Without significantly raising taxes on the people who decide to continue to work, how can this be paid for? Genuine question.
And if it’s that hard to find employees, companies will just have to pay a LOT for labor, most of which still goes to taxes, but also causes prices to go up because the company’s costs are so high. Which causes COL to increase because all products have higher costs. Which means “basic” income needs increases, driving up costs, etc etc.
It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. It's almost like adding zeros to the currency. The only thing that matters is your purchasing power (which comes from your net income), not your gross income or what percentage tax that corresponded to. Like if (in today's economy) you pay me $10M/year and I have to pay 90% of that in taxes, I would happily work for you. If you pay me $10k/year, I wouldn't even work for you if my "tax" rate was -100%.
Is there a way to make the math work out? Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's impossible, maybe it's practical, or maybe it would come with so much baggage that we'll prefer the status quo. What I do know is that the people who declare the answer is obvious consistently arrive at that conclusion by artificially constrain the problem in some way that is in no way obviously implied by the premises, like "you can't raise taxes significantly", or "you can't touch defense spending", or "we won't decrease healthcare costs", or numerous other things.
1. in an economy where 30% (or whatever) of people aren't working and the remaining are getting taxed higher % of their income to fund the people who are not working, how is the living standard of the people who are working go up?
2. A sense of "fairness" factors into this as well. People are known to reject "unfair" deals, even though the said unfair deal would still give them strictly positive values.
2. The "fairness" that's relevant here is a function of (say) "net income/expended effort", not "tax rate". People get mad that others who put similar effort earn a lot more net income than them, not a lot more gross income.
For example, if before UBI a worker on average was producing one car, and assuming that after UBI half the working population quits their job, that worker now needs to produce two cars for everyone to maintain their standard of living. Except since that additional car must go to the UBI recipient, in other words his income was taxed, his quality of life does not go up despite becoming more productive. So either he needs to become more productive through than one more car so that he can raise his own standard of living, or he just won’t do it.
Where will these higher paying jobs come from? Are they coming from automation or by virtue of UBI being implemented? If it's the former, if I'm 2x more productive, why should I have to give up 0.8x of that productivity to non-workers? Moreover, why should I stay in a jurisdiction that taxes me the productivity gains, as opposed to another jurisdiction that lets me keep all the gains?
>2. The "fairness" that's relevant here is a function of (say) "net income/expended effort", not "tax rate". People get mad that others who put similar effort earn a lot more net income than them, not a lot more gross income.
Is there any research to suggest that people only care about net income/effort rather than gross? It seems pretty obvious in this thread that at least some people are care about the gross income/effort, as evidenced by the disdain of people on UBI as lazy weed smokers.
Given any amount of UBI people will be able to fix their costs below that and put the rest toward speculation.
I don’t know of a way to fix UBI right at cost because there is so much variability for a person’s costs.
Presumably, UBI would be a single number nationwide. For example, a politically acceptable minimum quality of life in the middle of Mississippi or whatever is cheapest. There is no worrying about people’s variable costs. If they want to live somewhere more expensive, they work for it.
How is this any different from other social programs like Social Security or Welfare?
There's no reason the tax rate would have to hit that number, or anywhere close to that number. I'd like to see math that supports it. Most math I've seen suggests a far more modest increase in taxes.
I don’t see a situation where people would be comfortable where workers pay more taxes so people can choose not to work.
There’s not enough billionaires (yet) to tax at 90% to cover this.
I think a more reasonable approach to UBI is to reduce costs for staple goods to such a low rate that it doesn’t cost as much and the need to work is reduced without raising taxes or introducing a freeloader problem. This is positive outcome of AI and cheap energy (think Star Trek).
The lower classes just worked and took drugs (soma) so they could withstand working.
Of course Huxley was writing sci-fi but it does fit into human nature of kind or messing around if possible. Look at chimps… they basically just gather food, sex, and lounge about. We aren’t too far evolved from chimps.
I think this alpha and beta framing is a useful one. I just watched the John Carmack keynote where he is talking about the Oculus operating system, and in it he is seething that the team around him is not valuing simple and piling complexity and its resulting slowness. In a world where only the people who were truly interested in innovation were working with him, I expect that the accidental complexity would be minimized, and the efficiency of his work would go through the roof even more than it has. Trying to make everyone as productive as possible turns out to have large negative effects on those who are as driven for innovation and those people are so productive that this is a net loss long term.
I feel like your underlying assumption is that "if UBI leads people to leave their jobs, UBI has obviously failed", whereas it's literally the very goal of UBI to reduce (or even eliminate, in the case of "full" basic income) the need to hold a job just to have enough income to merely survive. You can argue that's a bad goal if you want, but expecting everyone to continue working despite receiving free money is kind of missing the entire point of handing out that money.
Btw, just because people act a certain way in a short period of time (especially during a time that was so out of the ordinary) that doesn't mean they'd act the same way for ~half a century. Sure some fraction of them might, but lots of people would get bored and try new things. Having nothing to do for months or even a year or two can be fun and exciting for some, but that doesn't mean they'd love the idea of having nothing to do for the rest of their lives. People get bored, people want luxury, people want variety, people want fulfilment, people have kids to raise, etc.