If you're paying large numbers to do nothing, the value of that money plummets and people will starve.
Recall: 50% of the country make less than the median wage... UBI is going to have to be way below this to preserve the very wealth which UBI redistributes
I expect that UBI could start off very small and still have huge impact. A quick search shows that median income can range from ~40k-80k state to state. I'd bet you could radically change this country for way less than that.
Absolutely not. Having a large fraction of population being unemployed is not good but this is not the point of UBI. Also, this is completely disconnected from inflation/deflation.
Furthermore, deflation and "people will starve" are very much disconnected. Many countries devalued their money on purpose to be more competitive on international markets.
There are many stages between "people will starve" and having access to high quality food (and high QOL in general). For example if UBI is sufficiently high to allow most people currently employed in the food and service industries to not work (or to invest their time into gaining new skills etc.) I think a massive increase in food prices is unavoidable, at least in the short term until automation catches up. While basic foodstuffs would still remain affordable to all/most (the government would be forced to subsidize them if not), eating out and high quality, labor intensive products would likely become unaffordable to most people.
No I'm not.
> so export plummets, which will bring down the value of the $
No, if anything, it's the very opposite.
How?
The trillions of dollars printed by the Federal Reserve in the past two years beg to differ.
Honestly, if the country is going into deficit, you might as well give it directly to people instead of injecting it via financial institutes.
Society in general may greatly benefit from having people not HAVING to work.
What if we printed the same amount and gave it directly to people? the $6T/year could yield ~$40K to each of the ~150M working-age Americans.
The biggest impact is to give employees more power in the negotiation with employers: currently, employees are far more pressed to find work than the employer needs to fill in a position (if the employee fails to pay rent, they are evicted; if an employer fails to meet a deadline, nothing happens immediately), and have the inherent disadvantage of having orders of magnitude more employees than employers.
UBI will help the public by reducing the pressure on employees to find job, thus improving the negotiation power and conditions for all other employees. Even the slight help during COVID created the best conditions for working people in decades. Seems to be worth the inflation IMO.
those trillions were swapped, not given, to the financial institutes, in return for the bonds and treasuries they held.
It isn't the same sort of printing that you hear about in Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
If the gov't really printed trillions and gave them to people like you described, you'd get major inflation. Oh wait, that's already happening...and it's only a couple thousand for some people, and it's not printed, it's borrowed. Imagine the effects, if it was truly printed like you described!
The inflation we’re experiencing now wants to have a word with you.
Some things will become expensive. Some might be balanced. Construction cost will increase, but land value may decrease (since there is no necessity to crowd in job hubs).
Taxis and Uber will probably increase as people are not forced to work at all costs, but people might find this trade-off favorable: unemployment is far more painful than having to take the bus.
And everyone could still work to afford expensive things, if they chose so. They will also have much better working conditions, since they will have much more negotiation power.
We already pay large numbers of people to do nothing, retirees.
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but this strikes me as a "but some people will be upset!" argument, which seems irrelevant to whether the policy achieves its stated goals or not.
And for the record, I would appear to be in the group bankrolling it rather than receiving from it, and I'm completely cool with it.
What it too to get mine, required very hard work and literally signing my life away for 4 years. Then, when I started gaining, I got fined for not having health insurance. Now that I can comfortably afford my health insurance and am starting to look at buying a house, here’s the left again saying I should help others, when I received no such help, and taking away the money I worked hard to earn. Imagine not having a degree in the software engineering field. The struggle is real, and if I can do it then what are others excuses?
No, I’m sorry, I will fight to force others to follow my path (albeit in a different field should they choose). I will not willingly pay for others to have an easy life unless they are related to me.
Also I’m a Navy veteran. I can’t tell you how many times I can back from deployment to see actual hatred from these people I had never met, who I was defending their freedom for. The idea of helping others is gone after 1) I already did by defending their freedom and 2) most people here are assholes only thinking of themselves, so i joined them.
Being a programmer, what I earned is a result of several factors - most importantly investments made into me by my parents and by the society (with schools, infrastructure etc. mostly funded with taxes); and also plenty of pure luck and sheer coincidence. Only afterwards comes a lot of hard work I've put into learning what I know. Without the former, I would probably earn only a small fraction of that (and/or under much worse conditions) even assuming that I'd be putting the same amount of hard work. Alternatively, with more dumb luck I could be earning much more while putting less work into achieving that. Of course, this is just barely scratching the surface, as there are also other ways to get rich than working hard or being lucky; mere ability to invest your time and effort into "working hard" is often filled with external factors as well; and "being (un)lucky" itself contains so many factors to consider that I wouldn't even know where to start.
You’re talking to one. I have no degree, am self taught and a software engineer. The most help I got was reading open source code, which was pretty difficult to do when I started. My parents had no money for school for me, and I joined the military to try to get some education. That still wasn’t enough to actually get a degree so I had to work low paying jobs knowing I could do better while working side projects to improve my skill. I just recently caught up to what I should be making.
It’s common for those that took the standard path to think nobody works for what they got.
I don't even have a degree, by the way; I'm mostly self-taught too.
I knew you were going to fixate on that, as you’re grasping at straws, which is why I put it in there. The amount of source code I read was one project, a php web framework. Yea I learned about 2 things from it back then, which I’ve long forgotten now.
Since I didn’t earn what I have, call your school, revoke your degree, quit your job and start over again with only unskilled jobs on your resume. Until you do that you won’t understand.
I already said that I don't even have a degree. All you did in this thread was proving the point of my original comment.
They do. I learned a lot thanks to them.
> What you’re saying is essentially that your degree was free.
My degree that does not exist?
Since you’re still not following, why do people post blog articles? Why do people write research papers? Just to get the info out there? No, they do it because it gives them some advantage over others. FAANGs won’t hire you without proof of knowledge. The other side of it is SEO. You want to exist on google you have to look like an expert, so you write a lot of articles to increase your score. Both of these situations are driven by money, not by some desire to help others.
> My degree that does not exist?
Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read. If your self taught, or went to school, you know this is just dumb.
So back to the point, did you or did you not work for the knowledge you have? Or did it just get matrixed into you?
I've learned a lot from pseudonymous or even anonymous people with no money or fame involved. And helped others this way too.
> Fine, then you’re essentially saying that all the learning you did was free for you. It required no effort at all, all you had to do was read.
That's not what I'm saying at all and you would have known that if you would read what I wrote with comprehension. It took a lot of effort, but I recognize that this effort alone is just a single factor that influenced what I earn, and not even the most important one. Other factors outside of my control could have easily ruined (or boosted) it all, and it's true for everyone.
I haven't "got mine" yet and tend to disagree when people propose to lock me out of upper-middle class lifestyle by taxing the hell out of my income. It is more like people like you who "got theirs" want to pull the ladder up.
Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.
What a weird claim. Decisions in democracies upset some people too. That's the whole point of voting on things, to resolve conflicts.
> If you support this idea then feel free to donate to the cause.
Donate to what?
> Not trying to be an ass but the so what attitude does not tend to further constructive discussion.
"Some people will complain" isn't constructive by itself either.
It doesn’t resolve the conflict, one side is just forced to accept something they don’t want. The hatred, and therefore the division, builds regardless.
Imagine something as simple as burger flipping became completely automated. There would be a million fast food workers suddenly unemployed. Add making espresso to the mix and half a million baristas lose their job.
There won't be a million new jobs created to maintain the automation to pick up the slack.
Both of these are completely automated already.
https://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-restaurant-r...
I can’t find a link for the espresso machine but many FAANGs have the ones you can place orders through a website then go to the lounge to pick it up.
No, it won't. It might be the best way forward but it's not the only option. You could:
1. Give people free housing and food
2. Allow people to work other jobs, even if they're marginally as productive as automation (sweeping the floors, picking up trash, etc)
3. UBI
4. Give people welfare/foodstamps as we currently do in many countries
No, it replaced large number of medium and low skilled jobs too. Before industrial revolution, more labor hours were spent on working distaff and spindle than probably any other single job. Industrial revolution reduced number of spinning jobs to roughly zero. The same happened to many other low skilled jobs, like weaving, mining, digging, and many more.
Due to the massively the increased efficiency the industrial revolution created many many of them low skilled new jobs which couldn't have existed earlier. An average person in the 19th century probably consumed significantly more textile and other manufactured products than someone in the prior centuries. However in the beginning this increase in efficiency led to large decrease in incomes due to the surplus in labour and in part because efficiency increases in agriculture were trailing behind other areas. E.g. an unskilled worker in the UK could only purchase about 60% of the amount of bread in ~1800 compared to what he could in 1750 (real earnings only started to grow significantly between 1850 and 1875.
Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
> Modern automation on the other hand seems to mostly just replaced many low and medium paying jobs with a smaller number of high paying ones.
Modern automation created so much prosperity that we now have significant portions of the population doing things that 19th century people would scarcely call "jobs" -- Tyler Cowen, an economist, collects many of those on his blog, see https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=new+service+sector+jobs . Additionally, many jobs that would be recognizable to them are now done by greatly increased number of people. Consider, for example, a job of university administrator: as such, this job would make sense to 19th century people. However, the idea that university employs more administrative than research or teaching staff would seem rather ludicrous to them. The reason we can do it is that the productive sector of the economy creates so much surplus, that we can through regulation, taxation, and social custom funnel so much of it to people doing jobs that are not by any means crucial to the functioning or prosperity of the society.
If all the work was automated/outsourced those people would still make the same money.
These are the people who ostensibly will pay for UBI and automation/outsources is one of the cases for UBI.
of course it's not at the same rate as GDP (5x vs 1.5x for personal income).
If a minority of voters are dependent on the UBI and a majority decides that they do not like the system, or a politician persuades them so, they will vote against it. ("Working your ass off on lazy strangers" is a huge boon for populist politicians.)
If a majority of voters depends on the UBI and a minority is compelled to provide it to them, they basically have no recourse but to emigrate. At which point you lose their tax money, unless you impose draconic measures on emigration.
Which nation is that?
Otherwise, I can simply point out that many almost all the countries with single-payer health care are still plenty enough peopled to be able to pay for it and don't have to have any draconian policies against leaving. As I understand it, even residing outside of them often exempts you completely from taxation, which even the 'can't afford single-payer!' US doesn't do.
I don't honestly know why whether or not people will work even factors into one's support for UBI. Some people will keep working, some people won't. Nobody will starve so that seems like something in the "pro" column at least.