$1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment. They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute.
It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work.
I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal.
I suspect that you need to get international cooperation and a more sophisticated form of money and resource tracking for a real UBI to be feasible.
Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment?
Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?
And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in this trap and don't want to start working, forsaking valuable on the job training and socialization that will hurt them in the long run. That's where universal part comes in
Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US military was actively drawing down). She basically said that the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of money, but both had potential for her to eventually be promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow it.
Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.
To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid.
The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum.
This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.
Under that concept, well, if actually taking the social security (Grundsicherung) in Germany as a given, even assuming low CoL situations (it's worse in higher-CoL situations), the effective average tax rate past like about 160 EUR/month of income will rise to a peak at around 1500 EUR/month income and then continuously decrease to the super wealthy limit tax just under 50%.
At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
> At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
When the effective marginal tax rate is high, this is often as close as makes no difference, because you not only have the cost of bureaucracy but also the cost of working. You're paying an effective marginal tax rate of 80% so nominally you get to keep 20% of your income and have the incentive to work, but working requires you to commute, so you have to buy transit tickets or maintain a vehicle.
And because you're now spending your day working, you can't use that time to prepare food or maintain your household, so you may have to pay someone else to do some of those things -- but their entire compensation has to come out of the 20% of your pay you actually get to spend, so this can easily eat the entire thing and make you better off to not take the job.
The problem is that I'm not talking about getting +1300 EUR/month situations, but about +300 EUR/month situations.
And suddenly you have to explain your finances to the bureaucracy and... you still have to earn +1000 EUR/month in addition to the bureaucracy needed so you get to keep at least some of it (without committing social security fraud, ofc).
It's not that bad if it's steady; but if it's fluctuating you easily spend a couple hours each month. And for at least some people, that type of work is far worse than their occupation of choice.
oh, and I'm aware that it might be engaging for some, but they either fall into the category that better learns to organize and administer themselves now rather than later or into the category that will always need a social worker, who will the find the bureaucracy easy as well and the organization is paid by his employer
There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves.
This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
> a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare."
The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
But there's something else you can do here which is really neat. Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely. Now instead of low income people having a nominal 0% tax rate but an effective 50% benefits phase out rate and high income people having a nominal 30% tax rate, you just use a flat 35% tax rate which implicitly has the benefits phase out built into the tax system. Which means you don't need any of this income reporting or annual tax returns or anything of the kind, the employer/seller just withholds the fixed tax rate and you're done, and everybody unconditionally gets the UBI to provide the effect of a progressive rate structure.
> Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
> Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely.
From a welfare-cliff perspective, that's a fine idea. However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign, suggesting that integrated welfare system might need an even stronger pro-wage bias.
> True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
But that's just an accounting sham to claim you're taxing them less than you are and you no longer actually have a negative marginal tax rate.
> However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign
Well that's mainly because they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week and were less desperate to take a low-quality job.
You might also notice that the effect you're referring to isn't net of the payments, and is also probably invalidated by the period the study was done -- it started during COVID. Between the first and last year of the study, the household income for the control group increased by $20,000 -- on a $30,000 base! The experiment group increased by almost as much before the payments and were ahead by more than $6000/year including them.
In any event, you don't have to use a different rate structure to do what you suggest, you get the same effect without the complexity by increasing the flat tax rate and adding the money to the UBI.
Suppose Alice makes $100,000 and Bob makes $20,000.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, the state gets a total of $18,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 40% thereafter, the state gets $23,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes everyone uniformly at 25%, the state gets $30,000 from Alice and Bob. This is not a smaller number and 5/6ths of it is from Alice. In fact, you can use that money to give them each a $12,000 UBI, leaving Bob with an effective tax rate of -35%, delete all of the transfer programs that obsoletes and still have some left over for transit and uniforms.
You don't need it, it's already built in. The flat tax rate needed to serve as the implicit benefits phase out is already in the range as what you'd use in the high tax brackets in a progressive tax system with separate benefits phase outs.
If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.
> In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
> Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
I know about the EITC, but the ETIC net of benefit clawbacks still presents a high marginal rate. Then the EITC itself gets clawed back at its own threshold, imposing a small region of high marginal rates. (The EITC itself is also rather paltry for filers without children.)
Additionally, the US tax system is ill-structured to really implement this. If you're trying to operate on the "under-the-table cash payments for day labour" margin, a system that depends on filing one's taxes to receive a refund later is not exactly hassle-free.
The EITC isn't as complicated as the child tax credit; that one is not refundable so you end up trying to calculate a way to get enough tax to get it fully.
> That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
Yeah, my wording could have been better. The suggestion that I've seen for UBI is $12k/year (which is clearly not enough to live on in today's economy), with the $2:$1 reduction being only for the UBI, and then standard taxes starting after that.
This system was actually proposed a looong time ago (like 1970s, I think). Just by giving everyone a massive tax credit to start with.
It is a free gift, because you keep receiving it even if you dont make money next year.
And that's right, its not meant to pay for people who can pay their way themselves, just like in most income redistribution schemes the rich would be taxed at several (thousand?) multiples of the value they receive back.
In the current regime, the rich gain far more benefits from taxes (they pay little, and get to offload much of their cost of society to the rest of us) than in a UBI approach. That's the point.
1. Why are assuming that UBI would be paid for by individual income taxes?
2. Yes, no matter what, the richest people are going to receive so little benefit relative to their wealth/income that they won't support it. The same is true for most public services, actually. The ultra-wealthy receive little-to-no direct benefit from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, public schools (big one), public universities, or even public police and firefighters (they can afford their own). But somehow they haven't (yet) managed to rid themselves of these horrible violations of their privilege.
The sum total of the wealth of all the billionaires in the US in 2021 was ~$4.1 Trillion [0]. That's about the same as the government budget in a normal year pre-pandemic, or about 2/3 of the government budget post-pandemic.
Assuming a $1000/month and a population of ~350 million, you're looking at $4.2 Trillion per year. You could almost fund it for the first year by taxing all of the wealth of the billionaires at 100%.
But what are you going to do the second year? That's total wealth, not yearly income.
The stocks would actually crash if converted to money. The net effect wouldn't be more cash to spend, but a stake in the economy. You would probably have to invent some more democratic formats of corporate governance.
Stocks are converted to money with every trade. Every buy has a matching sell. That's something that happens trillions of times a day and stocks aren't crashing because of it. I'm not sure I'm following.
I think the hypothetical here is if you tried to fund UBI via a billionaire-wealth-tax, it would involve liquidating basically all stock they hold. If you sell that much stock, the price will go down. (It's the opposite side of the coin compared to why you can't do a hostile takeover at market cap by just buying stock - the price goes way up as you buy up all available shares).
There's several second and nth-order effects that seem crucial to our understanding.
Every seller has a buyer. Who would be buying these liquidated stocks?
What would the estimated new equilibrium be? What would be the effects of this equilibrium compared to the current state? Can we estimate the pros and cons?
Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.
just curious, but why is there always an implicit assumption in this debate that we only tax the wealth of billionaires? is the money of a half billionaire somehow less green than a full billionaire?
Keep going until you're taxing everyone that makes over $80K/year or so, and you pretty much have it being balanced.
I never understood the UBI argument. 30 seconds of napkin math would show you how insane the proposal is, even at the rate of $1000/month. If you want to increase welfare for those below the median income, fine, let's have that discussion. Don't play games with the word 'universal'
The premise of it being universal is that it doesn't have an explicit phase out and instead it's implicit in the tax system. Obviously someone making six figures is not going to be a net recipient, but they would still have the money deposited into their account. The amount would just be smaller than the amount they're paying in taxes.
The advantage of doing it this way is that it makes it clear what's going on. Right now we nominally impose low marginal tax rates on the poor but their effective marginal tax rates are high because of benefits phase outs, so their effective marginal tax rates are higher than the wealthy. With a UBI you replace the benefits with cash payments and eliminate the phase outs, but also flatten the tax rates so the poor are paying the same effective marginal rates as the rich, instead of higher ones.
The result would be that the poor pay slightly lower effective marginal rates and the rich pay slightly higher ones (although you don't even inherently have to do that; it depends entirely on the tax rate and the amount of the UBI), but the overall system is much simpler. And the consequence that the poor are paying higher effective marginal rates than the rich, which was presumably never intended, goes away.
Right! It also lets you eliminate the means testing part of the system that makes people jump through humiliating hoops to show that they’re poor enough to need a handout, punishes people who are working too much by taking away their benefits, etc.
You'd adjust marginal rates so the poor would (net) benefit, the middle class would about break even, and the rich would pay more. Napkin math on that isn't that bad, especially if you chop a bunch of other welfare payments (and the associated expensive means-testing and administration).
No one serious is suggesting "everyone gets $1000/month and literally nothing else changes".
Which welfare plans are you cutting? Social Security? Nope, because the average payout is 50% higher than $1000/m. Same with SSI/disability. You certainly couldn't replace any of the medical plans (Medicaid/Medicare) with anywhere near that amount.
The welfare plans that might be subject to being replaced only amount to a few percent of the federal budget. The bulk of the budget is those plans above, which would result in less benefits if replaced. You're not paying for this by finding lost coins in the couch cushions.
Yeah, as I said in my comment, the primary way to pay for it is to adjust marginal rates so that it's (mostly) a transfer from rich to poor. If you're rich, you'll get a $1k UBI and also pay $2k more in taxes (or $4k, or whatever). Probably for those at the median income it would be roughly neutral - but with the benefit that if you ever lose your job, or want to leave an abusive marriage, or want to try starting a business, you still have that $1k coming in.
Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.
I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.
I don't think that's the case. Instead, it's just that the "let's tax the rich people more!!" idea is ill-founded to begin with, and the easiest way to show that is to point out that if instead of just taking some percentage more, you took everything they have, it still wouldn't solve the problem, not by a longshot.
Choosing some arbitrarily small segment of the population and saying "See, they don't have enough money to fund this program" is not the steelman you seem to think it is. Instead, try discussing something serious, like a plausible adjustment to the progressive tax system.
Nah, if someone puts forth an argument that is fundamentally flawed, it's neither wrong to point it out nor on me to do their thinking for them.
That said, if we want to talk taxes, I think a progressive tax system is nearly always wrong, immoral, and unfair, so you probably would disagree with any adjustments I'd suggest. :)
For new and expensive schemes it is often a challenge to figure out who will be paying for it. The proponents typically don't want to say for the obvious reason - the people paying for a universal service will probably be worse off than if they weren't so it isn't helpful to identify them (they'll just add to the resistance). But that means it is awkward to attack an idea on cost because detractors don't propose the scheme and are often dealing with people unwilling to suggest realistic costs or tax schemes. People with technically excellent arguments have to be a bit oblique in pointing out that someone has to pay and it'd speed the debate along for someone to figure out who. For a UBI, we might suspect it isn't going to be billionaires.
The fair way would be if sentences had to pattern match "I think [scheme] is a good idea and we will pay for it by [specific tax proposal].". Seems unlikely in practice though.
It's not about means-testing, it's about setting income tax rates/brackets sanely so that it gets taxed back in an appropriate way and not in a way that prevents people from picking up work, etc.
The reason UBI exists as an idea is that means-tested programs are inherently politically vulnerable. Another name for means-tested benefits would be "benefits ear-marked for the politically powerless".
Everyone making less than 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) qualifies for free healthcare. I dont think most people would say that the USA has universal healthcare.
The same is true here. If you make $0, you get $12K UBI. If you make $24K, you get $0 UBI. Is that universal?
Assuming there's no other income tax on the first $24K you make, it's a bit aggressive but it's still a valid form of UBI and an improvement on the status quo.
This particular method is mathematically equivalent to both of them. There's no actual difference between "You get full UBI and you pay income tax on other income" and "You get X cents less UBI per dollar of other income".
The system could be as simple as "UBI, also income tax is 50%, end of description".
> The question isn't about mathematics, it's about psychology and politics.
That's valid, but when someone's roughly describing a plan I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and worry about whether it can be framed the correct way rather than whether they framed it right.
> In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?
I don't know, every two weeks? So it's the difference between a $460 UBI check and a $400 paycheck, versus a $60 UBI check and an $800 paycheck.
I wasn't describing anything. A negative income tax is approximately what the guy I replied to was describing. It obviously wasn't a perfect description, but I didn't think my label of the description in his comment would be taken so literally. If you'd care to describe why you believe this isn't an approximation of the outcome of a negative income tax, then feel free to explain.
because in the scheme described the effective tax on your income is positive (the more you earn, the more is transferred away) as opposed to negative (the more you earn the more is transferred to you).
What you are describing might intuitively sound like what a negative income tax should mean, had you never heard of a negative income tax before, but that is not what a negative income tax is. A negative income tax, which is a name for a type of benefit system, does not mean that people are literally negatively taxed, regardless of their income.
A negative income tax increases your total benefits as you earn more (up to a point), the system that was being described is one where total benefits are decreased as you earn more.
Benefits do not increase with income in a negative income tax system. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. The point of a negative income tax system is to allow total income, from the combination of work and benefits, to increase as work income increases, preventing the incentive to not work due to benefits exceeding or only matching potential work income due to a hard income cutoff for qualifying for a non-dynamic amount of benefits. In this way, as work income increases in a negative income tax system, the benefits will incrementally decrease, until the individual meets the level where they become a net payer, not receiver, but those that are net payers will not have a total income less than any of those that are net receivers.
In the system that was described it would take two units of income to decrease one unit of benefits, allowing total income to increase with an increase in levels of work income, while not having a hard cutoff for benefits. This is an approximation of what would occur in a negative income tax system and it would not result in a net decrease in earnings considering it takes twice the earnings units to lower one unit of benefits.
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
Just subsidize the minimum wage. It's dead simple. Raise the minimum wage by $x but have that extra $x be paid from taxes, not the employer. Big businesses will scream "But inflation! But wage-price spiral!". Their screams are to be ignored.
Depends on what you're comparing it to. This thread is about unconditional cash. Giving everyone $1000 a month, unconditionally, is clearly many times more expensive than subsidizing the minimum wage by $1 an hour - it's rather difficult to work 1000 hours when a month has ~730 hours!
The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.
To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare.
The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work.
Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.
That's how you breed shadow employment. People on welfare who can work often will find jobs that pay some, or all of the salary, under the table. The attitude this instills in children is that of having to work hard, while scheming against the taxman, to improve your life. Some people then do that way past the point they need to, and end up at risk of being caught for tax evasion.
>Some people then do that way past the point they need to, and end up at risk of being caught for tax evasion.
Only because we tax people's income. Instead, tax only the income of corporations and other shareholder based limited liability entities. Income tax should be the insurance premium business pays to limit the legal liability to the owners and shareholders of the business.
You're right to fear employers who want to avoid claiming employees so that they don't have to comply with, for example, safety laws. But shadow work also includes situations with "casual" business relationships, like a couple who hires a nanny to watch their kids 40 hours a week. Both parties may feel that complying with tax and labor laws is too much of a burden.
The employee, under current laws, does not get to skip out on taxes; they have to pay the self employment tax rate of 15%; We're talking about 40 hour weeks, that kind of regular pay doesn't go un noticed by revenue offices.
Yes, the employee must file and pay taxes, even if they've reported their employer to the IRS for mis-classification.
You may have been downvoted because you seem be ignoring the point gp post. By working under the table, the nanny or gardener or handyman can (often fraudulently) qualify for government healthcare and welfare programs as well as other low income assistance.
In my opinion those programs are of a greater benefit than the ones you listed.
Not only that, it doesn't specify the compensation.
Suppose the employer avoids paying Medicare tax and unemployment insurance, but gives some of this money to the employee, who also avoids paying Medicare tax. This is, of course, illegal, but it isn't inherently the case that the employee is getting the worse of it outside of the risk of being prosecuted for tax evasion.
Unemployment insurance in particular generally screws anyone who maintains stable employment because the net beneficiaries are the people who collect benefits every other year, not the people who pay premiums their whole lives and only collect benefits once if at all. The latter would come out ahead to receive even half the premiums as money they could save and collect interest on and then have in reserve in the event they become unemployed. (In general mandatory insurance of this kind is a net economic loss and a source of benefits fraud that only gets passed by alleging it gets paid for by employers rather than employees, but who pays for something on paper and who is affected by the economic effects of the cost are different things.)
>> The attitude this instills is that of having to work hard, while scheming against the taxman, to improve your life.
Sounds like a lot of politicians I know. Really, how is this not being "Smart" and gaming the system? If we're all upset about being "fair" then we would have changed the system.
I like to believe--or at least fantasize--that bipartisan alliances can be built around a shared commitment to Good Equations in Public Policy, even if they disagree on what those policies are.
"Look Bob, I think your tax cut proposal is pure pork and regulatory capture, but that one one goddamn sexy curve."
When you really peel back the layers, you'll find that voters' instincts are that any means-tested program should come with a hefty punishment for using it. While they aren't exactly against helping, they definitely think the priorities are 1) Spending as little taxpayer dollars as possible, 2) Punishing any recipient of help enough to be a warning to others, and then, distantly, 3) Helping.
This is not exactly voters. What really happens is more like this: There is some call for helping people, voters want it, but voters (possibly some of the same voters, possibly different ones) also want lower taxes.
So the plan that passes is the one that claims to help people (appeasing the first group) while also costing the minimum amount of money (appeasing the second group). The proposal with evolutionary fitness in politics is then to create a system that helps people on paper but actually limits eligibility for the system to a minimum number of people or otherwise makes use of it more arduous to deter usage so it costs less. Extra points for making it so complicated that people don't realize what's really happening so they don't object if it doesn't really do what they wanted.
But there is also a level of incompetence/inefficiency here, because the complex and overlapping systems that pass as a result often have high overhead that waste tax dollars, or create bad incentives because nobody thought them through and those incentives create deadweight economic losses adverse to the interests of even the people who want to minimize taxes. As the obvious example, if you create a system with welfare cliffs and then people have the incentive to stay on welfare instead of taking a job, you now have more government expense and lower tax revenue than a system that doesn't do this.
At which point there is a Pareto-optimal improvement on the table if you can get the bill passed.
Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone holding an elected or decisive office these days. The will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper, freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS AFTER ALL!!1!
My elected representatives seem to understand this pretty well. The problem is that people keep electing other people who view anyone not working as leeches. Often the difference between keeping those elected officials and electing someone that represents you is a few hundred or a few thousand people deciding that their vote does matter after all and going and casting it. It's about the population of a rural village or small town. I don't know how we're going to get back to our golden age, but I know that we need to find the motivation somehow.
I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).
I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated).
I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process.
So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.
Yes, exactly. If you pay someone not to work, I can't blame them for not working. Sure it could be short-sighted, but that's not a moral flaw. The system is designed to keep people in poverty and dependent on the system. It's really tragic
If your kids have to live on the street if you take that part-time job, it's not only short-sighted to stay on welfare, it's the rational thing to do even in the long term.
Even more rational is finding an unofficial source of income, which is what people in this situation often do. At scale, this may create a wrong impression that levels of welfare are adequate to guarantee the basics.
Yes, and worse, the incidents of unreported income like that also create a narrative to be spoon-fed to the public, that “welfare cheats” are taking advantage of everybody’s goodwill. I’m sure it actually happens. Everything gets abused by some. But people who are doing what you describe are usually not doing it out of greed, but to work around that broken system.
In this specific experiment, people earned $0.20 less for every $1 they were given mainly due to working fewer hours. Those hours were primarily shifted to leisure. (This is not a value statement, just what the study found.)
Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching.
A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?
> I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though.
I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions.
You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.
It seems like you are getting down-voted, but I think you are probably right.
One concern I have is that publicly announcing ways to break the law might result in the government cracking down on those particular ways. You could make a case for telling people how to break laws which don't really matter either way, and let them figure out how to break laws that are stupid and matter though.
Another, less pressing, concern I have is that if taken to its limit, no laws will matter anymore. I would hope human kindness would keep people from murdering and stealing from each other for the fun of it, but I'd expect some Tragedies of The Commons to occur. This could still be worth it though. I'm in a fortunate enough position to not really understand how limiting the stupid laws are, but I do understand that laws are hard to repeal.
This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!
I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.
If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".
the woman is correct in blaming the system. she understands that the disincentive comes from a systemic failure and deliberate misrepresentation/misconception. even @geohot said in some interview he'd rather die than receive UBI while his face and body language radiated 'LIAR'.
let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free.
she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher.
students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.
have spent some time on jobseekers benefit a few years ago. It's soul crushing and you get just enough to get by, and i'm in country where the benefits are kinda ok.
always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering.
This last part is just my opinion:
Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.
I've heard negative income taxes suggested as an alternative to our current approach. I'm not an expert on them, but it might be worth looking into for people who are interested in ideas for improving our system:
Re-introducing progressive tax rates would be a small start;
Though, allegedly, a majority of Americans don't comprehend progressive tax rates.
Many state income taxes reach the top income tax rate before the federal poverty rate (ie < $12k).
The federal tax rates are poorly graduated; the first, 10% rate, cuts at $11,600 over to 12%; and then we jump 10% to 22%, only for the next bracket to have only 2% bracket gap again. Imagine if the first bracket was 0% and went all of the way to welfare levels - approximately $30k, the US could effectively eliminate the additional complication of the Standard Deduction (also a paint point of illegal filing and fraud). Imagine if every bracket was easily defined at ~10% - that could make predicting and filing easier. This is addition to payroll taxes being flat and regressive - when they could be built into the income tax.
2024 tax brackets
Tax rate Single filers Married couples filing jointly Married couples filing separately Head of household
10% $11,600 or less $23,200 or less $11,600 or less $16,550 or less
12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300 $11,601 to $47,150 $16,551 to $63,100
22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050 $47,151 to $100,525 $63,101 to $100,500
24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900 $100,526 to $191,150 $100,501 to $191,150
32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450 $191,151 to $243,725 $191,151 to $243,700
35% $243,726 to $609,350 $487,451 to $731,200 $243,276 to $365,600 $243,701 to $609,350
37% $609,351 or more $731,201 or more $365,601 or more $609,351 or more
I'm confused. These look progressive to me. Can you explain?
Yes - first - this is progressive - but, not efficient in the context of Median income being $40k, poverty being $12k, and most welfare programs having a cutoff at ~$30k.
The 10% bracket is all under poverty level (the reasons this exists is somewhere between occasional part time work for seniors or teenagers, the standard deduction)
The 12% bracket includes ~50% of individual filers that are under most welfare levels. Does that 20% increase in tax rate make sense for that group? The Married/household rate covers the majority of American households, including median household income.
The 22% bracket... let's start with this is a 47% graduation increase versus the previous 20% increase (more than double)
The 24% bracket... again, a seemingly random increase of < 10% rate graduation increase
The 32% bracket... an 8 point rate increase, that's 25%...
The 35% bracket, back to a 3 point, 10% increase
the 37% bracket, even more decreasing, a 2 point, 6% increase
So; the rates of graduation increase are 10%, 47%, 10% , 25%, 10%, 6%; from a distance we can see that the 47% and 25% changes are definitely outliers; If, the top rates of change were at least at the top marginal incomes, it would make more sense.
It looks even worse if you also include the regressive 6.2% OASDI payroll tax. 16%, 18%, 28%, 30%, 38%, and 41% -- 25%, 55%, 11%, 26%, 8% (ignoring the employer's OASDI / Social Security)
Nc Income tax rates
4.5%
SC Income Tax Rates
$0-$3200, 3%
> $3200, 6.5%
Al Income tax rates
$0-$500 2%
$500-$2500 4%
> $2500 5%
I believe those are just the federal tax rates. In the US you pay both federal and state taxes, so it depends a lot on which state you live in.
Their taxes probably are lower than yours, but probably not by as much as you think, and certain things like medical insurance are really expensive in the US.
Who cares about marginal tax rates -- that is the rate you pay on your last one Euro of income. What really matters is effective (blended) rate.
In the US, there are normally two levels of income tax (Federal and State), and, rarely, there is also a local/city income tax (like New York City). Sorry, I am not familiar with the Irish income tax system. Since you mentioned that you are in the 24% bucket, your gross income is more than 100K USD. (Congrats: That is pretty high in Ireland where the median income is about 38K EUR.) If you add up all income taxes in the US (Federal + State + Payroll), I guess it is pretty close to your 35% effective rate in Ireland. So really, not so different.
That is one of the most interesting ideas I read from Friedman.
I assume the administration of such a program is heavy though, but with future technological advancement and bureaucratic reform it could be possible.
The idea of replacing all welfare services with money in your hand derived from this formula is radical… and has its promise but I worry about those who rely not only on welfare for the economic side, but also the social support aspects.
Ignoring all the fallacies, you are correct about one thing; the recipients are of course not the problem, the problem are the proponents of such nonsensical, fantastical, infantile, and even outright immoral and unethical concepts like UBI or even welfare.
All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror.
Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.
> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work
No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.
You need to provide hard numbers because welfare fraud is typically less than single digits. Going by “vibes” is pretty useless, especially since the government has been the largest force in reducing poverty in western nations.
The problem with this is that there's little way to get any realistic data here. Of course the number of people polled that say they're a deadbeat will be low.
The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard.
No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray.
Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum.
If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work.
Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.
Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all.
As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?
Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!
And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.
The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.
People say it because they experience similar cliffs in the tax system even with higher incomes.
I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.
So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.
That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.
The entire tax regime in the UK is outright designed to inhibit class mobility and penalise hard work. The 60% tax trap and other benefit cliffs over 100k are just punishing. At the same time the capitalist class enjoy a cool 20% haircut on capital returns.
i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money.
i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.
> I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive
Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.
> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions
The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.
I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
> I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.
And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.
That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend:
(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").
(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
Good point about making it unconditional. I meant more like for an opportunity to pause work or reduce work to find a better job, or study, or start a business. And I should not have said nice apartment but rather standard apartment. Many lower cost apartments are substandard: pest problems, poor heating/AC, no hookups for washer/dryer, crime-ridden area, etc.
> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment?
> Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?
Ultimately, the whole point of UBI is to head off political objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least until it's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna).
It is complex. Although the label UBI suggests a good thing, I believe we should eliminate the term "universal," at least.
Humanity has always dealt with a shortage of resources and their allocation. What is certain is that no amount of UBI will fix this human condition. There will always be differences (not only economic but ideological), and people will try to compensate for them. Rinse and repeat.
I love the "nice" part of apartment requirement, like some UN Geneva charter of basic human rights declaration. Especially when everybody should have it, like you can clone "nice apartments" ad infinitum so everybody has >150m2, beautiful terrace with view on lake or mountains, and of course while being in or very close to city center. I wonder what other basic "nice" stuff is a must have, we can go on for a long time.
The pipe dreams some people have... I mean its fine, you do you, nobody else in this world actually cares. But thats not how you actually achieve anything in life, in any system out there, rather exact opposite.
Most American housing is 2x4 garden sheds where if you stomp a bit harder the floorboards are gonna dislodge and you'll literally see the mud beneath your house. Also, most people in California can't afford to buy a house, let alone something up to current building codes (which are ridiculously lenient compared to Europe). So yeah, "nice" probably just means something that wasn't built in 1970. Imagine they said "liveable" if it works better for you.
Maybe by "nice" they just meant "not rat-infested, not cockroach-infested, the roof does not leak, it's not unlivably hot in the summer etc". Problems with which plenty of people on this planet still contend.
People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.
I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter.
If quitting your job doesn't put your life or your ability to get another job (because you're not capable of maintaining basic grooming, for example) at risk, then the "free market" model of employment can actually work, and people can opt out of jobs that treat them poorly or underpay them. At that point all the most essential/difficult/unpleasant jobs would actually have to pay the most, and cushier jobs with more reasonable hours could pay less, and people could do the amount of work it takes to get the amount of money they want. Think of how hard people work just to make a bit more money even when they're financially stable, just because they want a house or a cool car or a nice vacation. Why would that change if you didn't have to bleed yourself dry just to eat and sleep under a roof?
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all.
That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games.
I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.)
I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things.
(I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things.
But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)
When I was in the military reserves, there were some guys who graduated High School and went straight into a minimum-wage job, working at Home Depot and the like. At first they thought it was great -- I have my own place! Sure, it's a room in a flat shared with three other guys, but it's mine! I have my own car! Sure, it's an old beater that guzzles gasoline, but it's mine! I can buy a Playstation and afford whatever game I want, and stay up as late as I want!
But pretty soon, once the novelty wears of, it begins to pale. I mean, I have my own place, sure, but it's with three other guys; not someplace I'd want my GF to move into, and definitely not a place to raise a kid. I have my own car, but it's a piece of junk. I can't really afford to go to concerts or long trips, all I can really afford to do is sit around at home and play games on my PS/2.
So, after 2-3 years they all started do things to make themselves more valuable to society: one took classes to become an EMT. Another took classes to become a fire fighter. They landed better, more stable jobs, and could afford to move into a nicer home, get better cars, attend concerts and sporting events, go on trips, start families.
That would be my ideal for how UBI would work: make sure people never have to chose between a bad job and starving or being on the street; but also make sure they have a clear path and opportunities to improve their situation and become more valuable to society.
Are there "deadbeats" who would just play video games for life? Sure, but there already are. I'm not sure how much those kinds of people contribute to society, even if they are working a minimum wage job to support their lifestyle.
>That would be my ideal for how UBI would work: make sure people never have to chose between a bad job and starving or being on the street; but also make sure they have a clear path and opportunities to improve their situation and become more valuable to society.
I think this discounts the formative experience of the prior years. I would expect it helped by:
1. Motivating those guys to make themselves more valuable on the job market.
2. Giving those guys baseline discipline/reliability to get them to their next work and training milestones.
The military reserves is an interesting beast, but if you were in the active component before that, you probably ran into lots of guys needing similar training in basic reliability. UBI could be a strong disincentive away from those minimum-wage jobs, and the outlay described by grandparent is superior to a minimum-wage standard of living.
I think it depends on your perspective and prior experience with people.
There are a lot of people that dont engage in the rat race even when food, health, the material conditions of their children depend on. It seems like most people want a base level of UBI to be better than the conditions they have from working now. It also seems like the expectation for UBI is often even above the average US income of $37K, and that would be if there was no additional salary left to be had from working
Based on this, I empathize with anyone of median income or higher who feels like they are struggling to get what they want, and UBI would be a huge dead weight, likely preventing them from getting all of the things on their lists.
I assume my list would go down the drain to support a UBI policy.
There are indeed plenty of people who can't or won't work. These people exist today, with or without UBI. And they will exist tomorrow, with or without UBI.
And so what?
These people are still human beings. They still deserve life: If dogs deserve no-kill shelters[1] then humans also deserve a life. They deserve a chance to live out their days, and to tell stories to their (perhaps prolific) kids and grandkids (who also deserve a healthy life, and that includes having a healthy -- if piss-poor and inept -- family that includes their elders).
Right now, it often works like this: They live in squalor, and have broadly have nothing of merit. Their kids -- if they manage to thrive -- disown them. And the whole time this very real person is still alive (if they make it that far), their grandkids only know of them through photos.
That's no life. Not for the senior, the kid, or the grandkid.
We can do better than that. It will not be cheap, but we can afford it, and we'll have a healthier society as a result. People, and the families they create, are important to the healthy existence of everyone in a society.
[1]: We can certainly talk about assisted suicide for humans or just culling the herd as options that may be superior to leaving folks to die in the gutter, but isn't it easier to just avoid that topic and give all humans a stable and reliable chance to stay alive? How much does that cost, do you suppose?
I can afford it. It will cost me a lot of money because I'm barely on the tall end of that hypothetical situation right now, but I can put my part in.
I can afford it because a healthy society is a productive society, and this will return to me because good economies are built largely upon productive societies, and healthy societies are more productive than unhealthy societies are.
Productivity generates wealth.
Are these not things that we generally understand to be true?
(Unless... Can it instead be shown that it is economically beneficial to have a relatively unhealthy and unproductive society?)
[Shall I make popcorn?]
(edit, can't reply further because of HN thread limits:
My dudes, "free" money from UBI isn't to keep people from working who want to get ahead. Most people can work, and most people do want a lot more than a shitty apartment in their life and are willing to work for that.
Y'all certainly want more than shitty apartment in your own lives, don't you? So why in the fuck would you ever assume that "dur, I have a shitty apartment and some simple food, so I don't have to do anything ever!" is the be-all, end-all human state?
Please re-align yourselves with the people you actually-know in life: I promise you that you'll see that almost none of them will give up on the rat-race if they start getting UBI. They'll generally want to keep making steps that seek to bring them ahead of their peers, and that means that they'll continue to do productive things. A thousand dollars per month (or whatever) isn't enough motivation for them to somehow cease being productive and stop working to get ahead.
There is no proposal for UBI that means the end of the fantastic American dream. UBI doesn't even mean the end of capitalism. UBI just creates a baseline financial safety net onto which anyone may fall without necessarily facing disease and death in the gutter, and it's there for everyone without even a shred of additional paperwork because it exists like clockwork without additional action on the part of the recipient, while also providing a bit of a boost for those at the low-end who do produce something that lets them get ahead of the game a little bit easier.)
I think we are discussing different magnitudes of Ubi. I would consider leaving a 200k job for 40k Ubi (which I think is a number more in line with what people describe.
First off, my 200k salary would be taxed into effectively a 100k salary.
I could live pretty well off 40k if I never had to work, so quitting my job would be a quality of life upgrade.
I think a lot of my peers would consider the same.
I think 40k is way more than most UBI proponents are aiming for. It's certainly 3 times as much as I have bean mentally considering in UBI discussions.
When I think UBI, I think paying for a shared living space and food. A minimum budget, not necessarily a comfortable budget.
I think that is a fundamental Gap between different people talking about this. The most upvoted response to this article was an argument that this isn't a real test of Ubi because 12K a year is a trivial amount and not enough to see results. Also keep in mind that this 12K was in addition to existing welfare programs, and most Ubi proponents argue that it would replace welfare
Ps, the people want Ubi as a replacement to means tested welfare and Social Services, consider what level of Ubi would be required for an unemployed or disabled mother of two
That's just another assumption you're adding into the ring. I see no reason why UBI would replace disability. It wouldn't even make sense to. They solve different problems.
really? How are they different? I thought the point was the same: make sure people have enough income to survive without working. Why does the reason for them not working change how much they need to live?
if you're in a country where healthcare costs to the individual can be considerable, someone who's disability costs them extra money would need additional funds to get to a baseline of living. Eg I don't need a wheelchair to get around, so my cost of living does not include buying and maintaining a wheelchair. Someone who does would need to pay for that somehow.
People are still expected to work with UBI. Disability is for people whose ability to work is impacted. They don't even have the option to work, or must do so to a lower degree than previously able.
That being said, I can see the argument to reduce disability in the event of UBI.
I dont think money and getting ones needs met without work is an incentive for health or productivity. I think it is an incentive for the exact opposite.
Or retirees who have plenty of money but still choose to work because they're bored.
If getting your needs met was a disincentive for work then why are all the multi-millionaires still working instead of downsizing their lives and playing video games / smoking weed for 40 years?
I think the "at that point" is the crucial element. An extra 20k to work a physically and mentally taxing job for inconsistent hours, no benefits, and no flexibility -- the calculus is garbage. But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.
If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point. These are "inferior jobs" in an economic sense and it's up to the employer to do better. Make working for you suck less. Even in customer-facing retail jobs it's more than possible.
I'm having a hard time seeing the downside. Employees can afford to take more risks because they're not betting their livelihood anymore, and it provides a natural upward pressure on wages and working conditions at the bottom on the labor market which is sorely needed. Anyone whose desired lifestyle can't be supported on the meager income, which is most people, there's no change.
>If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point.
I think that is a major motivation for most work and I question if it is as bad as you think it is? Is it really that unreasonable that someone do something they don't like to get shelter, food, and healthcare?
>But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.
Would you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50% to pay other people who choose not to work?
How small would the difference between working full time and full retirement have to be before you considered it?
I don't actually think it's that bad but I was trying to steelman your argument. The hypothetical presumes a terrible job with not enough pay to make up for it. The kind of job that someone would only take if they had not better option. If the job isn't that bad, or it pays well enough I think people will take it despite not needing it to make rent.
> you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50%
I don't think that would happen because UBI is supposed to be replacement for all other forms of welfare and I would also expect some small gains in reducing the prison population, and administrative overhead. But to answer your question, yes. Government already takes >30% right now and because of the U I'm getting the benefit as well so that covers a good chunk of mandatory expenses. In a very real sense I need less money under this system.
I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.
I dont think that UBI could or would ever be implemented in a tax neutral way, so that is a pretty huge difference right there.
>I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.
another way to frame this is how much (if any) of your income would you be willing to give up if it meant 0 work hours. Would you take a 10k pay cut? 50k? or are you completely inflexible when it comes to lifestyle spending, or alternatively, do you like your job enough that you would do it for free.
Why do you think dogs deserve no kill shelters? Euthanizing stray dogs and other critters in urban areas is quite common throughout the world and most definitely a superior choice if you have a limited budget and would need to cut services for humans instead.
If no-kill shelters ever make sense (and some people must think they do, as these are things that do exist), then no-kill humanitarian efforts also must make sense. I find this to be self-evident because I think that humans are more important than domestic animals are.
UBI directly helps with the latter; UBI helps people avoid death.
UBI also indirectly helps with the former: By reducing the burden of taking care of pets when the bottom starts to fall out on folks' lives for whatever reason that happens, the need for dog shelters of any sort is also reduced.
The American consumerist economy is already heavily driven by keeping up with the Jones's. Why would that change just because we let people that can't work eat, shit in a toilet, and sleep indoors?
Yes, teenagers can be lazy and get stuck in unproductive situations. Some adults even can! That doesn't mean that's what the majority of people want to do, and there are more effective ways of getting people unstuck than turning off their power and evicting them!
One thing that I haven't seen discussed is retirement. When you have a high paying job, you can retire early and still maintain your desired standard of living (and most people do, because most people don't enjoy their job and that is why we call it work). So a pretty uninspiring job like plumbing would end up paying a very high salary. Or stressful jobs like nurse or doctor. What happens when people doing these critical and now highly paid jobs retire to their yachts at 40? Will the market balance things, and did enough apprentice plumbers get trained to take over? Or will things spiral out of control and collapse? And how does the extremely high wages of critical jobs affect the level of UBI? If it is set to meet minimum essentials, then the UBI too can spiral up as the cost of those essentials such as the plumbers wage goes up. I tend to think that without a lot more automation, then a UBI cannot cover the minimum essentials/poverty line, because of the large amount of work required to support society that is only done because people are forced to do it, to the point that we cannot sustain bribing people to do it. But maybe it will work if we are able to replace every barista with a vending machine, have the trucks load and drive themselves, and build robotic assistants to allow 1 plumber to do the job of 10.
Honestly, I think it would even be acceptable to punish UBI "freeloaders" with, like, austerity. Like they get slow(ish) internet, a 10x10 foot studio apartment with a toilet, a stand-up shower, a counter with a mini-fridge and a hotplate (or premade food rations, whichever is cheaper), and a single window with a shitty view. Nutritious food, clean water.
And then, if you have proof of another habitable residence, you can get the cash value of all that instead.
The tricky part is that the austerity absolutely cannot reduce anyone below the minimum actual needs to live a full human life. You absolutely need to be giving them enough and healthy enough food, and water. The apartment can be claustrophobic, but it needs ventilation and sound insulation so people can actually sleep. The bed can be boring, but tall people can't be literally cramped when they sleep, and it needs to actually support their weight so people don't get back injuries. Health care needs to be fully adequate. Basically, minimum needs are 100% covered, so that if anyone ever wants to get working they don't have any immediate barriers. Don't take away anything that will make it harder for people to work.
There are many who would feel blessed with a 10x10 studio apartment with a (safe, clean, minimal) bathroom in the corner and barely enough room for good sleep, with shitty Internet and a bad view, and a barely-functional kitchen (and heat when needed, and maybe even cooling when needed).
(I've stayed in cheap-ish hotel rooms that are a lot larger and more flexible than that. I've also stayed in far worse.)
And that's... well, fuck: Isn't that OK? Is it not OK for some people who have (for whatever reason) failed to thrive and climb ahead at the present time to have these things?
(I think it's OK to give all people means with which to limit how far they can fall, even if that means that many quasi-successful people are essentially including this as a line-item that they pay to themselves on their own tax bill.
I also think that it is imperfect, and that we mustn't let imperfection stand in the way of general progress.
I mean: Nothing is fucking perfect. But the mere existence of ubiquitous imperfection doesn't somehow mean that positive progress cannot ever be made.)
The system breaks down when people get to democratically vote for their own UBI. Why work extra for a cool car or nice vacation when you can just vote for more benefits?
UBI is the risk in question, and the economics ARE terrible. The average US income is ~$37K and that includes workers. How does that stack up with expectations for UBI, given that it would take 100% socialization of income to reach that level of UBI.
> it would take 100% socialization of income to reach that level of UBI
I want to see you attempt to do the math to show that.
Here's my rough math: Mean income is about $60k. If we take the extra simple option, we can increase all tax brackets by 20% and give everyone a $12k credit, and it trivially balances. The median income increases, the low end of income drastically increases, and higher incomes drop.
Such an outcome is very far from total socialization. The effective tax rate of anyone below $60k income drops, and the max marginal rate is a not-crazy 57%.
But also we can make the tax increase progressive as well. And we can include capital gains as income and lower the percents. And we can cut a good chunk of existing welfare which decreases the tax burden. This isn't a suggestion for an optimal method, it's a basic sanity check.
60k is the average working income, not average adult income or human income.
You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing. My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California
My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
There’s nothing magical about exceeding a 50% marginal tax rate. (Hitting 100%, sure, that would be bad.)
There’s definitely a psychological threshold there for most people. I ran an informal survey a few years back about what tax rates people would consider fair, and there was a very strong clustering at 50%.
I have a hard time understanding it myself. The whole point of taxation is redistribution, so why would you care whether you’re “winning” versus the marginal tax rate?
>The whole point of taxation is redistribution, so why would you care whether you’re “winning” versus the marginal tax rate?
A substantial portion of the population doesnt think taxation should be used for distribution at all. They think the fundamental point of taxation is to pay for public goods that everyone uses like roads, police, and firemen.
> 60k is the average working income, not average adult income or human income.
It's close enough, that's for 240 million people. If I use Gross National Income I get a much higher number.
I'm not worried about children right this second.
> You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing.
Another 20%, minus 12 thousand dollars. That makes a big difference.
The median worker would pay significantly less than before.
And I already said progressive would be better. But a flat tax like that is very simple and would not be the end of the world.
> My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
Are you taking the minus 12k into account? If so it sounds like you're making a lot more than the people you just described that can't find reasonable housing. You'll be fine.
> 12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California
The nice thing about having a guaranteed income is that you actually can move without massive risk.
Or you can adjust it based on location, idk, I'm going with the simple version first. If it only helps most people then that's enough to show the idea has merit. Nitpicking won't work!
Okay. Please stop nitpicking and either defend your claim about "100% socialization of income" or admit you were wrong.
Sorry for saying irrelevant words, I will try to minimize them.
A flat tax increase of 20% of income minus 12k would be far from ideal, but anyone making less than 60k would have less taxes, anyone making 60k-120k would have a 0-10% of income increase, and super high cost of living places could use different numbers.
The exact details don't matter because I only made that scenario to prove your claim wrong. Because it's wrong.
At the end of the day, I have fun I don't think you are 60k number is right, or your 12K number is sufficient to cover all of the cost of living a comfortable life. This is fundamental to the difference. I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.
If we assume the average income is 60k, urinalysis is still wrong. A 20% flat tax for Ubi would then provide a 12K benefit. This would not be a net positive for incomes between 60 and 120k. The break-even point would be an income of 60k, progressing to a 10% net loss at 120k. 20% of 120 is negative 24,000, and 12 would be returned via Ubi.
I meant to say income tax increase of 0-10% for 60k-120k. That's why I said break even at 60k. Sorry for the confusion.
> I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.
You think the "desired level of UBI" is more than the median income? You're talking to caricatures and fools, not real advocates. And you should have said you were talking about far more than $1000 a month significantly earlier in the conversation.
I think most advocates sell UBI as a replacement for welfare and enough that people would feel "comfortable" quitting jobs they don't like, or support the disabled.
Top post for this thread mocks 12K as a negligible handout, and claims UBI has never been tried.
Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?
What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?
These are exactly the types of things advocates claim UBI would solve (along with poverty and crime).
> Top post for this thread mocks 12K as a negligible handout, and claims UBI has never been tried.
Top post says it's not enough to quit their jobs (and keep the same lifestyle, presumably) or to get a "nice" apartment. That doesn't make it negligible.
And the claim of never really trying is also true, these tests tend to be small and pick random people out of a big crowd.
> Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?
That depends on whether the children are getting UBI, or whether there is a separate program for poor children. But UBI for the mother alone should not be expected to pay for that situation.
> What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?
Well we don't fix tuition prices through UBI. Or the housing crisis.
But let's see. 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation, you could easily get a dorm bed for $4000 per school year at a big school. (Yes I know that doesn't cover the entire year.) So if we can just do that again, and charge a reasonable tuition (my local college is about $2500 per year right now and that number would be fine) then $12k of UBI would let someone go to school.
An issue is where.... rent in SF or LA or NYC is $4k a month for a 1bedroom apartment. Rent in some parts of the mid-west is probably $500 a month or less. So is UBI for the first or the 2nd? Do you have to move somewhere where rent is cheap? If not why not?
I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people to make more long term decisions for their well being.
Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after contingency before I could even drive.
This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years.
I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.
I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.
The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.
Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing.
Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game,
let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.
People really do love to take imperfect solutions to tractable problems and deceptively expand them into something intractable so they can continue to sit on their hands.
"How can I tie real solvable issues to some kind of thought stopping meme", it's a fun game politicians and and other disingenuous people play.
Every pundit buzzword you've injected is orthogonal to the point and the issue. You can personally pursue those plans if you want, they have nothing to do with what I am discussing.
Worse, everything you've raised is irrelevant to all the little american kids getting screwed right now.
But better America and Americans suffer and decline than having measurable but marginally imperfect solutions right? Perfection or nothing right? Iteration, measurement and incremental improvement isn't real so we shouldn't try? Defeatist attitudes didn't make this country.
Both of those things are in fact tractable, and many other countries manage to keep track of who's supposed to be in them just fine. It's telling that you think something that should be a non issue is a thought stopping meme.
For instance, couples where both partners need a job in a fixed location have less mobility than couples where one or both can work remotely. Therefore, they are locked into their geographic markets, unable to explore better opportunities.
> in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working
In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic apartment and have their basic food, social and education, etc, needs met.
In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire people to convince the majority of the population they must work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80).
Which society would you say is "functioning" better?
Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society, when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so much more responsible?
The way to get to A is through people working. We didn’t get from where we were 100 years ago to now because society as a whole was fine with working the minimum amount needed to sustain life.
People consume a hell of a lot more now than 1950. Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets. The yacht class can only consume so much.
> People consume a hell of a lot more now than 1950.
The graph is true regardless.
Americans could be working 20 hours a week without society falling apart. The only thing that would change would be to the yacht class - who would still be very very wealthy.
> Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets.
How much more does housing cost? I'll save you the effort - it's fully twice as much per square foot, adjusted for inflation.
How much more temporary and flimsy are our clothes?
How much less nutritious is our food? How much more toxic is it - to ourselves, to the soil? How much fatter are we? How much more unhealthy?
We have more gadgets, sure. They're all owned by a handful of companies with damn-near monopoly powers, and none of them are changing this trend of a more and more unequal society.
> Why are people in society B concerned with the majority working if they are unnecessary?
I think that's a great question to ask. Some possible answers:
A - to make money for the yacht class
B - to keep the 99% too busy/distracted to wonder why all the productivity gains of the last 50 years have gone to the yacht class (see graph above)
C - They're not even that concerned - they pay people to be concerned about that stuff on corporate media / in politics / in our Supreme Court.
The point above is that "100% employment" is absolutely not the barrier between society B and society A. There's no good reason for full employment to be "necessary" to a well functioning society.
It could even be argued that one measure of a functioning society is how many people need to work 60 hours a week just to have their basic needs met...
In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than everyone.
It's not that utopian to want a society where people aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it - it worked great. It wasn't even that hard.
Also in a society where just eight people own as much as 4 billion. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're in late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah, we're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.
> People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working.
There's nuance worth teasing apart here.
The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point.
However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the idea (as I understood it) is that it's not supposed to go beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your job if you at all can, not quit it.
> The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point.
Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least?
> However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate
Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions.
I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.
Because until we have unlimited robots with AGI, stuff needs to get done for the society to function. Growing food, building stuff, delivering stuff, fixing/maintaining stuff, etc.
I appreciate the honest answer to what was a bit of a provocation.
Can we assume a fraction of people would still be doing these relevant things and that it'd be enough to maintain a functioning society? If not, wouldn't that point towards the directions we need technology to evolve? Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
One thing I would bet on is that, in that scenario, degrading working conditions (as we frequently see in agriculture, transportation, etc) would make it harder to find people willing to subject themselves to them.
Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives.
> Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working.
I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation among the workers so that some get more, while collectively they get less.
> Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives.
I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.
If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.
I agree with everything you said except the shareholder value part.
people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.
The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)
> it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume
Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.
Value isnt the same thing as labor/work. This would change where the value goes, not the amount of work done.
A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.
You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.
Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.
The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
> The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
>That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
Value =/= Work.
no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.
The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?
In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.
In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.
By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.
>> The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
This then invokes the problem that if everyone works less, less is produced. Even if you raise salaries, the options are the same. A) Same hours, same amount of goods to buy, or B) fewer hours, fewer goods to buy.
This is why I am saying "value" is entirely besides the point. What matters is production and consumption. you could cut salaries by 99%, and if production is the same, prices go down 99%. You can double salaries, and if production is the same, prices double.
The amount of "value" an investor has locked up doesnt change this. all that matters is the consumption of investors. If Investors are buying and eating all the hamburgers for themselves, yeah, that impacts workers. If they stick it a locked box of reinvested stocks, it has exactly zero impact.
>You can always measure by actual consumption.
Yes, this has been proposed in the last 150 years of economic literature. The challenge is who measures it, and who controls it. Remember, we already no that the market isnt perfect. The question is if it is better than a realistic alternative. Do you think a panel of elected republicans and democrats, with all their campaign promises, lobbyists, and personal product desires would do a better job of keeping the super market stocked?
>Note Walmart is subsidized by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
Lets be honest about what is happening here. Voters feel bad and want people to have more money than Walmart needs to pay them to secure their work.
Calling this a subsidy is rhetoric. Walmart doesn't need the programs. Walmart will have enough workers either way, or even raise the wage to secure workers if they need to.
People dont want to work but they want the benefits of other peoples labor. Simultaneously they try to fight the automation that would lead to a world were humans dont need to work for things to exist
Alright, I'll concede the numbers, let's say some fraction of people are employed not because they see value in their work but because they're economically incentivised (in other words, to make ends meet). I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so, and furthermore, that humanity owes it to itself to remedy that situation in order to maximise for fulfilled lives. That is if you agree that societal progress means making people's lives better, and that spending one's time meaningfully is a good measure of better.
What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.
>I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so
You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.
People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).
It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.
A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.
You want fresh produce in your supermarket, but you don't want to be the person who drives around to various farmers to get their produce, the person who stocks the shelves, the person who plants and harvests the produce, etc.
(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)
I see, but I’m not sure if these wouldn’t get done in a “do what you want” policy. There’s even a chance that they get done better than how they are done today. People would put in resources to improve (automate, simplify, etc.) the tasks they don’t enjoy doing.
It's not Star Trek, even in very automated industries someone has to do the things.
If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.
Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.
Sure, someone needs to do something, but due to automation we need less labor for the same value, even if it isn’t fully automated luxury space communism (yet?).
That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.
how much productive work would you undo for more leisure time? Go back to the productivity of 2000? 1980? further?
On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.
On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.
It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.
> On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
...why?
We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?
That's a loaded question. Presumably you have a person that needs food. On order for that person to get food in our society, you need (lets focus on grown food for now)
- People that plant things
- People that harvest things (may be the same people, but maybe not)
- People that a order things to be planted (seeds)
- People that order/plan short term things to facilitate planting (fertilizer)
- People that make those short term things (who other industry, lots of people)
- People that order/plan long term things to facilitate planting (tractor)
- People that maintain long term things to facilitate planting (repair men)
- People that build systems to allow ordering of short term things
- People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use of long term things
- People that build systems to allow finding people that maintain long term things
- People that handle making sure those ^ people have the infrastrucure they need (government + industry)
- People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired and paid
We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people participating in this thread are in the set of people that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole, have access to food.
And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society to function
You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?
Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?
UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
You can see that they exist already, without UBI. So the question is, what effect will UBI have on freeloading if introduced? Will they contribute even less than they do now? Will there be more of them? Or will they stop free-loading off companies and individuals?
If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
You're forgetting about the bit in which you've literally given the person thousands of dollars.
They use that free money to get you to do things for them.
It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice.
It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way.
If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.
If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.
Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".
So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.
> I... don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people.
And I hope two things are clear:
1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)
2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.
What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.
If that's the case, then our options are:
1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders
2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.
If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.
Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.
Knowing that it doesn't matter how badly you screw up, you'll always be able to cover your most basic needs.
This is one. We should go deeper into this question. I most certainly would continue doing a lot of the things I do now, but for fun and to progress the state-of-the-art in my field of work. I'd accept higher taxes in compensation for the assurance I will always be able to do what I do best, instead of what someone would pay me to do.
This assumes people just stop doing anything of value if there no longer is a proverbial stick in the form of financial ruin if they stop working.
Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial support.
Society already produces enough wealth to cover the expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other welfare systems in place today.
Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and choose to do something that I personally believe is of actual value to society rather than please some corporation or VC.
> it would replace any other welfare systems in place today
I’ve never seen this math worked out.
Also, some benefits are inherently lumpy. A special-needs or chronically-ill person needs (and receives) resources that wouldn’t be covered by a broad-spectrum UBI.
Most UBI proposals assume a functioning healthcare system, which would deal with most of those needs. Probably not all, so you could certainly have additional programs as needed.
What's your incentive for continuing to eat, drink, and breathe once your overlords have fulfilled their greatest dream and replaced their need for human labor with robots and machines and other forms of automation? Your purpose will have been fulfilled and your existence now meaningless. That is the ultimate goal we're all working for, right? Being freed from working for our overlords so that we can all just lay down and die and leave the world to the worst of humanity?
the "overlords" already have enough money to pay a team of real live human beings to tend to their every need until they die, AGI robots aren't going to change that for them.
Because it's 2024 and we're not yet living in the world of WALL-E.
I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.
Because I want to live in an interplanetary society with awesome tech and flying cars and holodecks and life extending medicines and who-knows-what-else and we're not going to get there if people are content to sit around in their nondescript 1-person apartments eating pre-packaged meals and the occasional weekly piece of cake and play Call of Duty or watch YouTube all day.
I agree, and I think there are more nuanced and meaningful historical and especially modern reasons we encourage veterans to turn swords to ploughshares.
It’s reasonable to assume that the powers that be may find themselves in situations politically precarious if veterans aren’t able to provide for themselves and those they ostensibly fought for. Veterans know where real and metaphorical bodies are buried, they also know that at a nation scale, the internal problems that face first world nations are usually not logistical, but political. If not for fear of disrupting business interests, UBI in the form of food stamps, housing, and Medicare for all is possible. The veterans know this, because they are fed and housed and medically treated at scale during and after service. However, if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited.
UBI is a thorny issue due to the complexities of implementing it piecemeal alongside the already-existing status quo. In some ways, a greenfield solution would be easier, but they call those revolutionary changes revolutions rather than evolutions for good reasons.
> I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes.
If we eliminated waste and slippage/loss and gained efficiencies of scale by eliminating private health insurance obligations except for high net worth, like is done in some countries like Australia, I think we could come out ahead actually, due to reducing the cost of employment borne by businesses, while maintaining or increasing health outcomes for those on public healthcare rolls.
To our great collective shame. That being a veteran is essentially a greater risk factor for peacetime structural violence in the form of homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of health care is a travesty only eclipsed by the how commonplace these issues are among fellow countrymen who are merely civilians.
What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?
> What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?
We treat our veterans poorly, but let’s not lose perspective, that’s still far better than most countries today or in history.
Another comment mentions land grants and swords to plows in antiquity. Lots of those vets weren’t super happy with the offering at the time since it moved them out to the frontiers where they’d feel less threatening to the republic, sure, but idk, a actual land grant seems better than token assistance of a loan for housing that remains pretty unaffordable.
Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then again that’s something much of the civilized world enjoys without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from home in a pointless conflict.
Indeed though, let’s not lose perspective, let’s take a hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether we’re doing better or worse.
The military is one of the best available options to lift people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at life, and it always has been. but it’s also a chance at no life at all, and so if people are forced into making this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and reflects badly on what we’ve actually accomplished with all the time since antiquity.
Veterans in countries with free college and health care for all, such as Australia or many European countries have it better still, as they receive their veterans benefits, while allowing those who did not or could not serve to also live free from undue burden or peril.
I do take your point, though, and don’t protest too much. It’s less a matter of how much is enough for our veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits of political capital before the rest of us, and now that the problems veterans face are similarly butting up against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has become the stalking horse for larger structural issues largely left unaddressed facing us all.
I’ve worked with organizations that employ people whose physical or mental condition makes it difficult to obtain/maintain a typical job. In all likelihood the type of work performed (stuffing event participant packets) was a net negative in a small view of value. The folks there seemed pretty happy to do what they did in a supportive setting with other folks who had similar life circumstances. That leads me to believe that there were larger value-concepts at play than what a cash amount can enumerate.
The value that any person can create is principally limited by imagination, not the free market. The wonderful thing about a moderately regulated free market is that the imagination of more people can be used to engage the value creation inherent in every person.
I'm reading this as: anything short of providing everyone globally with enough money to quit their jobs and rent a nice apartment is not UBI.
Which, of course, is never going to happen, nor should it. The term "basic" definitely does not automatically entail quitting jobs or getting an apartment.
$1000 is enough to not be very afraid to lose a job, or to fall seriously ill. It would allow to look for a job for a longer time, or to take a lower-paying but nicer job (as in less strain, easier commute, better growth prospects, etc). It may allow to start saving some money.
It's more of a safety net than a comfortable sofa: maybe it's not as nice, but it keeps you from hitting the floor nevertheless.
But significantly more than $1000 is not financially feasible for a balanced UBI program. The average US taxpayer has $40,000 of income and pays $6000 in taxes. A balanced UBI program would increase the average taxpayers taxes by an amount equal to the UBI. So the $40,000 of income would increase to $52,000 and taxes would increase from $6000 to $18000. It works out to about 15% increase in tax levels.
Yes, we'd try and reduce that income tax increase by getting money elsewhere, most significantly because UBI should allow us to decrease welfare payments significantly. But that would still contribute well under half of the $12K.
The numbers work at $1k a month, but they don't work for levels significantly higher than that.
And if UBI isn't balanced, then it will affect inflation, making it much less impactful.
I believe that $1k/month is a good figure for UBI. It's not quite enough to live on, but it can be in a shared-housing situation, and it can go a long ways to cover expenses if you have to quit your job due to an abusive boss or something.
A thousand dollars is enough to pay for theater class, three and a half semester worth. It is almost enough to pay for five months of personal coaching. It would definitely cover a voice acting workshop that I am going to attend.
Granted, some form of education are cheaper than other, especially those that can easily be self taught. I spent hundred of dollars on books and materials to learn electronics. Maybe I could spent less to learn the materials. Really, the hard part is actually spending the time and effort actually building circuits and experimenting.
If you're skilled and persistent enough, you could learn mathematics and other skills for very low cost. However, tutors and coaches are worth their money even though they are expensive, because they help demolish obstacles and get you unstuck faster so that you can progress faster.
A thousand dollars a month? Please, that's enough to pay for a lot of education like you wouldn't believe. It would make the money I spent on my continuous education look like a drop in the bucket. The difference is that I am not pursuing a degree from overpriced schools, but real knowledge and skills.
> A thousand dollars a month? Please, that's enough to pay for a lot of education like you wouldn't believe.
Alas, it would probably not be. People like to compare apples and oranges in discussions like this. UBI is such a game-changer that we probably wouldn't be able to predict how prices would react once such a thing is enacted. Look at the pandemic stimulus worldwide, and the inflation since.
If a lot of people had more money on hand, they would: 1) want to spend it; 2) prefer to work less (on average) so they have more time to enjoy spending it. Both of those lead to inflationary pressure, so it's unlikely $1000 in the new system would get you anything near what you currently get with it.
I've always wondered why we don't just nationalize our resources and use that income to provide a kind of UBI to residents, similar to what Saudi Arabia or even Alaska does (for residents who plan to stay long term)
Because the resource income is trivial in comparison with national spending. Most of the resources you might be thinking of are already nationalized and rented to industry through a competitive bidding process.
A lot of people have this weird cognitive dissonance that lets them understand a “partial UBI” is a universally guaranteed income that does not meet basic needs, and then that a “full ubi” is one that does; but then fail to understand that if it’s not full UBI it’s not UBI.
A universally guaranteed income that does not meet your basic needs is of course a thing. But it’s not a universal BASIC income. It’s a subset. The games people play on semantics is very strange
How far is it from meeting basic needs? "Basic" should imply very modest living, not even "normal" living standards.
For a living situation "basic" implies a shared space (family or otherwise). For food it would imply enough food to be healthy, but nothing about the form of food.
I think $1000/month/person probably is "basic" income. You can survive on that indefinitely.
(Healthcare is the other big expense, but I don't think UBI can reasonably cover healthcare, it's to complex and variable)
> I think $1000/month/person probably is "basic" income. You can survive on that indefinitely.
I think part of the problem is that people are assuming that you can and should pick a number for UBI that is sufficient for basic needs everywhere.
$1k/mo is probably not enough in San Francisco. But should our UBI be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs anywhere they'd like to live, or should it be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs if they're willing to leave the high cost of living areas and go out into the rest of the country where rent and food and transportation is cheaper?
Housing can be very variable, to the degree there aren't any reasonable options in San Francisco even if you have a lot of people sharing a space. I don't think basic food varies nearly as much. A 5 pound bag of rice costs a little more in San Francisco, but not much more. I think there's less geographical variability in cost of living (excluding housing) if you constrain costs to basic needs.
Also a UBI shouldn't have to facilitate living _everywhere_. Santa Monica is lovely. Should we arrange it so anyone can move to Santa Monica and be able to live there fully supported on their UBI?
I hadn't really thought about transportation costs, and am inclined to leave it out of UBI calculations as it doesn't feel like a necessity. But in a rural area transportation is necessary just to buy food, so I guess that adds some complexity.
One of the selling points of unconditional cash transfers is that they wouldn’t be a disincentive to work. That instead they would help quality of life. And indeed, in high poverty contexts, they don’t disincentivize work. But this result suggests that in the US at least, they do cause people to work less. This is only one study in one context, so I wouldn’t consider anything “proven.” But, it is a big study and a very bad sign.
I agree that we never had a real test and probably never will.
Another aspect that I think completely shifts the conversation and is often overlooked: duration.
If I am told I have X amount of money for Y amount of time, I'll plan accordingly.
If Y tends to forever, that completely changes my plans.
With some money guaranteed, maybe now I can go to college or a trade school. Long term is a possibility. If it's only there for a small amount of time, I'll focus on much more immediate issues.
Without this aspect, which is kind of un-testable, all studies are kind of useless IMO.
It's the same as asking people what they would do with additional time off. The answers will vastly differ if we're talking about a couple of days, weeks, months, years or a lifetime.
$1000 can be a difference between living in a shitty apartment 2 hours drive to work and a nice apartment 10 min walk to work.
I was working as a home assistant and learning C++, took me a year before getting a programming job this way. Could have been much shorter if I had $1000.
Sure, but rent will not increase by $1000 - most people don't rent, they will spend it on something else. Of course, need to build more housing, or learn to live more compactly - an average American occupies several times more floor space than most other people in the world.
But even w/o these levels we get inflation? How could we compare it to the recent inflation which has been labelled as "greed-flation" and "shrink-flation" ?
Nice is always relative to what most has, if you compare to 1700s any apartments would have been called nice, this is why UBI may not work as well as people think. When everyone has the same quality of life they take it for granted
Basically the city has some nice apartments and some not-so-nice. Paying everyone an equal additional amount of paper money won't give everyone the nice apartment, there are still only a few of those available.
$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....
One challenge is that people who must work full-time (or more) can't participate and benefit from free education. At the same time they are forced to fund this free education through taxes.
> It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work.
... should it be? Or should you have to save some of your basic income for a period to go to school?
If every year you got enough to live off and to be an enrolled student, I think the temptation to just be a perpetual student might be really attractive to some individuals, and not really valuable to society. Even from the yardstick of "how much do you learn", I think it's important to follow formal education with meaningful periods of trying to usefully apply what you've learned to real needs.
> I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal.
Every single time we see results from a study on something like UBI, someone comes out with this argument—you missed the universal and the basic! Yes.
With that stipulated, how would you propose to test UBI before rolling it out on a country-wide scale? Every test I can think of that isn't just "implement UBI" will either fail the universal or the basic part, and "implement UBI" will never get the political will until it can be tested on a small scale first. Tests like this are the best way we know how to do it.
If you want UBI then you either are going to need to figure out how to work with incomplete tests or solve the problem of how to test UBI without just implementing it. We're not going to entirely restructure our economy because some folks on the internet think that UBI sounds great in theory.
I think the issue is that we don't really want or need UBI. We need to take a step back and think of the goal. Is that to help people that need it most? We can start with something to try to achieve that. Then continue to roll that forward.
We could try an approach like:
People who make less than the poverty line pay no state/federal taxes.
Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) to bring you up to poverty line for last month.
Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) of up to $1000 or whatever would bring you to double the poverty line.
These programs would be automatic based on payroll tax filings and help the people who need UBI most.
Also, we'd slowly be able to evolve these further to handle all benefit assistance programs and save a ton of money.
Imagine if we gave everyone $20/mo. No strings, tax free, not qualifed by income. That obviously isn't enough to live on, let alone buy food. But imagine the infrastructure that would be universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society. We could find the balance. Maybe it's $1000, maybe it's $5000. Maybe another global pandemic happens and we need to dump an infusion into people's lives for a time. Just having the system would be powerful.
As a society, do we need to worry about where this money will come from? Or will there always be an inexhaustible supply that also scales up? Or could taking that money away from other parts of the economy possibly cause harm, to the point where the ubi would become unsustainable?
Do we as a society know where money comes from now? Could the current distribution of money be denying ourselves greater value? Is the current system sustainable?
> Do we as a society know where money comes from now?
Technically, yes. The only difference between money and an IOU is the formal paper trail (i.e. accounting). The paper trail tells where the money comes from. Granted, we as a society don't always follow the paper trail, which is perhaps what you are meaning?
What the parent means, though, is that money still needs a real, live person standing behind a promise to provide something in the future to whomever holds the IOU (money). Without such a promise, the IOU (money) doesn't mean anything. But who is offering to make that promise? Are you volunteering your services?
Interestingly, the UK is pretty advanced in terms of digital benefits infrastructure with its Universal Credit system, which works pretty much like a Negative Income Tax.
> But imagine the infrastructure that would be universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society.
What kind of special infrastructure is needed? Doesn't your government already have a system in place for sending tax refunds to its people? That's ultimately all your $20/month is.
One result they are missing out is that the income actually reduced overall employment compared to the control group, and ended up decreasing household earnings: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719
Even with a generous reading, it was an extremely expensive study. And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less? I think, for those who imagine AI taking a vast swath of jobs (like Altman), the aim for basic income is to get people working less but without this resulting social/work disengagement (whether AI will have that effect is a different matter).
This strikes me as such an out-of-touch idea right now.
Maybe in the distant future we do not need people to work. But we are currently dealing with the largest retiree population our country has ever had, and more money chasing after fewer goods and services nearly crippled our economy with stagflation. It takes two weeks to get a plumber right now in our area.
If you also hope to implement UBI nationwide, you need some expectation that it pays for itself with productivity gains. Otherwise it will all get inflated away into nothing.
It would also be nice if people could stay longer in the work force. The way I read the results, recipients had more access to health care, abused substances less and had more time to recover after work.
Having an hour less in the work week should be balanced against being productive for longer.
Yeah and what’s more you’re contributing more to society, whether or not you can measure it in money. You have some spare time and energy to help your family, your neighbors, the person you see once a week.
I want to live in a society where people have time to actually live.
Devil's advocate: why do you get to have what you want?
For almost all of human history, you had to work to survive. Working is living. And yet you want to not work? So all of the resources you will need, who is going to provide them? I'm sorry, but I'd rather I not work and you work to provide the resources I need.
> Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
Because significant portion of UPI proponents argue that it will promote working more and higher productivity. The typical argument is that it will remove barriers that prevent better worker-job matching.
A significant proportion that is not the majority? I think the vibe about UBI was always "people will work less and employers will have stricter competition when hiring employees".
hard to say either way without statistics on actual UBI proponents. I would argue most, but my opinion is also based on cumulative vibes from vocal proponents like Andrew Yang and random internet commenters.
> Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
Working less is not so bad, but their income (before transfers) also went down. That means they did not replace poorly paying jobs with better paying ones (or they did with net decrease), nor started a business.
The issue is that social safety net is meant for people who's income is seemingly too low. If the net effect is to decrease that even lower, then yes its a concern.
It's not a surprise to most people, but UBI proponents often explain the unworkable economics by saying it would make people earn more... or something.
I don't think realists really needed any evidence that normal people would love to quit their job and play computer games all day, but I guess this study wasn't for them.
> And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
Most people file taxes once a year, meaning they would get this payment once rather than monthly, which makes a huge difference if living on the poverty line. Similarly, many people making less than the minimum for filing [1] likely don't file their taxes. This was an issue with the child tax credit as well -- you want to get resources to the lowest-income households, but doing that with tax credits means you don't actually reach those households, meaning you still have to introduce new programs to reach those people [2]. There were proposals to make that tax credit into a monthly payment but IIRC they did not pass before the child tax credit was ended in 2022.
I understand the pragmatic barriers to onboarding or bi-monthly payments via NIT, but it still seems easier to overcome these barriers than institute a domestic UBI.
> And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
It all depends on how you tweak the numbers; in theory a negative income tax and a guaranteed income cost exactly the same amount. A guaranteed income of $1200 taxed at a marginal rate of 50% is just the same as a marginal tax rate of -50% on an income of $400. That being said, there are some pretty big negative externalities to a negative income tax, in the sense that it even further overburdens the tax system with knowing people's exact monthly income (assuming monthly payments), which is not-at-all straightforward for the poorest taxpayers whom presumably such a system would be designed to most help.
They are mathematically the same, depending on the tax curves.
A negative income tax doesn't mean you get -50% of $400, it means your income starts negative. So someone making $0 gets like $1000 back (say by paying 20% over -$5000).
Caring for loved ones is a tremendous value enhancement that is entirely missing in any study looking at income and profits. Someone who loves to cook cooking for someone that loves sharing a home cooked meal with the person that cooked it is entirely valueless in any such interpretation of income and profits being the sole measure for evaluating value. Delivery food services are the most valuable forms of sustenance in such measures.
So did these people decrease their earnings because they were able to do more of what they value the most? Is that a thing we should try to make more people capable of doing?
> One result they are missing out is that the income actually reduced overall employment compared to the control group
That’s not something negative or even a surprise. Of all the people on this planet, why do you think Altman payed its with its own money for this study ? That’s the goal of universal income : allowing people to work less because there is/will be less work to do.
As for decreasing household earnings, I’m not even surprised : most people would accept a decrease in income in exchange of the certainty of the income. You don’t need to save a lot if your income is guaranteed.
It’s not even a bad thing because as we can see in the results, global expenditures increased. One interpretation could be that people felt like they needed less money but that they also spent more. Overall it feels like a net positive for the economy.
in the future, maybe so, but decreasing employment is surely bad during a labor shortage: you do need workers for a functioning, productive economy.
the rise in buying power may look good by the numbers, but doesn't inherently better society -- consumerism doesn't encourage quality goods/services. take AI: it's a lot easier to replace human workers when they've quit, when the positions are already vacant. you don't need to provide on-par performance or quality service(s), just fill the shoes with slop
so they were more picky? I dont think that’s intrinsically good or bad, but it seems concordant with the finding in unemployment studies that a large proportion of unemployed workers who get a fixed period of unemployment payments end up finding a job in the last month when the payment is about to end. Which raises the question, should you make the period shorter to reduce financial burden of unemployment insurance on workers, or longer to allow workers to be even more “deliberate” about their employment choices?
I think something like this already exists in the U.S. It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit. Low income people may get a tax credit that could result in a bigger refund. Effectively, some people are getting money they woudln't be getting without working. It makes a lot of sense, imo.
True, but that part only makes a significant difference if the unemployment rate is quite high. At a time where restaurants have trouble filling their staff in low tip shifts, the salaries are closer to what the employer can pay without serious risk.
so it's a handout to companies. corporate welfare. probably no worse than currently - a lot of companies in the UK are subsidised via the benefits system because their employees can't afford to live off their wages.
Yeah - this suggests the simple explanation is true, if you reduce the incentive to work then people work less.
There is a lot of speculation that that's not the case, but it doesn't seem to really hold up.
This comes up a lot in lefty politics imo - similar to people arguing (erroneously) that increasing housing supply raises rents or reducing crime enforcement reduces crime. The simpler/dumber causality around incentives seems more true in all of these cases, the complicated second order theories fail to hold up.
I agree that something like a negative income tax would be cheaper with fewer downsides. But it would be spun as "subsidizing Walmart". You see that today when politicians criticize part time Walmart employees for still being eligible for benefits.
Imagine if some low wage employer could pay you $10 an hours and government throws in an extra $5. If the market clearing rate is $15 for an employee, giving a subsidy of $5 pushes the wage down to $10 (effectively $10). They could offer $15 (effectively $20), but then you have a misalignment of quantity supplied and quantity demand, which would result in too many applicants and having to select on non-economic terms (e.g. overpaid do-nothing internship going to the CEO's nephew)
> everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone
Working a job you don't like is a leaser evil than mooching off of your neighbors. The level of entitlement required to argue the opposite is absolutely mind boggling.
How many people have to work full time to support one able-bodied layabout?
UBI may make sense in the event of technology-induced mass unemployment, but folks won't tolerate it otherwise. The incentives are simply and universally too bass-ackwards for society to function. They're backwards for the idle (who will find it easier to cut costs than work), for new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely), for workers (who would rather rent a trailer and chill than work 40 hours a week and live in the 'burbs and drive a new truck), and for politicians (who will shamelessly promise endless increases in benefits).
IMO UBI is a litmus test for basement dwellers, unserious utopians and plain-old first-order thinkers.
The issue here is the layabout is likely that way not from his own doings. There are many people you think are normal and fine, but are some degree of mindfucked and just want to find peace, quiet, guaranty, safety, basically the tranquility of mother's bosom because they got kicked too hard too many times.
Those are (IMO) who are your likely layabouts, who need to salve bleeding minds. Depression is high, suicides and deaths of despair are high. There is always an exit from the matrix and people commonly call it selfish to take it. I do not agree with this sentiment. I am not on that journey myself but have known others who were; though, I am introspective enough to understand that often times we can play key roles in other peoples' lives and we really need to try and be there for support and understanding as much as possible. Quit assuming bad faith, or the worst intentions in people even if it's Nash. We have to try to maintain the mindframe that others are acting in good faith, or at least as good enough faith as [they think] they can while trying to survive.
Working a job that makes the world a worse place because you need to survive is the issue.
It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up arms in a factory that produces produces that people want, but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good thing.
A lot of people like cigarettes. The idea that no one would work in a cigarette factory because everyone would see it as morally objectionable and they could afford not to is preposterous.
Would you take a low paying factory job that creates an objectively addictive poison as a product willingly when you have other options? Do you REALLY know ANYONE that would? I'm not saying that number is in fact 0, there will always be outliers...
> new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely),
This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens, and their time spent not working is instead spent on improving their communities. I think that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making a billionaire slightly richer
Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do open source projects instead.
The second order effect of putting everyone in the workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no community support for people on the edge of homelessness, or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.
> This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens
Yes. The system incentives against it, yet and it still happens. Redesign the system so that it incentivizes for it and it'll happen way, way more.
The idea that the idle poor are running around "improving their communities is obviously bullshit. The poor already work fewer hours per person, and their communities are universally the most neglected.
> UBI compensates all work
Capitalism compensates work that someone is willing to pay for--i.e. work that consumers find valuable. UBI compensates "work" playing video games and sleeping until noon. Pretending that the latter is more moral than the former is positively asinine.
though if you do, it's useful to perpetuate the idea and it probably doesn't make much sense to discourage this, especially if you would not want to do it yourself.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" - Karl Marx.
It's not an inherent function of capitalism. If anything, Marx himself actually pitched communism as boosting overall productivity of society by putting bourgeois to work.
This stupid adage by Marx has to die. It never works.
For one, some people have extraordinary abilities, and will be pissed off if, in exchange for their extraordinary contributions, they only got the income "according to their needs", as defined by government. This basically takes away all the motivation to excel at something.
Also, the masses would be discontent because their perceived "needs" are much bigger that their actual ability to produce anything. This is partially remedied by capitalism, where the "greedy capitalist" basically forces them to work harder than they would out of their own free will.
I think you might be mistaken about the ratio of the average person's needs/abilities... a probing question is: do we really need telemarketers to continue to exist (just so people have jobs... and that's better that people receive unwanted calls... because?)?
Greed is greed and shouldn't be rewarded.
I otherwise basically agree with you... just that most people are basically able and society doesn't need to do things arbitrarily if there is a better (more direct) way...
We don't need to be in a constant state of production/consumption - we can take a break and still feed people. We throw out food if we aren't selling it because we'd rather let people starve than get a free loaf of bread... which really just stems from a lack of imagination and empathy.
Let's imagine a better world. Imagine and make it so.
But the companies use of telemarketers isn't a net benefit to society. If the company instead spent on product quality, warranty services, employee benefits, or charity, we'd see more of a net-positive impact on the world around us. Generally, companies spending money competing for market share through advertising only benefits specific parties, and only financially.
The goals and incentives (for companies) aren't currently aligned with our needs & problems (as a society). So a lot of resources get spent on things like advertising, that (in theory) could instead be spent on solving problems related to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, if the incentives existed or the goals were set differently.
In capitalism people vote with their own money: if there is a demand for some good or service it keeps getting provided.
Of course you might argue, that average person can be manipulated into buying things that are harmful to them, but if you want to prevent that there's really no way to do that efficiently other than turning the whole country into a totalitarian surveillance state. And you also need an elite, a group of people who are above the law because they are just smarter, and know better and therefore set the rules for lesser beings.
I was not at all advocating for Marx or that quote.
I'm just pointing out that it's largely a universal truth that if we want a functioning society with food and roads and electricity and houses and internet, a lot of people are going to have to do something they would rather not do.
The "greedy capitalist" is more about how the work is coordinated. We have a market-based system where work assignments are more or less voluntary where he who signs the checks sets the work. But I am not volunteering myself to going back to a manorial or subsistence agriculture society.
I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may now be in the 10th or 15th percentile (no idea if those numbers are correct).
Once you give everybody an extra $12000 a year, the median income is now $12000 higher. I'm sure there's still some benefit, but relative to others their position hasn't changed. Someone who's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the 5th percentile.
I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
With a progressive taxation, the gap between high and low income narrows. Low income people may not even notice a change in tax bracket, if any such thing happen, high income people will give back a substantial part of that additional income. I believe, up to 50+% in some US states.
Is UBI a necessary part of progressive taxation? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like that same thing can be accomplished without UBI. Am I thinking about that wrong?
I know what a progressive tax is and I don't believe UBI is a pre-req to be able to implement a more progressive tax structure.
I worded my response as a questions because this isn't an area that I have done a lot of research on and I'm not confident enough in my understanding to be sure of that. I'd rather ask a question than assert my uncertain belief.
It's also worthwhile to reduce taxation at the lowest end, as long as the extra taxes are used to provide basic human rights such as universal and comprehensive healthcare.
> Someone who's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the 5th percentile.
Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.
That said, this is basically inflationary pressure and we have a lot of tools to deal with inflationary pressure. It is a challenge, but I am always struck by how differently people speak about it in this context v.s. when average incomes rise because the labor market is doing better. On some level, average incomes going up across society is the most normal thing in the world for welfare state capitalism and is one of the challenges we are best-equipped to deal with.
> Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.
Absolutely, but I guess I don't see how just giving everyone money brings that floor up. Maybe I'm looking at this naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor is unchanged. I realize it's not that simple and that type of inflation wouldn't happen over night, but it seems like that's the direction it would head. Just looking at the housing aspect of it, it actually seems like the people who would benefit the most from UBI would be the people at the middle to upper end of the wage scale since they are more likely to own a house which means their housing costs are more fixed than someone renting.
To me it seems like we need some way to control the cost of basic needs otherwise it's just a constant race between the government raising UBI and the market raising prices (although, admittedly, it seems like the same argument could be made about minimum wage).
This is definitely not something I'm super well versed in though, so I might be looking at it wrong and am very open to people showing me what I'm missing.
If A is making $1 and B is making $1000, A has to survive on 0.1% of what the economy produces.
If A is making $1001 and B is making $2000, A has to survive on 33% of what the economy produces.
Even if inflation could be exclusive to basic needs, causing A’s costs and B’s costs to both rise by $1000, the economy now heavily incentivizes more competition around satisfying basic needs. All rent going up equally regardless of unit size means it’s time to start building or converting luxury apartments to multiple low income apartments.
That's super fair and I think you are absolutely right that it's an obvious question. Generally when people get more money for some reason the people who they buy from don't know it - but in this case they would know it! It would be foolish to ignore it.
I don't have a pat answer to your concerns, but I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it? Unless there's rent control it's allowed. The classic "efficient markets" answer is that providing housing does have underlying costs and, though people having more money does tend to lead prices to go up, sellers are still competing for buyers. At least historically, even in boom economic times, housing costs did not 100% stay even with rising incomes (which is just what this is).
That said, us housing has been getting worse for most people for a long time. House costs have outpaced inflation for 60 years[1]. Rents are even worse[2]. Reporting suggests this is now being made worse by highly concentrated rental conglomerates[3]. That is to say that the cost of these services is not tied to how much money people have to pay for them - your scenario where landlords just raise prices to new income levels is actually optimistic. There's also practical evidence that local factors and competition will lead prices to go down under "the right" local conditions[4].
So I think my answer is that your concern is based on an idealized economic model, but the actual trends US in housing haven't really been following the economic ideal for some time. I don't think all gains from UBI would be snapped up by raising prices, but like all inflation we'd lose some! Overall, to me, the weakness here is that the study doesn't show that many benefits for a ~40% (!!) increase in income. Which seems WILD. Just not what you would expect at all.
> I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it?
Answering as a landlord (I have one property I used to live in that I rent out), the reason I don't just keep raising rent is mainly because I like my tenant and want to be fair to them. Having had bad tenants in the past, a good tenant is worth their weight in gold.
More relevant to your question though, the other reason is because I know there's a ceiling after a certain point where the number of people who have the money to rent my property starts to shrink and the time it would take to find a new tenant would cost more than the amount of money I would make by raising rent.
If rent is $2000/mo and raising it by $100/mo means it's going to take an extra month to find a tenant, then I need to believe that that tenant is going to stay for at least 20 months to break even.
If everyone all of a sudden has an extra $1000/mo I could be fairly certain that my tenant won't be priced out if I were to raise rent a few hundred dollars.
Thanks - I hadn't thought to mention the risk of trying to raise rent but it's a good note. I was mostly getting at how the conditions in the UBI scenario ("everyone could pay $1000 more in rent if I insisted") is often true now and the 1:1 rent raising wouldn't happen under UBI for similar reasons that it doesn't happen now.
I also think people tend to under-rate the softer side of landlord / tenant relationships[1]. It's better to have a tenant who you get along with and who cooperates with how you want to rent a place. It's nice not to fight with your landlord. There's some economic value there too, but it's hard to quantify. I'm kind of interested in housing interventions that ban large companies from holding too many units of housing. It mostly "puts a ceiling" on how much profit one company can derive from many rental units, but actually I'm not sure I care - and trying to maximize the human connection between the person who owns the building and the people who live in it seems sensible.
[1] To be fair, when push does come to shove, a reason to under-rate them is the landlord looses some months of rent while the tenant becomes homeless. It pushes people towards strategic thinking.
>Maybe I'm looking at this naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor is unchanged.
Natural competition is supposed to keep that in check: Supply and demand dictates that in a free market (which UBI does not implicitly change), a landlord with a vacancy will try to offer a better deal than their peers who also have vacancies, with the direct incentive of getting units filled.
The idea is that some money (a rented unit provides more income than a vacant unit does) is better than no money, which incentivizes landlords to get units filled and making money instead of not making money -- in large part by competing on price. That's how supply and demand works.
In a free market, landlords can't really say in unison "Hey, I heard everyone has an extra $1k every month! So guess what: Your rent just went up by $1k! Suckers!"
I mean sure, some might say that -- or at least try to do that.
But the way it is supposed to work is that one of their peers goes "Yeah? Well, rent with me! I only raised rent by $700!" and another goes "Hey, I've got lots of vacancies! My rent only went up by $400!" and this rinses and repeats until the ultimate lowball of "Rents are up? Not here! Save $50 compared to last year!"
That's not to say that the concept is without flaws: Collusion can happen[0], and collusion fucks up pricing in an otherwise-free market.
But this kind of collusion is already criminalized, and criminals will both exist and collude with or without UBI.
(In an ideal reality free of criminal acts, rents must increase a bit if for no other reason than a properly-profitable landlord's expenses must also increase a bit: UBI isn't free to fund, and the haves must fund it more than the have-nots do. That's unavoidable. But it also can't be an increase of precisely $1k/month or whatever a UBI might hypothetically be: That's hyperbolic nonsense even with criminal landlords colluding to victimize tenants.
Fortunately for the concept of UBI in this context, landlords are kind of small potatoes here in a sea of others who also need to extract their pound of flesh to pay for it.
This kind of broad-scale wealth redistribution can be good, I think, but it does not happen for free.)
> I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the crazy rise in college tuition. student loans should be private (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy). Alternatively, public institutions shouldn't charge for tuition. The current state makes absolutely no sense.
Imo the biggest problem with student loans is that they don’t assess the credit worthiness of what they’re paying for in any way. Student loans and mortgages are the only two times that most consumers access huge lines of credit on very good terms. But unlike mortgages (which are already prone to creating the occasional credit crisis), student loans don’t assess the value of the “asset” they’re underwriting. You can’t get a $100,000 mortgage on a house that’s only worth $50,000, but you can get a $100,000 student loan on a degree that’s worth exactly $0 in potential future earnings. If you assessed student loan applications on that basis, the student debt “crisis” goes away.
> student loans should be private (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy)
While I mostly agree, how do you prevent basically every student from going bankrupt immediately after graduation? None of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students so it's logically the best course of action if students loans could be discharged.
I'm not convinced you would need to. "Students" cease to be students immediately after graduation, so they wouldn't really be "students" anymore, right? So "none of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students" doesn't really seem accurate, does it?
Even reading it more charitably, students and recent graduates still probably would like access to credit cards, or the housing rental market, or whatever. Bankruptcies stick with you for 7(?) years, so you'd also have to think about whether you'd be locked out of the mortgage market, auto loan market, what-have-you, while your peers are able to make those moves.
Bankruptcies are also like a whole legal thing with a judge and everything, so I doubt we'd see every single student getting their whole debt discharged instead of a judge just being like "Didn't you, like, just spend all this money on getting the training required to get a high-paying job? Seems like if you plan on working anytime soon you should make some payments."
Also lenders can just like, be more selective or restrictive in other ways? Higher interest rates, requiring more established co-signers, etc etc etc. Honestly the strangest part of this is that we've normalized saddling 18 year-olds with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
Bankruptcy stays on your credit report for 7 years, but doesn't lock you out of the credit market. Someone with a high paying job has relatively easy access to credit regardless of recent bankruptcies. At most it effects them for a year or two, but new graduates aren't really making any big purchases using credit immediately after graduation anyway.
That's part of the risk. It will downsize annuity present/future values so as to reduce the windfall payout of bankruptcy vs its credit score and process costs. It will help keep college cheap: if what they teach is worthless then students should welch. The investor has more money, let him eat the friggin' risk! The student is otherwise forced to delay family for a decade and take a 67%+ cut in fertility rate as a result, a really bad outcome if we don't let students welch.
Maybe put the school on the hook in some way too, forcing it to actually screen for talent (which would absolutely murder DEI lol), that way investor isn't totally SOL if the school was the useless party.
Wow, I just made education affordable again by murdering any safety in financially speculating in it. Change the game, change the outcomes!
> It will help keep college cheap: if what they teach is worthless then students should welch.
Just the opposite, presumably the best colleges that product the highest earning graduates cost the most, those high earning graduates would be might more incentivized to start over than someone with a lesser degree because at least they'd be part of a high paying field and immune from needing to use credit.
>Maybe put the school on the hook in some way too, forcing it to actually screen for talent (which would absolutely murder DEI lol), that way investor isn't totally SOL if the school was the useless party.
You're so wrongheaded there, I don't even know how to get you on the right track, but companies, and schools, with so called diversity hires do better overall. Schools already screen for talent and the ability to graduate, DEI initiates just have them look a little harder in an expanded pool.
If you make student loans dischargeable and private, wouldn't lenders would tighten up and only give loans to people with good odds of repaying the loans? IE, people from middle class+ could still get loans, but how about the smart kid from a very poor family? Wouldn't they be too risky to give a massive loan to?
There might need to be some regulations made so that lenders should discount family background, but only consider grades/earnings potential/etc.
But on the plus side, this should theoretically bring tuition costs down as there won't be effectively unlimited capital for tuition. It also encourages potential students to consider more carefully whether getting a degree makes sense.
Perhaps Pell Grants should also be expanded in eligibility (to make it so that more poor, but motivated kids can get access to higher education).
The goal of these changes would be to:
- Reduce the market distortions that are created by giving out federally backed student loans (reducing or at the minimum slowing the pace of growth of tuition costs)
- Reduce the burden on taxpayers by eliminating public student loans
- Makes it so that kids don't get stuck with student loans that are a drag on them for life, at worst, they'll have to deal with bankruptcy
Potential downsides:
- Reduces number of people studying potentially useful/valuable to society degrees that don't have much expected monetary return
- Potentially reduces average level of education in the population (could be untrue if it also sufficiently reduces tuition costs)
Note that this was a time-limited study where participants knew they would only receive money for 3 years. Personally, I feel like this leads to different behaviors than if people believe they will receive the income indefinitely.
This is bordering on an unfalsifiable (hence religious claim). If it's only going to work if the money is in perpetuity and then, when that doesn't work, we require the money is in perpetuity for an individual and his descendants, and then, when that doesn't work, require the money is truly perpetual with no hope to end it, then there becomes no way to determine whether or not the policy works in any meaningful way.
Do we really need academic studies on this topic? When Republicans cut taxes on the rich, it is not like they are making sure they have academic consensus on their side.
We know welfare works. It is pretty simple. People need to eat, they need shelter, and a few other basic necessities. When they fall on hard times, not having those things can make it infinitely harder to get back on their feet.
Our current welfare system is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare and has a stigma attached to it. The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop. No fuss, no stigma. They are going to need that money to survive anyway, so might as well just give it to them rather than forcing them to suffer the indignities of poverty.
Public policy is a messy business. But I find it odd that this topic is so controversial as it only took me a few minutes of ruminating on it before realizing how good of an idea it is. Maybe it is because I have had a brief encounter with poverty myself, and ever since my anxieties around finances, access to healthcare, etc.. run deep. Or maybe I just realize that a ton of people were born into poverty and due to no fault of their own are now stuck in it. Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database. The fact that we could just flip a few bits and instantly make the lives of so many people better, boggles my mind why we wouldn't try that.
You don't need anything to implement any policy. You just need someone with power to implement it. There's multiple ways of doing that. One way is to do so democratically, in which case you need to convince the population to vote for you. This can be done through religious means (I.e., appeals to a greater authority or set of morals) or -- ignoring metaphysical concerns -- evidentiary means (i.e., appeals to science and studies). The authors of this study are clearly trying to do the latter, because they want to convince you to vote for these policies.
The other way to implement it is to stage a coup, gain power by sheer force, and implement it that way.
In either case, you don't need an academic study.
> Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database.
Except money does grow on trees (and in supernovae and a few other places). Money is not a number in a database is a unit of net work owed by someone else to you. No work can be accomplished without sunlight and trees.
Money has to come from somewhere, because there's only so much work being done.
Highly recommend Debt: the first 5000 years by Graeber if you're confused.
> The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop.
UBI is typically not envisioned as means-tested (hence ”universal”).
But in practice, the funds are going to have to come from somewhere. Most likely from taxes. So assuming it comes from income taxes, and assuming those income taxes are progressive, at some point along the income scale your UBI is cancelled out by an increase in taxes. It would be a bit silly to give someone $12k/yr in UBI if they are making $500k/yr in income and we would need to increase their taxes by $24k/yr to pay for the program. Just tax them $12k/yr.
This is why I like NIT. It is much more transparent about how the benefit scales with income. At this point if anyone mentions UBI, I just mentally substitute that with NIT as it is a much more practical and easy to understand implementation.
The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably less than in the past. You can easily live from the "Bürgergeld", but the labor market currently takes a third hit after Covid and Russia's full scale invasion on Europe: lots of companies, especially labor intensive services like bars and restaurants, have serious trouble to hire staff. The only way is to offer higher salaries – which, in turn, needs to be paid by the customers. This makes goods and services less affordable for everyone, but especially for those relying on government money...
>Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine.
It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
>but especially for those relying on government money...
Yes, those are the real victims here. Who else could be victimized by working full time, so that other people don't have to work?
Maybe the real victims are the people who have to work full time and are suffering from the increased cost of living?
> It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
Oh wow, the exact thing people have been saying would happen has happened. Turn's out Quasi-UBI is a drain on tax paying citizens after all. Amazing.
German here, our country is broken beyond recognition due to 40 years of terrible political decisions independent of party or political side.
I cannot even name one thing that is not broken beyond belief. The conservative government has added the debt ceiling to our Constitution requiring a 2/3 vote to change it, thereby making investments like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US utterly impossible. However, they are needed for dozens of reasons, not just the collapsing infrastructure which will directly impact our economy.
Conservatives, Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats have all completely failed at running this country for 40+ years. Russian-supported fascists AfD are obviously not an alternative.
We are coasting on the gains, relationships and industries established before 1990. This is where our standing and wealth comes from and we are simply riding on that high until it pops.
I can go deeply into all of the troubles but Ill keep it simple: the state of the military is entirely representative of the state of ALL other sectors. That should be relatable to non-Germans. I am not exaggerating for karma, my deepest worry is the condition of the real estate / housing market. This is material for a complete shit show, it honestly scares me.
>We are coasting on the gains, relationships and industries established before 1990. This is where our standing and wealth comes from and we are simply riding on that high until it pops.
And more and more of that is either going bankrupt or is being outsourced to China. Whole sectors are step by step becoming non-competitive. Manufacturing, which has been the most important wealth generator for the lower middle class, is going away. Engineering is only relevant if you can innovate, which for many, many reason doesn't really happen. In Germany a very experienced Software developer makes a pittance compared to what you can in the US with much less experience, even before taxes.
Of course it doesn't really help that much of the population is not particularly inclined to do anything engineering/scientific/manufacturing related and actively looks down on that.
>my deepest worry is the condition of the real estate / housing market
Honestly, I am "optimistic" that multiple big manufacturers will fail before that, together with their suppliers.
> I cannot even name one thing that is not broken beyond belief. The conservative government has added the debt ceiling to our Constitution requiring a 2/3 vote to change it
Good. You'd see a government without this restriction spend more money on pension benefits faster than you'd think possible.
> thereby making investments like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US utterly impossible
This is not true. Germany has a spending problem, not a tax income problem. Never before have we had as much taxes in the Governments pockets as we do now.
> Maybe the real victims are the people who have to work full time and are suffering from the increased cost of living?
If this was a genuine concern there wouldn't be so many people skimming off the top of every nation on the planet. We're surrounded by parasites and you're picking on people running calorie deficits for some reason.
>If this was a genuine concern there wouldn't be so many people skimming off the top of every nation on the planet. We're surrounded by parasites and you're picking on people running calorie deficits for some reason.
Wrong. The only way to go hungry here in Germany is by choice.
The people "skimming off the top" are not the ones paying millions upon millions in taxes. It is those who are to lazy to work, because they and their family get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income. If you are able, but not working in some capacity, you are the leech and millionaires are paying for your leeching.
> because they and their family get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income
This means it’s not UBI, and that’s kind of the whole point here. With UBI this welfare cliff wouldn’t exist; if you work, you still raise your income. That means, unlike the current German system, UBI still incentivises people to work to increase their income/wealth.
Of course actively disincentivising people to work will cause them to not work. That’s just rational behaviour, you cannot blame anyone for that.
>get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income.
This very rarely ever happens by accident. It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushing for a pay raise.
This way they can leech more of the surplus value of their labor.
This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work, because more people working depresses wages and more people working allows growing the economy.
If people don't want to work, they have to pay the leeches and they have to pay more to get people willing to work. Your economics are insane.
>It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushing for a pay raise.
No, it incentivizes them, because there are fewer people working, meaning the supply of labor goes down. At a constant demand that means the price for labor goes up. Literally economics 101.
I've read plenty about how every working family struggling on benefits is a crack dealer too, written in media that is exclusively owned by the economic leeches who contribute little to no economic value but "who pay millions in taxes" on their unearned income:
This is a conspiracy theory. There is a labor shortage already, so the people “who pay millions in taxes” would be able to earn much more money if they could find more motivated workers.
>> Who else could be victimized by working full time, so that other people don't have to work?
As when employees work full time so that shareholders can be given dividends? Part of me would rather a cut of wages go to support thousands of people on welfare who "don't have to work" rather than that cut go to a handful of billionaires who also "don't have to work". Our economy already supports an array of non-working people (retirees, disabled people, passive shareholders). So I'm not going to get hung up on the principal. We broke that glass long ago.
Your sarcasm is out of place. I criticise the scheme because it’s not sustainable, not even for those that get the handouts. It’s not even solving the supposed problem. This is important with regard to the posted article, because that effect cannot be observed on small scale experiments that do not restrict labor supply on a societal scale.
That is the problem with these programs. You will never get full buy in from the population unless EVERYONE benefits from it. Just look at social security and Medicare if you go to cut that it is political suicide.
Forced large scale redistribution is just theft, honestly. The value proposition of heavy taxing is no longer met, people here (in Germany) no longer receive fair benefits for their taxes. Infrastructure is failing.
Society and economies aren’t zero-sum games. It usually costs less to prevent someone from robbing you by giving them some welfare money - boom, value created out of nothing and everyone is better off ;-)
While there are areas where the "Fachkräftemangel" (lack of skilled laborers) is actually real, the problem for gastronomy is the minimum wage, which is ~12 Euros. Why choose being a service worker or part of the kitchen brigade in (especially small) gastronomy (where, often, all you get is only slightly above minimum wage), if there are other, easier choices which pay basically the same?
As someone who was service staff as a student, I completely understand that, to be honest. It doesn't help that many restaurants just fired their whole service staff during COVID, even though there are other instruments like "Kurzarbeit" (where the state gives you welfare, and you temporarily only work few hours or not at all, if no work is available at your place of labor) - obviously people find new jobs in this case and aren't available anymore.
Is this true in Germany? As an American, I was always of the impression that in continental Europe, tips were as a rule a much smaller part of compensation.
Not as extreme as in the US, but it's still true. My brother nearly outearned me during our studies, I was a working part time student and he worked tables on the Weekend.
> as as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine.
More like as far as I can imagine.
Basic Income has to be provided to everyone, not just the ones who don't have a job. That's the whole point. It's not that the amount must be sufficient to live off of, that can be worked out later, but it has to start with everyone on board and that's what makes it "Basic".
That's something that most programs don't even try to explain, and something ive wondered about - how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor?
If you're affecting very small percentages of the population, the impacts seem minor. We've seen this with analysis on raising minimum wage to about $10/hr. Most people make over that amount (or work in excluded roles), so the impact is small. Raise it too much too quickly, and some industries experience issues due to costs passed on in their products/services, and inflation can become detrimental to the people at the bottom.
I wonder how this sort of thing will work out with something on a nearly universal scale - Social Security. To keep up with inflation, we need higher payouts. To keep the program solved, we need more revenue. This can be achieved with more workers, but relies on ever expanding population to cover the prior generation. Or it can be achieved with higher earning workers, which generally requires higher prices which potentially drives inflation, or though higher consumption (not very competitive on the global market due to cost of living, so not likely). Or we can raise the payroll taxes to cover the payouts.
Anything besides the higher output/consumption is likely to result in higher costs to consumers and drive inflation. More money being in more people's pockets also means more competition for constrained resources, also driving inflation.
UBI creates inflation. I think anyone trying to deny that amounts to denying it because they really want UBI, and so they need it to not have that bad effect, but it does. You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.
The theory is that productivity increases will in fact offset it. One way to prevent an increase in money causing inflation is to correspondingly increase the value generated by the economy. Some economic theories, including the current dominant mainstream one, would suggest that if you have that sort of productivity increase you need to increase the money supply to avoid negative impacts brought on by deflation.
One of my several major problems with the idea is I see almost no one trying to figure out how to actually bind the productivity increases together with UBI. Even if I stipulate for the sake of argument a perfectly functioning UBI system working exactly as the advocates propose, as gracious as I can possibly be, it is still a fragile system. Droughts, wars, asteroid strikes, volcanos, bad crop years, supply chain disruptions, normal economic variations including recessions, these things all happen. The productivity excess will shrink at times, but, no politician under any political governing scheme could reduce the payouts, and after long enough on UBI, the hypothetical paradise it produces full of wonderful artists and musicians and programmers creating text editors rather than CRUD apps and people just enjoying life also produces an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet when there is a disruption... but they're still there with their hands out.
>no one trying to figure out how to actually bind the productivity increases together with UBI
Because we not only figured that out, but already implemented this several times in practice. Productivity decreasing until there is nothing to eat, and then people dies from starvation (for some reasons they can't live without food)
I'll be honest. You had me in the first half, but then: "... the hypothetical paradise it produces full of wonderful artists and musicians and programmers creating text editors rather than CRUD apps ..."
Who willingly endeavors to write text editors in 2024 when acme(4) exists?
I jest. More seriously though, if the measure of one's value to society is in their ability to crank out CRUD apps, I'm appalled. I want more dishwashers, more plumbers, more framers, more joiners, more cooks, more babysitters, more stonemasons, and the only way any of that kind of hard labor is sustainable is if there's a cushion to fall back on to recuperate. Bodies break. They break more catastrophically when the damage is continued and sustained over time.
I want my girlfriend to feel free to take on domestic work full-time with the knowledge that, no matter what, she'll be paid for it and that her domestic labor contributions, as informal as they are, are valued monetarily without my having to make up the balance. Likewise, I want that there in case I myself want to take up those domestic responsibilities for a while.
These are two cohorts that literally cement the foundation of society, let alone our trade system, not a cavalcade of keyboard cowboys wrangling Ruby on Rails. I want UBI for them because, without them, the entire project literally crumbles.
The UBI problem, and the problem in your post, is you're engineering starting from what you want, and then assuming that there must be a solution to get there.
You have to start with what you have and build from there.
This is a subtle point and it may take some meditation and thought, possibly ever over some months or years, to understand what I mean. But if you are an engineer, life will hand you opportunities to see what I mean. You can't write down a list of requirements, then assume that exact solution exists, and then burn for it full speed. You must always start with what you actually have and the options you actually have.
The thing that makes perfect sense to me, but you would consider ironic, is that while you may accuse me of this and that, lack of imagination, lack of dreaming, lack of belief, whatever, my way builds better worlds and your way builds failures. I don't follow this path because I don't also see the temptation to build dreamscapes and live in them, I follow this path because it's the one that works.
I am, in fact, not an engineer; I trained to be an actuary. (Though, I guess if one squints enough, the operations research electives look like industrial and systems engineering.)
I consider UBI less an engineering exercise with requirements that feed into the engineering method and more one of ratemaking and claim severity against an entire trade system. My only goal is to put a dollar amount on a loss event (and get some quantification of how many loss events occur over time while we're not looking). What anyone does with that is up to them.
>how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor?
We have the entire 20th century, when many countries tried exactly that. Production is decreasing, labor participation decreasing, good availability decreasing. Mass famine, millions of deaths from starvation. Governments have to decree force labor to overcome famine and totalitarian oppression to avoid revolutions and protect the progressive achievements of general welfare. Last part centralizes authority even more and gives the government tools to remain in power no matter what.
>Or we can raise the payroll taxes to cover the payouts.
This is exactly where the spiral of death begins. Hieger taxation (when there is welfare) - less work incentives - fewer workers - less goods availability - you need bigger welfare share, so even hieger taxes. And so on until people have literally nothing to eat. Not once or twice, always.
That's not exactly correct. The bürgergeld was planned to be a kind of basic income, but that part of it was axed. The conditions that apply move it to exactly the same social security money that existed before.
There is also statistically no existing move from work to existence supported by bürgergeld. It's just propaganda when that's claimed.
Your argument ignores the fact that people do not "need" to demand a full market wage if they already get UBI. Indeed, it is often claimed that state subsidies to the poor are in effect subsidies to their employers.
The situation exists where any low income person gets subsidies from the state, e.g. through cheaper housing, free schools and healthcare, etc. People are still incentivized to work even when they get these subsidies. UBI merely extends such subsidies to include food and other daily expenses.
That's probably because the second order effects of UBI are obvious to anyone that's ever had a job. So you have the people that know the obvious, and the people that want to hide the obvious from the few that don't get it.
The covid handouts and raised unemployment benefits gave a sneak peak to anyone else that was blind.
Even things on the user market were on shirt supply and with high prices. In California the effective unemployment rate was something like $23+.. why would anyone sell their old lawn mower for $50 if you're getting $4000 to stay home? Why work painting houses for $4k a month when you got $4k to sit home. Magically everything cost double or more instantly... I wonder why.
It isn't a very good critique, as it assumes that the only reason people work is to avoid starvation.
People will work very hard to increase their income levels above that required solely for basic needs (i.e. UBI levels), see pretty much every non-minimum wage employee.
I think why people work at the jobs they do is a lot more complicated than that.
Many people do work to avoid starvation PLUS maintain whatever level of standards they've become comfortable with.
But the reason IMO people work non basic jobs is because if they are already forced to work their entire lives to avoid starvation, they might as well optimize. If I have to commute, and maintain a car, and be there for 40+ hours a week, I might as well invest in getting the most out of that as possible.
But once people have enough money to maintain their comfortable lifestyle for the rest of their life, many do retire.
Why does that logic not apply to those on higher incomes?
Have a job with a free-market rate of $100/hr? Why not work for only 30 hrs a week?
Also, UBI levels are never proposed at $3k/week ($150k/yr), but rather at about $250/wk ($13k/yr), or only 2-3 hours of work per week for the $100/hr guy.
I know you really want to believe it, but this is bs: look at inflation statistics in Europe and you'll see that the effect you're imaging doesn't exist. There's no excess inflation in Germany compared to everywhere else in the EU.
Also Bürgergeld is $500 a month for an adult, which is very far from "You can easily live from the Bürgergeld". Survive maybe but definitely not "easily live".
The labor market issues in Germany like in most Europe have a demographic origin, when there's not enough young people you cannot hire them.
> Also Bürgergeld is $500 a month for an adult, which is very far from "You can easily live from the Bürgergeld". Survive maybe but definitely not "easily live".
You're leaving out a ton of information there. The 500 Euros is after everything else has been paid for. There's also lots of benefits like Kindergeld, money for each child you have.
False. They are not living in "absolute misery". The highest germany court has established this in the past. German welfare is among the highest in the world. I also know this personally, I have lived on the past (even more strict) alternative to "Bürgergeld" for the first 18 years of my life.
German welfare guarantees you food, an apartment for you and your children, public schooling, funding for school projects and even includes money for social gatherings.
To portray this as "absolute misery" is false to the point of being dishonest and you're being unfair to billions of people living in pitiful states of poverty.
I've personally given benefits to these people, and I can assure you that you live in a fiction built for you by propaganda on TV.
Are these people better than those in Gaza? Sure but their life is still insanely hard.
You said you lived this way for the first 18 years of your life, then ask your parents how much sacrifices they made so you can feel this comfortable. If you never skipped meal because you could not afford food, be sure that your parents were and just hid it from you out of dignity.
> Are these people better than those in Gaza? Sure but their life is still insanely hard.
They are better off than 95-99%% of the world's population. Put this into perspective. I've seen incredible poverty in this world. Our people are largely ungrateful and have lost the point entirely.
> You said you lived this way for the first 18 years of your life, then ask your parents how much sacrifices they made so you can feel this comfortable
You don't know my situation. There were little sacrifices to be had. I also never said it was always comfortable. But it was dignified and we had everything we needed. There was not a single day where we had to skip meals, and I remember filling out the forms for school trips myself. To live always comfortable is not the point of welfare.
> I've personally given benefits to these people, and I can assure you that you live in a fiction built for you by propaganda on TV.
Seeing as you're swatting away my opinions and personal experience as propaganda, I don't think there is any way to get a fruitful discussion out of this. I don't think we should lower welfare benefits. I just think we're being nationally out of touch with reality.
> They are better off than 95-99%% of the world's population
Who themselves are miles ahead the entirely of work population that ever lived on this planet before XXth century, but that doesn't make their life any better, does it?
> Our people are largely ungrateful and have lost the point entirely.
You aren't entitled any gratitude from people, especially not on the basis that there lives is being made a bit less miserable because of policies you oppose. Maybe I would deserve it slightly more, because at least I'm voting in favor of these policies, but I don't think anyone owes me gratitude whatsoever.
> To live always comfortable is not the point of welfare.
I'm not arguing the opposite, but you did insist that these people lived comfortably. This is obviously BS and I'm glad to see you're retracting it now.
> Seeing as you're swatting away my opinions and personal experience as propaganda, I don't think there is any way to get a fruitful discussion out of this. I don't think we should lower welfare benefits. I just think we're being nationally out of touch with reality.
Whatever your opinions (which BTW are as valid as mine, by definition of being opinions), you started this conversation with factual lies (which, on the opposite, isn't OK) about people “easily living” on welfare. I give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not make this lie on purpose by yourself, and given that this is a recurrent trope of right wing politicians on TV, it's fair to assume that's where it came from.
> Who themselves are miles ahead the entirely of work population that ever lived on this planet before XXth century, but that doesn't make their life any better, does it?
Eh. I‘d argue the average dirt poor Indian right now isn‘t far off from your 1800‘s Chinese rice farmer.
> You aren't entitled any gratitude from people, especially not on the basis that there lives is being made a bit less miserable because of policies you oppose.
This is untrue and I‘m not sure where you’ve made this observation. I wholly support these policies for German people. I have voted for a lot of them in the past and I‘m not a conservative. I love my country and the people in it and I voted progressive in every election I could.
Which is why I‘m getting angry when people spread straight lies that our people on welfare here in my country regularly go without food or live in awful states of disarray and poverty. We provide so much to people and I‘m proud of it. But I‘m also realistic in the way that we can‘t provide this level of welfare to just any outsider, and that welfare is not supposed to provide a life of leisure activity.
> I'm not arguing the opposite, but you did insist that these people lived comfortably. This is obviously BS and I'm glad to see you're retracting it now.
Nowhere in this thread did I state such a thing. I merely said they and their children their basic needs met, which is true. I‘m sitting in my office right now while my partner - an elementary school teacher - fills out forms for the kids in her class with parents on welfare, for them to be provided with any needed materials and money for overnight school trips. I love this. This is good. I didn’t have the privilege when I was a child. How are these people struggling exactly? They live in Munich, the most expensive city here, in one of the most expensive parts of the city, on welfare.
> , you started this conversation with factual lies (which, on the opposite, isn't OK) about people “easily living” on welfare.
Prove where I said anything about easy living. Quote me. It‘s you who is lying and I‘m getting annoyed by this conversation.
> I give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not make this lie on purpose by yourself, and given that this is a recurrent trope of right wing politicians on TV, it's fair to assume that's where it came from.
Nice resort to ad hominems. Note that I have spared you these baseless attacks. I would have expected you to keep this standard up as well. How disappointing. Maybe consider that differing opinions are not always propaganda you might read in the Bild, but sometimes come from people‘s real experiences.
I came out of this system and fought my way out of it. You‘re denying me not only these anecdotes but you and other posters in this thread also argue against information that can be easily found on our official webpages for welfare, all because you assume I‘m some kind of far right idiot. I‘m a bit sad for you honestly.
> Eh. I‘d argue the average dirt poor Indian right now isn‘t far off from your 1800‘s Chinese rice farmer.
Look at life expectancy and infant death, it's night and day. People really tend to underestimate how world changing antibiotics and vaccines really are. And most of those “dirt poor Indians” have mobile phones too!
> How are these people struggling exactly?
You really need to build up empathy and open your eyes to the world, look at them, listen to their stories and you'll hear the struggle. Here are a few examples from the top of my mind: the constant fear of being sanctioned because they did something deemed “wrong” by the administration, is one easy example. The contradictory requirements they need to meet. The struggle to get those benefits in the first place (try interacting with the administration when you're not fully literate, or barely speak German). The lack of any financial mattress in case of trouble, which makes even minor issues critical (an example which happened recently to someone I know: you need to comply with rules in order to get your benefits, but one day your old car break and you cannot afford to repair it, but you also cannot comply anymore without it and risk losing money). It's about having no food left in the fridge 3 days before you get your benefits and cannot buy new before it comes in. Everyone has their story, and they are depressing. But to accept that those struggles are real, you need to make the effort of looking at it.
> Prove where I said anything about easy living. Quote me. It‘s you who is lying and I‘m getting annoyed by this conversation.
I've explained that in another comment: I just mix you up with another user whom I was responding to when you replied and took his side, so I mistakenly assumed you where the original guy.
> Maybe consider that differing opinions are not always propaganda you might read in the Bild, but sometimes come from people‘s real experiences.
You are the one asking “how are those people struggling?”, it's easy to assume people don't struggle when it's not directly visible. You are the one arguing that something which exists (poor people being poor and having constant difficulties) doesn't in fact exists. In a way you are telling me that the people I've witnessed, don't exist!
So yeah I blame propaganda because the reasonable reaction to someone telling you “this thing exist” isn't to say “no it doesn't exist”. The line of reasoning “I've never seen that so it must not exist” is not how the human brain works in general. Even flat-eathers don't believe the earth is flat because they've never seen it round, they do believe that because of a socialization process: other people told them it was false, and so they started questioning it and liked the idea.
> all because you assume I‘m some kind of far right idiot. I‘m a bit sad for you honestly.
I never mentioned anything about you being far right. You see, you too are being confused between different HN users;)
> You really need to build up empathy and open your eyes to the world, look at them, listen to their stories and you'll hear the struggle
I do and I have empathy. Everyone has their own struggles. I see no reason why welfare should reduce struggle to zero.
> the constant fear of being sanctioned because they did something deemed “wrong” by the administration, is one easy example.
Bürgergeld was introduced to deal with these restrictions and even if it's now appended form is still less restrictive than Hartz IV ever was.
> The contradictory requirements they need to meet.
I'm afraid this is just German inefficiency and beurocracy in disguise.
> you need to comply with rules in order to get your benefits, but one day your old car break and you cannot afford to repair it, but you also cannot comply anymore without it and risk losing money
I would be very interested in these rules, because last time I googled, the Arbeitsamt supplies a car if you need it with up to 15k Eur in value.
> It's about having no food left in the fridge 3 days before you get your benefits and cannot buy new before it comes in.
Again, we have food and soup kitchens. I've been there myself. You just have to get over your internal self inflicted shame. There is nothing to be ashamed of when you're going there and the staff there were nothing but friendly, if a little stressed last time I went.
> Everyone has their story, and they are depressing. But to accept that those struggles are real, you need to make the effort of looking at it.
I know those struggles are real. But more often enough, we do have ways to deal with them.
> You are the one asking “how are those people struggling?”, it's easy to assume people don't struggle when it's not directly visible.
As I see it, most of those struggles are either self inflicted due to shame or rise from missing knowledge on how to navigate the system when you're in need.
> In a way you are telling me that the people I've witnessed, don't exist!
They certainly do exist. But there are solutions for almost every one of their problems. You just have to work together with the people at the Arbeitsamt, which many don't.
No one has to go hungry or cold in Germany and I stand by this firmly.
> Bürgergeld was introduced to deal with these restrictions and even if it's now appended form is still less restrictive than Hartz IV ever was.
How is that supposed to go in favor of your argument?
> I'm afraid this is just German inefficiency and beurocracy in disguise.
It is, but it's not just Germany. I know Germans love to complain about their bureaucracy like they love to complain about Deutsche Bahn, but it just shows their lack of foreign experience…
> Again, we have food and soup kitchens.
I address that in the other thread: only if you're lucky to have one nearby.
> I know those struggles are real.
You suggested the opposite in the previous comment so which is it?
> As I see it, most of those struggles are either self inflicted due to shame or
“Lazy poor people who can't just hire a layer like anyone else”
> No one has to go hungry or cold in Germany and I stand by this firmly.
“They just happen to chose to go hungry or cold because they are dumb”
That's just not true. Bürgergeld does not cover real rent costs for example. There is ceiling that is unreachably low. Heating is also not included,so in no way is everything else covered.
To others: This thread is full of propaganda from the neoliberal and extreme right like this. Don't believe a single bit, they do not describe the state of the country nor how the policies work. It is a common wave of propaganda though and maybe interesting from that side.
Your statements are not true. Heating is fully covered and Bürgergeld pays way more for rent than the average student can afford. Maybe it’s different in your city, but in mine, Jobcenter is very generous when it comes to paying rent.
It's just not. Heating is only covered when its costs are deemed to be reasonable. It's just not fully covered by default. It's nice when they cover it for you without problems, but it's not a given. Plus there are limits, like not covering parts of the costs if your apartment is deemed too big.
I could also have picked electricity costs as a different cost of living that is not covered at all.
> That's just not true. Bürgergeld does not cover real rent costs for example.
Yep. That's where "Wohngeld" comes in.
> This thread is full of propaganda from the neoliberal and extreme right like this
This is not true. I live in Germany. I have family members in the system on both sides. I read news from all isles.
Fact is, our social welfare state is unmatched compared to any other country. Nowhere else will you get welfare benefits this high. Our welfare benefits are so high, the sudden drop in benefits reduces benefits from earning more money by insane margins. There is a good calculation example here [1]
Wenn Sie Bürgergeld erhalten, haben Sie keinen Anspruch auf Wohngeld. Allerdings ist Wohngeld eine vorrangige Leistung. Wenn Sie dadurch Ihre Hilfebedürftigkeit beseitigen oder vermeiden können, können Sie einen Wohngeldantrag stellen (ab dem 1. Juli 2023 sind Sie verpflichtet, einen Wohngeldantrag zu stellen).
For a more full picture have a look at https://www.ifo.de/publikationen/2024/aufsatz-zeitschrift/lo... (though the ifo is not always trustworthy). There exist specific scenarios where there is not enough money remaining when you pick up work with a better salary. Even I know scenarios like that, for example when getting unemployment benefits, all money earned at the side is lost, which is just stupid if you wanted people to slide into work (through being self-employed for example). That should be a percentage, so that you have more at the end when completing a freelance project for example, instead of having worked for nothing.
What makes it rightwing propaganda is taking these cases and claiming that it would explain why people don't want to work anymore - which is not true, neither the connection nor that people don't want to work. And to combine it with the statement that the welfare benefits are high, when they are not - the problem, if there is one, is that earned money reduces the benefits 100%, instead of on a sliding scale. It's not the amount, as in 99% of scenarios being on state welfare completely sucks in Germany, it's the scenario of not having enough money for food at the end of the month, being scared to heat in the winter and each unforeseen bill a mayor crisis.
Also, it is also not okay to not mention that bürgergeld is still combined with sanctions. If not taking up (usual shitty ) work it can be lost, or missing a summoning, etc. Being in that system is thus highly stressful. Those sanctions were supposed to go away, instead they were made harder. Thanks SPD.
If these sanctions did stay in place… then why is chancellor Scholz (SPD) currently rallying to reintroduce them?[0] of course, he’s a populist, but that doesn’t make your statement true.
> What makes it rightwing propaganda is taking these cases and claiming that it would explain why people don't want to work anymore
I still don't agree it's right wing propaganda. Bürgergeld is just one part of a larger picture of why people don't want to work anymore. The reality is that social welfare in its entirety is too close to what you can earn with low skilled work, wages are too low and benefits are too high and cut off too suddenly.
> It's not the amount, as in 99% of scenarios being on state welfare completely sucks in Germany
Again, I can not confirm. I have lived on state welfare (Hartz IV) for my entire life before moving out of my parents.
> it's the scenario of not having enough money for food at the end of the month, being scared to heat in the winter and each unforeseen bill a mayor crisis.
This is not true in my experience. I don't know where you're getting this information from. Heating costs were always covered unless you heat like a maniac and unforseen bills are not happening. Where should they? Your apartment and car fixing costs are covered. You can read more about this here: [1]
> Also, it is also not okay to not mention that bürgergeld is still combined with sanctions. If not taking up (usual shitty ) work it can be lost, or missing a summoning, etc. Being in that system is thus highly stressful. Those sanctions were supposed to go away, instead they were made harder. Thanks SPD.
Why shouldn't they take up shitty work? It's not undignified. My mother stocked shelves for Aldi. She worked gas stations. She did community work. She couldn't hold a job for long. It's hard work and that's okay. You don't have the right to dodge shitty work just because you don't think it's gratifying. It's also not as stressful as you make it out to be. You have to remember, you're still getting so much stuff for free there are millions of people who would die for that chance. A little stress still makes it worth it.
Yes, you need to be smart with money. That's okay. Welfare should not make for a live of comfortable spending. But people don't live in a state of desolation. The point of welfare is to enable people who can't work to live a dignified live. Not a comfortable one. We're just so out of touch in Germany, people on our welfare system can't see their incredible privilege.
> This is not true in my experience. I don't know where you're getting this information from. Heating costs were always covered unless you heat like a maniac and unforseen bills are not happening. Where should they? Your apartment and car fixing costs are covered. You can read more about this here: [1]
That does not fit together at all. The article is covering a legal decision from 2020 where one woman forced the jobcenter to cover car repair costs. So before, it was not covered. So you just did not have a childhood in the system where stuff like this was covered.
> Why shouldn't they take up shitty work? It's not undignified.
That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
> The reality is that social welfare in its entirety is too close to what you can earn with low skilled work
So which other social welfare systems than Bürgergeld are you aiming at here?
> That does not fit together at all. The article is covering a legal decision from 2020 where one woman forced the jobcenter to cover car repair costs. So before, it was not covered. So you just did not have a childhood in the system where stuff like this was covered.
I did, but we did not experience this specific case. I lived in a small town and the Government paid for my public transport costs. They do provide a car as well if you need it for work or for educational purposes. They also pay for transport if you're sick and need to see a doctor. Of course, if you're on welfare with a car without a need for a car, they won't cover anything, which is fair.
> That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
I've not said this once.
> So which other social welfare systems than Bürgergeld are you aiming at here?
I'm asking again, are you even German? There are lots of other opportunities which we do provide. We pay for your Apartment with Wohngeld, even if you do work and don't earn enough. We pay for your healthcare costs. We pay for school supplies, trips and education costs for children. In my city, there are a lot of subsidised offers like free access to public pools. You have access to free TV and internet if you're on welfare. You can get a free social carer who will manage your expenses, if you yourself are not able.
I am not trying to be rude, but you're again discussing from a point of severe misinformation and you're lacking crucial knowledge about how our system works. You've been corrected multiple times in this thread for spreading misinformation, like heating costs not being covered by the government.
It's the other way around. You seem to take your information from the AFD or FDP bubble and are thus thoroughly misinformed in how the system works and what effect it has on the people under it. I did not react to your question for my nationality as it's ad hominem. Be assured that I know german politics and social systems perfectly well.
You ignore which limits and obligations are placed under the bürgergeld system, and how stiffling the bureaucracy is. For example, yes, Schuldbedarf is covered, but only up to an amount. Depending on the school that can be not enough, and then be a big problem. You also implied (and even said directly) that aids like Wohngeld and Bürgergeld can be combined, which is wrong.
> They do provide a car as well if you need it for work or for educational purposes
I just linked you to an article showing that they did not.
>> That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
> I've not said this once.
It is impossible to read your comments without seeing that this is what you want to say. You also directly agreed with comments saying the same. I quoted you already on that.
> Fact is, our social welfare state is unmatched compared to any other country. Nowhere else will you get welfare benefits this high. Our welfare benefits are so high, the sudden drop in benefits reduces benefits from earning more money by insane margins.
It's very funny, because people with the same political opinions as you in my country are absolutely positive that this is the case for my country instead (France).
And in practice they are pretty similar (as are many European systems unsurprisingly, we all draw inspiration on each other) and as someone who knows the French social system fairly well I can assure you that the trope you hear from right wing politicians on TV is nothing but lies.
Both can be right in their own way. I'm not saying we should get rid of our welfare. I'm just saying our people are missing the point. It's incredible privilege to live here. You think they would get the same welfare in the US, in China, Ghana or Russia? Think again. They should be grateful is what I'm saying.
No that's not what you're saying, you're saying that they live easily and have no incentive to work, which I'm arguing against. You also said this lack of incentive to work is causing inflation, which I'm also arguing against.
Now I agree with you that even though their live is still tough, they are still very lucky to live in Germany as opposed to many other places on earth.
But that wasn't the topic and you moved the goalpost.
> No that's not what you're saying, you're saying that they live easily and have no incentive to work
Well you‘re free to quote me on that. I haven‘t been saying this at all.
> which I'm arguing against.
No, you’re arguing for falsehoods. Posters here are stating that things that are covered aren‘t and that people on Bürgergeld live in abhorrent poverty, which is demonstrably untrue.
> You also said this lack of incentive to work is causing inflation, which I'm also arguing against.
I haven‘t. Again, please do quote me.
> But that wasn't the topic and you moved the goalpost.
No, the topic was that you (among others) think people on Bürgergeld starve, are in dire need of heating and live in depressed states for lack of funding. These are lies. You‘re lying. I’ve no idea why.
You're right I mistook you and nkmnz from whom you defended the original argument.
> and that people on Bürgergeld live in abhorrent poverty, which is demonstrably untrue.
It's only untrue if you define “abhorrent” as worse as everywhere. But that's not a good criteria because then the entirety of the world population today is affluent by even 1800 standards, and most European people in 1800 were themselves in a very good situation compared to Paleolithic humans. So of course people can survive with much less but that doesn't mean these people are suffering. It's as saying to someone with a missing foot that he's OK since others have lost both legs.
People living on social welfare are definitely struggling and only ascetic people would put themselves voluntarily under such a standard of living. And evidently pretty much anyone claiming it's not a harsh life isn't willing to live with so little.
> think people on Bürgergeld starve, are in dire need of heating and live in depressed states for lack of funding.
Skipping meal is routine, and mental health issues are indeed a problem for those people. You are the one lying to yourself.
> It's only untrue if you define “abhorrent” as worse as everywhere
> So of course people can survive with much less but that doesn't mean these people are suffering.
I‘d argue that as long as you‘re surviving entirely on someone else‘s money without being forced to work, you can argue for my point. Think about this: Never before in history did you have the chance to rely entirely upon the effort of others for your basic human needs. In almost no other country on earth can you survive with most of your needs met just because you happen to live there, even if you‘re not born there. This is insane privilege.
> And evidently pretty much anyone claiming it's not a harsh life isn't willing to live with so little
Nope, sorry. You‘re saying this from a privileged western perspective.
I‘m not comparing humans of the past, I‘m comparing it with the huge majority of people living on earth, right now. A person living on German welfare is so far removed from the average poor Afghan farmer, people in Favelas living in poverty , Ethiopians living under warlord rule or even the average poor person in the US they might as well be royalty. And again, welfare isn‘t supposed to provide an entirely struggle free life. It‘s supposed to have you meet your basic human needs. We give our people so much more than that. Public schooling, free access to public pools, additional housing money in cities, free internet for people on welfare, and a car. It’s delusional if one thinks that‘s still not enough.
Skipping meals is not routine, that‘s untrue as well. We have soup kitchens here. I’ve been there myself as a poor student.
> Think about this: Never before in history did you have the chance to rely entirely upon the effort of others for your basic human needs. In almost no other country on earth can you survive with most of your needs met just because you happen to live there, even if you‘re not born there. This is insane privilege.
Let's flip it upside down: never before[1] in history could you be bared from earning your food from your own work, and same for housing. That's the entire reason why people need welfare: there's no berries or roots to harvest, no game to hunt, no fields to farm, no vacant lot to build your house on with the help of your family and friends. All of this is behind the control of the gatekeepers who own the means of subsistence. The modern world is a prison in that regard.
> Nope, sorry. You‘re saying this from a privileged western perspective.
No, you misread me: barely nobody with your or my standard of living would voluntarily adopt this lifestyle. You act as if the ability not to work was a luxury that made all this worthwhile, but the truth is almost nobody ever voluntarily leave the wage-slavery state to take advantage of this luxury. Why that in your opinion?
> I‘m not comparing humans of the past, I‘m comparing it with the huge majority of people living on earth, right now. A person living on German welfare is so far removed from the average poor Afghan farmer, people in Favelas living in poverty , Ethiopians living under warlord rule or even the average poor person in the US they might as well be royalty
As I said in another thread, you cannot compare struggle between regions of the world or time periods, because all the poor people in the world today have access to things even royalty couldn't dream about. Infant death in Afghanistan (45/1000) is comparable to the level in Germany in the 50s and is roughly a tens of European infant mortality until the beginning of 19th century. Even in royal families, child death were consistently a terrible problem for millennia. And that's a problem that's almost non-existent in today Afghanistan. Same for food, as famine as disappeared almost everywhere in the world and people in Favelas have access to food in a diversity and quality (both in taste and in food safety) that would make aristocrats from the past in awe. Does that mean that Afghan farmers and people in Favelas are not struggling by your definition?
> Skipping meals is not routine, that‘s untrue as well. We have soup kitchens here. I’ve been there myself as a poor student.
Please read the massive literature about how many people refuse to go there even when it's close to their home (it's not always, especially in suburban or rural places) because they're “worth more than this”.
> It‘s supposed to have you meet your basic human needs. We give our people so much more than that. Public schooling, free access to public pools, additional housing money in cities, free internet for people on welfare, and a car.
You fail to realize how almost all of these (that is, everything except access to public pools) can be basic human needs in modern societies: schools are a no-brainer of course and I really don't understand how you can put it in your list, but so is housing. Cars and internet connection are only necessities because we shaped the world around it, but here's the world we live in: internet is basically mandatory for many government-related stuff and so are cars when you don't live in cities. Locking people out of the normal world isn't a rational move no matter how “morally good” it sounds.
(Also, since I can't find it easily on the web, does welfare in Germany genuinely provide access to a car? That sounds really clever actually, because the lack of mobility is a huge blocker for people to get back to the job market once they've lost access to a car here in France, and we are subsidizing people who are practically stuck without opportunity to get a job which is a terrible policy).
[1] at least not before the “enclosure movement” in Britain in the early modern period, where this madness came from.
> Let's flip it upside down: never before[1] in history could you be bared from earning your food from your own work, and same for housing. That's the entire reason why people need welfare: there's no berries or roots to harvest, no game to hunt, no fields to farm, no vacant lot to build your house on with the help of your family and friends. All of this is behind the control of the gatekeepers who own the means of subsistence. The modern world is a prison in that regard.
This is a false equivalence. There are odd-jobs now like they were in the past, with much better benefits. There are two classes of people on welfare: Those wo can't work and those who could but don't, for whatever reason. The first class couldn't work hunter or gathering jobs in the past and the second class would be forced to do so out of necessity. The modern world is not a prison for these people, but instead provides a cushion for our nation's weakest. These people wouldn't have had the opportunities you state. They would have just died instead.
> No, you misread me: barely nobody with your or my standard of living would voluntarily adopt this lifestyle.
I agree entirely. 95% of the world's population do not have our standard of living. Which is why they try to migrate into the west. Even European countries with the lowest standards of welfare provide lifestyles and opportunities that seem like luxury to poor people from all over the world.
> You act as if the ability not to work was a luxury that made all this worthwhile, but the truth is almost nobody ever voluntarily leave the wage-slavery state to take advantage of this luxury. Why that in your opinion?
You are correct, they don't and that is not my opinion of European natives. But people leave the state of real slavery and spend their entire life savings with hopes to cross over into the West. Europe will have to protect the standards of welfare like Denmark already does, if we want to keep benefits up to standard for the people who are already here.
> Does that mean that Afghan farmers and people in Favelas are not struggling by your definition?
Of course not, they just struggle differently.
> Please read the massive literature about how many people refuse to go there even when it's close to their home (it's not always, especially in suburban or rural places) because they're “worth more than this”.
That struggle is entirely self-made and quite frankly, not the problem of the Government. Opportunities are readily available. There is no shame in going to a soup kitchen. I had the same sentiment in the past, went there, and dropped any prejudice, because I was hungry.
> You fail to realize how almost all of these (that is, everything except access to public pools) can be basic human needs in modern societies
You would think, but this even the richest country on the earth doesn't provide good schooling to poor children.
> internet is basically mandatory for many government-related stuff
This made me laugh. It's still Germany we're talking about.
> Also, since I can't find it easily on the web, does welfare in Germany genuinely provide access to a car
We do. More often than not, if the Government deems that you don't need a car, you're granted free public transport. I've made use of this system. It was fine.
> because the lack of mobility is a huge blocker for people to get back to the job market
I'd wager the largest blocker for people to get back into the job market is that wages haven't kept up with welfare costs. There is an incredibly sharp drop off point for welfare benefits. For most people able of only unskilled labor, there is a loss of money if they start working at minimum wage level.
We have failed our immigration efforts because of a couple of factors, one of which being the availability of welfare benefits. I know how this sounds, but it's true. Compared to other European nations, for example, only about every fifth Ukranian refuge has found work here. Poland, which does not provide a lot of welfare for refugees, has seen a working rate of 70% in the same group. This problem is twofold however, refugees by and large benefit from unskilled labour and manufacturing, work which is rare to come by in Germany.
I'm not saying we should lower benefits. The only possibility I see is an increase of wages, which by and large isn't really possible in Germany; our infrastructure and global economic competitiveness is declining. The job market is in a dire situation right now and jobs opportunities are getting less available each day. Germany is in a catastrophic state right now and there's no solution. We have a fast aging population, rising inflation, housing, and food costs and too few workers.
> You would think, but this even the richest country on the earth doesn't provide good schooling to poor children.
Interesting to see how the topic you know the best (from your GF as I understand it) is exactly the one where government isn't doing enough. You see what I mean by TV giving you wrong impressions on topics you're less familiar with …
You‘re really going to make your point with an Article from 2007 of a mentally ill man that didn‘t even answer his letters from the Arbeitsamt? He didn‘t even apply for aid. Also, you never have to go hungry in Germany. Anyone can go to a Suppenküche and get meals for free.
Your other article is from 2022, the middle of the Ukraine war which caused an incredible explosion in heating costs. There is no mention of welfare there. Even then, if you actually read the stats behind it, Germany was still in the top 3 EU wide by a far margin. Also, as per the Statistisches Bundesamt, the people polled gave self assessed answers in these polls. There is no information to be found on the severity or degree of how many funds they were lacking, or even what „enough heating“ is supposed to mean. Bit disappointing to be honest.
These articles do not support your point at all. What even is your point? Are you even German? You‘re discussing from a point of severe misinformation. I really don‘t get your agenda here.
Given the full thread, you claimed both things here:
>> It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
> Oh wow, the exact thing people have been saying would happen has happened. Turn's out Quasi-UBI is a drain on tax paying citizens after all. Amazing.
The first one is not my statement, but a direct quote from the top poster.
The second comment makes no statement about it being free and easy. Just that UBI money is being largely spent on leisure activities. It also is a drain on taxes.
Nowhere there do I talk about easiness or inflation - at all. On the contrary, you‘ve been alerted of your easily disproven statements multiple times in this thread and not just by me. Let‘s keep being civil about this though.
As others have pointed out [0], the summaries have a much more positive spin than the accompanying paper [1].
The paper's abstract:
> We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leverag-ing an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.
I think UBI is a horrifically bad idea. However, I don't think good OR bad results from studies like this are remotely relevant. It's like testing air pressure by patching 1% of a hole. The effects from testing a subset of the population could be drastically different from the effect when rolled out to the entire population.
If you were to hand out $1k a month to everyone in my area an immediate result would likely be that rents would increase by somewhere close to $1k a month.
Everyone needs somewhere to live. Everyone wants to live closer to where they work and where there friends and family are. Housing is in limited supply. If everyone had more purchasing power, then everyone's going to collectively bid up what they're willing to pay for housing simply because they can.
This is the basic uncertainty I have about UBI, and I've never heard an argument against it that went step by step and explained how that wouldn't happen. It seems intuitively like it would. In response, I've hear the equivalent of "don't worry, they've thought of that already, and the math still works". Maybe, but I'd feel a lot better if somebody could walk me through it.
- At a macro level, if a program is "paid for" i.e. revenue neutral, it does not result in inflation (at least in aggregate).
- UBI/Negative Income Tax (NIT) is not a handout to literally everyone, only the unemployed and lowest income folks will actually net money. Anyone with a modest income or larger will likely either see no changes to their net income or even a reduction in net income (due to higher taxes to pay for the program).
- Assuming a UBI of $1k (just making a number up, but it gets tossed around a lot), you would only get that full amount if you were unemployed, so that means you are pulling in $12k a year. Someone making $12k a year isn't really going to be renting an apartment by themselves. They are probably going to crash on a couch, live with relatives, or maybe rent a single room.
- As you go higher up the income ladder, the UBI phases out. I am also just making up numbers here, but maybe the phase out starts when you make $1k/month and stops at $3k/month. So someone making $12k a year in income would actually get $24k/year with UBI, but by the time you are making $36k/year you get $0 UBI. There are not a lot of areas in the country where you can rent apartments on these incomes. The places where you can do that, housing is probably not in as much demand and will likely not suffer from much if any inflation. So again, even if you are making a small income and bringing in some UBI, it will be designed to phase out long before someone could afford a one bedroom apartment in a high demand area.
- And I think a nice feature of this type of program, is UBI would actually help even out the demand imbalances between VHCOL and LCOL areas. No one living solely off UBI is going to be comfortable in SF or NYC. But there are a lot of regions in our country that have minimal job prospects and could desperately use some revitalization. UBI would go a lot farther in those areas and would create some monetary inflows back into those regions. That in turn could reduce some of the housing pressure on the VHCOL areas (although I am not sure it would be a huge effect).
It is worth mentioning that I assume most proponents of UBI are also acutely aware of the housing crises. To solve that, we need to build more housing. For the reasons listed above, I don't think UBI would cause much housing inflation, but even if it did, the solution to that problem is to build more housing, not to forgo welfare programs.
Thank you. Is what you're describing what is commonly referred to as UBI? It sounds like a different formulation to me. Most of the time I hear about UBI, the emphasis is on it being universal—everyone gets it, not just people living in poverty. That's where the intuition problems arise: if everyone you are competing for real estate with has more money, why wouldn't the cost of real estate increase?
I think anyone who has thought deeply about the topic recognizes that NIT is probably the only practical implementation (if you search this thread it gets mentioned a lot). There are the MMT folks that think you could finance UBI with deficit spending, but I think the recent bout of inflation we experienced has them on their heels.
At the end of the day, if someone is making $500k/yr and we give them $12k/yr in UBI, that isn't really going to move the needle for them. And from a practical standpoint, we are probably going to have to raise their taxes by a bit more than what they are getting in UBI to pay for the program. So it is kinda pointless. NIT solves this. And as an added bonus NIT can be implemented by the IRS, eliminating the need for another bureaucracy (although some UBI folks suggest that the social security admin can handle things, but I would argue that we should get rid of social security and just have a bigger NIT for seniors).
I still consider NIT to be "universal", because everyone would qualify for it. You do not need to apply for it. And it will kick in automatically when you need it. A lot of our current welfare programs are a bureaucratic nightmare. There is an entire industry of non-profits that exist solely to help people navigate that mess. A lot of people don't get the help they need because of this, or because they don't like the stigma of being on welfare. NIT/UBI eliminate that, so that is why I consider both to be "universal".
I agree, in my opinion, a common misconception I've seen is people saying wealth isn't zero sum. It can be created from thin air, but as long as there are needed and scarse resources (housing, maybe medical, maybe ivy league college), the market will adapt to consume more of the wealth.
So wealth can be created but it makes everyone else slightly poorer in different ways
The post you responded to leaves out that supply of housing can increase - in the US, we stopped building to meet demand decades ago and are only in the last few years showing signs of reversing that trend in some major metro areas. We also have a "missing middle" of housing density that can be further built in.
At the margins, more people would have more ability to try to work around the market power of landlords. More time for political advocacy to rollback NIMBYism, or loosen zoning, or to build their own home, or to make an additional purchase that makes a marginally cheaper rental more acceptable.
The whole point of UBI is that everyone gets the money.
When you give a select few extra money they can do things that they otherwise wouldn't. When you give everyone money the value of the money just decreases.
Negative income tax (NIT) solves this. At this point, when anyone says UBI, I just substitute NIT in my head. It is really the only practical implementation of a UBI scheme.
Further, if a UBI-like program is funded with new taxes (or cuts to existing programs), it should have a negligible impact on inflation. It is only when you do deficit spending that you risk inflation.
Good points. I think NIT would cause some inflation though as the cost for some things is related to the geography so kind of like what we saw with the pandemic some people would change location so they could afford a better lifestyle and end up driving up the prices of things in other locations. But maybe then they could base the amount on wherever someone is a resident however I’m sure this would be gamed. Maybe a state issued debit card for NIT could solve this though or banks could be required to pass transaction details to government. This could possibly assist government in information gathering for tax compliance.
I think a major feature of a UBI/NIT would be to make it entirely location independent. There are tons of areas in our country that are economically depressed, largely due to a lack of jobs. These areas typically have low cost of living, so someone on UBI would be able to live a lot more comfortably there than they would in a high cost job center.
And this in turn would provide some monetary inflows into those areas that could help revitalize them. A lot of these areas are occupied by seniors living off of social security. An influx of younger folks with UBI checks would help balance things a bit better.
UBI represented as a progressive tax system would be so wildly different from our current brackets it would be qualitatively different. Some brackets would be negative.
"negative brackets" is a truly great idea and would help many affected by poverty.
but that's not what adherence to UBI is about. UBI is about chasing an impossible utopia and burning ourselves in the process so that we have greater net inequality.
Stick to the plan. Call out anyone who tries to make UBI work by watering it down from our idealized end-goal as nay-sayers. Clutch to random hypothesis'.
It's the only way we can bludgeon them through democratic or revolutionary means.
If you were to hand out $1k per month to everyone in a country that has vacant housing in places where there are no jobs, some people would move to and revitalize these places.
Completely devastating results for promoting free money. 1k a month and the "benefits" are some minor lifestyle changes.
No impact on health. Biggest spending beverages. Slightly less time spent working. Some people start budgeting (presumably to figure out how to spend the money). And black people start businesses.
There are 300M people in the US. Giving 1k to each every month is 3.6T a year. And the effects are miniscule. With 3.6T you could do a lot of things. Just reversing the trend of obesity would be a major improvement for the lives of millions.
People in that study were receiving a lot more money, relative to typical local incomes. But it seems like they used it quite differently. I think there are major differences between poor people in rich vs poor countries.
That is a common misconception. No serious UBI proposal would be that expensive.
UBI is not about free cash to everyone. It's about reforming basic welfare benefits and income taxes to prevent welfare traps.
The "U" part is about making basic welfare benefits automatic and unconditional. You don't have to apply for them, and you don't have to do anything specific to qualify for them.
The "B" part is fundamentally a tax reform. Everyone gets the automatic welfare benefit, but some common tax credits and deductions would disappear, as would the lowest tax brackets. In the US, the 24% federal income tax bracket might start at $0.
For low-income people, the biggest change would be lower effective marginal tax rate, as they would only pay actual taxes. For medium incomes and above, the main change would be that people would have to calculate their taxes in a different way.
The necessity of a tax reform also means that testing UBI properly is difficult. A $1000/month benefit with current income taxes would be more money for low-income workers than an actual $1000/month UBI.
With effects this small UBI is clearly not something worth doing.
The 3.6T are for everyone getting an additional 1k a month. Which is exactly what the study tested and which had negligible effects. If the effects of 3.6T free money are negligible, then spending less on the same thing is obviously more negligible.
I used to support UBI but after seeing the US stimulus money get socked away into savings and the stock market, leading to rising prices and inflation, I no longer support it. I think all it will do is raise the cost of nearly everything and those that couldn’t afford the basics still won’t be able to since they’ll be more expensive.
I understand where you're coming from but my perspective is that the two aren't directly comparable. The stimulus money came at a time of fear, and a time when people were primarily stuck inside. It was also known by all to be limited to just one or a couple of payments.
All that combined meant for those that didn't have an immediate need, it was effectively like getting a small bonus from work - putting it in savings or an investment made a lot of sense. I also know several friends that were only able to pay rent or bills because of it.
That is different than if people who need it were given a base source of income that was predictable and long term. I don't think it would just dump into savings then - it would get spent on a new car, or rent, or to pay off debts.
I don't think it matters where it gets put in terms of inflation. What we learned from the stimulus is that taken in aggregate, the population became less price sensitive because they had more money, and sellers felt the increased money supply. This allowed prices to rise. I don't see how UBI doesn't create a similar outcome, but I'm happy to review a paper or something that shows possibly how after an extended period it levels out. I'd imagine in a similar vein if you deleted overnight Social Security prices would fall because the money supply would be impacted so severely.
And then businesses start competition for the customer with pricing pulling that inflation down. No one will start new business or start adjusting existing in context of stimulus money to make prices competitive because they know this spike is just a temporal glitch. Business was rather interested in raising prices to get more in the face of supply shortage. Showed good corporate profit numbers.
Stimulus checks are nowhere close to ubi from person's and business perspective, I would not extrapolate observations from one to another.
I argue against this in that I don't think anyone was acting with such precision. This was an aggregate effect of money supply increasing dramatically. There would no doubt be a spike in prices upon the rollout of UBI, but maybe it would level off over time. My fear is that it would raise the water level permanently and the new price baseline would negate the benefit of UBI.
I don't see how UBI can work, on a nationwide scale it means everyone got x% more money and the market would adjust itself accordingly by raising prices?
Also UBI is funded by taxes, which if applied to middle class they will vote against you. And if applied to companies, they push it down on the customer, making everything cost more (and therefore negating the UBI effect).
What probably would be more effective for society would be improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you will and free yearly health checkups.
UBI is generally not metered by "%" but some flat quantity of money, whether nominal or real. That is, like a "head tax," but...negative.
In that common formulation, it would compress consumption by the entire tax+benefit base, that is, everyone would move towards median consumption by some amount, keyed to the magnitude of the UBI, if funded by any kind of proportional taxation (including a nominally regressive proportional tax, like consumption tax/VAT).
Politically, it has tough problems: 18% of the population [over age 65] already has a "MeBI" in the form of Social Security that they can vote to increase, and 22% of the population is below the age of 18, and can't vote. So that's 40% right there. Of the remaining 60% in their working years that produce the output split among themselves and that 40%, quite a few would rather not be compressed towards median consumption: the voting population is shifted higher in the consumption deciles, and people are not often so disposed to think they might find themselves luckless in the future. There's a thicket of "tax expenditures" that can form a "MeBI" for the electorate at the upper-half, like the mortgage interest deduction.
If we look at the difficulty in gaining electoral support in splitting consumption to the benefit of minors (thus, future labor) to even things out a bit, in the form of the semi-recently expired expanded child tax credit, we see the magnitude of the political problem.
Personally, I prefer to see UBI as tax reform to avoid crazy wiggling in effective marginal tax rate. But there are many reasons why it's unlikely that the electorate would see it that way, or approve of it even if they did.
Some of those taxes are already being paid. We have a lot of social programs that, for what could politely be called "political reasons", include extensive administration whose primary function is gatekeeping and means testing. Often, the administration of those programs costs substantially more than any money "saved", leaving aside that it also has a very high false positive rate, excluding people who actually should have received it. But there is a political faction that would rather see government burn a billion dollars just to make sure a tiny fraction of that isn't paid to someone who didn't "deserve" it. To quote https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... , "the policy choices available to them impact the user experience of fraudsters and legitimate users alike. They want to choose policies which balance the tradeoff of lowering fraud against the ease for legitimate users to transact."
Eliminating entire programs and the massive administrative overhead of those programs, and replacing them with something that merits the label "universal", is much more efficient.
Also:
> on a nationwide scale it means everyone got x% more money and the market would adjust itself accordingly by raising prices?
This is assuming the injected money has zero multiplicative effect on the economy, which is very unlikely to be the case. By way of example, since we're on a site created by a startup accelerator: Many, many people have said that UBI would be a massive boon to the startup ecosystem, by making it possible for many more people to safely try to build a startup without as much personal risk.
Analyses vary, but some analyses have suggested that UBI may be a net benefit to the economy. At the very least, economic boosts provided by UBI substantially offset its cost. That's in addition to the offset mentioned above of replacing existing less-efficient programs with UBI.
> improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you will and free yearly health checkups.
We should do this as well, because healthcare is one of the few things that isn't addressed by UBI (since ultimately it's an insurance mechanism).
UBI at this time is like topical ointment on a festering wound. Americans first need livable wages and single-payer healthcare that isn't Medicare, which is a Byzantine, confusing maze of dozens of coverage options largely outsourced to for-profit corporations.
Ointment on a festering wound applies much more to healthcare, which can't fix many problems associated with poverty, like stress, bad nutrition, bad housing and to livable wages, which don't help people who don't have a job, then to UBI.
I am not sure how small studies can account for the inflation wide rollout could cause. Consider this hypothetical: If you give 1 of 1000 renters $100, 1 landlord will leave the rent alone because they don't know. If you give 1000 of 1000 renters $100, word will get to 1000 landlords, who will all increase rent $100, because the market will bear it. I'm not saying this will happen, just that a small study enjoys the benefits of anonymity.
They also don't account for the way these decisions would be made, if done at the government level.
Put simply: I'm looking forward to the study where the participants get to vote every year to decide how much money they should be getting from the people running the study.
For completeness the study should also be financed by wealth tax on the asset owners in the area, who can also vote.
If everybody can have one vote per dollar, this system would probably tend to zero UBI. If everybody can have one vote per person then some equitable equilibrium could develop.
The rich person will have a choice. Either stay and compete for the money that was taken from other rich people with this tax and given to poor people that are way easier to extort or leave and forgo the opportunity and go to some other place where the only money that's available for taking is what poor earned with their work.
If I were a skillful rich person I'd stay, because that could help me to raise in ranks of the rich more quickly. If I was skilless rich person I'd get the hell out of there because other rich would be getting my money redistributed through this tax.
I don't understand why all of the basic income studies I've seen seek to indicate whether or not giving someone free money improves their quality of life. That it does should be blindingly obvious, but that is not the question which determines whether basic income should be a political goal. That question is whether basic income is the best use of a given amount of public assistance funding. Whether it is more efficient at improving lives than alternatives such as food stamps, rent assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem to be no efforts to answer this essential question.
>That question is whether basic income is the best use of a given amount of public assistance funding. Whether it is more efficient at improving lives than alternatives such as food stamps, rent assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem to be no efforts to answer this essential question.
Honestly, it's sorta self evident that replacing a myriad of confusing and contradictory systems with one system is more efficient. We effectively have UBI already for a subset of the population and it not efficient at all because it's provided through a ton of different programs that all different regulations and inclusion parameters.
But this study is showing no benefits, at least to mental and physical health, educational attainment, and advancement at work. So it seems to sort of moot the latter question.
UBI might be an OK stopgap in the beginning when comparatively just a few are losing their jobs. Over time though, in the long run, the core of currency-based systems will need to be replaced as a greater percentage of labor is made valueless by AI, with the resulting increase in bodies not earning anything and decrease in bodies bearing the tax burden. I hardly see any discussion anywhere of what happens when 100% of useful labor is automated to the point that humans have 0 comparative advantage compared to AI+robots in anything of economic value.
As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have some comparative language compared to AI + robots. Favorite metaphor for this is a lawyer and a secretary. The lawyer is better at everything than the secretary, but there's still a role for the secretary because the lawyer's time is better spent actually doing the law. It'll be the same for humans and AI.
> As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have some comparative <s>language</s> [advantage] compared to AI + robots.
The truth of that really depends what you mean by "humans"...
All humans? Probably not, as there are a lot of people who aren't especially capable or talented, and every conceivable economic activity they could do can be done by a machine with an AI with a below-average human intelligence and a capable robot body.
Also, IIRC, solar panels are already more efficient than plants, so I doubt there's a dystopian "humans are better for manual labor" loophole.
Most humans? Still probably no, given that AI seems to be making the most progress against white collar work right now.
Some minority of humans? This might be true, as there are people who are extraordinarily smart and talented. It seems most likely that AI will be unable to replace the people at the very tops of their fields, but there are very, very few people in those positions, and most people just plain don't have the ability work at that level.
> I hardly see any discussion anywhere of what happens when 100% of useful labor is automated to the point that humans have 0 comparative advantage compared to AI+robots in anything of economic value.
Eventually automated gas chambers, or just letting poverty take care of the problem my itself.
Labor is the main part of the cost of most products. If AI could produce all these products without any human input, they would become drastically cheaper.
Conceptually the flaw is treating cash as a proxy for value.
Consider the assertion “Cash is one important piece of the puzzle. The impact may be limited without other resources like health care and child care.” This is paradoxically spot-on in highlighting that money in of itself doesn’t create value, people create value for one another. Taking people out of an underperforming value stream by injecting cash is like confusing palliative and restorative care. Pain meds can keep a person limping along, and it is great as a bridge to get to a cure, but long term use has risks.
As an alternative, I would advocate for a government (or other org) facilitation of people strengthening the streams of value between themselves. This doesn’t rule out a cash distribution based on increased taxes, but would focus more on enlisting community cooperation.
One might look at wealthy people as tax cows to be milked or as people who have insights into how value is created. Instead of creating an adversarial relationship of tax avoidance, create a mutually beneficial relationship of opportunities to give and serve.
The most successful wealthy people serve large orgs in boards of directors. What if there was a similar set of local boards that guided a grant or a loan program for life transformation in the way that student loans or GI Bill works but with an explicit stipulation (as opposed to the implicit stipulation of education) of how the funding would be used to create a better life well after the funding is complete?
> "We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/ month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app.
> "The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances."
> "Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education."
> "Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities."
So they gave folks $12k per year to see a reduce in working hours by 1.5 hours per week and lower earnings by $1500/yr. I don’t think I’d call that a “moderate” labor supply effect - I’m frankly surprised that’s far enough outside the error bars to support the claim.
Interesting to see the largest increase in consumption is "beverages". As far as I can see the commentary completely ignores this, but I presume this includes alcohol?
If you look at the percentage breakdown it’s much more modest, so it appears to be an indication of how much the participants were already spending on alcohol. Also if you filter by “high income” beverage spending appears to switch to marijuana, and there the % breakdown remains high (no pun intended)
I think UBI without regulations on pricing will result in inflation that will negate the benefits of UBI.
Regulating prices will have unintended consequences (outside of a specific set of goods).
Perhaps the Govt needs to take over the provisioning of these basics (production and distribution) and anything outside the basics will be market driven.
I know this has been tried in the past and has failed miserably. But, we now have better ways to track these things. So, maybe time to give it another try?
> I think UBI without regulations on pricing will result in inflation that will negate the benefits of UBI.
I believe that too, and that sounds like a market failure to me.
Shouldn't competition keep prices down?
I believe we need to investigate why that mechanism doesn't seem to work, and fix it; regulating prices can only be a very narrow and interim solution.
That's how it always goes with market interventions. They lean on the scales in one area which causes movement somewhere else, then try to lean on that too. Eventually end up in terrible contortions.
It's such a small amount of money per person that it is hard to see what effects one would expect. I think for the majority of people reading hacker news $1000 per month would be barely noticeable in their bank account (obviously some people out there would notice it, but for say a lowly software dev making $150k it's not going to change much about their lifestyle). So to think it would fundamentally change someones life is a stretch. I mean it's not enough to not have to earn money (and so have the financial security to start a company or restart education) and it's not enough to purchase accommodation (especially cause it's limited to 3 years). Most I would expect is people could pay down some of their debt - so they can tread water a little easier for a few years.
Real question: What is to stop someone with power/money from taking advantage (or just fooling) someone with UBI to sign away their future UBI income? For example, the UBI person wants to buy a car, but has nothing other than UBI, the car dealer says, "no problem, just sign here and all your UBI for the next 5 years will pay for the car. Not our problem if you don't have anywhere to park it or gas to run it". Historically, those with power are able to clip a little extra assets from someone who doesn't have the power. Why wouldn't the UBI just become a new baseline for almost-zero? I hope I'm phrasing this in a way that is understandable.
If the income really is guaranteed, competition in UBI-secured lending should eventually drive margins down to the point where the borrowing cost approaches the risk-free interest rate, so at least people are getting a reasonable deal on their loan.
Of course, it's still a serious social problem if people borrow against their future earnings to buy expensive things and then go years without enough money for food. It might not even be irrational, for example someone might borrow to pay for a life-saving surgery for a family member.
UBI really makes me think of AI-safety-world i-risk. i.e. Ikigai risk (feeling like you have a meaningful purpose in life).
Ikigai, or purpose, is a Japanese concept dating back to the Heian period in Japan. The Japanese word “iki” translates to life. Additionally, the “gai” portion of the word comes from the word “kai” meaning shell.
Beyond basic needs, Homo Sapiens in their current incarnation need some kind of meaning or purpose in life. Some folks can find this internally, other folks need to operate in an externally imposed value-structure to have meaning.
I'm not sure that UBI actually addresses this, and may be counter productive.
Is it not obvious that people would have more time to seek a meaningful life if they spent less time working?
The trick will be figuring out how to get people to actually do that, rather than just using the money to further participate in the same carrot/stick game that they're accustomed to.
How to get them to take a risk and start a business doing sobering w important, versus just buying the next larger SUV because that's supposedly going to make them happy.
This would necessarily[0] be a cultural thing, and particularly any mention of Japan means an implicit strong work culture stemming from their geographic situation[1]. And if it does turn out that there are enough people needing some externally imposed structure, something can always be simulated for them.
[0] Necessarily because there was a time when this wasn't a thing at all, before the birth of wage labor. Everyone had the opportunity to contribute as they saw fit.
[1] Japan is very poor in natural resources (oil, ores, etc), and so in order to participate in the global economy, the only thing they have to rely on is their human labor pool. And so they needed a society of extra hard workers to have a competitive edge in something.
But even my dumb self makes the correlation that in 2020/2021, we handed out free money to keep people afloat (a very good thing), and then immediately following there was a surge in inflation.
So I guess I don't understand, how do you give out free money without devaluing the currency? Am I making an incorrect correlation between the stimulus checks and the subsequent inflation? Again, I don't know anything about this topic and I think the stimulus checks were a good idea that kept a lot of people afloat, but was that not the cause of the subsequent inflation?
The difference is that money was created then for that purpose. In an ideal universal basic income, the money comes from taxes; not just printed on the spot. This to my (probably base and naive understanding of economics) would not result inflation, because it would be a re-circulation/flow of tax money, rather than injecting new money to the economy.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It also really matters which people get the money. For example: we printed gazillions of dollars after the 2008 financial crisis, but "inflation" was super low that whole time. What happened? We gave that money to banks and owners of financial assets, so the stuff that they buy more than others was what got inflated aka houses and startup equity (yes, your startup equity!) and the stock market and yachts and stuff. In 2020 we gave a bunch of money either directly to every individual or to their bosses to give to them, so a different set of things got inflated. What do wage workers buy more of with their money? Groceries et al. Home rental prices are through the roof, but home purchase prices are not. My guess is we see home price deflation (or at least lower-than-otherwise inflation) unless interest rates start getting cut again, which they will probably do because the people that get to influence and make that decision all benefit financially or politically from cutting those rates, but I digress.
So my (old, bachelors) degree in econ gives me a story that makes sense, but surely a more recent or grad-level or professional economist can probably point out all the ways I'm deluded. One of my physics teachers once told me that every year they start by telling you that everything you learned last year is a gross oversimplification and now they're going to teach you the way it "really" works.
The stimulus checks weren't the only thing we did, however. We did a lot of quantitative easing to keep the stock markets from crashing, and I would blame that first.
The stimulus checks were too small to move the needle any appreciable way. It was basically a larger than usual tax return. Having like $2500 extra isn’t why goods went up so much in price. That was from supply chain disruption.
The stimulus checks kicked off inflation. But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy. We ended up seeing inflation exceeding the amount of money injected.
Hidden in Covid was a massive decline in labor force productivity and participation - the lion's share coming from baby boomers retiring during this time. So it's no longer about the amount of money, but the shrinking pile of stuff it is chasing after.
> But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy.
I'm curious to hear more about why that would be the case. Money swaps hands constantly and we have explicit ways that a single dollar can become many multiples of itself (aka you get a dollar, you put it in a bank, the bank lends me 90 cents, I put it in a different bank, they lend you 81 cents, one of us gets another loan secured by our assets, etc, etc, etc, now how many dollars are there?).
What you are describing is referred to as the "velocity of money" - how many times the same dollar changes hands, which there is a rough approximation baked into the monetary supply analysis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
The UBI folks were cursed by the pandemic and inflation. You cannot deal with that confounder.
They’re not the only ones. Remember Green New Deal? That also evaporated with the end of ZIRP.
You can complain relentlessly about these guys, or offer alternative solution with nothing but vibes to vouch for them. The truth is, as long as interest rates are high, the economic contraction is making everyone too scared to try anything in case things “get worse.” Sadly, the best time to make great social change was between 2009 and 2022 and it’s officially over now.
You can do whatever you want during periods of inflation. "It" will fail. The existence of a control group is meaningless. The control group will have bad outcomes too. So what if it does? Nobody can design interventions for periods of inflation, because inflation makes everything look bad: your outcome, control group's outcomes, everyone's outcomes.
For example, Brazil created their current public health system in 1988, realizing it in 1990, during inflation that was between 1,000-2,000%. It wasn't really functional then. Looking at it in isolation, at the time it was created, it would look like a failure, but all of Brazil looked like "a failure." Would it be valid to use SUS as implemented during 1,000% inflation as an example of why public health insurance is bad? No way.
UBI is another tool for make citizen obedient to state. Once implemented, like debts, there will be strong voting mass for system that they could benefit from - with price of less independency.
That is ultimately a better outcome than we currently have, where the exact same thing happens, except it's only large corporations benefitting. Politicians _should_ be buying votes from the working class and tangibly improving their lives in the process.
Political machines did deliver tangible benefits to their constituents through what could be described as vote buying. In Daley's Chicago, if you there was a pothole on your street or your cousin who was new to the country needed a job, you could go to your alderman who would solve the problem for you. In return you were supposed to vote for the party and get everyone you knew to vote for the party.
This worked as long as the machine was unquestioned and there were contractors willing to play ball to finance the whole thing. Now as a series of court decisions limiting the spoils system and incompetent successors have weakened the system, the mayor's approval rating is half of what it once was and overall confidence in the city is much lower. And the city's finances are about as bad as they can get today. So I wouldn't call it socialism and I wouldn't even say that it's worse than the alternatives.
Most people fails to understand a thing talking about basic income: it's not for those who get the money but for those who get them from those who get in the first place.
Yes, poor tend to be unable to retain money, they spend. Spending means someone else get money from them. So those with a basic income can spend more, making local economy a bit better and still making their life a bit better.
Remember a neglect thing: money are unit of measure of various substrate, not a value per se. Exchanging money means moving something else.
Many might not think about the costs of every day basic items for a minimal level of survival.
After seeing the system in use, I think it would be best if general relief type programs like you have in California, do not allow cash withdrawals. It is a factor in the ongoing fentanyl crisis. The pattern of behavior is enabled by the free cash.
Instead a debit card that can be used anywhere except for cash is ideal. While many use the money for necessary things this is a factor in what is seen in inner cities.
Buy prepaid credit cards with your debit card, cash them. Buy commodities and sell them at a loss.
People will find a way around it, especially desperate people with addiction issues. This will just add overhead. If you want to stop the fentanyl crisis then attack the root cause, don’t make life more difficult for the poor for a marginal benefit.
UBI wouldn't be needed if we got rid of loans. Loans block the increase in prosperity, as they become hard to pay if the economy improves, and misallocate resources on the bank's whim. The great depression likely wouldn't happen at all (or to a much limited extent, as some people would have to find new jobs) and instead the prices would drop until most people could live off their savings.
My feelings are that if the basic income is not enough to cover the same privilege that the older generations have of home ownership and a pension covered lifestyle (food security, housing security, medical security) then it is not basic.
And also that if it was only given to some at a sliding scale, it is not universal.
Result for higher income people is crazy. They used the additional cash to move to where they pay way more for rent and spent more on drugs to the detriment of health, child care and household spending.
It seems that more affluent are way more irresponsible with their money than poorer people.
It's interesting that the last 2 years of this study happened during a period of increasing inflation and rising interest rates. I wonder how that affected some of the metrics and qualitative surveys from the participants
Other merits or demerits aside, doesn’t it seem obvious that if the state started distributing $3,600,000,000,000 of cash a year, it could possibly, just maybe, move the needle on inflation just a tiny wee bit? Has anyone ever addressed that challenge, or is it baked into the pie on purpose? If so, is this just a way to redistribute the allocation of assets? If so, why not just be honest and start the conversation there?
Is there anyone else in here that sees UBI is the "left's" equivalent to flat-earth or chemtrails? No matter how much you explain the most basic and fundamental realities that are adjacent to the laws of physics, they simply cannot or appear to be psychologically incapable of accepting the reality of the matter and are baffled.
It's like those flat-earth people who did that experiment with the extremely sensitive gyroscope that proved that the earth was rotating and spherical; and were caught on recording saying "well, we clearly cannot accept that" and I think eventually simply deliberately ignored and suppressed it from their minds.
Do not ever underestimate certain human's capacity for self-delusion.
The bigger problem though is that this UBI cult is very authoritarian and tyrannical at its core, consistently increasing the insistence that they must take and use ever increasing amounts of other people's money to prove that UBI works, coincidentally making the researchers and the common NGO types scam artist operatives huge amounts of money in the process.
UBI is simply a con job, a fraud, a lie, theft, and even slavery ... theft of resources and services against their will and under threat of violence and harm in order to support the lives and livelihoods of others.
You want UBI? Great, sign up to have your income taxed to pay for it.
Serious question, didn't we have a glimpse into UBI w/ all the stimulus packages? I'm very open to discussion here because I'm quite naive.
My current lens is that UBI ultimately inflates prices leaving everyone back where they were before. The problem with openresarchlab's test is it's limited scope. It did increase the spending power of a particular group because the prices around them did not increase.
If everyone has more money the "open market" raises prices to simply meet that. The root problem is non-limited capitalism? The price of basic goods cannot be allowed to rise vs cash on hand.
I do believe UBI's ultimate goal is to increase "spending power", but simply giving money doesn't change the problem long term and thus UBI is doomed to fail in its current form.
An UBI that inflates prices doesn't leave everyone back to where they were before.
This is most obvious in the case of someone who doesn't have any money at all without UBI. This person can now buy things, and before they weren't able to buy anything.
Depending on how much money people make pre-UBI, there's a point where the inflation costs them more then they get.
Ah fair point, I hadn't considered that, but how is that better than welfare?
There is the welfare trap, but I don't really see us in a net positive position vs UBI because I see creating a bunch of inflation only to help the bottom 5%? I imagine there's a better way.
The connection between UBI and Silicon Valley elite (specifically the VC class and, lately, AI people) should give everyone pause.
Why does this group of people that are not historically known for their generosity or their sympathy for the unworking poor suddenly want to give everyone a little bit of money for nothing?
In my mind, it is to create a permanent underclass. A group of people with just enough money to survive but not enough to participate in the world of the elites (or even the middle class). This underclass will represent a massive user base for the products and services that the VC class wants to sell. And they’ll be stuck there, and easier to target than ever.
There's been a narrative in the US over the last 40-or-so years that a "job" is the answer to all social problems. At best, that's half-true. Money is the real solution to social problems. And maybe it was the case 40 or 50 years ago, but having a job doesn't provide the same money that it used to, relative to required expenses.
My boomer dad got a job right out of high school, with only a diploma, and was able to purchase a house and support my then-stay-at-home mother within 3 months of starting work. That is simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have jobs.
Money can't fix everything, but a little money can make many problems go away.
> That is simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have jobs.
Could it be that we have higher expectations today? (housing quality, technology access, not cooking ourselves, etc).
Part of it could also be that today, like it or not, you're increasing competing in a global market. And the best leverage you can find is having a long education.
$1000 is not enough to quit their jobs or get a nice apartment. They could move slightly closer to work if they have to commute.
It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work.
I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal.
I suspect that you need to get international cooperation and a more sophisticated form of money and resource tracking for a real UBI to be feasible.
Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment?
Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?
And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in this trap and don't want to start working, forsaking valuable on the job training and socialization that will hurt them in the long run. That's where universal part comes in
Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US military was actively drawing down). She basically said that the current welfare system (in the 90s, in California) didn't allow a way to slowly move off welfare. She said she had many offers for part-time work, and work that didn't earn a lot of money, but both had potential for her to eventually be promoted to full-time or to make more money than welfare paid her. But she said there was no way to do this: welfare was either all or nothing. But most of all, she dispelled the myth that she was some sort of leech that didn't want to work. She wanted to work, but the welfare system didn't allow it.
Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.
You are looking for the term "effective marginal tax rate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_marginal_tax_rate
To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid.
The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum.
This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.
Under that concept, well, if actually taking the social security (Grundsicherung) in Germany as a given, even assuming low CoL situations (it's worse in higher-CoL situations), the effective average tax rate past like about 160 EUR/month of income will rise to a peak at around 1500 EUR/month income and then continuously decrease to the super wealthy limit tax just under 50%.
At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
> At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).
When the effective marginal tax rate is high, this is often as close as makes no difference, because you not only have the cost of bureaucracy but also the cost of working. You're paying an effective marginal tax rate of 80% so nominally you get to keep 20% of your income and have the incentive to work, but working requires you to commute, so you have to buy transit tickets or maintain a vehicle.
And because you're now spending your day working, you can't use that time to prepare food or maintain your household, so you may have to pay someone else to do some of those things -- but their entire compensation has to come out of the 20% of your pay you actually get to spend, so this can easily eat the entire thing and make you better off to not take the job.
Maybe it could be reframed as "incremental hourly income". Partial derivative of disposable income w.r.t hours worked (including time overheads)
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> severe bureaucracy
been there, done that. it's not severe, it's not even 2 hours per month and maybe waiting for 2 or three letters from xyz.
2 hours of non-engaging bureaucratic work for 1300 € per month. Thats 650 €/h ...
The problem is that I'm not talking about getting +1300 EUR/month situations, but about +300 EUR/month situations. And suddenly you have to explain your finances to the bureaucracy and... you still have to earn +1000 EUR/month in addition to the bureaucracy needed so you get to keep at least some of it (without committing social security fraud, ofc).
It's not that bad if it's steady; but if it's fluctuating you easily spend a couple hours each month. And for at least some people, that type of work is far worse than their occupation of choice.
oh, and I'm aware that it might be engaging for some, but they either fall into the category that better learns to organize and administer themselves now rather than later or into the category that will always need a social worker, who will the find the bureaucracy easy as well and the organization is paid by his employer
There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves.
This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
> a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare."
The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
But there's something else you can do here which is really neat. Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely. Now instead of low income people having a nominal 0% tax rate but an effective 50% benefits phase out rate and high income people having a nominal 30% tax rate, you just use a flat 35% tax rate which implicitly has the benefits phase out built into the tax system. Which means you don't need any of this income reporting or annual tax returns or anything of the kind, the employer/seller just withholds the fixed tax rate and you're done, and everybody unconditionally gets the UBI to provide the effect of a progressive rate structure.
> Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
> Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely.
From a welfare-cliff perspective, that's a fine idea. However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign, suggesting that integrated welfare system might need an even stronger pro-wage bias.
> True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
But that's just an accounting sham to claim you're taxing them less than you are and you no longer actually have a negative marginal tax rate.
> However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign
Well that's mainly because they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week and were less desperate to take a low-quality job.
You might also notice that the effect you're referring to isn't net of the payments, and is also probably invalidated by the period the study was done -- it started during COVID. Between the first and last year of the study, the household income for the control group increased by $20,000 -- on a $30,000 base! The experiment group increased by almost as much before the payments and were ahead by more than $6000/year including them.
In any event, you don't have to use a different rate structure to do what you suggest, you get the same effect without the complexity by increasing the flat tax rate and adding the money to the UBI.
Doesn't a flat tax rate lower the income that a state has?
Suppose Alice makes $100,000 and Bob makes $20,000.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, the state gets a total of $18,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 40% thereafter, the state gets $23,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes everyone uniformly at 25%, the state gets $30,000 from Alice and Bob. This is not a smaller number and 5/6ths of it is from Alice. In fact, you can use that money to give them each a $12,000 UBI, leaving Bob with an effective tax rate of -35%, delete all of the transfer programs that obsoletes and still have some left over for transit and uniforms.
Yeah, and it makes it even easier for the rich to become richer, which is why they're the ones advocating for it.
You could keep it flat up to a high threshold, like top ~5% of salary, then transition to marginal tax
You don't need it, it's already built in. The flat tax rate needed to serve as the implicit benefits phase out is already in the range as what you'd use in the high tax brackets in a progressive tax system with separate benefits phase outs.
If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.
> In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
> Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
I know about the EITC, but the ETIC net of benefit clawbacks still presents a high marginal rate. Then the EITC itself gets clawed back at its own threshold, imposing a small region of high marginal rates. (The EITC itself is also rather paltry for filers without children.)
Additionally, the US tax system is ill-structured to really implement this. If you're trying to operate on the "under-the-table cash payments for day labour" margin, a system that depends on filing one's taxes to receive a refund later is not exactly hassle-free.
The EITC isn't as complicated as the child tax credit; that one is not refundable so you end up trying to calculate a way to get enough tax to get it fully.
Excel1040 is great for this - https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home
> That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
Yeah, my wording could have been better. The suggestion that I've seen for UBI is $12k/year (which is clearly not enough to live on in today's economy), with the $2:$1 reduction being only for the UBI, and then standard taxes starting after that.
This system was actually proposed a looong time ago (like 1970s, I think). Just by giving everyone a massive tax credit to start with.
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare"
That's..that's not UBI, at all. UBI is universal. If there are any means tests whatsoever, that's not UBI.
UBI would never be truly 'universal'. If someone takes money from me and then gives some of it back, I don't consider that a free gift.
The only way the numbers would ever balance would be for most income earners to end up being taxed >100% of their UBI payment.
It is a free gift, because you keep receiving it even if you dont make money next year.
And that's right, its not meant to pay for people who can pay their way themselves, just like in most income redistribution schemes the rich would be taxed at several (thousand?) multiples of the value they receive back.
In the current regime, the rich gain far more benefits from taxes (they pay little, and get to offload much of their cost of society to the rest of us) than in a UBI approach. That's the point.
1. Why are assuming that UBI would be paid for by individual income taxes?
2. Yes, no matter what, the richest people are going to receive so little benefit relative to their wealth/income that they won't support it. The same is true for most public services, actually. The ultra-wealthy receive little-to-no direct benefit from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, public schools (big one), public universities, or even public police and firefighters (they can afford their own). But somehow they haven't (yet) managed to rid themselves of these horrible violations of their privilege.
or for the ridiculously wealthy to be taxed at a very high rate. which is why they reject the notion of UBI so fervently.
The numbers don't line up for that.
The sum total of the wealth of all the billionaires in the US in 2021 was ~$4.1 Trillion [0]. That's about the same as the government budget in a normal year pre-pandemic, or about 2/3 of the government budget post-pandemic.
Assuming a $1000/month and a population of ~350 million, you're looking at $4.2 Trillion per year. You could almost fund it for the first year by taxing all of the wealth of the billionaires at 100%.
But what are you going to do the second year? That's total wealth, not yearly income.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/26/report-ame...
Where does all that money go after the first year? It sounds like it vanishes?
The stocks would actually crash if converted to money. The net effect wouldn't be more cash to spend, but a stake in the economy. You would probably have to invent some more democratic formats of corporate governance.
Stocks are converted to money with every trade. Every buy has a matching sell. That's something that happens trillions of times a day and stocks aren't crashing because of it. I'm not sure I'm following.
I think the hypothetical here is if you tried to fund UBI via a billionaire-wealth-tax, it would involve liquidating basically all stock they hold. If you sell that much stock, the price will go down. (It's the opposite side of the coin compared to why you can't do a hostile takeover at market cap by just buying stock - the price goes way up as you buy up all available shares).
There's several second and nth-order effects that seem crucial to our understanding.
Every seller has a buyer. Who would be buying these liquidated stocks?
What would the estimated new equilibrium be? What would be the effects of this equilibrium compared to the current state? Can we estimate the pros and cons?
Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.
just curious, but why is there always an implicit assumption in this debate that we only tax the wealth of billionaires? is the money of a half billionaire somehow less green than a full billionaire?
Keep going until you're taxing everyone that makes over $80K/year or so, and you pretty much have it being balanced.
I never understood the UBI argument. 30 seconds of napkin math would show you how insane the proposal is, even at the rate of $1000/month. If you want to increase welfare for those below the median income, fine, let's have that discussion. Don't play games with the word 'universal'
The premise of it being universal is that it doesn't have an explicit phase out and instead it's implicit in the tax system. Obviously someone making six figures is not going to be a net recipient, but they would still have the money deposited into their account. The amount would just be smaller than the amount they're paying in taxes.
The advantage of doing it this way is that it makes it clear what's going on. Right now we nominally impose low marginal tax rates on the poor but their effective marginal tax rates are high because of benefits phase outs, so their effective marginal tax rates are higher than the wealthy. With a UBI you replace the benefits with cash payments and eliminate the phase outs, but also flatten the tax rates so the poor are paying the same effective marginal rates as the rich, instead of higher ones.
The result would be that the poor pay slightly lower effective marginal rates and the rich pay slightly higher ones (although you don't even inherently have to do that; it depends entirely on the tax rate and the amount of the UBI), but the overall system is much simpler. And the consequence that the poor are paying higher effective marginal rates than the rich, which was presumably never intended, goes away.
Right! It also lets you eliminate the means testing part of the system that makes people jump through humiliating hoops to show that they’re poor enough to need a handout, punishes people who are working too much by taking away their benefits, etc.
And you don't have to pay for all the government workers that exist solely to manage and observe the hoop jumping!
You'd adjust marginal rates so the poor would (net) benefit, the middle class would about break even, and the rich would pay more. Napkin math on that isn't that bad, especially if you chop a bunch of other welfare payments (and the associated expensive means-testing and administration).
No one serious is suggesting "everyone gets $1000/month and literally nothing else changes".
Which welfare plans are you cutting? Social Security? Nope, because the average payout is 50% higher than $1000/m. Same with SSI/disability. You certainly couldn't replace any of the medical plans (Medicaid/Medicare) with anywhere near that amount.
The welfare plans that might be subject to being replaced only amount to a few percent of the federal budget. The bulk of the budget is those plans above, which would result in less benefits if replaced. You're not paying for this by finding lost coins in the couch cushions.
Yeah, as I said in my comment, the primary way to pay for it is to adjust marginal rates so that it's (mostly) a transfer from rich to poor. If you're rich, you'll get a $1k UBI and also pay $2k more in taxes (or $4k, or whatever). Probably for those at the median income it would be roughly neutral - but with the benefit that if you ever lose your job, or want to leave an abusive marriage, or want to try starting a business, you still have that $1k coming in.
Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.
I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.
> Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI.
This has been discussed for decades. The US healthcare system is one of the biggest impediments to other forms of governmental change.
Generally the people who want UBI "as promised, no compromises" also don't see why we can't just print money to make the shortfall
> why we can't just print money to make the shortfall
Printing money to make the shortfall is how US public sector budgeting has worked for decades.
I don't think that's the case. Instead, it's just that the "let's tax the rich people more!!" idea is ill-founded to begin with, and the easiest way to show that is to point out that if instead of just taking some percentage more, you took everything they have, it still wouldn't solve the problem, not by a longshot.
Choosing some arbitrarily small segment of the population and saying "See, they don't have enough money to fund this program" is not the steelman you seem to think it is. Instead, try discussing something serious, like a plausible adjustment to the progressive tax system.
Nah, if someone puts forth an argument that is fundamentally flawed, it's neither wrong to point it out nor on me to do their thinking for them.
That said, if we want to talk taxes, I think a progressive tax system is nearly always wrong, immoral, and unfair, so you probably would disagree with any adjustments I'd suggest. :)
For new and expensive schemes it is often a challenge to figure out who will be paying for it. The proponents typically don't want to say for the obvious reason - the people paying for a universal service will probably be worse off than if they weren't so it isn't helpful to identify them (they'll just add to the resistance). But that means it is awkward to attack an idea on cost because detractors don't propose the scheme and are often dealing with people unwilling to suggest realistic costs or tax schemes. People with technically excellent arguments have to be a bit oblique in pointing out that someone has to pay and it'd speed the debate along for someone to figure out who. For a UBI, we might suspect it isn't going to be billionaires.
The fair way would be if sentences had to pattern match "I think [scheme] is a good idea and we will pay for it by [specific tax proposal].". Seems unlikely in practice though.
It's not about means-testing, it's about setting income tax rates/brackets sanely so that it gets taxed back in an appropriate way and not in a way that prevents people from picking up work, etc.
The reason UBI exists as an idea is that means-tested programs are inherently politically vulnerable. Another name for means-tested benefits would be "benefits ear-marked for the politically powerless".
Wikipedia has a nice graph showing how UBI and NIT are effectively the same thing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
It's the same only if the income tax is linear, which is almost never the case ? Most places have progressive income tax rates.
For a given progressive income tax rate with UBI, you can make an equivalent progressive tax rate with NIT.
I disagree. Universal just implies everyone gets it. If the system includes a gradual fall off, it's still universally applied to everyone, no?
Everyone making less than 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) qualifies for free healthcare. I dont think most people would say that the USA has universal healthcare.
The same is true here. If you make $0, you get $12K UBI. If you make $24K, you get $0 UBI. Is that universal?
Assuming there's no other income tax on the first $24K you make, it's a bit aggressive but it's still a valid form of UBI and an improvement on the status quo.
You're confusing Universal Income with Guaranteed Income.
And again, Guaranteed Income is just another form of "benefits earmarked for the politically powerless."
This particular method is mathematically equivalent to both of them. There's no actual difference between "You get full UBI and you pay income tax on other income" and "You get X cents less UBI per dollar of other income".
The system could be as simple as "UBI, also income tax is 50%, end of description".
The question isn't about mathematics, it's about psychology and politics.
In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?
> The question isn't about mathematics, it's about psychology and politics.
That's valid, but when someone's roughly describing a plan I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and worry about whether it can be framed the correct way rather than whether they framed it right.
> In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?
I don't know, every two weeks? So it's the difference between a $460 UBI check and a $400 paycheck, versus a $60 UBI check and an $800 paycheck.
It doesn't matter what the individual words mean, the term UBI refers to income without any means testing. That's just how it's defined.
>Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept.
This idea is called a negative income tax.
you're not describing a negative income tax
I wasn't describing anything. A negative income tax is approximately what the guy I replied to was describing. It obviously wasn't a perfect description, but I didn't think my label of the description in his comment would be taken so literally. If you'd care to describe why you believe this isn't an approximation of the outcome of a negative income tax, then feel free to explain.
because in the scheme described the effective tax on your income is positive (the more you earn, the more is transferred away) as opposed to negative (the more you earn the more is transferred to you).
What you are describing might intuitively sound like what a negative income tax should mean, had you never heard of a negative income tax before, but that is not what a negative income tax is. A negative income tax, which is a name for a type of benefit system, does not mean that people are literally negatively taxed, regardless of their income.
eitc is a prototypical negative income tax and gives you more money for each dollar of added income up to a point. so… exactly what i’m describing?
This is exactly the misconception the other person I replied to had.
A negative income tax increases your total benefits as you earn more (up to a point), the system that was being described is one where total benefits are decreased as you earn more.
Benefits do not increase with income in a negative income tax system. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. The point of a negative income tax system is to allow total income, from the combination of work and benefits, to increase as work income increases, preventing the incentive to not work due to benefits exceeding or only matching potential work income due to a hard income cutoff for qualifying for a non-dynamic amount of benefits. In this way, as work income increases in a negative income tax system, the benefits will incrementally decrease, until the individual meets the level where they become a net payer, not receiver, but those that are net payers will not have a total income less than any of those that are net receivers.
In the system that was described it would take two units of income to decrease one unit of benefits, allowing total income to increase with an increase in levels of work income, while not having a hard cutoff for benefits. This is an approximation of what would occur in a negative income tax system and it would not result in a net decrease in earnings considering it takes twice the earnings units to lower one unit of benefits.
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
Just subsidize the minimum wage. It's dead simple. Raise the minimum wage by $x but have that extra $x be paid from taxes, not the employer. Big businesses will scream "But inflation! But wage-price spiral!". Their screams are to be ignored.
I'd like to see any reasonable math behind this idea.
Depends on what you're comparing it to. This thread is about unconditional cash. Giving everyone $1000 a month, unconditionally, is clearly many times more expensive than subsidizing the minimum wage by $1 an hour - it's rather difficult to work 1000 hours when a month has ~730 hours!
The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.
This is alternatively referred to as the welfare cliff [1]
Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits.
https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...
edit[2] https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/welfare_cliff.pn...
What is the link to the Chicago study?
oops, Added
To me, this is the single biggest problem with welfare.
The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work.
Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.
That's how you breed shadow employment. People on welfare who can work often will find jobs that pay some, or all of the salary, under the table. The attitude this instills in children is that of having to work hard, while scheming against the taxman, to improve your life. Some people then do that way past the point they need to, and end up at risk of being caught for tax evasion.
>Some people then do that way past the point they need to, and end up at risk of being caught for tax evasion.
Only because we tax people's income. Instead, tax only the income of corporations and other shareholder based limited liability entities. Income tax should be the insurance premium business pays to limit the legal liability to the owners and shareholders of the business.
I also shudder to think what types of employers would be complicit with such a scenario.
You're right to fear employers who want to avoid claiming employees so that they don't have to comply with, for example, safety laws. But shadow work also includes situations with "casual" business relationships, like a couple who hires a nanny to watch their kids 40 hours a week. Both parties may feel that complying with tax and labor laws is too much of a burden.
> Both parties may feel that complying with tax and labor laws is too much of a burden.
That's - a way - to phrase:
- facilitate an effective 7.5% pay cut (employer paid Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid tax)
- avoid being properly compensated for overtime (assuming non exempt salary),
- and make claiming unemployment, disability benefits more difficult
When you refer to both, can you emphasize a specific burden the employee is subject to other than reduce tax benefits on disability / social security?
> facilitate an effective 7.5% pay cut (employer paid Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid tax)
The employer skipping out on taxes is not a "pay cut".
And the employee also gets to skip out on taxes.
The employee, under current laws, does not get to skip out on taxes; they have to pay the self employment tax rate of 15%; We're talking about 40 hour weeks, that kind of regular pay doesn't go un noticed by revenue offices.
Yes, the employee must file and pay taxes, even if they've reported their employer to the IRS for mis-classification.
Then they're not a shadow worker at that point. The comment was about shadow workers.
You may have been downvoted because you seem be ignoring the point gp post. By working under the table, the nanny or gardener or handyman can (often fraudulently) qualify for government healthcare and welfare programs as well as other low income assistance. In my opinion those programs are of a greater benefit than the ones you listed.
Not only that, it doesn't specify the compensation.
Suppose the employer avoids paying Medicare tax and unemployment insurance, but gives some of this money to the employee, who also avoids paying Medicare tax. This is, of course, illegal, but it isn't inherently the case that the employee is getting the worse of it outside of the risk of being prosecuted for tax evasion.
Unemployment insurance in particular generally screws anyone who maintains stable employment because the net beneficiaries are the people who collect benefits every other year, not the people who pay premiums their whole lives and only collect benefits once if at all. The latter would come out ahead to receive even half the premiums as money they could save and collect interest on and then have in reserve in the event they become unemployed. (In general mandatory insurance of this kind is a net economic loss and a source of benefits fraud that only gets passed by alleging it gets paid for by employers rather than employees, but who pays for something on paper and who is affected by the economic effects of the cost are different things.)
>> The attitude this instills is that of having to work hard, while scheming against the taxman, to improve your life.
Sounds like a lot of politicians I know. Really, how is this not being "Smart" and gaming the system? If we're all upset about being "fair" then we would have changed the system.
This isn’t a problem really with welfare, but a problem with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible.
In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.
> All functions should be smooth.
I like to believe--or at least fantasize--that bipartisan alliances can be built around a shared commitment to Good Equations in Public Policy, even if they disagree on what those policies are.
"Look Bob, I think your tax cut proposal is pure pork and regulatory capture, but that one one goddamn sexy curve."
When you really peel back the layers, you'll find that voters' instincts are that any means-tested program should come with a hefty punishment for using it. While they aren't exactly against helping, they definitely think the priorities are 1) Spending as little taxpayer dollars as possible, 2) Punishing any recipient of help enough to be a warning to others, and then, distantly, 3) Helping.
This is not exactly voters. What really happens is more like this: There is some call for helping people, voters want it, but voters (possibly some of the same voters, possibly different ones) also want lower taxes.
So the plan that passes is the one that claims to help people (appeasing the first group) while also costing the minimum amount of money (appeasing the second group). The proposal with evolutionary fitness in politics is then to create a system that helps people on paper but actually limits eligibility for the system to a minimum number of people or otherwise makes use of it more arduous to deter usage so it costs less. Extra points for making it so complicated that people don't realize what's really happening so they don't object if it doesn't really do what they wanted.
But there is also a level of incompetence/inefficiency here, because the complex and overlapping systems that pass as a result often have high overhead that waste tax dollars, or create bad incentives because nobody thought them through and those incentives create deadweight economic losses adverse to the interests of even the people who want to minimize taxes. As the obvious example, if you create a system with welfare cliffs and then people have the incentive to stay on welfare instead of taking a job, you now have more government expense and lower tax revenue than a system that doesn't do this.
At which point there is a Pareto-optimal improvement on the table if you can get the bill passed.
Try that argument on a bean-counter, i.e. like everyone holding an elected or decisive office these days. The will think you are crazy, from Mars, an interloper, freerider, or, worse, a communist. At any rate, they will not understanhd you, but, whether they understand you or not they will ignore or silence you. THERE MUST BE LIMITS AFTER ALL!!1!
My elected representatives seem to understand this pretty well. The problem is that people keep electing other people who view anyone not working as leeches. Often the difference between keeping those elected officials and electing someone that represents you is a few hundred or a few thousand people deciding that their vote does matter after all and going and casting it. It's about the population of a rural village or small town. I don't know how we're going to get back to our golden age, but I know that we need to find the motivation somehow.
I wish somebody could come up with a framework whereby we drop people’s incentives, welfare, taxes, etc… into, I dunno, a sigmoid or something. This way politicians can do what they want to do: talk about, like, simple additions and subtractions. But then secretly it goes into a function that smooths it out, and makes sure we don’t provide big stupid cliffs to drop huge life changes into people’s laps (well my analogy clearly needs work but you get what I mean, I hope).
I'm retired.
I saved enough to live comfortably -not richly.
I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated).
I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process.
So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.
Those employers are used to having economic coercion to push people into their arms.
They cannot fathom treating their employees with respect. Their employees are tools to be used, abused, and discarded. Human resources.
Yes, exactly. If you pay someone not to work, I can't blame them for not working. Sure it could be short-sighted, but that's not a moral flaw. The system is designed to keep people in poverty and dependent on the system. It's really tragic
Incentives can be even worse than that if you punish people for working (e.g. take away more benefits than their income increases.)
If your kids have to live on the street if you take that part-time job, it's not only short-sighted to stay on welfare, it's the rational thing to do even in the long term.
Even more rational is finding an unofficial source of income, which is what people in this situation often do. At scale, this may create a wrong impression that levels of welfare are adequate to guarantee the basics.
Yes, and worse, the incidents of unreported income like that also create a narrative to be spoon-fed to the public, that “welfare cheats” are taking advantage of everybody’s goodwill. I’m sure it actually happens. Everything gets abused by some. But people who are doing what you describe are usually not doing it out of greed, but to work around that broken system.
In this specific experiment, people earned $0.20 less for every $1 they were given mainly due to working fewer hours. Those hours were primarily shifted to leisure. (This is not a value statement, just what the study found.)
yeah clearly nobody on this thread read the findings
You call it a myth and then describe the very real disincentive to work, in detail.
Could have worked under the table. Babysitting would make sense in particular if you are available during the day and have children of your own that you are already watching.
A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.
I am certainly glad that you managed to escape. I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though. Surely we should redesign the law to lift everyone up instead instead?
> I don't think our society's response to the welfare cliff should be to tell people to break the law though.
I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions.
You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.
It seems like you are getting down-voted, but I think you are probably right.
One concern I have is that publicly announcing ways to break the law might result in the government cracking down on those particular ways. You could make a case for telling people how to break laws which don't really matter either way, and let them figure out how to break laws that are stupid and matter though.
Another, less pressing, concern I have is that if taken to its limit, no laws will matter anymore. I would hope human kindness would keep people from murdering and stealing from each other for the fun of it, but I'd expect some Tragedies of The Commons to occur. This could still be worth it though. I'm in a fortunate enough position to not really understand how limiting the stupid laws are, but I do understand that laws are hard to repeal.
Could have worked under the table.
This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!
Yes, I believe that is correct.
I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.
Illegaling working as a daycare no less!
If one is giving a presentation to an audience on this sort of thing, it makes sense to highlight "these are the terrible incentives that are a problem with the system" instead of "here are some semi-illegal survival strategies that you could attempt if you are trapped in this terribly incentivised system".
Some would argue she was over-compensating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology)
the woman is correct in blaming the system. she understands that the disincentive comes from a systemic failure and deliberate misrepresentation/misconception. even @geohot said in some interview he'd rather die than receive UBI while his face and body language radiated 'LIAR'.
let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free.
she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher.
students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.
have spent some time on jobseekers benefit a few years ago. It's soul crushing and you get just enough to get by, and i'm in country where the benefits are kinda ok.
always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering.
This last part is just my opinion:
Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.
I've heard negative income taxes suggested as an alternative to our current approach. I'm not an expert on them, but it might be worth looking into for people who are interested in ideas for improving our system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
Re-introducing progressive tax rates would be a small start;
Though, allegedly, a majority of Americans don't comprehend progressive tax rates.
Many state income taxes reach the top income tax rate before the federal poverty rate (ie < $12k).
The federal tax rates are poorly graduated; the first, 10% rate, cuts at $11,600 over to 12%; and then we jump 10% to 22%, only for the next bracket to have only 2% bracket gap again. Imagine if the first bracket was 0% and went all of the way to welfare levels - approximately $30k, the US could effectively eliminate the additional complication of the Standard Deduction (also a paint point of illegal filing and fraud). Imagine if every bracket was easily defined at ~10% - that could make predicting and filing easier. This is addition to payroll taxes being flat and regressive - when they could be built into the income tax.
Yes - first - this is progressive - but, not efficient in the context of Median income being $40k, poverty being $12k, and most welfare programs having a cutoff at ~$30k.
The 10% bracket is all under poverty level (the reasons this exists is somewhere between occasional part time work for seniors or teenagers, the standard deduction)
The 12% bracket includes ~50% of individual filers that are under most welfare levels. Does that 20% increase in tax rate make sense for that group? The Married/household rate covers the majority of American households, including median household income.
The 22% bracket... let's start with this is a 47% graduation increase versus the previous 20% increase (more than double)
The 24% bracket... again, a seemingly random increase of < 10% rate graduation increase
The 32% bracket... an 8 point rate increase, that's 25%...
The 35% bracket, back to a 3 point, 10% increase
the 37% bracket, even more decreasing, a 2 point, 6% increase
So; the rates of graduation increase are 10%, 47%, 10% , 25%, 10%, 6%; from a distance we can see that the 47% and 25% changes are definitely outliers; If, the top rates of change were at least at the top marginal incomes, it would make more sense.
It looks even worse if you also include the regressive 6.2% OASDI payroll tax. 16%, 18%, 28%, 30%, 38%, and 41% -- 25%, 55%, 11%, 26%, 8% (ignoring the employer's OASDI / Social Security)
Nc Income tax rates 4.5%
SC Income Tax Rates $0-$3200, 3% > $3200, 6.5%
Al Income tax rates $0-$500 2% $500-$2500 4% > $2500 5%
Wow! It's amazing how anti-tax Americans are when their taxes are so low!
My income is at the 24% level above, and I'm paying 52% marginal taxes in Ireland (or 35% of my total income after tax credits etc)
I believe those are just the federal tax rates. In the US you pay both federal and state taxes, so it depends a lot on which state you live in.
Their taxes probably are lower than yours, but probably not by as much as you think, and certain things like medical insurance are really expensive in the US.
Who cares about marginal tax rates -- that is the rate you pay on your last one Euro of income. What really matters is effective (blended) rate.
In the US, there are normally two levels of income tax (Federal and State), and, rarely, there is also a local/city income tax (like New York City). Sorry, I am not familiar with the Irish income tax system. Since you mentioned that you are in the 24% bucket, your gross income is more than 100K USD. (Congrats: That is pretty high in Ireland where the median income is about 38K EUR.) If you add up all income taxes in the US (Federal + State + Payroll), I guess it is pretty close to your 35% effective rate in Ireland. So really, not so different.
American taxes are low because Americans are anti-tax. That's not amazing, it's democracy.
That is one of the most interesting ideas I read from Friedman.
I assume the administration of such a program is heavy though, but with future technological advancement and bureaucratic reform it could be possible.
The idea of replacing all welfare services with money in your hand derived from this formula is radical… and has its promise but I worry about those who rely not only on welfare for the economic side, but also the social support aspects.
> Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth
Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.
Ignoring all the fallacies, you are correct about one thing; the recipients are of course not the problem, the problem are the proponents of such nonsensical, fantastical, infantile, and even outright immoral and unethical concepts like UBI or even welfare.
All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror.
Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.
> The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work
No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.
You haven't met enough deadbeats in your life. Trust me, there's a virtually limitless number of them, and they very much do not want to work.
You need to provide hard numbers because welfare fraud is typically less than single digits. Going by “vibes” is pretty useless, especially since the government has been the largest force in reducing poverty in western nations.
The problem with this is that there's little way to get any realistic data here. Of course the number of people polled that say they're a deadbeat will be low.
And so what? I'm ok subsidising 100 deadbeats scraping by if I can score a couple performers with stellar ROI.
This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?
The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard.
No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray. Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum. If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work. Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.
Working on your own projects is also work. There's no reason why the term work should refer exclusively to working for an employer.
Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all.
As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?
Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!
And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.
The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.
> if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive
So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?
No, that's not "the problem". Framing dissatisfaction with existing solutions as if there is a singular problem is not constructive.
It's probably worse as a disincentive to marriage than as a disincentive to work.
How do you know how old he is?
People say it because they experience similar cliffs in the tax system even with higher incomes.
I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.
So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.
That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.
The entire tax regime in the UK is outright designed to inhibit class mobility and penalise hard work. The 60% tax trap and other benefit cliffs over 100k are just punishing. At the same time the capitalist class enjoy a cool 20% haircut on capital returns.
i mean this study clearly shows that people work fewer hours and increase leisure time when given money.
i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?
It shows they work 1.5 hours less per week. That’s one day off every six weeks, and I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive. I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions about people’s preference for work from a ~4% reduction in working hours following a roughly 20% increase in income.
> I’d frankly bet that’s going to taking care of all the other uncompensated labor a person must do to survive
Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.
> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions
The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.
I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
> I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.
I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.
And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.
Are we measuring work by time?
If you code for 100 hours a week, and I code for 40 hours a week, who's working more? We care about the productivity, not the hours worked.
That's a rather smarmy response for someone who clearly lacks reading comprehension. I'd recommend:
(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").
(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.
?so?
Good point about making it unconditional. I meant more like for an opportunity to pause work or reduce work to find a better job, or study, or start a business. And I should not have said nice apartment but rather standard apartment. Many lower cost apartments are substandard: pest problems, poor heating/AC, no hookups for washer/dryer, crime-ridden area, etc.
> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment?
> Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?
Ultimately, the whole point of UBI is to head off political objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least until it's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna).
Ditto the drab 'Modicum' welfare system of Disch's '334'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/334_(novel) (set in the 2020s, no less)
> Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment?
because that's the way things are in scifi like Star Trek. people want to make life imitate art.
You write like rhat’s a bad thing.
I just provided an answer to a question. Your projection of good/bad is on you
A definition and common understanding are part of the problem/challenge:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
It is complex. Although the label UBI suggests a good thing, I believe we should eliminate the term "universal," at least.
Humanity has always dealt with a shortage of resources and their allocation. What is certain is that no amount of UBI will fix this human condition. There will always be differences (not only economic but ideological), and people will try to compensate for them. Rinse and repeat.
I love the "nice" part of apartment requirement, like some UN Geneva charter of basic human rights declaration. Especially when everybody should have it, like you can clone "nice apartments" ad infinitum so everybody has >150m2, beautiful terrace with view on lake or mountains, and of course while being in or very close to city center. I wonder what other basic "nice" stuff is a must have, we can go on for a long time.
The pipe dreams some people have... I mean its fine, you do you, nobody else in this world actually cares. But thats not how you actually achieve anything in life, in any system out there, rather exact opposite.
Most American housing is 2x4 garden sheds where if you stomp a bit harder the floorboards are gonna dislodge and you'll literally see the mud beneath your house. Also, most people in California can't afford to buy a house, let alone something up to current building codes (which are ridiculously lenient compared to Europe). So yeah, "nice" probably just means something that wasn't built in 1970. Imagine they said "liveable" if it works better for you.
Maybe by "nice" they just meant "not rat-infested, not cockroach-infested, the roof does not leak, it's not unlivably hot in the summer etc". Problems with which plenty of people on this planet still contend.
Your comment sure sounds like mind-reading.
People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.
I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter.
If quitting your job doesn't put your life or your ability to get another job (because you're not capable of maintaining basic grooming, for example) at risk, then the "free market" model of employment can actually work, and people can opt out of jobs that treat them poorly or underpay them. At that point all the most essential/difficult/unpleasant jobs would actually have to pay the most, and cushier jobs with more reasonable hours could pay less, and people could do the amount of work it takes to get the amount of money they want. Think of how hard people work just to make a bit more money even when they're financially stable, just because they want a house or a cool car or a nice vacation. Why would that change if you didn't have to bleed yourself dry just to eat and sleep under a roof?
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all.
That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games.
I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.)
I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things.
(I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things.
But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)
When I was in the military reserves, there were some guys who graduated High School and went straight into a minimum-wage job, working at Home Depot and the like. At first they thought it was great -- I have my own place! Sure, it's a room in a flat shared with three other guys, but it's mine! I have my own car! Sure, it's an old beater that guzzles gasoline, but it's mine! I can buy a Playstation and afford whatever game I want, and stay up as late as I want!
But pretty soon, once the novelty wears of, it begins to pale. I mean, I have my own place, sure, but it's with three other guys; not someplace I'd want my GF to move into, and definitely not a place to raise a kid. I have my own car, but it's a piece of junk. I can't really afford to go to concerts or long trips, all I can really afford to do is sit around at home and play games on my PS/2.
So, after 2-3 years they all started do things to make themselves more valuable to society: one took classes to become an EMT. Another took classes to become a fire fighter. They landed better, more stable jobs, and could afford to move into a nicer home, get better cars, attend concerts and sporting events, go on trips, start families.
That would be my ideal for how UBI would work: make sure people never have to chose between a bad job and starving or being on the street; but also make sure they have a clear path and opportunities to improve their situation and become more valuable to society.
Are there "deadbeats" who would just play video games for life? Sure, but there already are. I'm not sure how much those kinds of people contribute to society, even if they are working a minimum wage job to support their lifestyle.
>That would be my ideal for how UBI would work: make sure people never have to chose between a bad job and starving or being on the street; but also make sure they have a clear path and opportunities to improve their situation and become more valuable to society.
I think this discounts the formative experience of the prior years. I would expect it helped by: 1. Motivating those guys to make themselves more valuable on the job market. 2. Giving those guys baseline discipline/reliability to get them to their next work and training milestones.
The military reserves is an interesting beast, but if you were in the active component before that, you probably ran into lots of guys needing similar training in basic reliability. UBI could be a strong disincentive away from those minimum-wage jobs, and the outlay described by grandparent is superior to a minimum-wage standard of living.
I think it depends on your perspective and prior experience with people.
There are a lot of people that dont engage in the rat race even when food, health, the material conditions of their children depend on. It seems like most people want a base level of UBI to be better than the conditions they have from working now. It also seems like the expectation for UBI is often even above the average US income of $37K, and that would be if there was no additional salary left to be had from working
Based on this, I empathize with anyone of median income or higher who feels like they are struggling to get what they want, and UBI would be a huge dead weight, likely preventing them from getting all of the things on their lists.
I assume my list would go down the drain to support a UBI policy.
There are indeed plenty of people who can't or won't work. These people exist today, with or without UBI. And they will exist tomorrow, with or without UBI.
And so what?
These people are still human beings. They still deserve life: If dogs deserve no-kill shelters[1] then humans also deserve a life. They deserve a chance to live out their days, and to tell stories to their (perhaps prolific) kids and grandkids (who also deserve a healthy life, and that includes having a healthy -- if piss-poor and inept -- family that includes their elders).
Right now, it often works like this: They live in squalor, and have broadly have nothing of merit. Their kids -- if they manage to thrive -- disown them. And the whole time this very real person is still alive (if they make it that far), their grandkids only know of them through photos.
That's no life. Not for the senior, the kid, or the grandkid.
We can do better than that. It will not be cheap, but we can afford it, and we'll have a healthier society as a result. People, and the families they create, are important to the healthy existence of everyone in a society.
[1]: We can certainly talk about assisted suicide for humans or just culling the herd as options that may be superior to leaving folks to die in the gutter, but isn't it easier to just avoid that topic and give all humans a stable and reliable chance to stay alive? How much does that cost, do you suppose?
Who can afford it? It sounds like the expectations are higher than the total funds available. What do you think would be a suitable amount for Ubi?
I can afford it. It will cost me a lot of money because I'm barely on the tall end of that hypothetical situation right now, but I can put my part in.
I can afford it because a healthy society is a productive society, and this will return to me because good economies are built largely upon productive societies, and healthy societies are more productive than unhealthy societies are.
Productivity generates wealth.
Are these not things that we generally understand to be true?
(Unless... Can it instead be shown that it is economically beneficial to have a relatively unhealthy and unproductive society?)
[Shall I make popcorn?]
(edit, can't reply further because of HN thread limits:
My dudes, "free" money from UBI isn't to keep people from working who want to get ahead. Most people can work, and most people do want a lot more than a shitty apartment in their life and are willing to work for that.
Y'all certainly want more than shitty apartment in your own lives, don't you? So why in the fuck would you ever assume that "dur, I have a shitty apartment and some simple food, so I don't have to do anything ever!" is the be-all, end-all human state?
Please re-align yourselves with the people you actually-know in life: I promise you that you'll see that almost none of them will give up on the rat-race if they start getting UBI. They'll generally want to keep making steps that seek to bring them ahead of their peers, and that means that they'll continue to do productive things. A thousand dollars per month (or whatever) isn't enough motivation for them to somehow cease being productive and stop working to get ahead.
There is no proposal for UBI that means the end of the fantastic American dream. UBI doesn't even mean the end of capitalism. UBI just creates a baseline financial safety net onto which anyone may fall without necessarily facing disease and death in the gutter, and it's there for everyone without even a shred of additional paperwork because it exists like clockwork without additional action on the part of the recipient, while also providing a bit of a boost for those at the low-end who do produce something that lets them get ahead of the game a little bit easier.)
Re your edit:
I think we are discussing different magnitudes of Ubi. I would consider leaving a 200k job for 40k Ubi (which I think is a number more in line with what people describe.
First off, my 200k salary would be taxed into effectively a 100k salary.
I could live pretty well off 40k if I never had to work, so quitting my job would be a quality of life upgrade.
I think a lot of my peers would consider the same.
I think 40k is way more than most UBI proponents are aiming for. It's certainly 3 times as much as I have bean mentally considering in UBI discussions.
When I think UBI, I think paying for a shared living space and food. A minimum budget, not necessarily a comfortable budget.
I think that is a fundamental Gap between different people talking about this. The most upvoted response to this article was an argument that this isn't a real test of Ubi because 12K a year is a trivial amount and not enough to see results. Also keep in mind that this 12K was in addition to existing welfare programs, and most Ubi proponents argue that it would replace welfare
Ps, the people want Ubi as a replacement to means tested welfare and Social Services, consider what level of Ubi would be required for an unemployed or disabled mother of two
That's just another assumption you're adding into the ring. I see no reason why UBI would replace disability. It wouldn't even make sense to. They solve different problems.
really? How are they different? I thought the point was the same: make sure people have enough income to survive without working. Why does the reason for them not working change how much they need to live?
if you're in a country where healthcare costs to the individual can be considerable, someone who's disability costs them extra money would need additional funds to get to a baseline of living. Eg I don't need a wheelchair to get around, so my cost of living does not include buying and maintaining a wheelchair. Someone who does would need to pay for that somehow.
People are still expected to work with UBI. Disability is for people whose ability to work is impacted. They don't even have the option to work, or must do so to a lower degree than previously able.
That being said, I can see the argument to reduce disability in the event of UBI.
I dont think money and getting ones needs met without work is an incentive for health or productivity. I think it is an incentive for the exact opposite.
Have you ever met a working dog? They go mad if they're not given something to do.
Yes, and I've had other dogs that won't even go for a walk.
Or retirees who have plenty of money but still choose to work because they're bored.
If getting your needs met was a disincentive for work then why are all the multi-millionaires still working instead of downsizing their lives and playing video games / smoking weed for 40 years?
I don't think that is a very realistic jump.
Most people are not facing that binary.
Would you work 40 hours a week at McDonald's for an extra $20k/year if all your basic needs are met?
OR at that point, would you say screw it and spend your days hiking, reading, and laughing with friends?
I think the "at that point" is the crucial element. An extra 20k to work a physically and mentally taxing job for inconsistent hours, no benefits, and no flexibility -- the calculus is garbage. But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.
If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point. These are "inferior jobs" in an economic sense and it's up to the employer to do better. Make working for you suck less. Even in customer-facing retail jobs it's more than possible.
I'm having a hard time seeing the downside. Employees can afford to take more risks because they're not betting their livelihood anymore, and it provides a natural upward pressure on wages and working conditions at the bottom on the labor market which is sorely needed. Anyone whose desired lifestyle can't be supported on the meager income, which is most people, there's no change.
>If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point.
I think that is a major motivation for most work and I question if it is as bad as you think it is? Is it really that unreasonable that someone do something they don't like to get shelter, food, and healthcare?
>But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.
Would you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50% to pay other people who choose not to work?
How small would the difference between working full time and full retirement have to be before you considered it?
> I question if it is as bad as you think it is
I don't actually think it's that bad but I was trying to steelman your argument. The hypothetical presumes a terrible job with not enough pay to make up for it. The kind of job that someone would only take if they had not better option. If the job isn't that bad, or it pays well enough I think people will take it despite not needing it to make rent.
> you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50%
I don't think that would happen because UBI is supposed to be replacement for all other forms of welfare and I would also expect some small gains in reducing the prison population, and administrative overhead. But to answer your question, yes. Government already takes >30% right now and because of the U I'm getting the benefit as well so that covers a good chunk of mandatory expenses. In a very real sense I need less money under this system.
I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.
I dont think that UBI could or would ever be implemented in a tax neutral way, so that is a pretty huge difference right there.
>I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.
another way to frame this is how much (if any) of your income would you be willing to give up if it meant 0 work hours. Would you take a 10k pay cut? 50k? or are you completely inflexible when it comes to lifestyle spending, or alternatively, do you like your job enough that you would do it for free.
Why do you think dogs deserve no kill shelters? Euthanizing stray dogs and other critters in urban areas is quite common throughout the world and most definitely a superior choice if you have a limited budget and would need to cut services for humans instead.
It's multifaceted.
If no-kill shelters ever make sense (and some people must think they do, as these are things that do exist), then no-kill humanitarian efforts also must make sense. I find this to be self-evident because I think that humans are more important than domestic animals are.
UBI directly helps with the latter; UBI helps people avoid death.
UBI also indirectly helps with the former: By reducing the burden of taking care of pets when the bottom starts to fall out on folks' lives for whatever reason that happens, the need for dog shelters of any sort is also reduced.
The American consumerist economy is already heavily driven by keeping up with the Jones's. Why would that change just because we let people that can't work eat, shit in a toilet, and sleep indoors?
Yes, teenagers can be lazy and get stuck in unproductive situations. Some adults even can! That doesn't mean that's what the majority of people want to do, and there are more effective ways of getting people unstuck than turning off their power and evicting them!
"Hey, bro. I noticed you haven't been working or paying your bills. Don't know what's up with that.
Feels bad, bro. Must be rough.
Anyway, I went ahead and turned off your lights at the meter and posted an eviction notice on your door.
You've still got two weeks to turn it around if you can find a way."
--life and landlords
One thing that I haven't seen discussed is retirement. When you have a high paying job, you can retire early and still maintain your desired standard of living (and most people do, because most people don't enjoy their job and that is why we call it work). So a pretty uninspiring job like plumbing would end up paying a very high salary. Or stressful jobs like nurse or doctor. What happens when people doing these critical and now highly paid jobs retire to their yachts at 40? Will the market balance things, and did enough apprentice plumbers get trained to take over? Or will things spiral out of control and collapse? And how does the extremely high wages of critical jobs affect the level of UBI? If it is set to meet minimum essentials, then the UBI too can spiral up as the cost of those essentials such as the plumbers wage goes up. I tend to think that without a lot more automation, then a UBI cannot cover the minimum essentials/poverty line, because of the large amount of work required to support society that is only done because people are forced to do it, to the point that we cannot sustain bribing people to do it. But maybe it will work if we are able to replace every barista with a vending machine, have the trucks load and drive themselves, and build robotic assistants to allow 1 plumber to do the job of 10.
Honestly, I think it would even be acceptable to punish UBI "freeloaders" with, like, austerity. Like they get slow(ish) internet, a 10x10 foot studio apartment with a toilet, a stand-up shower, a counter with a mini-fridge and a hotplate (or premade food rations, whichever is cheaper), and a single window with a shitty view. Nutritious food, clean water.
And then, if you have proof of another habitable residence, you can get the cash value of all that instead.
The tricky part is that the austerity absolutely cannot reduce anyone below the minimum actual needs to live a full human life. You absolutely need to be giving them enough and healthy enough food, and water. The apartment can be claustrophobic, but it needs ventilation and sound insulation so people can actually sleep. The bed can be boring, but tall people can't be literally cramped when they sleep, and it needs to actually support their weight so people don't get back injuries. Health care needs to be fully adequate. Basically, minimum needs are 100% covered, so that if anyone ever wants to get working they don't have any immediate barriers. Don't take away anything that will make it harder for people to work.
There are many who would feel blessed with a 10x10 studio apartment with a (safe, clean, minimal) bathroom in the corner and barely enough room for good sleep, with shitty Internet and a bad view, and a barely-functional kitchen (and heat when needed, and maybe even cooling when needed).
(I've stayed in cheap-ish hotel rooms that are a lot larger and more flexible than that. I've also stayed in far worse.)
And that's... well, fuck: Isn't that OK? Is it not OK for some people who have (for whatever reason) failed to thrive and climb ahead at the present time to have these things?
(I think it's OK to give all people means with which to limit how far they can fall, even if that means that many quasi-successful people are essentially including this as a line-item that they pay to themselves on their own tax bill.
I also think that it is imperfect, and that we mustn't let imperfection stand in the way of general progress.
I mean: Nothing is fucking perfect. But the mere existence of ubiquitous imperfection doesn't somehow mean that positive progress cannot ever be made.)
The system breaks down when people get to democratically vote for their own UBI. Why work extra for a cool car or nice vacation when you can just vote for more benefits?
People could already vote for free cars to citizens, but they don't because the economics are terrible. I don't see UBI making that risk worse.
UBI is the risk in question, and the economics ARE terrible. The average US income is ~$37K and that includes workers. How does that stack up with expectations for UBI, given that it would take 100% socialization of income to reach that level of UBI.
> it would take 100% socialization of income to reach that level of UBI
I want to see you attempt to do the math to show that.
Here's my rough math: Mean income is about $60k. If we take the extra simple option, we can increase all tax brackets by 20% and give everyone a $12k credit, and it trivially balances. The median income increases, the low end of income drastically increases, and higher incomes drop.
Such an outcome is very far from total socialization. The effective tax rate of anyone below $60k income drops, and the max marginal rate is a not-crazy 57%.
But also we can make the tax increase progressive as well. And we can include capital gains as income and lower the percents. And we can cut a good chunk of existing welfare which decreases the tax burden. This isn't a suggestion for an optimal method, it's a basic sanity check.
60k is the average working income, not average adult income or human income.
You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing. My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California
My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
There’s nothing magical about exceeding a 50% marginal tax rate. (Hitting 100%, sure, that would be bad.)
There’s definitely a psychological threshold there for most people. I ran an informal survey a few years back about what tax rates people would consider fair, and there was a very strong clustering at 50%.
I have a hard time understanding it myself. The whole point of taxation is redistribution, so why would you care whether you’re “winning” versus the marginal tax rate?
>The whole point of taxation is redistribution, so why would you care whether you’re “winning” versus the marginal tax rate?
A substantial portion of the population doesnt think taxation should be used for distribution at all. They think the fundamental point of taxation is to pay for public goods that everyone uses like roads, police, and firemen.
You’re right -- that is actually what I had in mind (in addition to welfare), but I was imprecise.
> 60k is the average working income, not average adult income or human income.
It's close enough, that's for 240 million people. If I use Gross National Income I get a much higher number.
I'm not worried about children right this second.
> You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing.
Another 20%, minus 12 thousand dollars. That makes a big difference.
The median worker would pay significantly less than before.
And I already said progressive would be better. But a flat tax like that is very simple and would not be the end of the world.
> My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.
Are you taking the minus 12k into account? If so it sounds like you're making a lot more than the people you just described that can't find reasonable housing. You'll be fine.
> 12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California
The nice thing about having a guaranteed income is that you actually can move without massive risk.
Or you can adjust it based on location, idk, I'm going with the simple version first. If it only helps most people then that's enough to show the idea has merit. Nitpicking won't work!
do you know that Gross National Income has nothing to do with average individual income?
If you are taking that as your baseline, you have already nationalized every industry and productive asset in the country.
Income taxes wouldn't need to-- nevermind.
Okay. Please stop nitpicking and either defend your claim about "100% socialization of income" or admit you were wrong.
Sorry for saying irrelevant words, I will try to minimize them.
A flat tax increase of 20% of income minus 12k would be far from ideal, but anyone making less than 60k would have less taxes, anyone making 60k-120k would have a 0-10% of income increase, and super high cost of living places could use different numbers.
The exact details don't matter because I only made that scenario to prove your claim wrong. Because it's wrong.
At the end of the day, I have fun I don't think you are 60k number is right, or your 12K number is sufficient to cover all of the cost of living a comfortable life. This is fundamental to the difference. I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.
If we assume the average income is 60k, urinalysis is still wrong. A 20% flat tax for Ubi would then provide a 12K benefit. This would not be a net positive for incomes between 60 and 120k. The break-even point would be an income of 60k, progressing to a 10% net loss at 120k. 20% of 120 is negative 24,000, and 12 would be returned via Ubi.
I meant to say income tax increase of 0-10% for 60k-120k. That's why I said break even at 60k. Sorry for the confusion.
> I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.
You think the "desired level of UBI" is more than the median income? You're talking to caricatures and fools, not real advocates. And you should have said you were talking about far more than $1000 a month significantly earlier in the conversation.
I think most advocates sell UBI as a replacement for welfare and enough that people would feel "comfortable" quitting jobs they don't like, or support the disabled.
Top post for this thread mocks 12K as a negligible handout, and claims UBI has never been tried.
Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?
What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?
These are exactly the types of things advocates claim UBI would solve (along with poverty and crime).
> Top post for this thread mocks 12K as a negligible handout, and claims UBI has never been tried.
Top post says it's not enough to quit their jobs (and keep the same lifestyle, presumably) or to get a "nice" apartment. That doesn't make it negligible.
And the claim of never really trying is also true, these tests tend to be small and pick random people out of a big crowd.
> Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?
That depends on whether the children are getting UBI, or whether there is a separate program for poor children. But UBI for the mother alone should not be expected to pay for that situation.
> What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?
Well we don't fix tuition prices through UBI. Or the housing crisis.
But let's see. 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation, you could easily get a dorm bed for $4000 per school year at a big school. (Yes I know that doesn't cover the entire year.) So if we can just do that again, and charge a reasonable tuition (my local college is about $2500 per year right now and that number would be fine) then $12k of UBI would let someone go to school.
They do vote for free roads instead of rail infrastructure even though the economics are worse. Especially for cargo traffic.
An issue is where.... rent in SF or LA or NYC is $4k a month for a 1bedroom apartment. Rent in some parts of the mid-west is probably $500 a month or less. So is UBI for the first or the 2nd? Do you have to move somewhere where rent is cheap? If not why not?
I always interpreted the point of the programs as by taking immediate insecurity off the table, you are allowing people to make more long term decisions for their well being.
Growing up I was in a negative leverage situation, even though I was smart and hardworking I was bled financially and I had to spend effort to layer contingency after contingency before I could even drive.
This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years.
I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.
I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.
The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.
Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing.
Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.
Are you gonna give everyone a national ID and wall up the border first? Or just let everyone come and get the free money?
People really do love to take imperfect solutions to tractable problems and deceptively expand them into something intractable so they can continue to sit on their hands.
"How can I tie real solvable issues to some kind of thought stopping meme", it's a fun game politicians and and other disingenuous people play.
Every pundit buzzword you've injected is orthogonal to the point and the issue. You can personally pursue those plans if you want, they have nothing to do with what I am discussing.
Worse, everything you've raised is irrelevant to all the little american kids getting screwed right now.
But better America and Americans suffer and decline than having measurable but marginally imperfect solutions right? Perfection or nothing right? Iteration, measurement and incremental improvement isn't real so we shouldn't try? Defeatist attitudes didn't make this country.
Both of those things are in fact tractable, and many other countries manage to keep track of who's supposed to be in them just fine. It's telling that you think something that should be a non issue is a thought stopping meme.
Exactly.
For instance, couples where both partners need a job in a fixed location have less mobility than couples where one or both can work remotely. Therefore, they are locked into their geographic markets, unable to explore better opportunities.
> in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working
In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic apartment and have their basic food, social and education, etc, needs met.
In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire people to convince the majority of the population they must work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80).
Which society would you say is "functioning" better?
Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society, when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so much more responsible?
Look at this graph, and explain to me how unemployment is the problem here: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg
The way to get to A is through people working. We didn’t get from where we were 100 years ago to now because society as a whole was fine with working the minimum amount needed to sustain life.
From the graph posted above:
Productivity gains since 1950 - 253% Wage growth since 1950 - 115%
We could be in society A right now if those gains weren't hoovered up by the yacht class.
People consume a hell of a lot more now than 1950. Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets. The yacht class can only consume so much.
> People consume a hell of a lot more now than 1950.
The graph is true regardless.
Americans could be working 20 hours a week without society falling apart. The only thing that would change would be to the yacht class - who would still be very very wealthy.
> Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets.
How much more does housing cost? I'll save you the effort - it's fully twice as much per square foot, adjusted for inflation.
How much more temporary and flimsy are our clothes?
How much less nutritious is our food? How much more toxic is it - to ourselves, to the soil? How much fatter are we? How much more unhealthy?
We have more gadgets, sure. They're all owned by a handful of companies with damn-near monopoly powers, and none of them are changing this trend of a more and more unequal society.
So... What's your point?
Doesn't seem like a realistic concern given the current state of economies and the need for human labor.
Why are people in society B concerned with the majority working if they are unnecessary?
> Why are people in society B concerned with the majority working if they are unnecessary?
I think that's a great question to ask. Some possible answers:
A - to make money for the yacht class
B - to keep the 99% too busy/distracted to wonder why all the productivity gains of the last 50 years have gone to the yacht class (see graph above)
C - They're not even that concerned - they pay people to be concerned about that stuff on corporate media / in politics / in our Supreme Court.
The point above is that "100% employment" is absolutely not the barrier between society B and society A. There's no good reason for full employment to be "necessary" to a well functioning society.
It could even be argued that one measure of a functioning society is how many people need to work 60 hours a week just to have their basic needs met...
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Have you forgotten the context of the conversation? (Reminder: "in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working")
If you think that full employment is the barrier we're facing to society A then you're living in a logical wasteland.
In my mind, society C is the basic standard. Anything less is living in a late-stage capitalistic dystopia that is inherently anti-human. All progress depends on the unreasonable man. And I am more unreasonable than everyone.
I'll take that as a 'yes' then.
It's not that utopian to want a society where people aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it - it worked great. It wasn't even that hard.
Also in a society where just eight people own as much as 4 billion. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're in late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah, we're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.
Finland is a nightmare dystopia. I've been there and they have no nanobots.
If you're going to try this hard to be flippant on a serious topic, you could at least be funny. Otherwise you're just making noise.
> People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working.
There's nuance worth teasing apart here.
The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point.
However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the idea (as I understood it) is that it's not supposed to go beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your job if you at all can, not quit it.
> The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point.
Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least?
> However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate
Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions.
I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.
> People in a functioning society still have to work
Why?
Because until we have unlimited robots with AGI, stuff needs to get done for the society to function. Growing food, building stuff, delivering stuff, fixing/maintaining stuff, etc.
I appreciate the honest answer to what was a bit of a provocation.
Can we assume a fraction of people would still be doing these relevant things and that it'd be enough to maintain a functioning society? If not, wouldn't that point towards the directions we need technology to evolve? Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
One thing I would bet on is that, in that scenario, degrading working conditions (as we frequently see in agriculture, transportation, etc) would make it harder to find people willing to subject themselves to them.
Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives.
> Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?
This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working.
I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation among the workers so that some get more, while collectively they get less.
> Cards on the table: I think the vast majory of people would do less, and perhaps very little socially productive work without the current financial incentives.
I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.
If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.
I agree with everything you said except the shareholder value part.
people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.
The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)
> it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume
Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.
Value isnt the same thing as labor/work. This would change where the value goes, not the amount of work done.
A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.
You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.
Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.
The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
> The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.
So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
>That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.
Value =/= Work.
no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.
The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?
In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.
In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.
By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.
> The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
> In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.
You can always measure by actual consumption.
> By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear
Note Walmart is subsidised by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
>> The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).
>Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.
This then invokes the problem that if everyone works less, less is produced. Even if you raise salaries, the options are the same. A) Same hours, same amount of goods to buy, or B) fewer hours, fewer goods to buy.
This is why I am saying "value" is entirely besides the point. What matters is production and consumption. you could cut salaries by 99%, and if production is the same, prices go down 99%. You can double salaries, and if production is the same, prices double.
The amount of "value" an investor has locked up doesnt change this. all that matters is the consumption of investors. If Investors are buying and eating all the hamburgers for themselves, yeah, that impacts workers. If they stick it a locked box of reinvested stocks, it has exactly zero impact.
>You can always measure by actual consumption.
Yes, this has been proposed in the last 150 years of economic literature. The challenge is who measures it, and who controls it. Remember, we already no that the market isnt perfect. The question is if it is better than a realistic alternative. Do you think a panel of elected republicans and democrats, with all their campaign promises, lobbyists, and personal product desires would do a better job of keeping the super market stocked?
>Note Walmart is subsidized by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.
Lets be honest about what is happening here. Voters feel bad and want people to have more money than Walmart needs to pay them to secure their work.
Calling this a subsidy is rhetoric. Walmart doesn't need the programs. Walmart will have enough workers either way, or even raise the wage to secure workers if they need to.
People dont want to work but they want the benefits of other peoples labor. Simultaneously they try to fight the automation that would lead to a world were humans dont need to work for things to exist
> Simultaneously they try to fight the automation that would lead to a world were humans dont need to work for things to exist
Because they are sure (rightfully so) the owners of said automation will not pay them enough to offset their lost jobs.
"Increasing shareholder value" is a meme.
In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.
The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
Most people work and do useful stuff for each other. Yes, there are bullshit jobs, but it's a huge exaggeration to pretend they all are.
Alright, I'll concede the numbers, let's say some fraction of people are employed not because they see value in their work but because they're economically incentivised (in other words, to make ends meet). I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so, and furthermore, that humanity owes it to itself to remedy that situation in order to maximise for fulfilled lives. That is if you agree that societal progress means making people's lives better, and that spending one's time meaningfully is a good measure of better.
What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.
>I'm saying that given the choice, those who are forced into spending their time in a way that is detrimental to themselves in any other term but economic would not do so
You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.
People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).
It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.
A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.
> A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?
You want fresh produce in your supermarket, but you don't want to be the person who drives around to various farmers to get their produce, the person who stocks the shelves, the person who plants and harvests the produce, etc.
(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)
examples would be that people dont want to collect trash, work a the sewage treatment plant, or lumber mill.
I see, but I’m not sure if these wouldn’t get done in a “do what you want” policy. There’s even a chance that they get done better than how they are done today. People would put in resources to improve (automate, simplify, etc.) the tasks they don’t enjoy doing.
It's not Star Trek, even in very automated industries someone has to do the things.
If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.
Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.
Sure, someone needs to do something, but due to automation we need less labor for the same value, even if it isn’t fully automated luxury space communism (yet?).
That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.
how much productive work would you undo for more leisure time? Go back to the productivity of 2000? 1980? further?
On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.
On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.
It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.
> On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
...why?
We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?
Real GDP per capita has gone from 41k to 67k, so going back to 1994 could actually be done with a 3 day work week.
Most people wouldn't want to because they would have to cut 40% of their spending across the board.
there are a lot of people today that can already have the option to work less for less money but dont choose to do it.
Okay. Well "they would decline" is pretty far from fighting tooth and nail.
No, they have declined. Already, and continue to do so.
People like to have more stuff, bigger houses, better cars, air conditioning, whatever.
This whole thing could be brought about by a law banning work over 3 days a week.
I think people would fight tooth and nail.
Which of those jobs do the people in this thread have? Are they doing anything for the society to function? Does the income level reflect that?
That's a loaded question. Presumably you have a person that needs food. On order for that person to get food in our society, you need (lets focus on grown food for now)
- People that plant things
- People that harvest things (may be the same people, but maybe not)
- People that a order things to be planted (seeds)
- People that order/plan short term things to facilitate planting (fertilizer)
- People that make those short term things (who other industry, lots of people)
- People that order/plan long term things to facilitate planting (tractor)
- People that maintain long term things to facilitate planting (repair men)
- People that build systems to allow ordering of short term things
- People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use of long term things
- People that build systems to allow finding people that maintain long term things
- People that handle making sure those ^ people have the infrastrucure they need (government + industry)
- People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired and paid
We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people participating in this thread are in the set of people that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole, have access to food.
And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society to function
Have you ever interacted with a free rider?
You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?
Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?
UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.
You can see that they exist already, without UBI. So the question is, what effect will UBI have on freeloading if introduced? Will they contribute even less than they do now? Will there be more of them? Or will they stop free-loading off companies and individuals?
If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.
You're forgetting about the bit in which you've literally given the person thousands of dollars.
They use that free money to get you to do things for them.
It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice.
It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...
Right, but there are situations where you will pay for something one way or another; we'd like "not paying" to be an option, but trying to take that option causes you to pay in the most expensive way.
If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.
If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.
Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".
So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.
I don't agree with cutting mental health services and don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people.
> they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners
This is trivially avoidable in both cases. The Offspring have a song that comes to mind.
> I... don't believe that it is equivalent to giving free money to people.
And I hope two things are clear:
1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)
2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.
What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.
If that's the case, then our options are:
1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders
2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.
If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.
Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.
What's my incentive for subsidizing non-work in others?
Knowing that it doesn't matter how badly you screw up, you'll always be able to cover your most basic needs.
This is one. We should go deeper into this question. I most certainly would continue doing a lot of the things I do now, but for fun and to progress the state-of-the-art in my field of work. I'd accept higher taxes in compensation for the assurance I will always be able to do what I do best, instead of what someone would pay me to do.
> > People in a functioning society still have to work
.. to pay taxes for social services.
> I'd accept higher taxes ...
how do you pay for these taxes if you have no job/income?
This assumes people just stop doing anything of value if there no longer is a proverbial stick in the form of financial ruin if they stop working.
Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial support.
Society already produces enough wealth to cover the expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other welfare systems in place today.
Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and choose to do something that I personally believe is of actual value to society rather than please some corporation or VC.
> it would replace any other welfare systems in place today
I’ve never seen this math worked out.
Also, some benefits are inherently lumpy. A special-needs or chronically-ill person needs (and receives) resources that wouldn’t be covered by a broad-spectrum UBI.
Most UBI proposals assume a functioning healthcare system, which would deal with most of those needs. Probably not all, so you could certainly have additional programs as needed.
You are already subsidizing non-work in others, however currently their non-work is at a 'job' that they commute to every day.
Do I correctly understand that your argument is that because something undesirable currently is happening I should support policies to increase it?
What's your incentive for continuing to eat, drink, and breathe once your overlords have fulfilled their greatest dream and replaced their need for human labor with robots and machines and other forms of automation? Your purpose will have been fulfilled and your existence now meaningless. That is the ultimate goal we're all working for, right? Being freed from working for our overlords so that we can all just lay down and die and leave the world to the worst of humanity?
the "overlords" already have enough money to pay a team of real live human beings to tend to their every need until they die, AGI robots aren't going to change that for them.
"Overlords" are a meme.
In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.
The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.
It isn't my ultimate goal.
Because it's 2024 and we're not yet living in the world of WALL-E.
I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.
To add value to society?
Why is value needed? How much of it is sufficient for society to function?
Yes, it IS a provocation. Let's go deeper into this question.
> Why is value needed? How much of it is sufficient for society to function?
As much as people want. A subsistence lifestyle is incredibly cheap and accessible; most of us just don't want it.
I think it is because people consuming social value without adding to it leads to division and fracturing of that society.
More simply, value production is needed because value consumption is occurring.
Because I want to live in an interplanetary society with awesome tech and flying cars and holodecks and life extending medicines and who-knows-what-else and we're not going to get there if people are content to sit around in their nondescript 1-person apartments eating pre-packaged meals and the occasional weekly piece of cake and play Call of Duty or watch YouTube all day.
Value production is needed, because the value we produce is fleeting and healthy societies grow.
How much value is needed is determined by the society through a free market.
How much value can a disabled veteran provide to the free market? If that value is zero, should they just lay down and die?
What if they're not a veteran, but just an unfortunate soul with a disability that provides "zero" value?
> How much value can a disabled veteran provide to the free market? If that value is zero, should they just lay down and die?
If you do this you stop getting new veterans. Functionally speaking this is why every society with armies has veteran benefits.
I agree, and I think there are more nuanced and meaningful historical and especially modern reasons we encourage veterans to turn swords to ploughshares.
It’s reasonable to assume that the powers that be may find themselves in situations politically precarious if veterans aren’t able to provide for themselves and those they ostensibly fought for. Veterans know where real and metaphorical bodies are buried, they also know that at a nation scale, the internal problems that face first world nations are usually not logistical, but political. If not for fear of disrupting business interests, UBI in the form of food stamps, housing, and Medicare for all is possible. The veterans know this, because they are fed and housed and medically treated at scale during and after service. However, if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited.
UBI is a thorny issue due to the complexities of implementing it piecemeal alongside the already-existing status quo. In some ways, a greenfield solution would be easier, but they call those revolutionary changes revolutions rather than evolutions for good reasons.
Some stray links for food for thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
> there are more nuanced and meaningful historical and especially modern reasons we encourage veterans to turn swords to ploughshares
Oh, I always thought it was a reference to the Roman practice of settling veterans on farmsteads [1].
> if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited
I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes. (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342861
Citizenship and a form of retirement through service is a time-honored military tradition, it’s true.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586918
> I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes.
If we eliminated waste and slippage/loss and gained efficiencies of scale by eliminating private health insurance obligations except for high net worth, like is done in some countries like Australia, I think we could come out ahead actually, due to reducing the cost of employment borne by businesses, while maintaining or increasing health outcomes for those on public healthcare rolls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(Australia)
> (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)
To our great collective shame. That being a veteran is essentially a greater risk factor for peacetime structural violence in the form of homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of health care is a travesty only eclipsed by the how commonplace these issues are among fellow countrymen who are merely civilians.
What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?
> What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?
We treat our veterans poorly, but let’s not lose perspective, that’s still far better than most countries today or in history.
Another comment mentions land grants and swords to plows in antiquity. Lots of those vets weren’t super happy with the offering at the time since it moved them out to the frontiers where they’d feel less threatening to the republic, sure, but idk, a actual land grant seems better than token assistance of a loan for housing that remains pretty unaffordable.
Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then again that’s something much of the civilized world enjoys without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from home in a pointless conflict.
Indeed though, let’s not lose perspective, let’s take a hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether we’re doing better or worse.
The military is one of the best available options to lift people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at life, and it always has been. but it’s also a chance at no life at all, and so if people are forced into making this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and reflects badly on what we’ve actually accomplished with all the time since antiquity.
Veterans in countries with free college and health care for all, such as Australia or many European countries have it better still, as they receive their veterans benefits, while allowing those who did not or could not serve to also live free from undue burden or peril.
I do take your point, though, and don’t protest too much. It’s less a matter of how much is enough for our veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits of political capital before the rest of us, and now that the problems veterans face are similarly butting up against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has become the stalking horse for larger structural issues largely left unaddressed facing us all.
I’ve worked with organizations that employ people whose physical or mental condition makes it difficult to obtain/maintain a typical job. In all likelihood the type of work performed (stuffing event participant packets) was a net negative in a small view of value. The folks there seemed pretty happy to do what they did in a supportive setting with other folks who had similar life circumstances. That leads me to believe that there were larger value-concepts at play than what a cash amount can enumerate.
The value that any person can create is principally limited by imagination, not the free market. The wonderful thing about a moderately regulated free market is that the imagination of more people can be used to engage the value creation inherent in every person.
A healthy society produces surplus to provide for those who depend on others. To ensure enough surplus, everyone who is able, should add value.
Because the food needs to come from somewhere?
Seriously?
Really?
I'm reading this as: anything short of providing everyone globally with enough money to quit their jobs and rent a nice apartment is not UBI.
Which, of course, is never going to happen, nor should it. The term "basic" definitely does not automatically entail quitting jobs or getting an apartment.
how much hair is enough to distinguish between a man that is bald and one that isn't ?
$1000 is enough to not be very afraid to lose a job, or to fall seriously ill. It would allow to look for a job for a longer time, or to take a lower-paying but nicer job (as in less strain, easier commute, better growth prospects, etc). It may allow to start saving some money.
It's more of a safety net than a comfortable sofa: maybe it's not as nice, but it keeps you from hitting the floor nevertheless.
But significantly more than $1000 is not financially feasible for a balanced UBI program. The average US taxpayer has $40,000 of income and pays $6000 in taxes. A balanced UBI program would increase the average taxpayers taxes by an amount equal to the UBI. So the $40,000 of income would increase to $52,000 and taxes would increase from $6000 to $18000. It works out to about 15% increase in tax levels.
Yes, we'd try and reduce that income tax increase by getting money elsewhere, most significantly because UBI should allow us to decrease welfare payments significantly. But that would still contribute well under half of the $12K.
The numbers work at $1k a month, but they don't work for levels significantly higher than that.
And if UBI isn't balanced, then it will affect inflation, making it much less impactful.
I believe that $1k/month is a good figure for UBI. It's not quite enough to live on, but it can be in a shared-housing situation, and it can go a long ways to cover expenses if you have to quit your job due to an abusive boss or something.
A thousand dollars is enough to pay for theater class, three and a half semester worth. It is almost enough to pay for five months of personal coaching. It would definitely cover a voice acting workshop that I am going to attend.
Granted, some form of education are cheaper than other, especially those that can easily be self taught. I spent hundred of dollars on books and materials to learn electronics. Maybe I could spent less to learn the materials. Really, the hard part is actually spending the time and effort actually building circuits and experimenting.
If you're skilled and persistent enough, you could learn mathematics and other skills for very low cost. However, tutors and coaches are worth their money even though they are expensive, because they help demolish obstacles and get you unstuck faster so that you can progress faster.
A thousand dollars a month? Please, that's enough to pay for a lot of education like you wouldn't believe. It would make the money I spent on my continuous education look like a drop in the bucket. The difference is that I am not pursuing a degree from overpriced schools, but real knowledge and skills.
> A thousand dollars a month? Please, that's enough to pay for a lot of education like you wouldn't believe.
Alas, it would probably not be. People like to compare apples and oranges in discussions like this. UBI is such a game-changer that we probably wouldn't be able to predict how prices would react once such a thing is enacted. Look at the pandemic stimulus worldwide, and the inflation since.
If a lot of people had more money on hand, they would: 1) want to spend it; 2) prefer to work less (on average) so they have more time to enjoy spending it. Both of those lead to inflationary pressure, so it's unlikely $1000 in the new system would get you anything near what you currently get with it.
I've always wondered why we don't just nationalize our resources and use that income to provide a kind of UBI to residents, similar to what Saudi Arabia or even Alaska does (for residents who plan to stay long term)
Because the resource income is trivial in comparison with national spending. Most of the resources you might be thinking of are already nationalized and rented to industry through a competitive bidding process.
A lot of people have this weird cognitive dissonance that lets them understand a “partial UBI” is a universally guaranteed income that does not meet basic needs, and then that a “full ubi” is one that does; but then fail to understand that if it’s not full UBI it’s not UBI.
A universally guaranteed income that does not meet your basic needs is of course a thing. But it’s not a universal BASIC income. It’s a subset. The games people play on semantics is very strange
How far is it from meeting basic needs? "Basic" should imply very modest living, not even "normal" living standards.
For a living situation "basic" implies a shared space (family or otherwise). For food it would imply enough food to be healthy, but nothing about the form of food.
I think $1000/month/person probably is "basic" income. You can survive on that indefinitely.
(Healthcare is the other big expense, but I don't think UBI can reasonably cover healthcare, it's to complex and variable)
> I think $1000/month/person probably is "basic" income. You can survive on that indefinitely.
I think part of the problem is that people are assuming that you can and should pick a number for UBI that is sufficient for basic needs everywhere.
$1k/mo is probably not enough in San Francisco. But should our UBI be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs anywhere they'd like to live, or should it be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs if they're willing to leave the high cost of living areas and go out into the rest of the country where rent and food and transportation is cheaper?
Housing can be very variable, to the degree there aren't any reasonable options in San Francisco even if you have a lot of people sharing a space. I don't think basic food varies nearly as much. A 5 pound bag of rice costs a little more in San Francisco, but not much more. I think there's less geographical variability in cost of living (excluding housing) if you constrain costs to basic needs.
Also a UBI shouldn't have to facilitate living _everywhere_. Santa Monica is lovely. Should we arrange it so anyone can move to Santa Monica and be able to live there fully supported on their UBI?
I hadn't really thought about transportation costs, and am inclined to leave it out of UBI calculations as it doesn't feel like a necessity. But in a rural area transportation is necessary just to buy food, so I guess that adds some complexity.
Kind of tangential. The thing that annoys me is people saying payments that they don’t believe cover basic needs still counts as UBI.
I think $1k does count as sufficient for basic needs, personally.
One of the selling points of unconditional cash transfers is that they wouldn’t be a disincentive to work. That instead they would help quality of life. And indeed, in high poverty contexts, they don’t disincentivize work. But this result suggests that in the US at least, they do cause people to work less. This is only one study in one context, so I wouldn’t consider anything “proven.” But, it is a big study and a very bad sign.
Having them quit jobs was not the desired outcome, but 2% did. Noahpinion talks about it briefly here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-thin...
I agree that we never had a real test and probably never will.
Another aspect that I think completely shifts the conversation and is often overlooked: duration.
If I am told I have X amount of money for Y amount of time, I'll plan accordingly. If Y tends to forever, that completely changes my plans.
With some money guaranteed, maybe now I can go to college or a trade school. Long term is a possibility. If it's only there for a small amount of time, I'll focus on much more immediate issues.
Without this aspect, which is kind of un-testable, all studies are kind of useless IMO.
It's the same as asking people what they would do with additional time off. The answers will vastly differ if we're talking about a couple of days, weeks, months, years or a lifetime.
$1000 can be a difference between living in a shitty apartment 2 hours drive to work and a nice apartment 10 min walk to work.
I was working as a home assistant and learning C++, took me a year before getting a programming job this way. Could have been much shorter if I had $1000.
The problem is rent will go up when everyone can afford that extra 1000. Unless you build more housing UBI will just inflate housing costs
Sure, but rent will not increase by $1000 - most people don't rent, they will spend it on something else. Of course, need to build more housing, or learn to live more compactly - an average American occupies several times more floor space than most other people in the world.
At those levels you just get inflation
But even w/o these levels we get inflation? How could we compare it to the recent inflation which has been labelled as "greed-flation" and "shrink-flation" ?
Inflation is not an on/off switch.
It is, but governments have welded it to the on position for fear of what off would do.
Nice is always relative to what most has, if you compare to 1700s any apartments would have been called nice, this is why UBI may not work as well as people think. When everyone has the same quality of life they take it for granted
Basically the city has some nice apartments and some not-so-nice. Paying everyone an equal additional amount of paper money won't give everyone the nice apartment, there are still only a few of those available.
$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....
Certainly not "universal" (targeted to the unhoused) but maybe more towards the "basic" issue you pose: https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research
Yes, maybe offering free education to everyone is easier than real UBI...
One challenge is that people who must work full-time (or more) can't participate and benefit from free education. At the same time they are forced to fund this free education through taxes.
We have plenty of ubi tests taking place as we speak in the form of people with their own trust funds.
Not universal, in that case.
> It's not enough for a real tuition or to support them to study instead of work.
... should it be? Or should you have to save some of your basic income for a period to go to school?
If every year you got enough to live off and to be an enrolled student, I think the temptation to just be a perpetual student might be really attractive to some individuals, and not really valuable to society. Even from the yardstick of "how much do you learn", I think it's important to follow formal education with meaningful periods of trying to usefully apply what you've learned to real needs.
> I don't think we've ever had a universal basic income test. We have always missed the universal and basic part. It's below basic and not at all universal.
Every single time we see results from a study on something like UBI, someone comes out with this argument—you missed the universal and the basic! Yes.
With that stipulated, how would you propose to test UBI before rolling it out on a country-wide scale? Every test I can think of that isn't just "implement UBI" will either fail the universal or the basic part, and "implement UBI" will never get the political will until it can be tested on a small scale first. Tests like this are the best way we know how to do it.
If you want UBI then you either are going to need to figure out how to work with incomplete tests or solve the problem of how to test UBI without just implementing it. We're not going to entirely restructure our economy because some folks on the internet think that UBI sounds great in theory.
I think the issue is that we don't really want or need UBI. We need to take a step back and think of the goal. Is that to help people that need it most? We can start with something to try to achieve that. Then continue to roll that forward.
We could try an approach like: People who make less than the poverty line pay no state/federal taxes. Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) to bring you up to poverty line for last month. Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) of up to $1000 or whatever would bring you to double the poverty line.
These programs would be automatic based on payroll tax filings and help the people who need UBI most. Also, we'd slowly be able to evolve these further to handle all benefit assistance programs and save a ton of money.
Imagine if we gave everyone $20/mo. No strings, tax free, not qualifed by income. That obviously isn't enough to live on, let alone buy food. But imagine the infrastructure that would be universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society. We could find the balance. Maybe it's $1000, maybe it's $5000. Maybe another global pandemic happens and we need to dump an infusion into people's lives for a time. Just having the system would be powerful.
As a society, do we need to worry about where this money will come from? Or will there always be an inexhaustible supply that also scales up? Or could taking that money away from other parts of the economy possibly cause harm, to the point where the ubi would become unsustainable?
Do we as a society know where money comes from now? Could the current distribution of money be denying ourselves greater value? Is the current system sustainable?
> Do we as a society know where money comes from now?
Technically, yes. The only difference between money and an IOU is the formal paper trail (i.e. accounting). The paper trail tells where the money comes from. Granted, we as a society don't always follow the paper trail, which is perhaps what you are meaning?
What the parent means, though, is that money still needs a real, live person standing behind a promise to provide something in the future to whomever holds the IOU (money). Without such a promise, the IOU (money) doesn't mean anything. But who is offering to make that promise? Are you volunteering your services?
Interestingly, the UK is pretty advanced in terms of digital benefits infrastructure with its Universal Credit system, which works pretty much like a Negative Income Tax.
let's make it 200 credits/mo, sounds cooler
also the credits expire each month for extra fun
> But imagine the infrastructure that would be universally in place to allow us to scale it up as a society.
What kind of special infrastructure is needed? Doesn't your government already have a system in place for sending tax refunds to its people? That's ultimately all your $20/month is.
"Real UBI has never been tried"
shouldn't even have to buy healthcare. What a joke this country is.
This is a pretty generous reading of the study.
One result they are missing out is that the income actually reduced overall employment compared to the control group, and ended up decreasing household earnings: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719
Even with a generous reading, it was an extremely expensive study. And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less? I think, for those who imagine AI taking a vast swath of jobs (like Altman), the aim for basic income is to get people working less but without this resulting social/work disengagement (whether AI will have that effect is a different matter).
This strikes me as such an out-of-touch idea right now.
Maybe in the distant future we do not need people to work. But we are currently dealing with the largest retiree population our country has ever had, and more money chasing after fewer goods and services nearly crippled our economy with stagflation. It takes two weeks to get a plumber right now in our area.
If you also hope to implement UBI nationwide, you need some expectation that it pays for itself with productivity gains. Otherwise it will all get inflated away into nothing.
It would also be nice if people could stay longer in the work force. The way I read the results, recipients had more access to health care, abused substances less and had more time to recover after work.
Having an hour less in the work week should be balanced against being productive for longer.
> Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
Exactly. If I have to have 3 jobs, then with this money I "only" work 2 jobs, I'm working less but almost certainly have a better quality of life.
Yup. Individuals want to optimize for quality of life but the decisionmakers are optimizing for household income (or perhaps GDP).
But stress didn't decrease according to the study, so it's not like their quality of life increased.
There's new stress about the money supply coming to an end.
Yeah and what’s more you’re contributing more to society, whether or not you can measure it in money. You have some spare time and energy to help your family, your neighbors, the person you see once a week.
I want to live in a society where people have time to actually live.
Devil's advocate: why do you get to have what you want?
For almost all of human history, you had to work to survive. Working is living. And yet you want to not work? So all of the resources you will need, who is going to provide them? I'm sorry, but I'd rather I not work and you work to provide the resources I need.
Comment was in response to going from 3 to 2 jobs
Yeah haha I just thought 100 hours a week was a bit much and we could all agree on that
> Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
Because significant portion of UPI proponents argue that it will promote working more and higher productivity. The typical argument is that it will remove barriers that prevent better worker-job matching.
A significant proportion that is not the majority? I think the vibe about UBI was always "people will work less and employers will have stricter competition when hiring employees".
hard to say either way without statistics on actual UBI proponents. I would argue most, but my opinion is also based on cumulative vibes from vocal proponents like Andrew Yang and random internet commenters.
> Why is it some shock-horror thing that people worked less?
Working less is not so bad, but their income (before transfers) also went down. That means they did not replace poorly paying jobs with better paying ones (or they did with net decrease), nor started a business.
The issue is that social safety net is meant for people who's income is seemingly too low. If the net effect is to decrease that even lower, then yes its a concern.
(for clarity, I read the link not the paper)
It's not a surprise to most people, but UBI proponents often explain the unworkable economics by saying it would make people earn more... or something.
I don't think realists really needed any evidence that normal people would love to quit their job and play computer games all day, but I guess this study wasn't for them.
Moreover, it is possible to create value without making money.
In fact often the most efficient, effective, and long-lasting value creation has nothing to do with money at all.
> And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
Most people file taxes once a year, meaning they would get this payment once rather than monthly, which makes a huge difference if living on the poverty line. Similarly, many people making less than the minimum for filing [1] likely don't file their taxes. This was an issue with the child tax credit as well -- you want to get resources to the lowest-income households, but doing that with tax credits means you don't actually reach those households, meaning you still have to introduce new programs to reach those people [2]. There were proposals to make that tax credit into a monthly payment but IIRC they did not pass before the child tax credit was ended in 2022.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/who-needs-to-file-a-tax-return [2] https://www.vox.com/22588701/child-tax-credit-accessibility-...
I understand the pragmatic barriers to onboarding or bi-monthly payments via NIT, but it still seems easier to overcome these barriers than institute a domestic UBI.
> And similar proposals like the Negative Income Tax would cost far less money and have none of the presented downsides.
It all depends on how you tweak the numbers; in theory a negative income tax and a guaranteed income cost exactly the same amount. A guaranteed income of $1200 taxed at a marginal rate of 50% is just the same as a marginal tax rate of -50% on an income of $400. That being said, there are some pretty big negative externalities to a negative income tax, in the sense that it even further overburdens the tax system with knowing people's exact monthly income (assuming monthly payments), which is not-at-all straightforward for the poorest taxpayers whom presumably such a system would be designed to most help.
They are mathematically the same, depending on the tax curves.
A negative income tax doesn't mean you get -50% of $400, it means your income starts negative. So someone making $0 gets like $1000 back (say by paying 20% over -$5000).
Caring for loved ones is a tremendous value enhancement that is entirely missing in any study looking at income and profits. Someone who loves to cook cooking for someone that loves sharing a home cooked meal with the person that cooked it is entirely valueless in any such interpretation of income and profits being the sole measure for evaluating value. Delivery food services are the most valuable forms of sustenance in such measures.
So did these people decrease their earnings because they were able to do more of what they value the most? Is that a thing we should try to make more people capable of doing?
> One result they are missing out is that the income actually reduced overall employment compared to the control group
That’s not something negative or even a surprise. Of all the people on this planet, why do you think Altman payed its with its own money for this study ? That’s the goal of universal income : allowing people to work less because there is/will be less work to do.
As for decreasing household earnings, I’m not even surprised : most people would accept a decrease in income in exchange of the certainty of the income. You don’t need to save a lot if your income is guaranteed.
It’s not even a bad thing because as we can see in the results, global expenditures increased. One interpretation could be that people felt like they needed less money but that they also spent more. Overall it feels like a net positive for the economy.
is/will there be less to do?
in the future, maybe so, but decreasing employment is surely bad during a labor shortage: you do need workers for a functioning, productive economy.
the rise in buying power may look good by the numbers, but doesn't inherently better society -- consumerism doesn't encourage quality goods/services. take AI: it's a lot easier to replace human workers when they've quit, when the positions are already vacant. you don't need to provide on-par performance or quality service(s), just fill the shoes with slop
It's literally the second paragraph:
> They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group.
so they were more picky? I dont think that’s intrinsically good or bad, but it seems concordant with the finding in unemployment studies that a large proportion of unemployed workers who get a fixed period of unemployment payments end up finding a job in the last month when the payment is about to end. Which raises the question, should you make the period shorter to reduce financial burden of unemployment insurance on workers, or longer to allow workers to be even more “deliberate” about their employment choices?
I'd say that's intrinsically good. What is the alternative to not being able to afford the cost of living?
Negative income tax? Does that mean the government pays me to work?
I think something like this already exists in the U.S. It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit. Low income people may get a tax credit that could result in a bigger refund. Effectively, some people are getting money they woudln't be getting without working. It makes a lot of sense, imo.
https://www.irs.gov/publications/p596
The U.S. Government also pays farmers not to grow crops! See, e.g., the Conservation Reserve Program (https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/conservation-...).
And Electric PUCs pay crypto miners not to mine, tens of millions of dollars, more than what they earn from mining.
Have you got a source for this?
Yeap. In fact, it's a more affordable option than UBI and already (partially) implemented across several countries.
Yes-ish.
But your employer knows. And he might immediately apply "you'll need less money from me, now" logic.
True, but that part only makes a significant difference if the unemployment rate is quite high. At a time where restaurants have trouble filling their staff in low tip shifts, the salaries are closer to what the employer can pay without serious risk.
Your employer may already be getting paid by a government for you to work, but that is above your pay grade.
That's why it should be enough to provide for basic subsistence.
so it's a handout to companies. corporate welfare. probably no worse than currently - a lot of companies in the UK are subsidised via the benefits system because their employees can't afford to live off their wages.
NIT and UBI are equivalent if you take income taxes into account.
They should do the experiment in a poor country where a $1000 is near the median income.
Yeah - this suggests the simple explanation is true, if you reduce the incentive to work then people work less.
There is a lot of speculation that that's not the case, but it doesn't seem to really hold up.
This comes up a lot in lefty politics imo - similar to people arguing (erroneously) that increasing housing supply raises rents or reducing crime enforcement reduces crime. The simpler/dumber causality around incentives seems more true in all of these cases, the complicated second order theories fail to hold up.
I don't think they missed this - the website does include those findings.
I agree that something like a negative income tax would be cheaper with fewer downsides. But it would be spun as "subsidizing Walmart". You see that today when politicians criticize part time Walmart employees for still being eligible for benefits.
Imagine if some low wage employer could pay you $10 an hours and government throws in an extra $5. If the market clearing rate is $15 for an employee, giving a subsidy of $5 pushes the wage down to $10 (effectively $10). They could offer $15 (effectively $20), but then you have a misalignment of quantity supplied and quantity demand, which would result in too many applicants and having to select on non-economic terms (e.g. overpaid do-nothing internship going to the CEO's nephew)
YES!!!!
Not every job is moral, essential or needed, the idea that 'everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone' needs to die.
> everyone needs to participate with American capitalism as a worker drone
Working a job you don't like is a leaser evil than mooching off of your neighbors. The level of entitlement required to argue the opposite is absolutely mind boggling.
How many people have to work full time to support one able-bodied layabout?
UBI may make sense in the event of technology-induced mass unemployment, but folks won't tolerate it otherwise. The incentives are simply and universally too bass-ackwards for society to function. They're backwards for the idle (who will find it easier to cut costs than work), for new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely), for workers (who would rather rent a trailer and chill than work 40 hours a week and live in the 'burbs and drive a new truck), and for politicians (who will shamelessly promise endless increases in benefits).
IMO UBI is a litmus test for basement dwellers, unserious utopians and plain-old first-order thinkers.
>able-bodied layabout
The issue here is the layabout is likely that way not from his own doings. There are many people you think are normal and fine, but are some degree of mindfucked and just want to find peace, quiet, guaranty, safety, basically the tranquility of mother's bosom because they got kicked too hard too many times.
Those are (IMO) who are your likely layabouts, who need to salve bleeding minds. Depression is high, suicides and deaths of despair are high. There is always an exit from the matrix and people commonly call it selfish to take it. I do not agree with this sentiment. I am not on that journey myself but have known others who were; though, I am introspective enough to understand that often times we can play key roles in other peoples' lives and we really need to try and be there for support and understanding as much as possible. Quit assuming bad faith, or the worst intentions in people even if it's Nash. We have to try to maintain the mindframe that others are acting in good faith, or at least as good enough faith as [they think] they can while trying to survive.
Working a job you don't like isn't the issue.
Working a job that makes the world a worse place because you need to survive is the issue.
It IS less evil to do nothing and be fed than to take up arms in a factory that produces produces that people want, but is poison (cigarettes, as an example). Paying people to prevent exploitation from plantation owners is a good thing.
A lot of people like cigarettes. The idea that no one would work in a cigarette factory because everyone would see it as morally objectionable and they could afford not to is preposterous.
Would you take a low paying factory job that creates an objectively addictive poison as a product willingly when you have other options? Do you REALLY know ANYONE that would? I'm not saying that number is in fact 0, there will always be outliers...
> new graduates (who can split living costs with friends and delay entry into the workforce indefinitely),
This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens, and their time spent not working is instead spent on improving their communities. I think that's still valuable, and maybe more valueable than making a billionaire slightly richer
Ubi compensates all work, rather than just what capitalists are willing to pay for. Id expect a good portion of software engineers to quit in a UBI world, so they can do open source projects instead.
The second order effect of putting everyone in the workforce is that nobody is having kids, and there's no community support for people on the edge of homelessness, or with mental health issues, or with drug issues.
> This one at least, and probably all of them is stuff that already happens
Yes. The system incentives against it, yet and it still happens. Redesign the system so that it incentivizes for it and it'll happen way, way more.
The idea that the idle poor are running around "improving their communities is obviously bullshit. The poor already work fewer hours per person, and their communities are universally the most neglected.
> UBI compensates all work
Capitalism compensates work that someone is willing to pay for--i.e. work that consumers find valuable. UBI compensates "work" playing video games and sleeping until noon. Pretending that the latter is more moral than the former is positively asinine.
At least America doesn't have an explicit "duty to work" clause in their constitution like Turkey has. It could've been worse.
though if you do, it's useful to perpetuate the idea and it probably doesn't make much sense to discourage this, especially if you would not want to do it yourself.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" - Karl Marx.
It's not an inherent function of capitalism. If anything, Marx himself actually pitched communism as boosting overall productivity of society by putting bourgeois to work.
This stupid adage by Marx has to die. It never works.
For one, some people have extraordinary abilities, and will be pissed off if, in exchange for their extraordinary contributions, they only got the income "according to their needs", as defined by government. This basically takes away all the motivation to excel at something.
Also, the masses would be discontent because their perceived "needs" are much bigger that their actual ability to produce anything. This is partially remedied by capitalism, where the "greedy capitalist" basically forces them to work harder than they would out of their own free will.
I think you might be mistaken about the ratio of the average person's needs/abilities... a probing question is: do we really need telemarketers to continue to exist (just so people have jobs... and that's better that people receive unwanted calls... because?)?
Greed is greed and shouldn't be rewarded.
I otherwise basically agree with you... just that most people are basically able and society doesn't need to do things arbitrarily if there is a better (more direct) way...
We don't need to be in a constant state of production/consumption - we can take a break and still feed people. We throw out food if we aren't selling it because we'd rather let people starve than get a free loaf of bread... which really just stems from a lack of imagination and empathy.
Let's imagine a better world. Imagine and make it so.
Telemarketers are not subsidized. If there is no return on investment for employing them, companies won't employ them at all.
But the companies use of telemarketers isn't a net benefit to society. If the company instead spent on product quality, warranty services, employee benefits, or charity, we'd see more of a net-positive impact on the world around us. Generally, companies spending money competing for market share through advertising only benefits specific parties, and only financially.
The goals and incentives (for companies) aren't currently aligned with our needs & problems (as a society). So a lot of resources get spent on things like advertising, that (in theory) could instead be spent on solving problems related to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, if the incentives existed or the goals were set differently.
Who decides what is a net benefit to society?
In capitalism people vote with their own money: if there is a demand for some good or service it keeps getting provided.
Of course you might argue, that average person can be manipulated into buying things that are harmful to them, but if you want to prevent that there's really no way to do that efficiently other than turning the whole country into a totalitarian surveillance state. And you also need an elite, a group of people who are above the law because they are just smarter, and know better and therefore set the rules for lesser beings.
I was not at all advocating for Marx or that quote.
I'm just pointing out that it's largely a universal truth that if we want a functioning society with food and roads and electricity and houses and internet, a lot of people are going to have to do something they would rather not do.
The "greedy capitalist" is more about how the work is coordinated. We have a market-based system where work assignments are more or less voluntary where he who signs the checks sets the work. But I am not volunteering myself to going back to a manorial or subsistence agriculture society.
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I'm not sure how to address this, but I always wonder how much we can extrapolate the findings from these studies to a universal basic income situation. I feel like giving a small group of people an extra $12000 a year provides benefits for low income people because their yearly income is now higher compared to the median income. Someone who's income is in the 5th percentile may now be in the 10th or 15th percentile (no idea if those numbers are correct).
Once you give everybody an extra $12000 a year, the median income is now $12000 higher. I'm sure there's still some benefit, but relative to others their position hasn't changed. Someone who's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the 5th percentile.
I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
With a progressive taxation, the gap between high and low income narrows. Low income people may not even notice a change in tax bracket, if any such thing happen, high income people will give back a substantial part of that additional income. I believe, up to 50+% in some US states.
This may slightly change median, I think.
Is UBI a necessary part of progressive taxation? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like that same thing can be accomplished without UBI. Am I thinking about that wrong?
I do not know. I just pointed out that progressive taxation makes UBI more sensible in the "more equitable society" sense.
But I do not like the notion of "more equitable society" at all. I do not think it is fair or useful.
Can you do me a quick favor and Google what progressive taxation means?
I know what a progressive tax is and I don't believe UBI is a pre-req to be able to implement a more progressive tax structure.
I worded my response as a questions because this isn't an area that I have done a lot of research on and I'm not confident enough in my understanding to be sure of that. I'd rather ask a question than assert my uncertain belief.
It's also worthwhile to reduce taxation at the lowest end, as long as the extra taxes are used to provide basic human rights such as universal and comprehensive healthcare.
> Someone who's yearly income is in the 5th percentile is still earning in the 5th percentile.
Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.
That said, this is basically inflationary pressure and we have a lot of tools to deal with inflationary pressure. It is a challenge, but I am always struck by how differently people speak about it in this context v.s. when average incomes rise because the labor market is doing better. On some level, average incomes going up across society is the most normal thing in the world for welfare state capitalism and is one of the challenges we are best-equipped to deal with.
> Isn't this an intended feature of UBI? The idea of UBI is that some level of material support should be guaranteed. It's about bringing "up" the floor, not really re-arranging relative equal and unequal positions. Plenty of people dislike that about it, but it's an intended feature.
Absolutely, but I guess I don't see how just giving everyone money brings that floor up. Maybe I'm looking at this naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor is unchanged. I realize it's not that simple and that type of inflation wouldn't happen over night, but it seems like that's the direction it would head. Just looking at the housing aspect of it, it actually seems like the people who would benefit the most from UBI would be the people at the middle to upper end of the wage scale since they are more likely to own a house which means their housing costs are more fixed than someone renting.
To me it seems like we need some way to control the cost of basic needs otherwise it's just a constant race between the government raising UBI and the market raising prices (although, admittedly, it seems like the same argument could be made about minimum wage).
This is definitely not something I'm super well versed in though, so I might be looking at it wrong and am very open to people showing me what I'm missing.
If A is making $1 and B is making $1000, A has to survive on 0.1% of what the economy produces.
If A is making $1001 and B is making $2000, A has to survive on 33% of what the economy produces.
Even if inflation could be exclusive to basic needs, causing A’s costs and B’s costs to both rise by $1000, the economy now heavily incentivizes more competition around satisfying basic needs. All rent going up equally regardless of unit size means it’s time to start building or converting luxury apartments to multiple low income apartments.
T are ways to deal with the land thing specifically that goes rather well together with UBI:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
Globalization/imports and competition prevents many prices from raising as much as the floor is raised.
granted this doesn't work for all goods, such as housing, but even then you would be better of with it just working for some goods.
That's super fair and I think you are absolutely right that it's an obvious question. Generally when people get more money for some reason the people who they buy from don't know it - but in this case they would know it! It would be foolish to ignore it.
I don't have a pat answer to your concerns, but I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it? Unless there's rent control it's allowed. The classic "efficient markets" answer is that providing housing does have underlying costs and, though people having more money does tend to lead prices to go up, sellers are still competing for buyers. At least historically, even in boom economic times, housing costs did not 100% stay even with rising incomes (which is just what this is).
That said, us housing has been getting worse for most people for a long time. House costs have outpaced inflation for 60 years[1]. Rents are even worse[2]. Reporting suggests this is now being made worse by highly concentrated rental conglomerates[3]. That is to say that the cost of these services is not tied to how much money people have to pay for them - your scenario where landlords just raise prices to new income levels is actually optimistic. There's also practical evidence that local factors and competition will lead prices to go down under "the right" local conditions[4].
So I think my answer is that your concern is based on an idealized economic model, but the actual trends US in housing haven't really been following the economic ideal for some time. I don't think all gains from UBI would be snapped up by raising prices, but like all inflation we'd lose some! Overall, to me, the weakness here is that the study doesn't show that many benefits for a ~40% (!!) increase in income. Which seems WILD. Just not what you would expect at all.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/why-home-prices-have-risen-f...
[2] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/
[3] https://accountable.us/watchdog-major-landlord-companies-con...
[4] https://sfist.com/2024/03/29/report-sf-rents-still-coming-do...
> I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it?
Answering as a landlord (I have one property I used to live in that I rent out), the reason I don't just keep raising rent is mainly because I like my tenant and want to be fair to them. Having had bad tenants in the past, a good tenant is worth their weight in gold.
More relevant to your question though, the other reason is because I know there's a ceiling after a certain point where the number of people who have the money to rent my property starts to shrink and the time it would take to find a new tenant would cost more than the amount of money I would make by raising rent.
If rent is $2000/mo and raising it by $100/mo means it's going to take an extra month to find a tenant, then I need to believe that that tenant is going to stay for at least 20 months to break even.
If everyone all of a sudden has an extra $1000/mo I could be fairly certain that my tenant won't be priced out if I were to raise rent a few hundred dollars.
Thanks - I hadn't thought to mention the risk of trying to raise rent but it's a good note. I was mostly getting at how the conditions in the UBI scenario ("everyone could pay $1000 more in rent if I insisted") is often true now and the 1:1 rent raising wouldn't happen under UBI for similar reasons that it doesn't happen now.
I also think people tend to under-rate the softer side of landlord / tenant relationships[1]. It's better to have a tenant who you get along with and who cooperates with how you want to rent a place. It's nice not to fight with your landlord. There's some economic value there too, but it's hard to quantify. I'm kind of interested in housing interventions that ban large companies from holding too many units of housing. It mostly "puts a ceiling" on how much profit one company can derive from many rental units, but actually I'm not sure I care - and trying to maximize the human connection between the person who owns the building and the people who live in it seems sensible.
[1] To be fair, when push does come to shove, a reason to under-rate them is the landlord looses some months of rent while the tenant becomes homeless. It pushes people towards strategic thinking.
>Maybe I'm looking at this naively, but I don't see what's preventing things from just costing more after UBI. If the government gives everyone $1000/mo so landlords raise rent by $1000/mo then the floor is unchanged.
Natural competition is supposed to keep that in check: Supply and demand dictates that in a free market (which UBI does not implicitly change), a landlord with a vacancy will try to offer a better deal than their peers who also have vacancies, with the direct incentive of getting units filled.
The idea is that some money (a rented unit provides more income than a vacant unit does) is better than no money, which incentivizes landlords to get units filled and making money instead of not making money -- in large part by competing on price. That's how supply and demand works.
In a free market, landlords can't really say in unison "Hey, I heard everyone has an extra $1k every month! So guess what: Your rent just went up by $1k! Suckers!"
I mean sure, some might say that -- or at least try to do that.
But the way it is supposed to work is that one of their peers goes "Yeah? Well, rent with me! I only raised rent by $700!" and another goes "Hey, I've got lots of vacancies! My rent only went up by $400!" and this rinses and repeats until the ultimate lowball of "Rents are up? Not here! Save $50 compared to last year!"
That's not to say that the concept is without flaws: Collusion can happen[0], and collusion fucks up pricing in an otherwise-free market.
But this kind of collusion is already criminalized, and criminals will both exist and collude with or without UBI.
[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/12/justice-department-...
(In an ideal reality free of criminal acts, rents must increase a bit if for no other reason than a properly-profitable landlord's expenses must also increase a bit: UBI isn't free to fund, and the haves must fund it more than the have-nots do. That's unavoidable. But it also can't be an increase of precisely $1k/month or whatever a UBI might hypothetically be: That's hyperbolic nonsense even with criminal landlords colluding to victimize tenants.
Fortunately for the concept of UBI in this context, landlords are kind of small potatoes here in a sea of others who also need to extract their pound of flesh to pay for it. This kind of broad-scale wealth redistribution can be good, I think, but it does not happen for free.)
> I'm concerned about a situation similar to college tuition in the US where easy, risk free money leads to price gouging. Once everyone has an extra $XXXXX how quickly does the market realize that the cost of goods can be raised by that amount.
Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the crazy rise in college tuition. student loans should be private (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy). Alternatively, public institutions shouldn't charge for tuition. The current state makes absolutely no sense.
Imo the biggest problem with student loans is that they don’t assess the credit worthiness of what they’re paying for in any way. Student loans and mortgages are the only two times that most consumers access huge lines of credit on very good terms. But unlike mortgages (which are already prone to creating the occasional credit crisis), student loans don’t assess the value of the “asset” they’re underwriting. You can’t get a $100,000 mortgage on a house that’s only worth $50,000, but you can get a $100,000 student loan on a degree that’s worth exactly $0 in potential future earnings. If you assessed student loan applications on that basis, the student debt “crisis” goes away.
> student loans should be private (but should 100% be dischargeable via bankruptcy)
While I mostly agree, how do you prevent basically every student from going bankrupt immediately after graduation? None of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students so it's logically the best course of action if students loans could be discharged.
I'm not convinced you would need to. "Students" cease to be students immediately after graduation, so they wouldn't really be "students" anymore, right? So "none of the downsides to bankruptcy really apply to students" doesn't really seem accurate, does it?
Even reading it more charitably, students and recent graduates still probably would like access to credit cards, or the housing rental market, or whatever. Bankruptcies stick with you for 7(?) years, so you'd also have to think about whether you'd be locked out of the mortgage market, auto loan market, what-have-you, while your peers are able to make those moves.
Bankruptcies are also like a whole legal thing with a judge and everything, so I doubt we'd see every single student getting their whole debt discharged instead of a judge just being like "Didn't you, like, just spend all this money on getting the training required to get a high-paying job? Seems like if you plan on working anytime soon you should make some payments."
Also lenders can just like, be more selective or restrictive in other ways? Higher interest rates, requiring more established co-signers, etc etc etc. Honestly the strangest part of this is that we've normalized saddling 18 year-olds with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.
Bankruptcy stays on your credit report for 7 years, but doesn't lock you out of the credit market. Someone with a high paying job has relatively easy access to credit regardless of recent bankruptcies. At most it effects them for a year or two, but new graduates aren't really making any big purchases using credit immediately after graduation anyway.
That's part of the risk. It will downsize annuity present/future values so as to reduce the windfall payout of bankruptcy vs its credit score and process costs. It will help keep college cheap: if what they teach is worthless then students should welch. The investor has more money, let him eat the friggin' risk! The student is otherwise forced to delay family for a decade and take a 67%+ cut in fertility rate as a result, a really bad outcome if we don't let students welch.
Maybe put the school on the hook in some way too, forcing it to actually screen for talent (which would absolutely murder DEI lol), that way investor isn't totally SOL if the school was the useless party.
Wow, I just made education affordable again by murdering any safety in financially speculating in it. Change the game, change the outcomes!
> It will help keep college cheap: if what they teach is worthless then students should welch.
Just the opposite, presumably the best colleges that product the highest earning graduates cost the most, those high earning graduates would be might more incentivized to start over than someone with a lesser degree because at least they'd be part of a high paying field and immune from needing to use credit.
>Maybe put the school on the hook in some way too, forcing it to actually screen for talent (which would absolutely murder DEI lol), that way investor isn't totally SOL if the school was the useless party.
You're so wrongheaded there, I don't even know how to get you on the right track, but companies, and schools, with so called diversity hires do better overall. Schools already screen for talent and the ability to graduate, DEI initiates just have them look a little harder in an expanded pool.
If you make student loans dischargeable and private, wouldn't lenders would tighten up and only give loans to people with good odds of repaying the loans? IE, people from middle class+ could still get loans, but how about the smart kid from a very poor family? Wouldn't they be too risky to give a massive loan to?
There might need to be some regulations made so that lenders should discount family background, but only consider grades/earnings potential/etc.
But on the plus side, this should theoretically bring tuition costs down as there won't be effectively unlimited capital for tuition. It also encourages potential students to consider more carefully whether getting a degree makes sense.
Perhaps Pell Grants should also be expanded in eligibility (to make it so that more poor, but motivated kids can get access to higher education).
The goal of these changes would be to: - Reduce the market distortions that are created by giving out federally backed student loans (reducing or at the minimum slowing the pace of growth of tuition costs) - Reduce the burden on taxpayers by eliminating public student loans - Makes it so that kids don't get stuck with student loans that are a drag on them for life, at worst, they'll have to deal with bankruptcy
Potential downsides: - Reduces number of people studying potentially useful/valuable to society degrees that don't have much expected monetary return - Potentially reduces average level of education in the population (could be untrue if it also sufficiently reduces tuition costs)
> Yeah, I'm convinced state backed student loans has led to the crazy rise in college tuition
I'm think it's pretty widely accepted that this is at least partially true.
Link to the preliminary study results from OpenResearch: https://www.openresearchlab.org/studies/unconditional-cash-s...
Note that this was a time-limited study where participants knew they would only receive money for 3 years. Personally, I feel like this leads to different behaviors than if people believe they will receive the income indefinitely.
This is bordering on an unfalsifiable (hence religious claim). If it's only going to work if the money is in perpetuity and then, when that doesn't work, we require the money is in perpetuity for an individual and his descendants, and then, when that doesn't work, require the money is truly perpetual with no hope to end it, then there becomes no way to determine whether or not the policy works in any meaningful way.
Do we really need academic studies on this topic? When Republicans cut taxes on the rich, it is not like they are making sure they have academic consensus on their side.
We know welfare works. It is pretty simple. People need to eat, they need shelter, and a few other basic necessities. When they fall on hard times, not having those things can make it infinitely harder to get back on their feet.
Our current welfare system is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare and has a stigma attached to it. The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop. No fuss, no stigma. They are going to need that money to survive anyway, so might as well just give it to them rather than forcing them to suffer the indignities of poverty.
Public policy is a messy business. But I find it odd that this topic is so controversial as it only took me a few minutes of ruminating on it before realizing how good of an idea it is. Maybe it is because I have had a brief encounter with poverty myself, and ever since my anxieties around finances, access to healthcare, etc.. run deep. Or maybe I just realize that a ton of people were born into poverty and due to no fault of their own are now stuck in it. Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database. The fact that we could just flip a few bits and instantly make the lives of so many people better, boggles my mind why we wouldn't try that.
You don't need anything to implement any policy. You just need someone with power to implement it. There's multiple ways of doing that. One way is to do so democratically, in which case you need to convince the population to vote for you. This can be done through religious means (I.e., appeals to a greater authority or set of morals) or -- ignoring metaphysical concerns -- evidentiary means (i.e., appeals to science and studies). The authors of this study are clearly trying to do the latter, because they want to convince you to vote for these policies.
The other way to implement it is to stage a coup, gain power by sheer force, and implement it that way.
In either case, you don't need an academic study.
> Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database.
Except money does grow on trees (and in supernovae and a few other places). Money is not a number in a database is a unit of net work owed by someone else to you. No work can be accomplished without sunlight and trees.
Money has to come from somewhere, because there's only so much work being done.
Highly recommend Debt: the first 5000 years by Graeber if you're confused.
> The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop.
UBI is typically not envisioned as means-tested (hence ”universal”).
But in practice, the funds are going to have to come from somewhere. Most likely from taxes. So assuming it comes from income taxes, and assuming those income taxes are progressive, at some point along the income scale your UBI is cancelled out by an increase in taxes. It would be a bit silly to give someone $12k/yr in UBI if they are making $500k/yr in income and we would need to increase their taxes by $24k/yr to pay for the program. Just tax them $12k/yr.
This is why I like NIT. It is much more transparent about how the benefit scales with income. At this point if anyone mentions UBI, I just mentally substitute that with NIT as it is a much more practical and easy to understand implementation.
The problem with this kind of test is that the people still live in a society where cheap labor is available to the companies around them that provide them with all the goods and services that they like to purchase with those $1000 (or whatever free amount they've gotten). Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine. There are some strings attached, but considerably less than in the past. You can easily live from the "Bürgergeld", but the labor market currently takes a third hit after Covid and Russia's full scale invasion on Europe: lots of companies, especially labor intensive services like bars and restaurants, have serious trouble to hire staff. The only way is to offer higher salaries – which, in turn, needs to be paid by the customers. This makes goods and services less affordable for everyone, but especially for those relying on government money...
>Germany shifted to a system that is as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine.
It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
>but especially for those relying on government money...
Yes, those are the real victims here. Who else could be victimized by working full time, so that other people don't have to work?
Maybe the real victims are the people who have to work full time and are suffering from the increased cost of living?
> It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
Oh wow, the exact thing people have been saying would happen has happened. Turn's out Quasi-UBI is a drain on tax paying citizens after all. Amazing.
German here, our country is broken beyond recognition due to 40 years of terrible political decisions independent of party or political side.
I cannot even name one thing that is not broken beyond belief. The conservative government has added the debt ceiling to our Constitution requiring a 2/3 vote to change it, thereby making investments like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US utterly impossible. However, they are needed for dozens of reasons, not just the collapsing infrastructure which will directly impact our economy.
Conservatives, Greens, Liberals and Social Democrats have all completely failed at running this country for 40+ years. Russian-supported fascists AfD are obviously not an alternative.
We are coasting on the gains, relationships and industries established before 1990. This is where our standing and wealth comes from and we are simply riding on that high until it pops.
I can go deeply into all of the troubles but Ill keep it simple: the state of the military is entirely representative of the state of ALL other sectors. That should be relatable to non-Germans. I am not exaggerating for karma, my deepest worry is the condition of the real estate / housing market. This is material for a complete shit show, it honestly scares me.
>We are coasting on the gains, relationships and industries established before 1990. This is where our standing and wealth comes from and we are simply riding on that high until it pops.
And more and more of that is either going bankrupt or is being outsourced to China. Whole sectors are step by step becoming non-competitive. Manufacturing, which has been the most important wealth generator for the lower middle class, is going away. Engineering is only relevant if you can innovate, which for many, many reason doesn't really happen. In Germany a very experienced Software developer makes a pittance compared to what you can in the US with much less experience, even before taxes.
Of course it doesn't really help that much of the population is not particularly inclined to do anything engineering/scientific/manufacturing related and actively looks down on that.
>my deepest worry is the condition of the real estate / housing market
Honestly, I am "optimistic" that multiple big manufacturers will fail before that, together with their suppliers.
Also German.
> I cannot even name one thing that is not broken beyond belief. The conservative government has added the debt ceiling to our Constitution requiring a 2/3 vote to change it
Good. You'd see a government without this restriction spend more money on pension benefits faster than you'd think possible.
> thereby making investments like the Inflation Reduction Act in the US utterly impossible
This is not true. Germany has a spending problem, not a tax income problem. Never before have we had as much taxes in the Governments pockets as we do now.
This.
> Maybe the real victims are the people who have to work full time and are suffering from the increased cost of living?
If this was a genuine concern there wouldn't be so many people skimming off the top of every nation on the planet. We're surrounded by parasites and you're picking on people running calorie deficits for some reason.
>If this was a genuine concern there wouldn't be so many people skimming off the top of every nation on the planet. We're surrounded by parasites and you're picking on people running calorie deficits for some reason.
Wrong. The only way to go hungry here in Germany is by choice.
The people "skimming off the top" are not the ones paying millions upon millions in taxes. It is those who are to lazy to work, because they and their family get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income. If you are able, but not working in some capacity, you are the leech and millionaires are paying for your leeching.
> because they and their family get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income
This means it’s not UBI, and that’s kind of the whole point here. With UBI this welfare cliff wouldn’t exist; if you work, you still raise your income. That means, unlike the current German system, UBI still incentivises people to work to increase their income/wealth.
Of course actively disincentivising people to work will cause them to not work. That’s just rational behaviour, you cannot blame anyone for that.
>get enough Bürgergeld, that actually working would lower their income.
This very rarely ever happens by accident. It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushing for a pay raise.
This way they can leech more of the surplus value of their labor.
This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work, because more people working depresses wages and more people working allows growing the economy.
If people don't want to work, they have to pay the leeches and they have to pay more to get people willing to work. Your economics are insane.
>It's a useful policy hack for people "who pay millions in taxes" because it disincentivizes their workers from pushing for a pay raise.
No, it incentivizes them, because there are fewer people working, meaning the supply of labor goes down. At a constant demand that means the price for labor goes up. Literally economics 101.
>This is genuinely insane. No, millionaires want people to work
These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages.
Have you never met any of these "leeches" taking benefits?
I meet them every day of my life.
>These people do work - generally unofficial odd jobs under the table for shitty wages.
Usually dealing drugs.
Evidently not.
I've read plenty about how every working family struggling on benefits is a crack dealer too, written in media that is exclusively owned by the economic leeches who contribute little to no economic value but "who pay millions in taxes" on their unearned income:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2260633/Drug-dealer...
The propaganda that underpins your belief system was designed to foster exactly your kind of resentment against the underclass.
This is a conspiracy theory. There is a labor shortage already, so the people “who pay millions in taxes” would be able to earn much more money if they could find more motivated workers.
>> Who else could be victimized by working full time, so that other people don't have to work?
As when employees work full time so that shareholders can be given dividends? Part of me would rather a cut of wages go to support thousands of people on welfare who "don't have to work" rather than that cut go to a handful of billionaires who also "don't have to work". Our economy already supports an array of non-working people (retirees, disabled people, passive shareholders). So I'm not going to get hung up on the principal. We broke that glass long ago.
Your sarcasm is out of place. I criticise the scheme because it’s not sustainable, not even for those that get the handouts. It’s not even solving the supposed problem. This is important with regard to the posted article, because that effect cannot be observed on small scale experiments that do not restrict labor supply on a societal scale.
That is the problem with these programs. You will never get full buy in from the population unless EVERYONE benefits from it. Just look at social security and Medicare if you go to cut that it is political suicide.
Forced large scale redistribution is just theft, honestly. The value proposition of heavy taxing is no longer met, people here (in Germany) no longer receive fair benefits for their taxes. Infrastructure is failing.
There is no system where everyone benefits from redistribution.
It is literally impossible to imagine a system where everyone benefits, unless you have a free energy machine of course.
Society and economies aren’t zero-sum games. It usually costs less to prevent someone from robbing you by giving them some welfare money - boom, value created out of nothing and everyone is better off ;-)
While there are areas where the "Fachkräftemangel" (lack of skilled laborers) is actually real, the problem for gastronomy is the minimum wage, which is ~12 Euros. Why choose being a service worker or part of the kitchen brigade in (especially small) gastronomy (where, often, all you get is only slightly above minimum wage), if there are other, easier choices which pay basically the same?
As someone who was service staff as a student, I completely understand that, to be honest. It doesn't help that many restaurants just fired their whole service staff during COVID, even though there are other instruments like "Kurzarbeit" (where the state gives you welfare, and you temporarily only work few hours or not at all, if no work is available at your place of labor) - obviously people find new jobs in this case and aren't available anymore.
> Why choose being a service worker in gastronomy
The tipping money often exceeds the wage, from what I hear.
Is this true in Germany? As an American, I was always of the impression that in continental Europe, tips were as a rule a much smaller part of compensation.
Not as extreme as in the US, but it's still true. My brother nearly outearned me during our studies, I was a working part time student and he worked tables on the Weekend.
> as as close to a basic income as you can currently imagine.
More like as far as I can imagine.
Basic Income has to be provided to everyone, not just the ones who don't have a job. That's the whole point. It's not that the amount must be sufficient to live off of, that can be worked out later, but it has to start with everyone on board and that's what makes it "Basic".
isn't that just inflation with extra steps?
The point is everyone would have contributed evenly to this inflation if you look at it from that angle.
depends how much you claw back in taxes for higher earners
That's something that most programs don't even try to explain, and something ive wondered about - how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor?
If you're affecting very small percentages of the population, the impacts seem minor. We've seen this with analysis on raising minimum wage to about $10/hr. Most people make over that amount (or work in excluded roles), so the impact is small. Raise it too much too quickly, and some industries experience issues due to costs passed on in their products/services, and inflation can become detrimental to the people at the bottom.
I wonder how this sort of thing will work out with something on a nearly universal scale - Social Security. To keep up with inflation, we need higher payouts. To keep the program solved, we need more revenue. This can be achieved with more workers, but relies on ever expanding population to cover the prior generation. Or it can be achieved with higher earning workers, which generally requires higher prices which potentially drives inflation, or though higher consumption (not very competitive on the global market due to cost of living, so not likely). Or we can raise the payroll taxes to cover the payouts.
Anything besides the higher output/consumption is likely to result in higher costs to consumers and drive inflation. More money being in more people's pockets also means more competition for constrained resources, also driving inflation.
UBI creates inflation. I think anyone trying to deny that amounts to denying it because they really want UBI, and so they need it to not have that bad effect, but it does. You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.
The theory is that productivity increases will in fact offset it. One way to prevent an increase in money causing inflation is to correspondingly increase the value generated by the economy. Some economic theories, including the current dominant mainstream one, would suggest that if you have that sort of productivity increase you need to increase the money supply to avoid negative impacts brought on by deflation.
One of my several major problems with the idea is I see almost no one trying to figure out how to actually bind the productivity increases together with UBI. Even if I stipulate for the sake of argument a perfectly functioning UBI system working exactly as the advocates propose, as gracious as I can possibly be, it is still a fragile system. Droughts, wars, asteroid strikes, volcanos, bad crop years, supply chain disruptions, normal economic variations including recessions, these things all happen. The productivity excess will shrink at times, but, no politician under any political governing scheme could reduce the payouts, and after long enough on UBI, the hypothetical paradise it produces full of wonderful artists and musicians and programmers creating text editors rather than CRUD apps and people just enjoying life also produces an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet when there is a disruption... but they're still there with their hands out.
>no one trying to figure out how to actually bind the productivity increases together with UBI
Because we not only figured that out, but already implemented this several times in practice. Productivity decreasing until there is nothing to eat, and then people dies from starvation (for some reasons they can't live without food)
I'll be honest. You had me in the first half, but then: "... the hypothetical paradise it produces full of wonderful artists and musicians and programmers creating text editors rather than CRUD apps ..."
Who willingly endeavors to write text editors in 2024 when acme(4) exists?
I jest. More seriously though, if the measure of one's value to society is in their ability to crank out CRUD apps, I'm appalled. I want more dishwashers, more plumbers, more framers, more joiners, more cooks, more babysitters, more stonemasons, and the only way any of that kind of hard labor is sustainable is if there's a cushion to fall back on to recuperate. Bodies break. They break more catastrophically when the damage is continued and sustained over time.
I want my girlfriend to feel free to take on domestic work full-time with the knowledge that, no matter what, she'll be paid for it and that her domestic labor contributions, as informal as they are, are valued monetarily without my having to make up the balance. Likewise, I want that there in case I myself want to take up those domestic responsibilities for a while.
These are two cohorts that literally cement the foundation of society, let alone our trade system, not a cavalcade of keyboard cowboys wrangling Ruby on Rails. I want UBI for them because, without them, the entire project literally crumbles.
The UBI problem, and the problem in your post, is you're engineering starting from what you want, and then assuming that there must be a solution to get there.
You have to start with what you have and build from there.
This is a subtle point and it may take some meditation and thought, possibly ever over some months or years, to understand what I mean. But if you are an engineer, life will hand you opportunities to see what I mean. You can't write down a list of requirements, then assume that exact solution exists, and then burn for it full speed. You must always start with what you actually have and the options you actually have.
The thing that makes perfect sense to me, but you would consider ironic, is that while you may accuse me of this and that, lack of imagination, lack of dreaming, lack of belief, whatever, my way builds better worlds and your way builds failures. I don't follow this path because I don't also see the temptation to build dreamscapes and live in them, I follow this path because it's the one that works.
I am, in fact, not an engineer; I trained to be an actuary. (Though, I guess if one squints enough, the operations research electives look like industrial and systems engineering.)
I consider UBI less an engineering exercise with requirements that feed into the engineering method and more one of ratemaking and claim severity against an entire trade system. My only goal is to put a dollar amount on a loss event (and get some quantification of how many loss events occur over time while we're not looking). What anyone does with that is up to them.
Use of the second person was certainly a choice.
> an economy full of people who can't help get the economy back on its feet
Because they're infantile, used to picnicking and playing their guitars, and devoid of industrial skills like lathe operating or CRUD app development?
> You can't pour money into an economy without a productivity offset without inflating it.
Isn't this even more egregious in the case of bank bailouts? Shouldn't that money have evaporated?
>how does the money affect competition, both for goods/services and labor?
We have the entire 20th century, when many countries tried exactly that. Production is decreasing, labor participation decreasing, good availability decreasing. Mass famine, millions of deaths from starvation. Governments have to decree force labor to overcome famine and totalitarian oppression to avoid revolutions and protect the progressive achievements of general welfare. Last part centralizes authority even more and gives the government tools to remain in power no matter what.
>Or we can raise the payroll taxes to cover the payouts.
This is exactly where the spiral of death begins. Hieger taxation (when there is welfare) - less work incentives - fewer workers - less goods availability - you need bigger welfare share, so even hieger taxes. And so on until people have literally nothing to eat. Not once or twice, always.
That's not exactly correct. The bürgergeld was planned to be a kind of basic income, but that part of it was axed. The conditions that apply move it to exactly the same social security money that existed before.
There is also statistically no existing move from work to existence supported by bürgergeld. It's just propaganda when that's claimed.
This.
Your argument ignores the fact that people do not "need" to demand a full market wage if they already get UBI. Indeed, it is often claimed that state subsidies to the poor are in effect subsidies to their employers.
The situation exists where any low income person gets subsidies from the state, e.g. through cheaper housing, free schools and healthcare, etc. People are still incentivized to work even when they get these subsidies. UBI merely extends such subsidies to include food and other daily expenses.
This is the best critique of UBI I've ever seen (which is a little sad). I don't remember ever reading anything about the second-order effects before.
That's probably because the second order effects of UBI are obvious to anyone that's ever had a job. So you have the people that know the obvious, and the people that want to hide the obvious from the few that don't get it.
The covid handouts and raised unemployment benefits gave a sneak peak to anyone else that was blind.
Even things on the user market were on shirt supply and with high prices. In California the effective unemployment rate was something like $23+.. why would anyone sell their old lawn mower for $50 if you're getting $4000 to stay home? Why work painting houses for $4k a month when you got $4k to sit home. Magically everything cost double or more instantly... I wonder why.
It isn't a very good critique, as it assumes that the only reason people work is to avoid starvation.
People will work very hard to increase their income levels above that required solely for basic needs (i.e. UBI levels), see pretty much every non-minimum wage employee.
I think why people work at the jobs they do is a lot more complicated than that.
Many people do work to avoid starvation PLUS maintain whatever level of standards they've become comfortable with.
But the reason IMO people work non basic jobs is because if they are already forced to work their entire lives to avoid starvation, they might as well optimize. If I have to commute, and maintain a car, and be there for 40+ hours a week, I might as well invest in getting the most out of that as possible.
But once people have enough money to maintain their comfortable lifestyle for the rest of their life, many do retire.
Agreed. Such variable motivations for work and money apply to those on low incomes as much as they apply to those on high incomes.
There's no a-priori reason why one would expect those who receive UBI to be work-shy.
It makes you work shy because unless you have a high paying job, it doesn't make sense to work.
$3k with tons of free time all week.
Or add working for $3k extra money by giving up all your free time? Not worth it.
Unless of course apartments become $5k a month since that's about the money that a person on UBI plus a bad job has..
Why does that logic not apply to those on higher incomes?
Have a job with a free-market rate of $100/hr? Why not work for only 30 hrs a week?
Also, UBI levels are never proposed at $3k/week ($150k/yr), but rather at about $250/wk ($13k/yr), or only 2-3 hours of work per week for the $100/hr guy.
The 3k was per month... Just using the common phrase of working all week with only weekends off to show the comparison.
> I don't remember ever reading anything about the second-order effects before.
That's because it's BS.
I know you really want to believe it, but this is bs: look at inflation statistics in Europe and you'll see that the effect you're imaging doesn't exist. There's no excess inflation in Germany compared to everywhere else in the EU.
Also Bürgergeld is $500 a month for an adult, which is very far from "You can easily live from the Bürgergeld". Survive maybe but definitely not "easily live".
The labor market issues in Germany like in most Europe have a demographic origin, when there's not enough young people you cannot hire them.
> Also Bürgergeld is $500 a month for an adult, which is very far from "You can easily live from the Bürgergeld". Survive maybe but definitely not "easily live".
You're leaving out a ton of information there. The 500 Euros is after everything else has been paid for. There's also lots of benefits like Kindergeld, money for each child you have.
Money which itself barely covers the cost that having kids puts on you…
People living out of it are living in absolute misery, well under the poverty line.
False. They are not living in "absolute misery". The highest germany court has established this in the past. German welfare is among the highest in the world. I also know this personally, I have lived on the past (even more strict) alternative to "Bürgergeld" for the first 18 years of my life.
German welfare guarantees you food, an apartment for you and your children, public schooling, funding for school projects and even includes money for social gatherings.
To portray this as "absolute misery" is false to the point of being dishonest and you're being unfair to billions of people living in pitiful states of poverty.
I've personally given benefits to these people, and I can assure you that you live in a fiction built for you by propaganda on TV.
Are these people better than those in Gaza? Sure but their life is still insanely hard.
You said you lived this way for the first 18 years of your life, then ask your parents how much sacrifices they made so you can feel this comfortable. If you never skipped meal because you could not afford food, be sure that your parents were and just hid it from you out of dignity.
> Are these people better than those in Gaza? Sure but their life is still insanely hard.
They are better off than 95-99%% of the world's population. Put this into perspective. I've seen incredible poverty in this world. Our people are largely ungrateful and have lost the point entirely.
> You said you lived this way for the first 18 years of your life, then ask your parents how much sacrifices they made so you can feel this comfortable
You don't know my situation. There were little sacrifices to be had. I also never said it was always comfortable. But it was dignified and we had everything we needed. There was not a single day where we had to skip meals, and I remember filling out the forms for school trips myself. To live always comfortable is not the point of welfare.
> I've personally given benefits to these people, and I can assure you that you live in a fiction built for you by propaganda on TV.
Seeing as you're swatting away my opinions and personal experience as propaganda, I don't think there is any way to get a fruitful discussion out of this. I don't think we should lower welfare benefits. I just think we're being nationally out of touch with reality.
> They are better off than 95-99%% of the world's population
Who themselves are miles ahead the entirely of work population that ever lived on this planet before XXth century, but that doesn't make their life any better, does it?
> Our people are largely ungrateful and have lost the point entirely.
You aren't entitled any gratitude from people, especially not on the basis that there lives is being made a bit less miserable because of policies you oppose. Maybe I would deserve it slightly more, because at least I'm voting in favor of these policies, but I don't think anyone owes me gratitude whatsoever.
> To live always comfortable is not the point of welfare.
I'm not arguing the opposite, but you did insist that these people lived comfortably. This is obviously BS and I'm glad to see you're retracting it now.
> Seeing as you're swatting away my opinions and personal experience as propaganda, I don't think there is any way to get a fruitful discussion out of this. I don't think we should lower welfare benefits. I just think we're being nationally out of touch with reality.
Whatever your opinions (which BTW are as valid as mine, by definition of being opinions), you started this conversation with factual lies (which, on the opposite, isn't OK) about people “easily living” on welfare. I give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not make this lie on purpose by yourself, and given that this is a recurrent trope of right wing politicians on TV, it's fair to assume that's where it came from.
> Who themselves are miles ahead the entirely of work population that ever lived on this planet before XXth century, but that doesn't make their life any better, does it?
Eh. I‘d argue the average dirt poor Indian right now isn‘t far off from your 1800‘s Chinese rice farmer.
> You aren't entitled any gratitude from people, especially not on the basis that there lives is being made a bit less miserable because of policies you oppose.
This is untrue and I‘m not sure where you’ve made this observation. I wholly support these policies for German people. I have voted for a lot of them in the past and I‘m not a conservative. I love my country and the people in it and I voted progressive in every election I could.
Which is why I‘m getting angry when people spread straight lies that our people on welfare here in my country regularly go without food or live in awful states of disarray and poverty. We provide so much to people and I‘m proud of it. But I‘m also realistic in the way that we can‘t provide this level of welfare to just any outsider, and that welfare is not supposed to provide a life of leisure activity.
> I'm not arguing the opposite, but you did insist that these people lived comfortably. This is obviously BS and I'm glad to see you're retracting it now.
Nowhere in this thread did I state such a thing. I merely said they and their children their basic needs met, which is true. I‘m sitting in my office right now while my partner - an elementary school teacher - fills out forms for the kids in her class with parents on welfare, for them to be provided with any needed materials and money for overnight school trips. I love this. This is good. I didn’t have the privilege when I was a child. How are these people struggling exactly? They live in Munich, the most expensive city here, in one of the most expensive parts of the city, on welfare.
> , you started this conversation with factual lies (which, on the opposite, isn't OK) about people “easily living” on welfare.
Prove where I said anything about easy living. Quote me. It‘s you who is lying and I‘m getting annoyed by this conversation.
> I give you the benefit of the doubt that you did not make this lie on purpose by yourself, and given that this is a recurrent trope of right wing politicians on TV, it's fair to assume that's where it came from.
Nice resort to ad hominems. Note that I have spared you these baseless attacks. I would have expected you to keep this standard up as well. How disappointing. Maybe consider that differing opinions are not always propaganda you might read in the Bild, but sometimes come from people‘s real experiences.
I came out of this system and fought my way out of it. You‘re denying me not only these anecdotes but you and other posters in this thread also argue against information that can be easily found on our official webpages for welfare, all because you assume I‘m some kind of far right idiot. I‘m a bit sad for you honestly.
> Eh. I‘d argue the average dirt poor Indian right now isn‘t far off from your 1800‘s Chinese rice farmer.
Look at life expectancy and infant death, it's night and day. People really tend to underestimate how world changing antibiotics and vaccines really are. And most of those “dirt poor Indians” have mobile phones too!
> How are these people struggling exactly?
You really need to build up empathy and open your eyes to the world, look at them, listen to their stories and you'll hear the struggle. Here are a few examples from the top of my mind: the constant fear of being sanctioned because they did something deemed “wrong” by the administration, is one easy example. The contradictory requirements they need to meet. The struggle to get those benefits in the first place (try interacting with the administration when you're not fully literate, or barely speak German). The lack of any financial mattress in case of trouble, which makes even minor issues critical (an example which happened recently to someone I know: you need to comply with rules in order to get your benefits, but one day your old car break and you cannot afford to repair it, but you also cannot comply anymore without it and risk losing money). It's about having no food left in the fridge 3 days before you get your benefits and cannot buy new before it comes in. Everyone has their story, and they are depressing. But to accept that those struggles are real, you need to make the effort of looking at it.
> Prove where I said anything about easy living. Quote me. It‘s you who is lying and I‘m getting annoyed by this conversation.
I've explained that in another comment: I just mix you up with another user whom I was responding to when you replied and took his side, so I mistakenly assumed you where the original guy.
> Maybe consider that differing opinions are not always propaganda you might read in the Bild, but sometimes come from people‘s real experiences.
You are the one asking “how are those people struggling?”, it's easy to assume people don't struggle when it's not directly visible. You are the one arguing that something which exists (poor people being poor and having constant difficulties) doesn't in fact exists. In a way you are telling me that the people I've witnessed, don't exist!
So yeah I blame propaganda because the reasonable reaction to someone telling you “this thing exist” isn't to say “no it doesn't exist”. The line of reasoning “I've never seen that so it must not exist” is not how the human brain works in general. Even flat-eathers don't believe the earth is flat because they've never seen it round, they do believe that because of a socialization process: other people told them it was false, and so they started questioning it and liked the idea.
> all because you assume I‘m some kind of far right idiot. I‘m a bit sad for you honestly.
I never mentioned anything about you being far right. You see, you too are being confused between different HN users;)
> You really need to build up empathy and open your eyes to the world, look at them, listen to their stories and you'll hear the struggle
I do and I have empathy. Everyone has their own struggles. I see no reason why welfare should reduce struggle to zero.
> the constant fear of being sanctioned because they did something deemed “wrong” by the administration, is one easy example.
Bürgergeld was introduced to deal with these restrictions and even if it's now appended form is still less restrictive than Hartz IV ever was.
> The contradictory requirements they need to meet.
I'm afraid this is just German inefficiency and beurocracy in disguise.
> you need to comply with rules in order to get your benefits, but one day your old car break and you cannot afford to repair it, but you also cannot comply anymore without it and risk losing money
I would be very interested in these rules, because last time I googled, the Arbeitsamt supplies a car if you need it with up to 15k Eur in value.
> It's about having no food left in the fridge 3 days before you get your benefits and cannot buy new before it comes in.
Again, we have food and soup kitchens. I've been there myself. You just have to get over your internal self inflicted shame. There is nothing to be ashamed of when you're going there and the staff there were nothing but friendly, if a little stressed last time I went.
> Everyone has their story, and they are depressing. But to accept that those struggles are real, you need to make the effort of looking at it.
I know those struggles are real. But more often enough, we do have ways to deal with them.
> You are the one asking “how are those people struggling?”, it's easy to assume people don't struggle when it's not directly visible.
As I see it, most of those struggles are either self inflicted due to shame or rise from missing knowledge on how to navigate the system when you're in need.
> In a way you are telling me that the people I've witnessed, don't exist!
They certainly do exist. But there are solutions for almost every one of their problems. You just have to work together with the people at the Arbeitsamt, which many don't.
No one has to go hungry or cold in Germany and I stand by this firmly.
> Bürgergeld was introduced to deal with these restrictions and even if it's now appended form is still less restrictive than Hartz IV ever was.
How is that supposed to go in favor of your argument?
> I'm afraid this is just German inefficiency and beurocracy in disguise.
It is, but it's not just Germany. I know Germans love to complain about their bureaucracy like they love to complain about Deutsche Bahn, but it just shows their lack of foreign experience…
> Again, we have food and soup kitchens.
I address that in the other thread: only if you're lucky to have one nearby.
> I know those struggles are real.
You suggested the opposite in the previous comment so which is it?
> As I see it, most of those struggles are either self inflicted due to shame or
“Lazy poor people who can't just hire a layer like anyone else”
> No one has to go hungry or cold in Germany and I stand by this firmly.
“They just happen to chose to go hungry or cold because they are dumb”
That's just not true. Bürgergeld does not cover real rent costs for example. There is ceiling that is unreachably low. Heating is also not included,so in no way is everything else covered.
To others: This thread is full of propaganda from the neoliberal and extreme right like this. Don't believe a single bit, they do not describe the state of the country nor how the policies work. It is a common wave of propaganda though and maybe interesting from that side.
Your statements are not true. Heating is fully covered and Bürgergeld pays way more for rent than the average student can afford. Maybe it’s different in your city, but in mine, Jobcenter is very generous when it comes to paying rent.
It's just not. Heating is only covered when its costs are deemed to be reasonable. It's just not fully covered by default. It's nice when they cover it for you without problems, but it's not a given. Plus there are limits, like not covering parts of the costs if your apartment is deemed too big.
I could also have picked electricity costs as a different cost of living that is not covered at all.
I have no idea why the poster above is outright lying. You can disprove their claims in a minute by looking at the official page of the Arbeitsamt.
> That's just not true. Bürgergeld does not cover real rent costs for example.
Yep. That's where "Wohngeld" comes in.
> This thread is full of propaganda from the neoliberal and extreme right like this
This is not true. I live in Germany. I have family members in the system on both sides. I read news from all isles.
Fact is, our social welfare state is unmatched compared to any other country. Nowhere else will you get welfare benefits this high. Our welfare benefits are so high, the sudden drop in benefits reduces benefits from earning more money by insane margins. There is a good calculation example here [1]
[1]: https://x.com/sozi_simon/status/1737361321186701336
BTW, you can't get bürgergeld and Wohngeld at the same time, so that's already completely wrong. See https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/buerg... :
Wenn Sie Bürgergeld erhalten, haben Sie keinen Anspruch auf Wohngeld. Allerdings ist Wohngeld eine vorrangige Leistung. Wenn Sie dadurch Ihre Hilfebedürftigkeit beseitigen oder vermeiden können, können Sie einen Wohngeldantrag stellen (ab dem 1. Juli 2023 sind Sie verpflichtet, einen Wohngeldantrag zu stellen).
For a more full picture have a look at https://www.ifo.de/publikationen/2024/aufsatz-zeitschrift/lo... (though the ifo is not always trustworthy). There exist specific scenarios where there is not enough money remaining when you pick up work with a better salary. Even I know scenarios like that, for example when getting unemployment benefits, all money earned at the side is lost, which is just stupid if you wanted people to slide into work (through being self-employed for example). That should be a percentage, so that you have more at the end when completing a freelance project for example, instead of having worked for nothing.
What makes it rightwing propaganda is taking these cases and claiming that it would explain why people don't want to work anymore - which is not true, neither the connection nor that people don't want to work. And to combine it with the statement that the welfare benefits are high, when they are not - the problem, if there is one, is that earned money reduces the benefits 100%, instead of on a sliding scale. It's not the amount, as in 99% of scenarios being on state welfare completely sucks in Germany, it's the scenario of not having enough money for food at the end of the month, being scared to heat in the winter and each unforeseen bill a mayor crisis.
Also, it is also not okay to not mention that bürgergeld is still combined with sanctions. If not taking up (usual shitty ) work it can be lost, or missing a summoning, etc. Being in that system is thus highly stressful. Those sanctions were supposed to go away, instead they were made harder. Thanks SPD.
If these sanctions did stay in place… then why is chancellor Scholz (SPD) currently rallying to reintroduce them?[0] of course, he’s a populist, but that doesn’t make your statement true.
[0] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/scholz-so...
He does not? The article is saying the contrary:
Gegen Bezieher, die sich immer wieder weigerten, Jobs anzunehmen, habe die Regierung zudem bereits härtere Sanktionen möglich gemacht.
> What makes it rightwing propaganda is taking these cases and claiming that it would explain why people don't want to work anymore
I still don't agree it's right wing propaganda. Bürgergeld is just one part of a larger picture of why people don't want to work anymore. The reality is that social welfare in its entirety is too close to what you can earn with low skilled work, wages are too low and benefits are too high and cut off too suddenly.
> It's not the amount, as in 99% of scenarios being on state welfare completely sucks in Germany
Again, I can not confirm. I have lived on state welfare (Hartz IV) for my entire life before moving out of my parents.
> it's the scenario of not having enough money for food at the end of the month, being scared to heat in the winter and each unforeseen bill a mayor crisis.
This is not true in my experience. I don't know where you're getting this information from. Heating costs were always covered unless you heat like a maniac and unforseen bills are not happening. Where should they? Your apartment and car fixing costs are covered. You can read more about this here: [1]
> Also, it is also not okay to not mention that bürgergeld is still combined with sanctions. If not taking up (usual shitty ) work it can be lost, or missing a summoning, etc. Being in that system is thus highly stressful. Those sanctions were supposed to go away, instead they were made harder. Thanks SPD.
Why shouldn't they take up shitty work? It's not undignified. My mother stocked shelves for Aldi. She worked gas stations. She did community work. She couldn't hold a job for long. It's hard work and that's okay. You don't have the right to dodge shitty work just because you don't think it's gratifying. It's also not as stressful as you make it out to be. You have to remember, you're still getting so much stuff for free there are millions of people who would die for that chance. A little stress still makes it worth it.
Yes, you need to be smart with money. That's okay. Welfare should not make for a live of comfortable spending. But people don't live in a state of desolation. The point of welfare is to enable people who can't work to live a dignified live. Not a comfortable one. We're just so out of touch in Germany, people on our welfare system can't see their incredible privilege.
[1]: https://www.inside-digital.de/news/buergergeld-jobcenter-bez....
> This is not true in my experience. I don't know where you're getting this information from. Heating costs were always covered unless you heat like a maniac and unforseen bills are not happening. Where should they? Your apartment and car fixing costs are covered. You can read more about this here: [1]
That does not fit together at all. The article is covering a legal decision from 2020 where one woman forced the jobcenter to cover car repair costs. So before, it was not covered. So you just did not have a childhood in the system where stuff like this was covered.
> Why shouldn't they take up shitty work? It's not undignified.
That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
> The reality is that social welfare in its entirety is too close to what you can earn with low skilled work
So which other social welfare systems than Bürgergeld are you aiming at here?
> That does not fit together at all. The article is covering a legal decision from 2020 where one woman forced the jobcenter to cover car repair costs. So before, it was not covered. So you just did not have a childhood in the system where stuff like this was covered.
I did, but we did not experience this specific case. I lived in a small town and the Government paid for my public transport costs. They do provide a car as well if you need it for work or for educational purposes. They also pay for transport if you're sick and need to see a doctor. Of course, if you're on welfare with a car without a need for a car, they won't cover anything, which is fair.
> That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
I've not said this once.
> So which other social welfare systems than Bürgergeld are you aiming at here?
I'm asking again, are you even German? There are lots of other opportunities which we do provide. We pay for your Apartment with Wohngeld, even if you do work and don't earn enough. We pay for your healthcare costs. We pay for school supplies, trips and education costs for children. In my city, there are a lot of subsidised offers like free access to public pools. You have access to free TV and internet if you're on welfare. You can get a free social carer who will manage your expenses, if you yourself are not able.
I am not trying to be rude, but you're again discussing from a point of severe misinformation and you're lacking crucial knowledge about how our system works. You've been corrected multiple times in this thread for spreading misinformation, like heating costs not being covered by the government.
It's the other way around. You seem to take your information from the AFD or FDP bubble and are thus thoroughly misinformed in how the system works and what effect it has on the people under it. I did not react to your question for my nationality as it's ad hominem. Be assured that I know german politics and social systems perfectly well.
You ignore which limits and obligations are placed under the bürgergeld system, and how stiffling the bureaucracy is. For example, yes, Schuldbedarf is covered, but only up to an amount. Depending on the school that can be not enough, and then be a big problem. You also implied (and even said directly) that aids like Wohngeld and Bürgergeld can be combined, which is wrong.
> They do provide a car as well if you need it for work or for educational purposes
I just linked you to an article showing that they did not.
>> That's not the point. The claim above was that you can comfortable live on Bürgergeld without having to work. Which you usually can't, since it would be taken away (or at least significantly reduced) if you tried that.
> I've not said this once.
It is impossible to read your comments without seeing that this is what you want to say. You also directly agreed with comments saying the same. I quoted you already on that.
> Fact is, our social welfare state is unmatched compared to any other country. Nowhere else will you get welfare benefits this high. Our welfare benefits are so high, the sudden drop in benefits reduces benefits from earning more money by insane margins.
It's very funny, because people with the same political opinions as you in my country are absolutely positive that this is the case for my country instead (France).
And in practice they are pretty similar (as are many European systems unsurprisingly, we all draw inspiration on each other) and as someone who knows the French social system fairly well I can assure you that the trope you hear from right wing politicians on TV is nothing but lies.
Both can be right in their own way. I'm not saying we should get rid of our welfare. I'm just saying our people are missing the point. It's incredible privilege to live here. You think they would get the same welfare in the US, in China, Ghana or Russia? Think again. They should be grateful is what I'm saying.
No that's not what you're saying, you're saying that they live easily and have no incentive to work, which I'm arguing against. You also said this lack of incentive to work is causing inflation, which I'm also arguing against.
Now I agree with you that even though their live is still tough, they are still very lucky to live in Germany as opposed to many other places on earth.
But that wasn't the topic and you moved the goalpost.
> No that's not what you're saying, you're saying that they live easily and have no incentive to work
Well you‘re free to quote me on that. I haven‘t been saying this at all.
> which I'm arguing against.
No, you’re arguing for falsehoods. Posters here are stating that things that are covered aren‘t and that people on Bürgergeld live in abhorrent poverty, which is demonstrably untrue.
> You also said this lack of incentive to work is causing inflation, which I'm also arguing against.
I haven‘t. Again, please do quote me.
> But that wasn't the topic and you moved the goalpost.
No, the topic was that you (among others) think people on Bürgergeld starve, are in dire need of heating and live in depressed states for lack of funding. These are lies. You‘re lying. I’ve no idea why.
> Well you‘re free to quote me on that.
You're right I mistook you and nkmnz from whom you defended the original argument.
> and that people on Bürgergeld live in abhorrent poverty, which is demonstrably untrue.
It's only untrue if you define “abhorrent” as worse as everywhere. But that's not a good criteria because then the entirety of the world population today is affluent by even 1800 standards, and most European people in 1800 were themselves in a very good situation compared to Paleolithic humans. So of course people can survive with much less but that doesn't mean these people are suffering. It's as saying to someone with a missing foot that he's OK since others have lost both legs.
People living on social welfare are definitely struggling and only ascetic people would put themselves voluntarily under such a standard of living. And evidently pretty much anyone claiming it's not a harsh life isn't willing to live with so little.
> think people on Bürgergeld starve, are in dire need of heating and live in depressed states for lack of funding.
Skipping meal is routine, and mental health issues are indeed a problem for those people. You are the one lying to yourself.
> It's only untrue if you define “abhorrent” as worse as everywhere
> So of course people can survive with much less but that doesn't mean these people are suffering.
I‘d argue that as long as you‘re surviving entirely on someone else‘s money without being forced to work, you can argue for my point. Think about this: Never before in history did you have the chance to rely entirely upon the effort of others for your basic human needs. In almost no other country on earth can you survive with most of your needs met just because you happen to live there, even if you‘re not born there. This is insane privilege.
> And evidently pretty much anyone claiming it's not a harsh life isn't willing to live with so little
Nope, sorry. You‘re saying this from a privileged western perspective.
I‘m not comparing humans of the past, I‘m comparing it with the huge majority of people living on earth, right now. A person living on German welfare is so far removed from the average poor Afghan farmer, people in Favelas living in poverty , Ethiopians living under warlord rule or even the average poor person in the US they might as well be royalty. And again, welfare isn‘t supposed to provide an entirely struggle free life. It‘s supposed to have you meet your basic human needs. We give our people so much more than that. Public schooling, free access to public pools, additional housing money in cities, free internet for people on welfare, and a car. It’s delusional if one thinks that‘s still not enough.
Skipping meals is not routine, that‘s untrue as well. We have soup kitchens here. I’ve been there myself as a poor student.
> Think about this: Never before in history did you have the chance to rely entirely upon the effort of others for your basic human needs. In almost no other country on earth can you survive with most of your needs met just because you happen to live there, even if you‘re not born there. This is insane privilege.
Let's flip it upside down: never before[1] in history could you be bared from earning your food from your own work, and same for housing. That's the entire reason why people need welfare: there's no berries or roots to harvest, no game to hunt, no fields to farm, no vacant lot to build your house on with the help of your family and friends. All of this is behind the control of the gatekeepers who own the means of subsistence. The modern world is a prison in that regard.
> Nope, sorry. You‘re saying this from a privileged western perspective.
No, you misread me: barely nobody with your or my standard of living would voluntarily adopt this lifestyle. You act as if the ability not to work was a luxury that made all this worthwhile, but the truth is almost nobody ever voluntarily leave the wage-slavery state to take advantage of this luxury. Why that in your opinion?
> I‘m not comparing humans of the past, I‘m comparing it with the huge majority of people living on earth, right now. A person living on German welfare is so far removed from the average poor Afghan farmer, people in Favelas living in poverty , Ethiopians living under warlord rule or even the average poor person in the US they might as well be royalty
As I said in another thread, you cannot compare struggle between regions of the world or time periods, because all the poor people in the world today have access to things even royalty couldn't dream about. Infant death in Afghanistan (45/1000) is comparable to the level in Germany in the 50s and is roughly a tens of European infant mortality until the beginning of 19th century. Even in royal families, child death were consistently a terrible problem for millennia. And that's a problem that's almost non-existent in today Afghanistan. Same for food, as famine as disappeared almost everywhere in the world and people in Favelas have access to food in a diversity and quality (both in taste and in food safety) that would make aristocrats from the past in awe. Does that mean that Afghan farmers and people in Favelas are not struggling by your definition?
> Skipping meals is not routine, that‘s untrue as well. We have soup kitchens here. I’ve been there myself as a poor student.
Please read the massive literature about how many people refuse to go there even when it's close to their home (it's not always, especially in suburban or rural places) because they're “worth more than this”.
> It‘s supposed to have you meet your basic human needs. We give our people so much more than that. Public schooling, free access to public pools, additional housing money in cities, free internet for people on welfare, and a car.
You fail to realize how almost all of these (that is, everything except access to public pools) can be basic human needs in modern societies: schools are a no-brainer of course and I really don't understand how you can put it in your list, but so is housing. Cars and internet connection are only necessities because we shaped the world around it, but here's the world we live in: internet is basically mandatory for many government-related stuff and so are cars when you don't live in cities. Locking people out of the normal world isn't a rational move no matter how “morally good” it sounds. (Also, since I can't find it easily on the web, does welfare in Germany genuinely provide access to a car? That sounds really clever actually, because the lack of mobility is a huge blocker for people to get back to the job market once they've lost access to a car here in France, and we are subsidizing people who are practically stuck without opportunity to get a job which is a terrible policy).
[1] at least not before the “enclosure movement” in Britain in the early modern period, where this madness came from.
> Let's flip it upside down: never before[1] in history could you be bared from earning your food from your own work, and same for housing. That's the entire reason why people need welfare: there's no berries or roots to harvest, no game to hunt, no fields to farm, no vacant lot to build your house on with the help of your family and friends. All of this is behind the control of the gatekeepers who own the means of subsistence. The modern world is a prison in that regard.
This is a false equivalence. There are odd-jobs now like they were in the past, with much better benefits. There are two classes of people on welfare: Those wo can't work and those who could but don't, for whatever reason. The first class couldn't work hunter or gathering jobs in the past and the second class would be forced to do so out of necessity. The modern world is not a prison for these people, but instead provides a cushion for our nation's weakest. These people wouldn't have had the opportunities you state. They would have just died instead.
> No, you misread me: barely nobody with your or my standard of living would voluntarily adopt this lifestyle.
I agree entirely. 95% of the world's population do not have our standard of living. Which is why they try to migrate into the west. Even European countries with the lowest standards of welfare provide lifestyles and opportunities that seem like luxury to poor people from all over the world.
> You act as if the ability not to work was a luxury that made all this worthwhile, but the truth is almost nobody ever voluntarily leave the wage-slavery state to take advantage of this luxury. Why that in your opinion?
You are correct, they don't and that is not my opinion of European natives. But people leave the state of real slavery and spend their entire life savings with hopes to cross over into the West. Europe will have to protect the standards of welfare like Denmark already does, if we want to keep benefits up to standard for the people who are already here.
> Does that mean that Afghan farmers and people in Favelas are not struggling by your definition?
Of course not, they just struggle differently.
> Please read the massive literature about how many people refuse to go there even when it's close to their home (it's not always, especially in suburban or rural places) because they're “worth more than this”.
That struggle is entirely self-made and quite frankly, not the problem of the Government. Opportunities are readily available. There is no shame in going to a soup kitchen. I had the same sentiment in the past, went there, and dropped any prejudice, because I was hungry.
> You fail to realize how almost all of these (that is, everything except access to public pools) can be basic human needs in modern societies
You would think, but this even the richest country on the earth doesn't provide good schooling to poor children.
> internet is basically mandatory for many government-related stuff
This made me laugh. It's still Germany we're talking about.
> Also, since I can't find it easily on the web, does welfare in Germany genuinely provide access to a car
We do. More often than not, if the Government deems that you don't need a car, you're granted free public transport. I've made use of this system. It was fine.
> because the lack of mobility is a huge blocker for people to get back to the job market
I'd wager the largest blocker for people to get back into the job market is that wages haven't kept up with welfare costs. There is an incredibly sharp drop off point for welfare benefits. For most people able of only unskilled labor, there is a loss of money if they start working at minimum wage level.
We have failed our immigration efforts because of a couple of factors, one of which being the availability of welfare benefits. I know how this sounds, but it's true. Compared to other European nations, for example, only about every fifth Ukranian refuge has found work here. Poland, which does not provide a lot of welfare for refugees, has seen a working rate of 70% in the same group. This problem is twofold however, refugees by and large benefit from unskilled labour and manufacturing, work which is rare to come by in Germany.
I'm not saying we should lower benefits. The only possibility I see is an increase of wages, which by and large isn't really possible in Germany; our infrastructure and global economic competitiveness is declining. The job market is in a dire situation right now and jobs opportunities are getting less available each day. Germany is in a catastrophic state right now and there's no solution. We have a fast aging population, rising inflation, housing, and food costs and too few workers.
> You would think, but this even the richest country on the earth doesn't provide good schooling to poor children.
Interesting to see how the topic you know the best (from your GF as I understand it) is exactly the one where government isn't doing enough. You see what I mean by TV giving you wrong impressions on topics you're less familiar with …
And here an example of someone starving because Hartz IV being cut: https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/article818850/Hartz-IV-Empfa...
Yes, that's not a common case, but it happens.
Here an article about 5.5 million Germans not being able to pay for heating:
https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/armut-5-5-million...
You‘re really going to make your point with an Article from 2007 of a mentally ill man that didn‘t even answer his letters from the Arbeitsamt? He didn‘t even apply for aid. Also, you never have to go hungry in Germany. Anyone can go to a Suppenküche and get meals for free.
Your other article is from 2022, the middle of the Ukraine war which caused an incredible explosion in heating costs. There is no mention of welfare there. Even then, if you actually read the stats behind it, Germany was still in the top 3 EU wide by a far margin. Also, as per the Statistisches Bundesamt, the people polled gave self assessed answers in these polls. There is no information to be found on the severity or degree of how many funds they were lacking, or even what „enough heating“ is supposed to mean. Bit disappointing to be honest.
These articles do not support your point at all. What even is your point? Are you even German? You‘re discussing from a point of severe misinformation. I really don‘t get your agenda here.
Given the full thread, you claimed both things here:
>> It is free money for everyone. Everyone obviously excluding the people who work full-time and who are paying taxes so that "everyone" can live of Bürgergeld.
> Oh wow, the exact thing people have been saying would happen has happened. Turn's out Quasi-UBI is a drain on tax paying citizens after all. Amazing.
The first one is not my statement, but a direct quote from the top poster.
The second comment makes no statement about it being free and easy. Just that UBI money is being largely spent on leisure activities. It also is a drain on taxes.
Nowhere there do I talk about easiness or inflation - at all. On the contrary, you‘ve been alerted of your easily disproven statements multiple times in this thread and not just by me. Let‘s keep being civil about this though.
500$?? You’re either uninformed, lying, or really bad at math:
- 561€ cash hand out alone amount to 610$ already
- rent and heating are paid in full, which can be up to another 500€ in the city where I live
- health insurance is free which would otherwise cost ~300€ as a private insurance
Thus, Bürgergeld is closer to 1500$ or 3x your phantasy amount.
As others have pointed out [0], the summaries have a much more positive spin than the accompanying paper [1].
The paper's abstract:
> We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leverag-ing an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.
[0] https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/1815413121822896270
[1]https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/nber-working-paper-...
I think UBI is a horrifically bad idea. However, I don't think good OR bad results from studies like this are remotely relevant. It's like testing air pressure by patching 1% of a hole. The effects from testing a subset of the population could be drastically different from the effect when rolled out to the entire population.
If you were to hand out $1k a month to everyone in my area an immediate result would likely be that rents would increase by somewhere close to $1k a month.
Everyone needs somewhere to live. Everyone wants to live closer to where they work and where there friends and family are. Housing is in limited supply. If everyone had more purchasing power, then everyone's going to collectively bid up what they're willing to pay for housing simply because they can.
This is the basic uncertainty I have about UBI, and I've never heard an argument against it that went step by step and explained how that wouldn't happen. It seems intuitively like it would. In response, I've hear the equivalent of "don't worry, they've thought of that already, and the math still works". Maybe, but I'd feel a lot better if somebody could walk me through it.
- At a macro level, if a program is "paid for" i.e. revenue neutral, it does not result in inflation (at least in aggregate).
- UBI/Negative Income Tax (NIT) is not a handout to literally everyone, only the unemployed and lowest income folks will actually net money. Anyone with a modest income or larger will likely either see no changes to their net income or even a reduction in net income (due to higher taxes to pay for the program).
- Assuming a UBI of $1k (just making a number up, but it gets tossed around a lot), you would only get that full amount if you were unemployed, so that means you are pulling in $12k a year. Someone making $12k a year isn't really going to be renting an apartment by themselves. They are probably going to crash on a couch, live with relatives, or maybe rent a single room.
- As you go higher up the income ladder, the UBI phases out. I am also just making up numbers here, but maybe the phase out starts when you make $1k/month and stops at $3k/month. So someone making $12k a year in income would actually get $24k/year with UBI, but by the time you are making $36k/year you get $0 UBI. There are not a lot of areas in the country where you can rent apartments on these incomes. The places where you can do that, housing is probably not in as much demand and will likely not suffer from much if any inflation. So again, even if you are making a small income and bringing in some UBI, it will be designed to phase out long before someone could afford a one bedroom apartment in a high demand area.
- And I think a nice feature of this type of program, is UBI would actually help even out the demand imbalances between VHCOL and LCOL areas. No one living solely off UBI is going to be comfortable in SF or NYC. But there are a lot of regions in our country that have minimal job prospects and could desperately use some revitalization. UBI would go a lot farther in those areas and would create some monetary inflows back into those regions. That in turn could reduce some of the housing pressure on the VHCOL areas (although I am not sure it would be a huge effect).
It is worth mentioning that I assume most proponents of UBI are also acutely aware of the housing crises. To solve that, we need to build more housing. For the reasons listed above, I don't think UBI would cause much housing inflation, but even if it did, the solution to that problem is to build more housing, not to forgo welfare programs.
Thank you. Is what you're describing what is commonly referred to as UBI? It sounds like a different formulation to me. Most of the time I hear about UBI, the emphasis is on it being universal—everyone gets it, not just people living in poverty. That's where the intuition problems arise: if everyone you are competing for real estate with has more money, why wouldn't the cost of real estate increase?
I think anyone who has thought deeply about the topic recognizes that NIT is probably the only practical implementation (if you search this thread it gets mentioned a lot). There are the MMT folks that think you could finance UBI with deficit spending, but I think the recent bout of inflation we experienced has them on their heels.
At the end of the day, if someone is making $500k/yr and we give them $12k/yr in UBI, that isn't really going to move the needle for them. And from a practical standpoint, we are probably going to have to raise their taxes by a bit more than what they are getting in UBI to pay for the program. So it is kinda pointless. NIT solves this. And as an added bonus NIT can be implemented by the IRS, eliminating the need for another bureaucracy (although some UBI folks suggest that the social security admin can handle things, but I would argue that we should get rid of social security and just have a bigger NIT for seniors).
I still consider NIT to be "universal", because everyone would qualify for it. You do not need to apply for it. And it will kick in automatically when you need it. A lot of our current welfare programs are a bureaucratic nightmare. There is an entire industry of non-profits that exist solely to help people navigate that mess. A lot of people don't get the help they need because of this, or because they don't like the stigma of being on welfare. NIT/UBI eliminate that, so that is why I consider both to be "universal".
I agree, in my opinion, a common misconception I've seen is people saying wealth isn't zero sum. It can be created from thin air, but as long as there are needed and scarse resources (housing, maybe medical, maybe ivy league college), the market will adapt to consume more of the wealth.
So wealth can be created but it makes everyone else slightly poorer in different ways
The post you responded to leaves out that supply of housing can increase - in the US, we stopped building to meet demand decades ago and are only in the last few years showing signs of reversing that trend in some major metro areas. We also have a "missing middle" of housing density that can be further built in.
> It seems intuitively like it would.
It already happened. Covid cash ended up in the hands of asset owners.
At the margins, more people would have more ability to try to work around the market power of landlords. More time for political advocacy to rollback NIMBYism, or loosen zoning, or to build their own home, or to make an additional purchase that makes a marginally cheaper rental more acceptable.
All the studies on UBI are flawed.
The whole point of UBI is that everyone gets the money.
When you give a select few extra money they can do things that they otherwise wouldn't. When you give everyone money the value of the money just decreases.
Negative income tax (NIT) solves this. At this point, when anyone says UBI, I just substitute NIT in my head. It is really the only practical implementation of a UBI scheme.
Further, if a UBI-like program is funded with new taxes (or cuts to existing programs), it should have a negligible impact on inflation. It is only when you do deficit spending that you risk inflation.
Good points. I think NIT would cause some inflation though as the cost for some things is related to the geography so kind of like what we saw with the pandemic some people would change location so they could afford a better lifestyle and end up driving up the prices of things in other locations. But maybe then they could base the amount on wherever someone is a resident however I’m sure this would be gamed. Maybe a state issued debit card for NIT could solve this though or banks could be required to pass transaction details to government. This could possibly assist government in information gathering for tax compliance.
I think a major feature of a UBI/NIT would be to make it entirely location independent. There are tons of areas in our country that are economically depressed, largely due to a lack of jobs. These areas typically have low cost of living, so someone on UBI would be able to live a lot more comfortably there than they would in a high cost job center.
And this in turn would provide some monetary inflows into those areas that could help revitalize them. A lot of these areas are occupied by seniors living off of social security. An influx of younger folks with UBI checks would help balance things a bit better.
That's obvious. The point is inequality is reduced.
So a progressive tax system like what we have? (ignoring capital gains taxes)
UBI represented as a progressive tax system would be so wildly different from our current brackets it would be qualitatively different. Some brackets would be negative.
"negative brackets" is a truly great idea and would help many affected by poverty.
but that's not what adherence to UBI is about. UBI is about chasing an impossible utopia and burning ourselves in the process so that we have greater net inequality.
Stick to the plan. Call out anyone who tries to make UBI work by watering it down from our idealized end-goal as nay-sayers. Clutch to random hypothesis'.
It's the only way we can bludgeon them through democratic or revolutionary means.
That's why UBI needs to be financed from wealth/property tax.
If you were to hand out $1k per month to everyone in a country that has vacant housing in places where there are no jobs, some people would move to and revitalize these places.
That's a good example for why we can't leave housing in the hands of investors.
Completely devastating results for promoting free money. 1k a month and the "benefits" are some minor lifestyle changes.
No impact on health. Biggest spending beverages. Slightly less time spent working. Some people start budgeting (presumably to figure out how to spend the money). And black people start businesses.
There are 300M people in the US. Giving 1k to each every month is 3.6T a year. And the effects are miniscule. With 3.6T you could do a lot of things. Just reversing the trend of obesity would be a major improvement for the lives of millions.
This is the first good data on direct cash transfers in developed countries. The results in developing countries were quite different:
https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
People in that study were receiving a lot more money, relative to typical local incomes. But it seems like they used it quite differently. I think there are major differences between poor people in rich vs poor countries.
That is a common misconception. No serious UBI proposal would be that expensive.
UBI is not about free cash to everyone. It's about reforming basic welfare benefits and income taxes to prevent welfare traps.
The "U" part is about making basic welfare benefits automatic and unconditional. You don't have to apply for them, and you don't have to do anything specific to qualify for them.
The "B" part is fundamentally a tax reform. Everyone gets the automatic welfare benefit, but some common tax credits and deductions would disappear, as would the lowest tax brackets. In the US, the 24% federal income tax bracket might start at $0.
For low-income people, the biggest change would be lower effective marginal tax rate, as they would only pay actual taxes. For medium incomes and above, the main change would be that people would have to calculate their taxes in a different way.
The necessity of a tax reform also means that testing UBI properly is difficult. A $1000/month benefit with current income taxes would be more money for low-income workers than an actual $1000/month UBI.
With effects this small UBI is clearly not something worth doing.
The 3.6T are for everyone getting an additional 1k a month. Which is exactly what the study tested and which had negligible effects. If the effects of 3.6T free money are negligible, then spending less on the same thing is obviously more negligible.
I used to support UBI but after seeing the US stimulus money get socked away into savings and the stock market, leading to rising prices and inflation, I no longer support it. I think all it will do is raise the cost of nearly everything and those that couldn’t afford the basics still won’t be able to since they’ll be more expensive.
I understand where you're coming from but my perspective is that the two aren't directly comparable. The stimulus money came at a time of fear, and a time when people were primarily stuck inside. It was also known by all to be limited to just one or a couple of payments.
All that combined meant for those that didn't have an immediate need, it was effectively like getting a small bonus from work - putting it in savings or an investment made a lot of sense. I also know several friends that were only able to pay rent or bills because of it.
That is different than if people who need it were given a base source of income that was predictable and long term. I don't think it would just dump into savings then - it would get spent on a new car, or rent, or to pay off debts.
I don't think it matters where it gets put in terms of inflation. What we learned from the stimulus is that taken in aggregate, the population became less price sensitive because they had more money, and sellers felt the increased money supply. This allowed prices to rise. I don't see how UBI doesn't create a similar outcome, but I'm happy to review a paper or something that shows possibly how after an extended period it levels out. I'd imagine in a similar vein if you deleted overnight Social Security prices would fall because the money supply would be impacted so severely.
And then businesses start competition for the customer with pricing pulling that inflation down. No one will start new business or start adjusting existing in context of stimulus money to make prices competitive because they know this spike is just a temporal glitch. Business was rather interested in raising prices to get more in the face of supply shortage. Showed good corporate profit numbers.
Stimulus checks are nowhere close to ubi from person's and business perspective, I would not extrapolate observations from one to another.
I argue against this in that I don't think anyone was acting with such precision. This was an aggregate effect of money supply increasing dramatically. There would no doubt be a spike in prices upon the rollout of UBI, but maybe it would level off over time. My fear is that it would raise the water level permanently and the new price baseline would negate the benefit of UBI.
Two other studies on slightly different cash transfer programs:
https://www.who.int/tools/elena/review-summaries/cash-transf...
https://epar.evans.uw.edu/blog/long-term-impacts-cash-transf....
I don't see how UBI can work, on a nationwide scale it means everyone got x% more money and the market would adjust itself accordingly by raising prices?
Also UBI is funded by taxes, which if applied to middle class they will vote against you. And if applied to companies, they push it down on the customer, making everything cost more (and therefore negating the UBI effect).
What probably would be more effective for society would be improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you will and free yearly health checkups.
UBI is generally not metered by "%" but some flat quantity of money, whether nominal or real. That is, like a "head tax," but...negative.
In that common formulation, it would compress consumption by the entire tax+benefit base, that is, everyone would move towards median consumption by some amount, keyed to the magnitude of the UBI, if funded by any kind of proportional taxation (including a nominally regressive proportional tax, like consumption tax/VAT).
Politically, it has tough problems: 18% of the population [over age 65] already has a "MeBI" in the form of Social Security that they can vote to increase, and 22% of the population is below the age of 18, and can't vote. So that's 40% right there. Of the remaining 60% in their working years that produce the output split among themselves and that 40%, quite a few would rather not be compressed towards median consumption: the voting population is shifted higher in the consumption deciles, and people are not often so disposed to think they might find themselves luckless in the future. There's a thicket of "tax expenditures" that can form a "MeBI" for the electorate at the upper-half, like the mortgage interest deduction.
If we look at the difficulty in gaining electoral support in splitting consumption to the benefit of minors (thus, future labor) to even things out a bit, in the form of the semi-recently expired expanded child tax credit, we see the magnitude of the political problem.
Personally, I prefer to see UBI as tax reform to avoid crazy wiggling in effective marginal tax rate. But there are many reasons why it's unlikely that the electorate would see it that way, or approve of it even if they did.
> Also UBI is funded by taxes
Some of those taxes are already being paid. We have a lot of social programs that, for what could politely be called "political reasons", include extensive administration whose primary function is gatekeeping and means testing. Often, the administration of those programs costs substantially more than any money "saved", leaving aside that it also has a very high false positive rate, excluding people who actually should have received it. But there is a political faction that would rather see government burn a billion dollars just to make sure a tiny fraction of that isn't paid to someone who didn't "deserve" it. To quote https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... , "the policy choices available to them impact the user experience of fraudsters and legitimate users alike. They want to choose policies which balance the tradeoff of lowering fraud against the ease for legitimate users to transact."
Eliminating entire programs and the massive administrative overhead of those programs, and replacing them with something that merits the label "universal", is much more efficient.
Also:
> on a nationwide scale it means everyone got x% more money and the market would adjust itself accordingly by raising prices?
This is assuming the injected money has zero multiplicative effect on the economy, which is very unlikely to be the case. By way of example, since we're on a site created by a startup accelerator: Many, many people have said that UBI would be a massive boon to the startup ecosystem, by making it possible for many more people to safely try to build a startup without as much personal risk.
Analyses vary, but some analyses have suggested that UBI may be a net benefit to the economy. At the very least, economic boosts provided by UBI substantially offset its cost. That's in addition to the offset mentioned above of replacing existing less-efficient programs with UBI.
> improved an ACA, a cap on healthcare costs for all if you will and free yearly health checkups.
We should do this as well, because healthcare is one of the few things that isn't addressed by UBI (since ultimately it's an insurance mechanism).
UBI at this time is like topical ointment on a festering wound. Americans first need livable wages and single-payer healthcare that isn't Medicare, which is a Byzantine, confusing maze of dozens of coverage options largely outsourced to for-profit corporations.
Ointment on a festering wound applies much more to healthcare, which can't fix many problems associated with poverty, like stress, bad nutrition, bad housing and to livable wages, which don't help people who don't have a job, then to UBI.
I am not sure how small studies can account for the inflation wide rollout could cause. Consider this hypothetical: If you give 1 of 1000 renters $100, 1 landlord will leave the rent alone because they don't know. If you give 1000 of 1000 renters $100, word will get to 1000 landlords, who will all increase rent $100, because the market will bear it. I'm not saying this will happen, just that a small study enjoys the benefits of anonymity.
There are places in the US that have vacant homes but no jobs. A UBI would let people move there.
Vacant owned home tax could also serve a similar purpose, in addition to financing (actually balancing) the UBI.
They also don't account for the way these decisions would be made, if done at the government level.
Put simply: I'm looking forward to the study where the participants get to vote every year to decide how much money they should be getting from the people running the study.
For completeness the study should also be financed by wealth tax on the asset owners in the area, who can also vote.
If everybody can have one vote per dollar, this system would probably tend to zero UBI. If everybody can have one vote per person then some equitable equilibrium could develop.
> If everybody can have one vote per person then some equitable equilibrium could develop.
Yep. As long as the wealthy can't leave, or keep their wealth / investments elsewhere, it should work pretty well.
The rich person will have a choice. Either stay and compete for the money that was taken from other rich people with this tax and given to poor people that are way easier to extort or leave and forgo the opportunity and go to some other place where the only money that's available for taking is what poor earned with their work.
If I were a skillful rich person I'd stay, because that could help me to raise in ranks of the rich more quickly. If I was skilless rich person I'd get the hell out of there because other rich would be getting my money redistributed through this tax.
This is a pretty common and unsupported argument that people also use for things like saying minimum wage doesn’t make sense for the same reason.
I don't understand why all of the basic income studies I've seen seek to indicate whether or not giving someone free money improves their quality of life. That it does should be blindingly obvious, but that is not the question which determines whether basic income should be a political goal. That question is whether basic income is the best use of a given amount of public assistance funding. Whether it is more efficient at improving lives than alternatives such as food stamps, rent assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem to be no efforts to answer this essential question.
>That question is whether basic income is the best use of a given amount of public assistance funding. Whether it is more efficient at improving lives than alternatives such as food stamps, rent assistance, childcare assistance, etc. There seem to be no efforts to answer this essential question.
Honestly, it's sorta self evident that replacing a myriad of confusing and contradictory systems with one system is more efficient. We effectively have UBI already for a subset of the population and it not efficient at all because it's provided through a ton of different programs that all different regulations and inclusion parameters.
But this study is showing no benefits, at least to mental and physical health, educational attainment, and advancement at work. So it seems to sort of moot the latter question.
Yes, and that's quite a surprising result, but even if it'd had the opposite results, it wouldn't indicate that UBI is a good idea.
UBI might be an OK stopgap in the beginning when comparatively just a few are losing their jobs. Over time though, in the long run, the core of currency-based systems will need to be replaced as a greater percentage of labor is made valueless by AI, with the resulting increase in bodies not earning anything and decrease in bodies bearing the tax burden. I hardly see any discussion anywhere of what happens when 100% of useful labor is automated to the point that humans have 0 comparative advantage compared to AI+robots in anything of economic value.
As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have some comparative language compared to AI + robots. Favorite metaphor for this is a lawyer and a secretary. The lawyer is better at everything than the secretary, but there's still a role for the secretary because the lawyer's time is better spent actually doing the law. It'll be the same for humans and AI.
> As long as energy isn't unlimited, humans will always have some comparative <s>language</s> [advantage] compared to AI + robots.
The truth of that really depends what you mean by "humans"...
All humans? Probably not, as there are a lot of people who aren't especially capable or talented, and every conceivable economic activity they could do can be done by a machine with an AI with a below-average human intelligence and a capable robot body.
Also, IIRC, solar panels are already more efficient than plants, so I doubt there's a dystopian "humans are better for manual labor" loophole.
Most humans? Still probably no, given that AI seems to be making the most progress against white collar work right now.
Some minority of humans? This might be true, as there are people who are extraordinarily smart and talented. It seems most likely that AI will be unable to replace the people at the very tops of their fields, but there are very, very few people in those positions, and most people just plain don't have the ability work at that level.
The sun's energy is "unlimited"; it'll be around for far longer than we will be.
> I hardly see any discussion anywhere of what happens when 100% of useful labor is automated to the point that humans have 0 comparative advantage compared to AI+robots in anything of economic value.
Eventually automated gas chambers, or just letting poverty take care of the problem my itself.
Labor is the main part of the cost of most products. If AI could produce all these products without any human input, they would become drastically cheaper.
Conceptually the flaw is treating cash as a proxy for value.
Consider the assertion “Cash is one important piece of the puzzle. The impact may be limited without other resources like health care and child care.” This is paradoxically spot-on in highlighting that money in of itself doesn’t create value, people create value for one another. Taking people out of an underperforming value stream by injecting cash is like confusing palliative and restorative care. Pain meds can keep a person limping along, and it is great as a bridge to get to a cure, but long term use has risks.
As an alternative, I would advocate for a government (or other org) facilitation of people strengthening the streams of value between themselves. This doesn’t rule out a cash distribution based on increased taxes, but would focus more on enlisting community cooperation.
One might look at wealthy people as tax cows to be milked or as people who have insights into how value is created. Instead of creating an adversarial relationship of tax avoidance, create a mutually beneficial relationship of opportunities to give and serve.
The most successful wealthy people serve large orgs in boards of directors. What if there was a similar set of local boards that guided a grant or a loan program for life transformation in the way that student loans or GI Bill works but with an explicit stipulation (as opposed to the implicit stipulation of education) of how the funding would be used to create a better life well after the funding is complete?
> "We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/ month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a custom mobile phone app.
> "The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances."
> "Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education."
> "Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities."
https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719
So they gave folks $12k per year to see a reduce in working hours by 1.5 hours per week and lower earnings by $1500/yr. I don’t think I’d call that a “moderate” labor supply effect - I’m frankly surprised that’s far enough outside the error bars to support the claim.
Interesting to see the largest increase in consumption is "beverages". As far as I can see the commentary completely ignores this, but I presume this includes alcohol?
If you look at the percentage breakdown it’s much more modest, so it appears to be an indication of how much the participants were already spending on alcohol. Also if you filter by “high income” beverage spending appears to switch to marijuana, and there the % breakdown remains high (no pun intended)
Alcohol is in separate category along with tobacco and marihuana and it spending on it increased the most in the most affluent group.
I think UBI without regulations on pricing will result in inflation that will negate the benefits of UBI.
Regulating prices will have unintended consequences (outside of a specific set of goods).
Perhaps the Govt needs to take over the provisioning of these basics (production and distribution) and anything outside the basics will be market driven.
I know this has been tried in the past and has failed miserably. But, we now have better ways to track these things. So, maybe time to give it another try?
> I think UBI without regulations on pricing will result in inflation that will negate the benefits of UBI.
I believe that too, and that sounds like a market failure to me.
Shouldn't competition keep prices down?
I believe we need to investigate why that mechanism doesn't seem to work, and fix it; regulating prices can only be a very narrow and interim solution.
That's how it always goes with market interventions. They lean on the scales in one area which causes movement somewhere else, then try to lean on that too. Eventually end up in terrible contortions.
It's such a small amount of money per person that it is hard to see what effects one would expect. I think for the majority of people reading hacker news $1000 per month would be barely noticeable in their bank account (obviously some people out there would notice it, but for say a lowly software dev making $150k it's not going to change much about their lifestyle). So to think it would fundamentally change someones life is a stretch. I mean it's not enough to not have to earn money (and so have the financial security to start a company or restart education) and it's not enough to purchase accommodation (especially cause it's limited to 3 years). Most I would expect is people could pay down some of their debt - so they can tread water a little easier for a few years.
not sure why this is downvoted? It's basically the exact same comment as the top comment
Real question: What is to stop someone with power/money from taking advantage (or just fooling) someone with UBI to sign away their future UBI income? For example, the UBI person wants to buy a car, but has nothing other than UBI, the car dealer says, "no problem, just sign here and all your UBI for the next 5 years will pay for the car. Not our problem if you don't have anywhere to park it or gas to run it". Historically, those with power are able to clip a little extra assets from someone who doesn't have the power. Why wouldn't the UBI just become a new baseline for almost-zero? I hope I'm phrasing this in a way that is understandable.
If the income really is guaranteed, competition in UBI-secured lending should eventually drive margins down to the point where the borrowing cost approaches the risk-free interest rate, so at least people are getting a reasonable deal on their loan.
Of course, it's still a serious social problem if people borrow against their future earnings to buy expensive things and then go years without enough money for food. It might not even be irrational, for example someone might borrow to pay for a life-saving surgery for a family member.
UBI really makes me think of AI-safety-world i-risk. i.e. Ikigai risk (feeling like you have a meaningful purpose in life).
Beyond basic needs, Homo Sapiens in their current incarnation need some kind of meaning or purpose in life. Some folks can find this internally, other folks need to operate in an externally imposed value-structure to have meaning.I'm not sure that UBI actually addresses this, and may be counter productive.
Is it not obvious that people would have more time to seek a meaningful life if they spent less time working?
The trick will be figuring out how to get people to actually do that, rather than just using the money to further participate in the same carrot/stick game that they're accustomed to.
How to get them to take a risk and start a business doing sobering w important, versus just buying the next larger SUV because that's supposedly going to make them happy.
This would necessarily[0] be a cultural thing, and particularly any mention of Japan means an implicit strong work culture stemming from their geographic situation[1]. And if it does turn out that there are enough people needing some externally imposed structure, something can always be simulated for them.
[0] Necessarily because there was a time when this wasn't a thing at all, before the birth of wage labor. Everyone had the opportunity to contribute as they saw fit.
[1] Japan is very poor in natural resources (oil, ores, etc), and so in order to participate in the global economy, the only thing they have to rely on is their human labor pool. And so they needed a society of extra hard workers to have a competitive edge in something.
I'm dumb and have no real education in economics.
But even my dumb self makes the correlation that in 2020/2021, we handed out free money to keep people afloat (a very good thing), and then immediately following there was a surge in inflation.
So I guess I don't understand, how do you give out free money without devaluing the currency? Am I making an incorrect correlation between the stimulus checks and the subsequent inflation? Again, I don't know anything about this topic and I think the stimulus checks were a good idea that kept a lot of people afloat, but was that not the cause of the subsequent inflation?
The difference is that money was created then for that purpose. In an ideal universal basic income, the money comes from taxes; not just printed on the spot. This to my (probably base and naive understanding of economics) would not result inflation, because it would be a re-circulation/flow of tax money, rather than injecting new money to the economy.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It also really matters which people get the money. For example: we printed gazillions of dollars after the 2008 financial crisis, but "inflation" was super low that whole time. What happened? We gave that money to banks and owners of financial assets, so the stuff that they buy more than others was what got inflated aka houses and startup equity (yes, your startup equity!) and the stock market and yachts and stuff. In 2020 we gave a bunch of money either directly to every individual or to their bosses to give to them, so a different set of things got inflated. What do wage workers buy more of with their money? Groceries et al. Home rental prices are through the roof, but home purchase prices are not. My guess is we see home price deflation (or at least lower-than-otherwise inflation) unless interest rates start getting cut again, which they will probably do because the people that get to influence and make that decision all benefit financially or politically from cutting those rates, but I digress.
So my (old, bachelors) degree in econ gives me a story that makes sense, but surely a more recent or grad-level or professional economist can probably point out all the ways I'm deluded. One of my physics teachers once told me that every year they start by telling you that everything you learned last year is a gross oversimplification and now they're going to teach you the way it "really" works.
The stimulus checks weren't the only thing we did, however. We did a lot of quantitative easing to keep the stock markets from crashing, and I would blame that first.
The stimulus checks were too small to move the needle any appreciable way. It was basically a larger than usual tax return. Having like $2500 extra isn’t why goods went up so much in price. That was from supply chain disruption.
Some inflation is worth it, but if it becomes too much of a problem, we can raise taxes.
The stimulus checks kicked off inflation. But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy. We ended up seeing inflation exceeding the amount of money injected.
Hidden in Covid was a massive decline in labor force productivity and participation - the lion's share coming from baby boomers retiring during this time. So it's no longer about the amount of money, but the shrinking pile of stuff it is chasing after.
> But inflation should have been limited to the amount of money injected in the economy.
I'm curious to hear more about why that would be the case. Money swaps hands constantly and we have explicit ways that a single dollar can become many multiples of itself (aka you get a dollar, you put it in a bank, the bank lends me 90 cents, I put it in a different bank, they lend you 81 cents, one of us gets another loan secured by our assets, etc, etc, etc, now how many dollars are there?).
It's a bit ramshackle, but we have a pretty consistent way we measure money supply in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
What you are describing is referred to as the "velocity of money" - how many times the same dollar changes hands, which there is a rough approximation baked into the monetary supply analysis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
The UBI folks were cursed by the pandemic and inflation. You cannot deal with that confounder.
They’re not the only ones. Remember Green New Deal? That also evaporated with the end of ZIRP.
You can complain relentlessly about these guys, or offer alternative solution with nothing but vibes to vouch for them. The truth is, as long as interest rates are high, the economic contraction is making everyone too scared to try anything in case things “get worse.” Sadly, the best time to make great social change was between 2009 and 2022 and it’s officially over now.
> The UBI folks were cursed by the pandemic and inflation. You cannot deal with that confounder.
The study had a control group, who also experienced pandemic & inflation.
You can do whatever you want during periods of inflation. "It" will fail. The existence of a control group is meaningless. The control group will have bad outcomes too. So what if it does? Nobody can design interventions for periods of inflation, because inflation makes everything look bad: your outcome, control group's outcomes, everyone's outcomes.
For example, Brazil created their current public health system in 1988, realizing it in 1990, during inflation that was between 1,000-2,000%. It wasn't really functional then. Looking at it in isolation, at the time it was created, it would look like a failure, but all of Brazil looked like "a failure." Would it be valid to use SUS as implemented during 1,000% inflation as an example of why public health insurance is bad? No way.
> Remember Green New Deal
This went along with the death of Modern Monetary Theory.
UBI is another tool for make citizen obedient to state. Once implemented, like debts, there will be strong voting mass for system that they could benefit from - with price of less independency.
That is ultimately a better outcome than we currently have, where the exact same thing happens, except it's only large corporations benefitting. Politicians _should_ be buying votes from the working class and tangibly improving their lives in the process.
Socialism never worked and killed millions in poverty. Centrally planed economics is crippling free market.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan
Also free money are perfect for make fiat currency more worthless and increase inflation even more.
If you want fight against corporate greedeing, stop buying and using their products. Stop work for them.
Political machines did deliver tangible benefits to their constituents through what could be described as vote buying. In Daley's Chicago, if you there was a pothole on your street or your cousin who was new to the country needed a job, you could go to your alderman who would solve the problem for you. In return you were supposed to vote for the party and get everyone you knew to vote for the party.
This worked as long as the machine was unquestioned and there were contractors willing to play ball to finance the whole thing. Now as a series of court decisions limiting the spoils system and incompetent successors have weakened the system, the mayor's approval rating is half of what it once was and overall confidence in the city is much lower. And the city's finances are about as bad as they can get today. So I wouldn't call it socialism and I wouldn't even say that it's worse than the alternatives.
Not all UBI schemes are issued by the state. Consider CirclesUBI for instance: issued by us for us as an alternative to what the state has for us.
Related: https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings
Also https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-basic-income-stud... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037226, but we merged the comments hither)
Most people fails to understand a thing talking about basic income: it's not for those who get the money but for those who get them from those who get in the first place.
Yes, poor tend to be unable to retain money, they spend. Spending means someone else get money from them. So those with a basic income can spend more, making local economy a bit better and still making their life a bit better.
Remember a neglect thing: money are unit of measure of various substrate, not a value per se. Exchanging money means moving something else.
Many might not think about the costs of every day basic items for a minimal level of survival.
After seeing the system in use, I think it would be best if general relief type programs like you have in California, do not allow cash withdrawals. It is a factor in the ongoing fentanyl crisis. The pattern of behavior is enabled by the free cash.
Instead a debit card that can be used anywhere except for cash is ideal. While many use the money for necessary things this is a factor in what is seen in inner cities.
Buy prepaid credit cards with your debit card, cash them. Buy commodities and sell them at a loss.
People will find a way around it, especially desperate people with addiction issues. This will just add overhead. If you want to stop the fentanyl crisis then attack the root cause, don’t make life more difficult for the poor for a marginal benefit.
UBI wouldn't be needed if we got rid of loans. Loans block the increase in prosperity, as they become hard to pay if the economy improves, and misallocate resources on the bank's whim. The great depression likely wouldn't happen at all (or to a much limited extent, as some people would have to find new jobs) and instead the prices would drop until most people could live off their savings.
My feelings are that if the basic income is not enough to cover the same privilege that the older generations have of home ownership and a pension covered lifestyle (food security, housing security, medical security) then it is not basic.
And also that if it was only given to some at a sliding scale, it is not universal.
what counts as "basic" will continually shift towards more and more.
I dont believe basic income is possible until the day humanity discover a source of limitless energy cheaply obtainable.
Someone will say their brand of limitless energy is better than the competition, it’s human nature
Result for higher income people is crazy. They used the additional cash to move to where they pay way more for rent and spent more on drugs to the detriment of health, child care and household spending.
It seems that more affluent are way more irresponsible with their money than poorer people.
It's interesting that the last 2 years of this study happened during a period of increasing inflation and rising interest rates. I wonder how that affected some of the metrics and qualitative surveys from the participants
I would prefer to have government-sponsored, tax-free housing for all citizens rather than UBI.
Forget Universal Basic Income, give me Universal Basic Housing.
No US citizen should be homeless, or feel like they could become homeless if they lose their job.
Interesting that saving for emergencies isn't one of the options. Having some savings would certainly reduce some stress.
Is there a link to the published research so it is easier to read through it without all these buttons to click to expand?
https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/category/working-pa...
Other merits or demerits aside, doesn’t it seem obvious that if the state started distributing $3,600,000,000,000 of cash a year, it could possibly, just maybe, move the needle on inflation just a tiny wee bit? Has anyone ever addressed that challenge, or is it baked into the pie on purpose? If so, is this just a way to redistribute the allocation of assets? If so, why not just be honest and start the conversation there?
These discussions always devolve into political diatribes instead of a discussion of the study itself.
Is there anyone else in here that sees UBI is the "left's" equivalent to flat-earth or chemtrails? No matter how much you explain the most basic and fundamental realities that are adjacent to the laws of physics, they simply cannot or appear to be psychologically incapable of accepting the reality of the matter and are baffled.
It's like those flat-earth people who did that experiment with the extremely sensitive gyroscope that proved that the earth was rotating and spherical; and were caught on recording saying "well, we clearly cannot accept that" and I think eventually simply deliberately ignored and suppressed it from their minds.
Do not ever underestimate certain human's capacity for self-delusion.
The bigger problem though is that this UBI cult is very authoritarian and tyrannical at its core, consistently increasing the insistence that they must take and use ever increasing amounts of other people's money to prove that UBI works, coincidentally making the researchers and the common NGO types scam artist operatives huge amounts of money in the process.
UBI is simply a con job, a fraud, a lie, theft, and even slavery ... theft of resources and services against their will and under threat of violence and harm in order to support the lives and livelihoods of others.
You want UBI? Great, sign up to have your income taxed to pay for it.
UBI doesn’t need to be a “left” idea.
See the Libertarian angle f.ex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
Or read John Lockes argument on how land, as given by God to all, must be shared fairly.
Expanded a bit upon by Thomas Paine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrarian_Justice
It is shocking that there is no category for Investing/Saving
I was wondering for a long time, why do they reduce benefits so easily. Like if you study or do volunteer work.
It wasn't like that earlier, but at some point all the farmer families' wives applied for unemployment benefits...
Serious question, didn't we have a glimpse into UBI w/ all the stimulus packages? I'm very open to discussion here because I'm quite naive.
My current lens is that UBI ultimately inflates prices leaving everyone back where they were before. The problem with openresarchlab's test is it's limited scope. It did increase the spending power of a particular group because the prices around them did not increase.
If everyone has more money the "open market" raises prices to simply meet that. The root problem is non-limited capitalism? The price of basic goods cannot be allowed to rise vs cash on hand.
I do believe UBI's ultimate goal is to increase "spending power", but simply giving money doesn't change the problem long term and thus UBI is doomed to fail in its current form.
An UBI that inflates prices doesn't leave everyone back to where they were before.
This is most obvious in the case of someone who doesn't have any money at all without UBI. This person can now buy things, and before they weren't able to buy anything.
Depending on how much money people make pre-UBI, there's a point where the inflation costs them more then they get.
Ah fair point, I hadn't considered that, but how is that better than welfare?
There is the welfare trap, but I don't really see us in a net positive position vs UBI because I see creating a bunch of inflation only to help the bottom 5%? I imagine there's a better way.
Well that’s one less option for when the robots take over…
The connection between UBI and Silicon Valley elite (specifically the VC class and, lately, AI people) should give everyone pause.
Why does this group of people that are not historically known for their generosity or their sympathy for the unworking poor suddenly want to give everyone a little bit of money for nothing?
In my mind, it is to create a permanent underclass. A group of people with just enough money to survive but not enough to participate in the world of the elites (or even the middle class). This underclass will represent a massive user base for the products and services that the VC class wants to sell. And they’ll be stuck there, and easier to target than ever.
There's been a narrative in the US over the last 40-or-so years that a "job" is the answer to all social problems. At best, that's half-true. Money is the real solution to social problems. And maybe it was the case 40 or 50 years ago, but having a job doesn't provide the same money that it used to, relative to required expenses.
My boomer dad got a job right out of high school, with only a diploma, and was able to purchase a house and support my then-stay-at-home mother within 3 months of starting work. That is simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have jobs.
> Money is the real solution to social problems.
Money can't fix everything, but a little money can make many problems go away.
> That is simply unheard of now. And it's not because people don't have jobs.
Could it be that we have higher expectations today? (housing quality, technology access, not cooking ourselves, etc).
Part of it could also be that today, like it or not, you're increasing competing in a global market. And the best leverage you can find is having a long education.
How about earning your own money?
What no pay down debt option?
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