Re:The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a j...
by dragonwriter on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:06PM
(#8148436)
The solution to both loan situations (and debt problems in general that would risk making BI/GMI inadequate) is to fix bankruptcy laws to the extent that they don't currently provide an adequate out for them. To the extent that basic income or GMI "looks different" to existing bankruptcy laws than welfare benefits, its probably an essential compoment of any such plan to work that out.
> There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles.
Poor people not being able to afford adequate food during an economic downturn -- or even an economic boom -- on their own (including with whatever government assistance is provided) isn't, however, one of them. During good economic times, some of that gap is covered by private charities (especially for the poor in relatively affluent areas), but (1) that goes away during economic downturns, and (2) that's not something that BI/GMI replaces, anyway.
Sure, lets question if alternatives to the status quo do what we want, but lets also not pretend the status quo does things that it doesn't.
Translation: The poor can no longer afford food, because there's no welfare program and their guaranteed minimum has dropped.
Maybe they entered into a predatory loan situation where they can't simply break their contract and have to keep paying a monthly minimum, so there's not enough money for food + payment each month.
Maybe it's a standard loan situation, and now their car is repo'd because they've missed a bunch of monthly car payments. "Just sell the car and get a cheaper one!" Nobody's buying it because the economy is in a downturn, which is why the guaranteed minimum dropped in the first place. So now they can't get to whatever employment they decided to have for themselves, which further reduces their income to a level that they can't even afford food. And then there's no welfare program to turn to. So now their family is in an oh-crap situation and there isn't any government solution.
There are all kinds of corner cases which the current system handles. Any new system has to have fallbacks so that the poor can still feed themselves. Not "feed themselves in an idealized scenario where they don't have any existing debts."