Altair
Well-known member
There needs to be a plan to keep people working. Simple. Despite automation, humans need to be employed and working. It does nobody any good having people at home not doing anything while receiving a liveable wage.
OT: American Politics
- Thread starter MindzEye
- Start date
There needs to be a plan to keep people working. Simple. Despite automation, humans need to be employed and working. It does nobody any good having people at home not doing anything while receiving a liveable wage.
Altair
Well-known member
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Oh, I've never claimed that there aren't challenges inherent to UBI, but I asked a specific question and didn't get an answer. Government control of business and the labour market (which is what would be required to "keep people working") isn't viable. It's far less viable than shifting money around and designing a functioning UBI system is.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
I don't think you're grasping the fact that human labour is largely coming to an end and there's little that can be done to stop it. "Not working" in the common sense of the word "working" is inevitable, it's how we reorganize government and society that is important.
Altair
Well-known member
Challenges. Yes.
2000 a month
36 million Canadians.
12 months a year.
Government revenues dropping due to loss of income tax.
2000 X 36 000 000=72,000,000,000 X 12= 864,000,000,000 a year. Toss in the loss of jobs due to automation and people content to live off 24k a year instead of working and the various levels of government will need to fund 864,000,000,000 with less money from income tax coming in.
If that's what UBI entails, its time to move beyond the concept of money or find some other solution.
Bleedsblue&white
Well-known member
If we can ever solve the Fusion/fission idea, if energy becomes cheap or basically free, then the greatest hurdle is removed.
Maybe second hurdle...people themselves will be the first.
Maybe second hurdle...people themselves will be the first.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Most UBI plans I've seen call for phasing out of the benefit as income levels of the individual increases. As well, children under 18 would not qualify, and that's ~25% of the population.
But being increased on productivity.
A whole bunch of faulty stuff in here man, a whole bunch. First, it's not 36M, but I've covered that. It would replace existing pensions (CPP & OAS), welfare, EI, etc so that has to be taken into account as those are already significant costs (both in government expenditure and in taxation). When you factor in what employment will continue to exist, we're probably talking about 7-10M recipients
Yeah, and I asked for a viable alternative. Nobody claims it's a great idea, just that it's a potential solution to an impending, unavoidable problem. Business won't go out of it's way to solve the problem (and will happily kill the societies they need to continue functioning if it means a better quarterly report for investors in the short term), and government shouldn't be controlling the means of production. Redistribution is easily the most viable tool government's will have at their disposal. Finding the balance within the numbers is the key.
Altair
Well-known member
10 000 000 X 2000 * 12= 240,000,000,000.
That and the income trap created by working more taking away from the money you get from a basic income scheme.
Its still a dumb idea. And no, I don't have a better solution, but that doesn't make it any better of an idea.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Thanks?
Now subtract all of the other social programs it would replace, subtract the efficiencies seen in studies on the improvements in health care spending, etc, etc. It's not remotely as simple as you keep making it seem.
Here, I'll help:
Elderly benefits - 41.8 billion (13-14)
EI - 17.3 billion
Welfare - 24 billion
That's without even taking a deep dive into it. There's expected efficiencies in health care to be found. Poverty costs society a lot of money, but because the costs end up buried in numerous individual department budgets we tend to do a really poor job of reconciling just how expensive it is.
So yeah, feel free to do the math again. It's not close to where you started out at.
Which is superior to simply leaving them to abject poverty? You're really not thinking this through. Those who want to earn more through working would be able to. There's going to be significantly less social mobility than we've become accustomed to anyway. Welcome to the era of the semi permanent lower middle class. But it's an era where people will be free to pursue education, trades, hobbies, etc in a way that human beings have never really been able to.
Thanks for coming out.
I'd think it was a dumb idea as well if I misunderstood it to the extent you appear to.
Last edited:
Altair
Well-known member
I never said leave them in abject poverty.
I said that this solution is unaffordable and largely unworkable, and that humanity, on a whole, needs to come up with a much better idea than UBI.
At least you resolved the trilemma, claw back money from those who work.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Not explicitly you didn't, but it's almost definitely the outcome of inaction.
Except it's not. Expensive sure, but unaffordable, no.
again no.
Yeah, good luck with "humanity" working together on anything. When you say things like this you're completely ignoring entrenched power structures (aka, rich ****s own the planet) and that the only type of solutions that won't require legit revolution and 100's of millions dead are those which leave the existing power structures of society intact. UBI is largely a compromise with the elites. You can continue to own everything, and the poor won't starve.
Like I said, most rational looks at UBI have included so sort of gradual decrease in benefits up until a cut off point at a certain income level. I assume that the economists who worked on the problem for Quebec were aware of this. It's a problem that's already been "solved".
The real problem is the numbers. What numbers are workable. How much cost savings is there in scrapping the other social programs UBI would replace, what tax numbers on automated production are workable, etc, etc. There's a lot of moving parts but it's easily the best solution currently being discussed and not a bad one if you envision what society would/could be like under a functioning UBI system.
zeke
Well-known member
most of the "great men" in history were born superrich and not needing to work, for the record.
UWHabs
Well-known member
I do kind of fall in this camp. While I think we definitely need *something* like this, I'm not sure a flat payout to everyone makes sense, as well. But there definitely needs to be something that we plan for for how to handle a future society where more and more things are automated.
One option that might work could be instead of simply giving people money, that essentially the government would find a way to set up small communities with essentially "free" amenities. So, you live in free housing, you go to a free grocery store for basic supplies, and you could in theory live there with absolutely no costs. However, you only get the basics, if you want to go out to a restaurant, or buy a fancier jacket than the default, then you need to do some work.
Something like that could have the advantage over a basic income as then government might be able to take advantage of efficiency in scale, and essentially cut a middle man out of a large portion of everyday transactions. But obviously that would be a large upfront cost, and obviously you start going through a sort of 1984 government controlled society, so there may be some backlash. But to me, that might be easier to work than simply paying people, since at the very least, you know that people can't really "abuse" the system, since you essentially control everything that they're getting for free.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
The amount of human potential wasted on the daily drudgery of wage slavery is incredible.
Altair
Well-known member
I'm hoping against hope that as we move forward as a society that better and more practical solutions are going to be discussed and that technological advancements don't turn our future into a jobless wasteland where people only survive due to government/corporate handouts.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Here's a good rule of thumb for figuring out the veracity of an idea in this context. If it requires significantly more government, it's probably a bad idea. If it requires less government it's probably potentially good. I don't say this from a libertarian ideological standpoint, but from a functional one. More government control = more inefficient cost to the program. One of the best aspects of a UBI program is that the money goes straight into the hands of the end user (with a very small sliver carved off for administration, fraud investigation, etc...which is quite different than how a program like welfare or EI is administered now, with huge overhead expenses) and that the money pumped into the bottom of the economy in this manner will almost entirely go towards meeting material needs of the end user (thus driving aspects of the local economy). A lot of the money spent on administering programs now goes into things like building ownership/maintenance, utilities, etc (no, I'm not ignoring salaries/jobs that it would pay for as well, but that shouldn't be the point of the program).
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Yeah, and when that looks like a legit possibility let us all take a look at the facts on the ground as they are at the time and come up with better ideas. Until then, let's work with what we have in front of us.
UWHabs
Well-known member
Yeah, I don't disagree there. One of the largest "benefits" of a true UBI is that it essentially eliminates a ton of red tape. Instead of having a welfare program with complicated rules whether you're in or out, or having to go prove that you're still searching for work, you simply give everyone the benefit, and then worry later about clawing it back through taxes. To me, I would have it essentially as a basic cheque to everyone, and we would simply raise taxes to compensate. So if I made 80k now, and the govt pays me 2k/month, then basically my income for tax purposes is now 104k. But we would raise the marginal rates, so if before i paid, say, 30k in taxes, under the new system maybe I pay 50k. The net is essentially 0 for this "middle class" income, and it's a little weird to get a cheque from the government and then to pay it back later through taxes, but that would be easier to maintain than a system with a variable payout depending on what other income you have.
But yeah, I'm not claiming that my system would absolutely be better (I doubt sitting on my couch for 5 minutes on a Saturday afternoon I'd devise a system without flaws), but if we don't have a system where the government pays out to people, then that's basically the alternative that we're talking about. Basically, if a large portion of people are not working and we don't want them living in poverty, then we either need to give people enough money to stay out of trouble, or we need to give them enough amenities that they don't have to pay for.
MindzEye
Wayward Ditch Pig
Yeah that's fair. There really aren't a lot of options for managing a program like this. It's either centralize control or minimal control. Given the examples history has for us when governments control access and prices of goods (USSR a bit more in the distant past, Cuba and Venezuela being more current examples), I think we're way better off if the government is just cutting a check sight unseen, and following up with a small fraud department ensuring that dead people aren't still collecting.