You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.
I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.
I wonder what they’ll do next with EVs becoming more popular? Outlaw home charging?
Mandate a monthly routing check by a certified specialist. You can sign up for a yearly commitment, 12 visits for just $899. A no brainer when a visit costs minimum $149.
Failure to comply can result in a fine up to $3,000 and up to 6 months in prison.
Can't make your own power, it's illegal to grow your own tobacco, what's next? Sewage bills?!
But you don't give out UBI and let people become potatoes. You give out UBI to allow them to meet their basic needs and then have them work a job they kfhr genuinely be OK at, and, ideally, enjoy. Ideally.
So yeah, even if no one ever really enjoying being a gas station attendant, getting up and going to a job to earn money and pay rent gives people a sense of purpose. And UBI definitely risks robbing people of that purpose. The alternatives to UBI soon though might be creating fake jobs or letting people starve.
Humans aren't like that. They don't deprive themselves of activity like a bored dog unless you (who?) give them a job. If you give people their time back, they will fill it out with whatever they actually want to do, and that's freedom.
Conversely, the erosion of free time over the past generation has arguably also eroded the social structures that keep people healthy.
There's an "epidemic" of people who have nothing to do and for whatever reason can't figure something out
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
Retiree data also shows finanical freedom and free time often doesn't lead to people figuring out something to do
A small parallel is that (for me) a weekend is not enough to do much more than recover from the workweek. But two weeks off is enough to recover and then do some more things. Even then, it would take more time to do things of major significance.
Chasing a ball, professionally, for millions of dollars a year, gives some very rich and famous humans a sense of purpose.
Laying on a beach and surfing may fulfill a sense of purpose for other humans.
Some humans need to solve hard problems.
Some humans need to create something original.
And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose. Does work, the need to work, give them some? I'm not a Calvinist, but I have to live in a world where most people are like that. So if they don't have some need to do something, idle hands are the devil's plaything, and no good can come from the idleness. Just drugs and dissolute degeneracy. Take it from a creative alcoholic who struggles with the question of purpose myself, and finds some light between music, painting, hard work I have to do and my better angels.
That's what you're having a hard time fathoming, because you think everyone is like you; imbued with meaning and purpose that they will find. They are not. Even those of us who are, or were, don't always remain so.
But need? Need wakes you up.
The crush. The urgency. The do or die. The death-defying situation. Sinking or swimming. Here is what brings out the initiative and the creativity and the purpose in people.
I used to believe exactly what you said when I was 17. If we didn't have to work we'd all use our free time to make amazing art and poetry and contribute to humanity.
Look around, man. I know a lot of people who don't have to work. Half of them are homeless and the other half are millionaires. You know what none of them are doing with their free time?? Anything resembling something with a purpose.
Whoever told you this or gave you that impression? It certainly does not reflect anyone in my life. It sounds like symptoms of major depression. But I strongly suspect it is actually just a lie.
What do you think people did before work was invented? Or rather, do you think evolution shaped humans in an environment that demanded 9-5 desk sitting, email sending, backcircling?
It's extremely revealing that people seem to not even be able to come up with things that might give you a sense of purpose in life. No wonder we're all depressed cynics.
Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it.
I also don't believe that we have eroded free time over the last generation. As one example, many now have a robot vacuum cleaner, which frees whatever time they previously spent vacuuming. They may be spending a lot of their time on things, but as long as those are things by choice, it's still free time.
That's a baffling proposition. I think society benefits overwhelmingly more from the sum of average contributions, not the rare exceptional contribution.
I do think we're missing out on a huge number of exceptional contributions due to the circumstances people face who would otherwise be free and able to make such contributions. Instead they are sending emails.
Not a joke.
All the folks talking about it, it sounds like some sort of fantasy cope to get people going along willingly into the void.
Now, times are becoming "interesting" again, unfortunately.
Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but it feels like you guys could just not.
I don't hate billionaires. They basically never cross my mind. All credit to those guys for doing what they did. I'm not personally jealous and I find the anger and jealousy at them to be petty and kind of stupid in a way that reflects badly on the person expressing it. Most of the billionaires in the tech sector didn't inherit that kind of wealth, and I respect the ones who earned what they earned. I wouldn't trade my life for theirs and I don't feel left out because I don't have private jets or islands. Whining you don't have a jet or an island is childish... grow a garden and get a dog, don't be jealous. Comparing what you have to someone else's possessions is a basic fault that makes a lot of people miserable for no reason, unable to appreciate what they have. Appreciate what you have. Billionaires can have everything you ever dreamed of and still be much more miserable than you. Good for them if they're happy, I say.
I'm just also saying that if I were in their shoes I wouldn't think the current situation was tenable.
We’re going through a series of ever record breaking heat waves where the only thing you can be sure of is that it will be worse next year.
They’re still pushing fossil fuels and blocking attempts to replace them with cheaper alternatives.
They’re too focused on who got the biggest yacht to care.
Circular financing???
He was telling me stories about how the communist had an implementation similar to what you were describing. There was a strong enforcement of everyone capable of doing something did something. He said it was not uncommon to see something like two men, each with one arm, operating a broom and dust pan. One would sweep, and the other would hold the dust pan. Or something else like a person confined to a wheelchair would be stationed to call center since walking was not necessary.
He said the real toxic part of the policy was that since everyone was required to do some form of work, there was also an incentive to snitch on people that were not working. Snitches were rewarded, in fact. Thus, there were instances of false accusations, extortion, etc., so it seems like it was rife with corruption and bullshit like everything humanity touches.
On the east coast I could understand not wanting to get out of your car in the winter. And an attendant standing out in the snow is a tough job. Not sure it should be mandated. But in Oregon there's really no time of year it's that great a hardship to pump your own gas.
The attendants weren't fired, btw. At most stations they're still there and they'll offer to pump your gas. You're just allowed to do it yourself now.
So today it would be mainly just busywork, I’m doing those like twice a year, but need to put gas in my car once a week (roughly).
Since the Manchester Arena terror attack (awful, tragic, evil, and an isolated event), it has been mandatory for music and live theatre venues to have an absolute army of "security" staff checking people's bags.
A full 95 percent of whom would be entirely and totally useless in any actual emergency or danger situation.
It's one of the things contributing to the ever increasing price of show tickets, but basically it's a tax on people who can afford live shows to create jobs for an otherwise fairly unemployable sector of the population (young and not much education - way too little natural demand for that in central London to mop up all the supply).
And yep, I get it on the booze thing, but they'd have to confiscate a ton of handbag booze for the nylon jacket army to make economic sense.
Festivals is one thing, sure, but we're talking theatre shows and comedy nights as well.
I don't think it would be fair fo make living on a UBI as comfortable as the lowest minimum wage job people are actually working at. Not fair to the people who work at whatever they can find.
Of course, you also pay taxes out of whatever you make, so the person who makes $100,000 might be paying $30,000 in taxes and then they're effectively paying $18,000 rather than receiving $12,000. But that's fine and is actually want you want, because it produces a progressive rate curve even when everyone is paying the same marginal tax rate. Right now we put irrationally high marginal rates on lower and middle income people in the form of benefits phase outs. With a UBI they get the benefits as cash and experience the phase outs as paying taxes at the same (rather than a higher) marginal rate as higher income people.
You don't want people doing nothing. You want them to have the incentive to take productive employment when it's available. Taking away the money you give them because they take a job is exactly what you don't want, which is crazy.
I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax. Specifically zero tax on basic necessities and an escalating sales tax on anything optional or luxury. A gluttony consumption tax, if you will. Want to spend your $12k on Nikes? You're only gonna get $3k of shoes for it. Make $300k a year and live on rice and beans? Keep your money. Want to buy a boat? 20% of that goes to pay for the UBI.
[edit] on the other hand, what I just wrote is probably also a prescription for destroying the world's most successful and productive economies, and the companies that fuel them. But taking a UBI out of income tax is a great way to make more people not want to work. And if Nikes get way too expensive, who knows how that could distort the economy. Maybe it would be better if the government just made some basic rules about minimum wages and work hours and let people fight it out for a buck like they do now. idk.
I'm not using actual proposed values, just an example. Lets choose $100k as the pivot point.
So person earning that currently pays $30k tax, meaning they get take-home of $70k. The new system means they get $12k UBI and tax needs to leave them $48k so they stay at the same salary level. They now pay $52k tax.
That means 52% tax rate, across the board.
The guy who previously earned $20k and paid $2k tax had a take home of $18k. He gets $12k UBI. Now he pays 52% tax on the $20k, so $10.4k. His take home is now $21.6k.
The closer you get to the floor, the better security there is. You can live on the $12k but you are not rich, and nobody goes without.
The $1m high earner should have paid $400k in tax but actually paid $100k because he pays $20k to an accountant. He now gets $12k UBI and pays $520k in tax because income tax rate is flat and the accountant needs to find another way to earn a crust, though he gets UBI, so..
the new flat tax rate is 42% and the $20k guy takes home $23.6k
It'd be more practical to net the $12k in UBI against each person's tax liability. If one owes more than $12k in taxes, then he or she pays the difference. If one owes less than $12k, then the government pays out the difference.
The $12k is additive, but the factors that would reduce its value are multiplicative. If prices were to all double (an extreme case) it would still be equivalent to today's $6k. There's no scenario where everyone gets $12k but also the first $12k of everyone's money stops counting.
Sales tax on luxury items isn't a terrible idea, but the problem with relying only on sales tax is that very rich people (the ones who are getting most of the population's money) don't buy a lot, so the money just gets stuck in their accounts forever (or until they decide to buy all of the world's RAM). It can be one prong of a mixed strategy, though.
One part of inflation is driven by the difference between money entering circulation and money leaving it. UBI obviously brings a lot more money into circulation; it's generally assumed that taxes would have to be raised to remove the same amount.
Only if something is preventing the market from responding to higher demand by building more cars or housing units rather than raising the unit price. And if that's happening then you're screwed independent of this, because anything that causes ordinary people to have more money would do the same thing. If energy costs went down then people would have the money they didn't spend on electricity and that would cause housing costs to increase.
This is why restrictive zoning rules are very bad.
> I know it's considered "regressive" but if we're going to pay for that I think it shouldn't come out of income tax, it should be sales tax.
Sales tax is considered regressive for two reasons. One, it's a flat rate, but that's the thing we want in this case because we're using it as the de facto phase out for the UBI. Two, rich people don't spend as much of their income. But that one has always been a giant fraud because it's really income tax that allows the rich to defer taxes (via unrealized capital gains), and when they do that they don't even pay taxes on the money they spend, since they can borrow against the assets and spend on credit.
So using a consumption tax actually works perfectly well in this case and is even more progressive than the status quo where the rich can avoid taxes entirely.
They have to pay taxes on the income/realised gains they use to pay the loan back when it matures. It’s not completely tax free.
No they don't, they just take out another loan. If you have a billion dollars in assets that increases in value by an average of 10% a year and can borrow money at 6% interest, guess how long you can spend anything up to your entire wealth on credit before the recapitalized loan principal catches up to your assets.
"Estate tax" is basically a tax on people who die before they do "estate planning". It's a sham that generates less than 1% of federal revenue, and most of that not from billionaires but from upper middle class families who didn't realize they would be subject to it or otherwise died without making advance preparations for it.
One of the most common cases it actually gets collected is when someone dies relatively young, because those are the people most likely to have not shielded their assets from it yet, which is one of the reasons "death tax" is a pretty appropriate moniker for it.
It's also one of the reasons that UBI + consumption tax works really well: Put your assets into whatever box you want, transfer them to your kids however you want, you're still paying the consumption tax when you buy something.
Here's an idea I just kinda came up with: Maybe instead of what you buy, the first UBIx3 you spend in a year should be sales tax free. After that you pay sales tax which goes back into the UBI. But I guess that means tracking everything everyone buys... which would be a privacy disaster. Okay back to the drawing board.
I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking. Whereas a blanket $12k UBI to everyone would make it just as hard to compete to buy a house as before.
Elon is really the boring case because a) it requires the premise that unrealized gains are income (which brings in more sticky problems than you really want) and b) billionaires are over-hyped and the majority of total income is the likes of doctors and law partners, because there are so many more of them than there are of Elons.
But those people actually do spend a significant proportion of their income. Not all on necessities, but what kind of sane tax would tax only necessities?
> I still think that in the case of individual buyers and sellers for houses and cars, a blanket injection of money just makes sellers able to raise their prices by the same amount.
Suppose that everyone suddenly has an extra $12,000 to buy housing. Now, to begin with, this isn't actually what happens, because we're not printing the money. Whatever someone receives, someone else is paying in tax. For middle income people this is going to largely cancel out. For lower income people this is replacing SNAP and Medicaid and so on. It's a less dramatic change than it's made out to be.
But never mind that and suppose everybody actually had an extra $12,000/year. At existing prices, more people could now afford to buy a home, right? There is now additional demand for housing. And additional housing can be created by construction companies, who want that additional money. If it costs them $150,000 to build a housing unit and the price is $200,000 then they make $50,000 for each one they build. Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them. Meanwhile $12,000 over 30 years is $360,000. So who is going to pay $560,000 for an existing unit when you can have a new one built for $200,000?
The problem only comes if you have zoning rules that inhibit new units from being built, because then everyone has to outbid each other on the existing stock. But even then it doesn't absorb all of the money, because some people would prefer to spend it on things other than housing.
> And while it's true that if energy prices dropped, the same would sort of apply, that wouldn't be a tax out of the value people generate, it would be a boon to everyone... meaning in theory wages could go up and taxes go down
Money doesn't care where you got it. A UBI and a tax credit are equivalent things. And if you don't think so then implement the UBI as a refundable tax credit and your concerns will be addressed, right?
> and, as above, energy prices are much more of a strain on people with less money, so it would benefit them more, relatively speaking.
Who do you suppose buys more electricity, a janitorial worker or OpenAI?
> Unless somebody stops them, they're going to keep building more housing units as long as anybody is willing to pay $200,000 for them.
sounds like you're describing a paperclip maximizer and drives home the importance of zoning (or rather land allocation and geographical coordination) as a general concept.
We would be better off if zoning density restrictions were entirely unconstitutional. Some state should try that.
Of course, one reason that they are very good is so that you can avoid living in hell. It's a balance.
Yes, this is why many people think Universal Basic Services (food, housing, health care, etc) is a vastly superior model to UBI
And to the extent that it doesn't, it's because they were going to buy those things anyway (since they're necessities) in which case it's equivalent to cash because they can now spend the money they otherwise would have used to buy those things. At which point all you're doing is wasting tax dollars on administrative overhead and reducing utility when you get the numbers wrong and what a given person actually needs is more money for food and less for housing or vice versa.
Then the gas station owner could hire another attendant. Or your parent could pick a different gas station or a different time of day, free markets and all...
The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.
Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.
When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.
Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.
This is not how unions work in the UK
In European unions you pay the membership and that is it.
On top of that many apply to complete industry sectors, they are not tied to specific jobs and don't care one second how you got your skills.
Moreover, getting your own full license takes around a decade, during which time you're expected to work as an underling regardless of whether you already have the capacity to do the job yourself. So to the extent that anyone can get an apprenticeship without blood relations or graft, they expect someone who is willing to be stuck in an entry level position for that long even if they already have significant relevant experience from a related field, and then you get in the queue behind a million high school seniors and never get a slot.
Getting permission for jobs is required in many cases without any union having anything to do with it, you have to get them regardless.
Finalising high-school without going through trade school, or into university, meant jobs that only unqualified people get.
Notice that this is equivalent to ensuring that they crash three times as hard for the people being excluded, because they all still need jobs but are now stuck competing for not just fewer but also lower skilled jobs, and on top of that then have to pay more for housing etc. because trade work is being artificially kept in undersupply.
Unions have saved my ass multiple times in the European countries I worked on.
There are a lot of industries (at least historically) that have organized labor.
In the UK, there was the “Wapping Dispute” in 1986 when computer technology enabled journalists to type in their copy directly, doing away with the need for workers to set type using linotype printing.
Linotype was a big improvement on the older letter-by-letter typesetting and sped up composition of text 3 - 5 times compared to hand composition. Its introduction enabled a small number of machine operators to set type for multi-page newspapers, leading to an explosion of print editions in the 1900s.
But in 1986, 100 years after the invention of linotype machines, they were being replaced with computerized direct input typesetting. As a result of the new process, UK print unions held a year-long strike.
Result of the strike: failure. 6000 printers were fired, but there were jobs for 670 new workers who used word processing.
You probably can't force your job to remain (well, I guess some people have).