobody ever does this right (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.
To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.
Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)
Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.
Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.
Welfare for Farmers (Score:5, Informative)
Here in the United States, we have apparently found enough of "other people's money" to give new welfare for farmers.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/po... [foxbusiness.com]
Our President, who has a very good brain, will be paying farmers who have been hurt by his tariffs by giving them money that's borrowed from very same countries he levied tariffs against.
That is some 39-dimensional chess shit right there.
Experiments should last their planned time (Score:4, Interesting)
UBI will happen either way. (Score:3)
People today probably just don't like it being called UBI.
Point in case: I do web development which these days means simply maintaining massive blobs of very complicated pieces of software that are available for free or some silly minimal annual fee. It mostly involves clicking on links and watching the WordPress Update Spinner go in circles. My deployment server is a rented service because I really can't be bothered fiddling with Jenkins or Travis for months on end till I get it right when I can get a nice and shiny UI ready to run my tasks for 5$/Month. That's 10 Minutes of "work" per month at my current rate for someone employed with healthcare, national pension and such.
I'm required to be at the office, but I can do this job on the side, remotely, and not even break into a sweat. I'm employed part time and earn more than most people. I do get to work on mission critical stuff that no one else in a radius of 5 kilometers can do, but that's 40 hours per quarter, maximum.
I'm now moving to automate most of my remaining manual work with custom scripts.
On the other side I have an abundance of spare time, am going to college on the side (College is free in Germany), planning a surf trip and couldn't even be bothered to update my smartphone because it's so powerful. I'm writing this on a refurbished laptop that costed little more than the refurbishment work and shipping +extra RAM & SSD and my main concern is if I will finally manage to get my exercise regime that I have planned going.
The robots are coming ever more and it's only a matter of single digit years until someone replaces starbucks with coffeebots and robots drive our cars and sew our t-shirts and jeans.
Bottom line:
Post scarcity abundance is happening as we speak and - to be honest - I think that's pretty fucking great. If you choose to live a "minimalist" lifestyle like I do (single room appartment, no car, PT & bike, focus on health, education and fun) you can feel it already every day.
And it feels awesome.
My 2 eurocents.
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Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Informative)
No. It was a fixed scale test where the costs were known up front and already budgeted.
There was no sudden realization behind this, only a reneged campaign promise.
Also look at who cancelled it (Score:3)
This was shut down by Mr Ford II, who is also making elected jobs appointed and rewriting city charters to dictate what they are to do.
His late brother was the mayor of Toronto, and was the most recent precursor to your Mr. Trump. This Mr Ford arguably thinks messers Trump and Putin are heroes.
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Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Interesting)
Staff numbers per prisoner need to be high enough for safety.
Prisons just cost a LOT to build, maintain, and run.
And then there are the demands to lock people up for longer to "teach them good".
So they same people who begrudge anyone a liveable benefit seems happy to pay 5 times the amount to lock people up.
And this is in addition to all the other social issues and costs that causes (fatherless children, etc et etc etc)
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you saying people in prison should be slowly starved to death or something?
No, just that most of them don't belong in prison. We have technology like tracking anklets and subcutaneous RFID chips that allows non-violent offenders to "serve their time" outside of prison. For instance, they could be sentenced to clean bedpans in a nursing home for 60 hours per week. Or a white collar criminal could teach finance or computer skills to low income people.
There are plenty of better options than prison for most offenders. Other countries have a tiny fraction of our incarceration rate, and end up with lower recidivism rates. Prisons are extremely expensive, waste human potential, and generate more crime than they deter.
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And take jobs from honest people?
Lump of labor fallacy [wikipedia.org]
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, obviously not for poor people, they're the ones we're putting behind bars, or paying a pittance to be the guards, but for rich people, it can be a great thing.
Very profitable.
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We must remember to earmark some of that sweet, sweet taxpayer money for more propaganda about what a bad thing Socialism is though.
Those poor people might start getting the wrong idea.
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right up until you get to the point where it is significantly cheaper to give these families a UBI rather than have any of them end up in prison.
That is entirely dependent on how your prison is run.
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Since it's local politics that you're probably unfamiliar with, it's pretty simple. It was already budgeted. It was also a campaign promise not to end this program, and now it's being ended, and Ms. MacLeod fully admits it's a campaign promise they're completely reneging on because it plays well to their populist base.
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
Or a 3rd possibility: Ms. MacLeod realized that there simply is not enough tax revenue to provide a UBI, without dramatically increasing taxes to a point that is unsustainable.
I highly doubt it.
This was a time-limited, area-limited test program: it started in 2017 and was supposed to last three years. It was not permanent. It was fully budgeted and the costs were known up-front, and they are and were small in comparison to the Ontario budget.
If Ms. MacLeod was so sure the that the program was not scalable, she could have let it run to the end (to 2020) and just expire without renewing it; and then, use the data obtained to clearly show that it's not the right way forward. She could say, OK, for X people this cost Y money, if we scale it up for everyone it clearly doesn't work.
No, this smells of just ideological preference: the project was cut short just a bit over a year in (out of three), so there could be no risk of the program actually giving a positive result. If you read TFA, you would see that the minister provided no data or reasons, just general qualifications ("not sustainable", "clearly not the answer"). If there is no meaningful data from the program, people who dislike the idea of the UBI can keep on arguing about how it's bad and how it will be the end of productive society safely, based on abstract reasoning and FUD. Governments (left and right) do this all the time, they cut short test programs (for whatever) they don't like, since their ideological preferences are more important to them that practical results.
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do
Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and the new premier of the province, is, like his late brother Rob Ford, the antic-ridden former mayor of Toronto, convinced that "government waste" is the source of all problems and that everything can be fine, i.e. that you could increase spending and reduce taxes and borrowing just if you could eliminate the waste and "find efficincies".
Now, of course there is government waste, of course there is corruption and embezzlement, and of course there could be some "efficiencies": but the reality is, the scale of the money that can be saved in this manner is nowhere near what is needed to put finances in order (not to mention funding all the nice things you promised in the campaign) without making hard choices. However it's a great pitch to voters: we can give you everything you want (more goodies from the government AND tax cuts) if we just end the corrupt "gravy train" of the current administration.
Once reality hits you, you start looking for ways to look tough on "government waste" and the "gravy train" to at least justify the fact that you won't be able to deliver the goodies and the tax cuts simultaneously (or neither, perhaps). The easy way out is that, beyond the mundane (e.g. whether a government department should order expensive designer office chairs or get cheap ones from IKEA), "government waste" is usually a very subjective, ideological thing. A UBI test program, which is percieved by many as "giving free money to some lazy slobs", is not something that is ideologically dear to the Conservatives. Hence, it's very convenient to proclaim that it's "waste" and should be eliminated. Cap-and-trade (for carbon), renewable energy subsidies, windmill projects for example all fit the same bill. We don't like it ideologically hence spending money on it is waste, look at us, we're ending the gravy train.
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
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That approach costs the tax payers 5 times what welfare would.
And then you also ignore economic theory which demands a certain level of unemployment, too much unemployment negatively impacts the economy and drives down wages, too little unemployment drives up wages and also harms the economy.
Re:what did you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
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If that was the case then they'd jack up my tax by (at least) $17,000/year, so take with one hand, give back with the other. Still effectively zero.
Not that I think that's a bad idea, by the time people were earning $35,000/year they're much less likely to jump through the hoops to claim another $17,000 and by the time they're earning $70,000/year they're paying themselves and someone else.
The alternative is to have people that are unemployable stealing $50,000 of shit/year to make $10,000. It's much cheape
Re: what did you expect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Easy to dis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Easy to dis (Score:5, Insightful)
I would rather replace the ugly ball of entitlement programs we have now with a UBI. Many are badly designed and incentivize people to avoid getting off welfare, not to mention the administrative overhead. Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.
However, just as with any other program, a UBI can be badly designed. If we want to implement one it needs to ensure that bad behaviors are not incentivized. Reducing payments for working is one such example. Letting parents siphon off any income from their children would be another.
I am a proponent of some form of UBI, not because I believe that it is morally right or good for us to redistribute wealth, but because since we have already decided to do that to the current degree, we may as well do it as sanely as possible.
My other reason for supporting it is that I suspect it would also lead to reductions in abject poverty and crime, the externalities of which likely start costing a significant portion of such a program when you factor in the economic activity that must be directed to dealing with the problems caused by such. I cannot verify it, but I recently read that some city was spending some tens of thousands of dollars per person on dealing with the homeless in the city. Think of how much is spent on the criminal justice system as well. If a UBI can lead to reductions in those problems outright it reduces the cost and size of government further.
Re: Easy to dis (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Easy to dis (Score:5, Informative)
Social Security retirement payments in the US costs the government *nothing* Yet.
Current SS retirement payments are made from current collections and a small amount from the so-called SS Trust Fund. In 20 years or so, the so-called Trust Fund will be depleted and payments from workers will not be enough, then the program will start costing the government money.
SS currently collects 6.75% of everyone's income for the first $100K (give or take) from the employer, and an equal amount from the employee.
Every dollar paid into SS in 2018 will be paid out to SS beneficiaries in 2018.
Re: Easy to dis (Score:5, Interesting)
People who believe that we will always need people to work really need to get a fuller understanding of the history of labor. Will there always be some people who need to do something? Probably. However, the proportion of people doing the hardest work will shrink, drastically. That's how things have always worked, and it's the root of your argument. We need almost nobody to be a farmer, so we invented a million new jobs.
The thing about general automation is that we're coming close to a point where thinking is the job. If we can automate that, and we're already starting to, then automating jobs where you don't need to think, which is most of them, will be a breeze. The only obstacle to it this very moment is how expensive a good robot is. If their cost drops below what workers demand, that job is dead to human hands.
Humanity will always serve a purpose. How could we not? We impose purpose upon existence itself, that's what we do. When what is considered "work" that human beings are needed for is so different from what it is now that it is no longer demeaning, unhealthy, or necessary to keep a roof over your head, this argument will be pointless.
Re: Easy to dis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Easy to dis (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
There'll always be an endless demand for things we could want done, but it does not mean there'll be an endless supply of capable workers. I know people who are on mental disability today who'd be working 100 years ago doing "Take ax. Chop wood." kinds of work. And there's far more who can't even make it through high school without dropping out, who could be a burger flipper or taxi driver but hardly a doctor or engineer no matter how many scholarships and free tutoring you give. They're not bad people, many are honest hard working men and women but they're not made for complex abstract problem solving. Unfortunately their kind of jobs are rapidly being automated and the halo jobs they create are usually advanced development/maintenance/repair work. And we're trying to automate that too.
Re: The labor market is ever present (Score:2)
No. The market for "physical manipulation capability, physical skills, and cognitive capability" is ever present.
What I have in quotes sounds a lot like labor, but is more general than human labor.
That market is increasingly being supplied by AI and/or complex, flexible automation, and the pace of that change will be faster than linear, as the technology continues to improve rapidly and cover more of the "labor" pie.
Re: The labor market is ever present (Score:5, Interesting)
That problem is People.
People have labor laws, they have personal issues, they need to take a shit, they go on strike for more money.
Automating them away is a win for most companies.
Let me give you an example. My sister works for a large food retailer in their IT division. Every year around xmas time the pickers (guys in forklifts who load the trucks from the distribution center) go on strike for more money. It's the busiest and most lucrative time of the year for retailers. People get their bonuses, they are on leave (some of them) and it's fucking xmas, so there are presents to be bought and fuckit lets eat some cow etc. so it's important for them to keep the shelves stocked. Empty shelves means nothing to sell, which means no profit. Some stock in the distribution center also has a short shelf life, known as "fast moving consumer goods" and if they are not placed on the shelves within a limited time become garbage (think lettuce and tomatoes, meat etc.) So, when the pickers go on strike over the busiest and most lucrative time of the year it's BIG problem. Which is why they do it. Every fucking year. They get temp workers in who try to keep the shelves stocked, but there is violence etc. from the strikers so they have to then hire extra security to protect the temp workers. All of this costs money and a loss of profit. So they are automating the picking and removing the problem, and the problem is People. They are spending a vast amount of money NOW to remove all problems that humans add to the business in the future. Then there is "shrinkage" which is a nice way to say the fucking humans are stealing shit out of the warehouse. Remove the majority of humans and replace them with robots and theft becomes less of a problem. It's no fucking wonder that automation is advancing so rapidly and spreading so much, it's to remove the problem in the system, which is us.
Re: (Score:3)
But the flip side is that the reason the system exists in the first place is us. Specifically us buying stuff. With the money we made being paid to be part of the system.
Remove us from the system and the system can't financially exist unless we get paid some other way.
Also, easy to support (Score:2, Interesting)
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000 [google.com].
This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend. And they would get another one next year. If you restrict it to adults, that figure goes up by another third.
The rise appears to be exponential, with the "doubling time" roughly 16 years, more or less depending on the growth rate of the economy in past decades. You can easily see this in the Google chart by tracking down to half th
Re: (Score:3)
The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000 [google.com].
This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend.
Do you have any idea how stupid this sounds?
You imagine, as a single example, that LeBron James will do what he does for $58K/yr, just like thetwenty-something kid who claims he can't work and gets an identical $58K/yr?
Will Apple engineers work for the exact same wages as the barista in the company coffee shop?
UBI doesn't scale to everyone, because for the government to give 320 million people $58,000/yr will cost $18.56TN/yr, about 4x the current federal budget.
Re:Also, easy to support (Score:4, Insightful)
UBI doesn't scale to everyone
Yes it doesn't, you have misunderstood how it works.
You don't take tht exact system you have now and give an extra $58,000 to everyone.
What you do is give $something to everyone, remove most benefits (generally excludig medical) and then bump up taxes. The median person sees no change in net income.
Re: (Score:3)
That aside, why are people convinced that humans need incentives? Most of them really like doing things. UBI is meant to solve the problem of having more people that want to do things than there are things to do.
Re: Unemployment is very low (Score:5, Informative)
Ever heard of a "dead cat bounce"?
That's what we're in right now regarding employment numbers.
Pretty soon, the AI and automation are going to be more cost-effective than people at many jobs, way more types of jobs than can be replaced by new jobs. What new jobs there will be will be for cognitive top 5% geniuses.
Other jobs which can't be totally replaced will be modified to be hybrid AI/automation + person jobs. The person will probably get paid less than now, since they're only doing part of the work. Many jobs like that will be modified slightly to be more amenable to AI/automation integration.
If you don't see that this time it's different, because the AI and automated systems are approaching/surpassing parity with human capabilities, then you have blinders on, and you live on a river called denial.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
So, what make you think you deserve other people's money flowing your way? Your suffering is somewhat more worthy than other's?
Also, if success is now the exception, please explain who is going to pay for these $1000/mo ?
And last, throwing money at the poor does a lot of short term good. That's true. But it doesn't solve the root cause and actually aggravates it as it removes a lot of incentive to the poor to get out of their misery. It's hard to say but someone with an empty belly usually works harder.
So f
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
UBI is NOT a cashless society. ffs. (Score:2)
WTF does this have to do with a cashless society, and why are you bothering to comment when so very uninformed?
This was not even UBI, but UBI has exactly zero to do with a cashless society.
I suggest you go back to step one, and perhaps learn just a very few very basic facts about subjects you want to discuss with adults. It will help.
Re: (Score:2)
You must have missed the fact that the moron Trump-style conservatives of Ontario, who don't believe in science anyway, killed the program before any reliable assessment of it could be completed.
Today's ultra-conservatives would rather kill research, remember, than face its inconvenient truths.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
this.
exactly this.
It's amazing how many people can't see beyond their noses to see the AI/automation revolution happening all around them.
/
--/---- you
/ robots
Re:Ford is a wannabe Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
Ultimately Ford is a fiscal conservative and leans social libertarian. If you think he's a Trumpette then you're doing a fine job of regurgitating the NDP, and left-wing media's talking points. Safe injection sites don't help the poor, they hurt them, increase crime, and spill over into other neighborhoods. Ask BC how it's working out. 15 years of the Liberal Party of Ontario has left ALL of the social assistance programs broken. Gutting and cutting of disability. The average wait for low-income housing in most places is now 7 years. But keep going and telling everyone how it's all Ford's fault, not McGuinty or Wynne.
In Ontario, ODSP will cover a large part of your apprenticeship. If you're low income, ODSP will give you the money for training. UBI should be placed at two levels: People on disability, and for people who were fucked over by Workmans Comp. Oh, and in Ontario, workmans comp has fucked over tens-of-thousands of people under the Liberals leadership, including doctors who didn't see the injured workers but denied them anyway. Yeah the guy missing an arm and leg is gonna get right up and go back to work.