The point of basic income is that everyone needs it to be there. You personally may not need the added income as the head of a multinational hugely successful electronics company selling luxury mobile phones and reaping in billions. But who's going to have enough money to buy your phones when 50% of people are out of work because your companies like your own have cut workforce by 70%?
We are at a point where we have become too efficient at so many fields, which is not healthy in an idealistic capitalistic Society. All the wealth concentrates at few actors, and then it starts clogging the wheels instead of oiling them.
Not for everyone. For young people.
The way we’ll get UBI is by repurposing Social Security and possibly Medicare funds for its purpose. That, in turn, requires millenials turn out to vote.
In other words, the people who built say the roads did so for a package of renumeration that included a salary and a pension. Now you are proposing to renege on half of that deal. Fine - but stop using the roads you didn't pay to build in the first place. Stop using the technology that you didn't pay to do the basic research for. Not such an attractive deal now is it?
The current 'old' also inherited a built environment and a great deal of basic research, and if you project back far enough (not far!) they barely paid anything for it either. Those working in the 40s and early 50s paid almost nothing (in terms of having to pay taxes for other people's benefits) for the infrastructure that they inherited.
It also somehow suggests that the bulk of historical economic activity was the development of long-lasting capital works that outlived the users, which is odd.
I think we already have enough spurious arguments for feather-bedding relatively well-off old people without inventing weird new ones. The monumental voting power of the old has ensured that they collectively do pretty well for themselves; astoundingly well, say, compared to children living in poverty.
The current generation of pensioners paid towards the previous generation of pensioners without quibbling.
It’s only millennials who take it all for granted and don’t want to pay what’s fair.
Every generation takes stuff for granted, true. Also, they play their music too loud and disregard the eternal verities (c.f. ancient Greeks).
The gaping holes in public-sector pension funds beg to differ.
A course on Modern Monetary Theory wouldn't go amiss...
If you believe it needs to be ever paid back, it hasn't been paid back since 1914. It just grows ever larger.
The initial 1914 version pegged the fiat money to gold. Like all pegging systems, they eventually collapse catastrophically, and this one did in 1929.
Private banks create money through lending, correct. Lending is constrained by the supply of creditworthy customers. Money is not issued by decree by the Federal Reserve or the government.
There is not really any such thing as an inter-generational wealth transfer. There are transfers from poor to rich that the rich are (successfully) scapegoating old people for.
From the issuer's (government) perspective it is a liability. From society's perspective it is both a liability and an asset.
Moreover, there's not necessarily anything "good" about having taxes pay for operational costs if those operational costs are cluster bombs on yemeni children.
There's not even necessarily anything intrinsically good about paying back those bonds in dollars that are of equal or greater value. Sometimes (e.g. in times of great wealth inequality) letting inflation eat huge chunks out of the value of outstanding bonds is the best course of action for society as a whole.
Deficit spending only really needs to be constrained when inflation is around 9% (~11% is the point at which inflation has a negative impact on growth).
We're constraining future cash flow during an expansion. That is stupid.
I am not sure how you keep mis-reading me.
The only risk is inflation.
The socialist slogan is - as Marx pointedly remarked in "Critique of the Gotha Program" -, not an argument for equality but "from each according to ability, to each according to their need"; for substantial parts of the left, the idea of society paying people if they're not contributing is directly in opposition to a central concern of their ideologies to prevent people from doing just that.
As careful as one should be about talking for the dead: Had Marx been alive today, he'd probably join you in opposing UBI, for similar reasons.
Rather, the idea stems from people like Thomas Paine, and was bolstered by experiments in the US and Canada in the 60's.
Recently it was rediscovered first and foremost by liberals (in the European sense; in other words mostly centrists, again by European standard, followers of classical liberalism) explicitly as an alternative to left-wing welfare systems.
> "opposition to enabling people to live off the back of others"? strange, the left implements that everywhere already.
"The left" is not a single thing, but represented by dozens of ideologies that are wildly different.
No shit. He won't. Not unless you pay him 300,000/year and that's a whole other kind of economic catastrophe.
That's 3.25 trillion dollars.
The total federal budget in 2015 was 3.8 trillion dollars [0]. After we disband the army, navy and air force, liquidate medicare, medicade and social security where do you think we should get the missing 1 trillion or so from?
[0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
"Andrew proposes funding UBI by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 10%. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.
A Value-Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value-Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent."
I've seen arguments UBI should include pensioners, but never for it to include minors.
It has to include pensioners. To make it work you need to take the cost of the bureaucracy out of the system, which means UBI supersedes all other welfare. There will be no pensions, no unemployment, no child benefits (children also get UBI, paid to their parents until they come of age), no means testing - everyone gets UBI, full stop. That's what the U is for!
Interestingly until recently Children in the UK got UBI in the form of family allowance (paid to the parents). x for first born, y for subsequent or something. The sweeping government cuts lead to it becoming means-tested and complicated.
One Conservative (sorry cannot find the quote) remarked that they spent theirs on Champangne, which caused horror in the press, but is money flowing into the economy at least...unlike tax benefits to land-owners
But since you want to keep social security, medicaid and medicare you need to keep a budget that somehow has 2 trillion dollars for BUI and 2 trillion for pensioners and children.
Not much of an improvement really.
Which is my main issue with everyone who proposes UBI. Once they are shown the number you get by multiplying population by income they slowly start to reinvent the welfare state that somehow is so terrible it needs to be replaced with UBI.
As someone once said: Crypto-currencies are gods way of teaching libertarians why regulations exist in the financial sector. I would like to rephrase that: UBI is gods way of teaching libertarians why the welfare state was created.
Also I don’t know which version of libertarian you’re using, but I don’t think I’d classify libertarians as being super supportive of UBI...
If you get $10k guaranteed, then somebody earning $20k exactly thus has an effective income tax rate of 0%, neither recieving nor paying income tax to the government. Anything earned over that starts to be taxed as standard currently.
You'd need to fiddle with the specific numbers, the rates, et cetera, but most serious suggestions are not as trivial as "let's give everyone ten thousand dollars". The principle behind UBI is not that everyone should recieve the same chunk of money from the government, but to provide an income floor that cannot be gone under that should be sufficient to keep people healthy and able to manage. It's a "Universal Basic Income" in the sense that the basic income is universally set, and nobody can go beneath it - you absolutely can go _above_ it.
Relating it to the welfare state is a good comparison, I think. In the same way that socialised healthcare ensures that everyone's bare minimum healthcare is at least up to a good standard, UBI could ensure that everyone's bare minimum income is livable. That doesn't mean that somebody earning $150k/yr still needs that 10k of government assistance, because they are not in need of that income protection (at that moment - of course it immediately returns should they _stop_ earning that much).
I think we have to be clear though, we are expecting to have to increase taxation to pay for UBI. If the need for UBI is driven by automation removing jobs, then the extra wealth that the automation creates is going to have to be re-distributed. It is also time to revisit the special treatment that capital (especially land) gets in the tax system. Land Value Tax is perhaps a much more socially aware approach.
I am not necessarily in agreement with everything UBI related, but adding noise to the conversation isn't going to get us to any insights any quicker.