There was an experiment in Canada in the 70s, Mincome. It went really well, from everything I can find about it, with increased school attendance and decreased hospital visits.
There was recently an article about a study on the prevalence of hookworm in is US south[0]. It seems to me that basic income could go a long way towards resolving this issue. One of the examples cited in the article involved a trailer park where they pumped sewage into open pools. If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system and the trailer park, in turn, could charge it's renters more and put in the system.
Currently it sounds like a blood from a stone situation: no one has any money, so requiring the park to install a sanitation system would simply cause it to file bankruptcy, likely with no change of any kind.
> If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system and the trailer park, in turn, could charge it's renters more and put in the system.
What you're describing is a special case of the exact sort of inflation that critics are afraid of (more money for tenants across the board just means more money that rentiers can extract).
If the argument is "we could use tax money (via a stipend to citizens, and then extracted as rent) to implement a law that required a trailer park to provide a functioning sewage system", then the easiest and most efficient way to do that would be use tax money to provide a functioning sewage system.
> If the argument is "we could use tax money (via a stipend to citizens, and then extracted as rent) to implement a law that required a trailer park to provide a functioning sewage system", then the easiest and most efficient way to do that would be use tax money to provide a functioning sewage system.
That's assuming the only objective was to fix trailor park sewage, when realistically there are thousands or maybe tens of thousands of similar problems that different populations. The federal government simply doesn't have the resources and logistical capabilities, to identify and address each need in turn. If they tried lots of needs would end up overlooked. So instead you provide the UBI and let the money get directed to the most pressing need.
> The government simply doesn't have the resources and logistical capabilities, to identify and address each need in turn.
We already made the assumption that they do, with the original claim " If every member of the park was getting some form of basic income, the state could require the trailer park to install a septic system".
Without that requirement, you're taking on the risk that the rentiers will extract the additional income and make no changes to the sewage system. That assumes a few things:
(1) The trailer park owners don't currently have the money to building a sewage system
(2) The lack of money is the only reason that the owners aren't building a sewage system
(3) The owners don't have other goals that they prioritize higher than providing a sewage system to tenants
(4) The amount that the rentiers would be able to extract from the stipend would be enough to cover a sewage system
I'm generally pretty sympathetic to the premise that allowing rational actors to choose how to spend their limited resources tends to produce results that ~everyone agrees are better than top-down planned efforts. But when you're talking about a situation in which the negotiating leverage of the two parties is so drastically imbalanced, and a problem which has such wide-reaching externalities as this one does, that's a really big leap of faith to take. Compare that to the alternative, where we've identified a concrete problem that we're looking to solve, and we use a normal process for budgeting and directing funds towards a targeted goal.
I think the issue is that in this case the municipality does not have a functioning sanitation system. Requiring that the municipality implement such a system would require a pretty massive outlay of money and would likely be a tough sell: the state would need to require it of the municipality and somehow fund it.
That said, you make a good point that landlords (in many cases) extract as much "value" from their tenants as they possibly can. If they knew each tenant was getting a fixed amount of additional income we could expect them to increase rents by approximately that amount and that would be bad.
My example was optimistic in that it presumed this would not be the case. I do think my basic idea is sound: if people had a basic income of a certain amount, then we could expect systems supporting those people to improve (to some degree) by a portion of that amount.
Inflation is happening if prices go up without any benefit to customers. It's not what's happening if there is an increase in quality.
This sounds like something in between where there's a law requiring an increase in quality. I expect that wouldn't be necessary. People with (a little) more money have more options and can vote with their feet by moving to a better trailer park.
If, today, the trailer park owner is not required to provide adequate sanitation (which strikes me as heinous btw), why would UBI change that? Either the state couldn't care less or their are laws that are being flouted. Either way, it's not clear why a change in distribution methodology would change either.
The bit of your argument that I completely agree would occur is that the trailer park owner will charge the renters more. That's pretty much a given. Whether or not the renters will receive anything for that rent change is likely to be an orthogonal question.
My concern with UBI isn't that it won't work. It's that it's a right winger's wet dream.
I mean, imagine. With a great fanfare of fairness, we give everyone $x00/month. Dismantle all the means tested benefits for pensioners, disabled etc. Then watch as successive governments either ratchet it up or ratchet it down depending on their persuasion and the state of the economy. And as a target for when things get tight, it's a bloody big one.
The only really meaningful change from the status quo would be that the the truly disadvantaged would get royally stiffed.
I agree. UBI is such a fascinating idea, but much like communism it feels like an extreme that will never work in practice.
Everyone gets an extra $1000/month. Great. That's extra money flowing into an economy which absolutely affects supply/demand for the things everyone needs (food, shelter). Food might be fine because there's a lot of competition, but landlords? Rental prices are almost completely set by market demand, not cost of service.
Its possible UBI could help sidestep this by allowing more people to purchase homes, but housing supply is constrained in many urban areas today; adding more capital to that market will increase prices. Granted, this isn't as bad a thing as money entering the renter markets, because that money just goes to build more developments and eat up more land that could be owned by people to build equity instead of corporations. But its still something to keep in mind.
Yes, housing prices are constrained in some urban areas and there increased income would tend to go towards increases in rent. But there's more competition from low cost areas if people have an income that's not tied to a job.
Take a look at social security to see how this plays out. Why do you think so many retirees move to Florida?
If those new taxes primarily target the rich and large corporations it would be, since a disproportionate amount of money they earn is not being spent.
You make a good point that landlords will increase their rent to eat up the majority of the basic income increase and that's a real concern. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
What I think might be a positive aspect of basic income is that we can expect everyone to have more money, so we can expect them to spend some of that money to improve their situation. The sanitation issue in this trailer park is one example I thought of as the story was posted recently. In my opinion, when people are at a subsistence level they can't invest in improving their situation in a meaningful way. If employment isn't growing in their location there's no way to increase their income without basic income. Tax breaks will not help them as their income is already so minimal.
> when people are at a subsistence level they can't invest in improving their situation in a meaningful way
You are, of course, correct. Why? Because the investment usually needs some form of capital outlay and folk don't have the capital nor have reasonable access to capital. And UBI, assuming it's at a non-trivial level, will not solve the former problem but most definitely will the latter.
Again, imagine what happens when you give a lot of poor folk access to a regular, guaranteed, future income stream. Overnight, you've pretty much taken all the default risk out of the payday loan business. Let's assume the first call is from a septic tank company. You can have that $15k tank installed next week! What's the monthly payment on that going to be? And what if it's not the sanitation company who calls. What if it's a white goods company or an AC company or an auto financer?
And note, I'm not arguing that poor people make poor financial decisions. Some do, some don't. Like rich folk. But these are all things that would genuinely make their lives better. And, they are very likely to get offered them. At a "reasonable" interest rate.
So there's no solution? I don't know. I do know that it can be substantially better than it is today without diving into the unknown. It's not as if no welfare state models have been attempted to varying degrees of success (for varying definitions of success).
But that's really the point. If you want to "fix" poverty, the problem isn't the distribution model, it's actually having people want to fix poverty.
The governments routinely implement plans without reasonable research to back up their claims, so why not try this?
There have been some studies, and from my recollection the takeaway is that most people, once their basic needs are met, strive to actually do something "useful". People on average do not become drug-addled sloths.
For many reasons it is difficult to do a comprehensive, long term study on this idea. The first, of course, is the cost. People or organizations with the money to spend on research tend to be motivated by profit, and thus far we've been taught (incorrectly, I would argue) that giving things away doesn't result in having more for yourself.
Right there's a pervasive "I'm fine so can we not rock the boat?" instead of a "fuck you got mine". BI could be real good, but I'd kinda like to see it implemented on a smaller scale first...
Don't forget that that money will also be spent on things, it doesn't just disappear, probably at least half of it comes back right where it came from while in the meantime making sure that those people in the USA that are currently living by third world standards are maybe getting closer to BRIC level of life.
There are already quite some levels of welfare here in the US, including food stamps, government healthcare, housing allowance, and welfare money. You’re much better off being poor in he US than the countries in your acronym.
That's not even close to true, because increasing the minimum wage 1) only affects people who have jobs 2) will cause some of those people to lose their jobs. $1000/m basic income is a vastly better solution because everyone at the bottom will be helped.
If you increase taxation at the top ranges (and close loopholes the very rich and their corporate personas use to evade taxes and so on) you'll end up just injecting those trillions back into the economy.
If you use that to replace means-tested aid, you get rid of the management overhead.
And, maybe, if the US cuts costs for the military, making them build roads and schools instead of bombing them, you'll realize you really didn't need to spend that much in the military anyway...
There is also an important point in terms of opportunities lost due to low surplus. As you reduce the pressure on the poor, they will end up making better decisions (http://thepsychreport.com/research-application/featured-rese...) with better overall outcomes.
It had already been cut via sequestration under Obama (although ironically the Republicans were more to blame for this in my opinion). Couldn't cut much more than that without doing something to improve efficiency. Looks like that isn't going to last under the current administration though, I would be surprised if we end up with a much larger military budget.
Makes sense, if you’re already wealthy then you pick where to live based on where you want to live. Optimizing based on taxes seems cheap, I’d imagine they’d rather solve that by making more money.
Plus it’s not like US citizens have much choice, they have to pay the IRS no matter where you live in the world forever. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide haha.
Depends on the total amount of taxes paid. Some people dodge a couple billion every year by doing some clever tricks with their residence, citizenship and tax domicile.
The authors are fools. Would the money just picked from the money tree? Increasing the money supply supply would result in an increase in housing inflation, just as it has now.
Ignoring whether the study's assumptions are accurate, one problem with this sort of rhetoric is that "the US economy" isn't a political constituency. There's just people, and their claims on the economy in terms of personal wealth and income.
It's sort of like when you say "NAFTA grows the US economy but $1 trillion" and the guy who's job was outsourced to Mexico ask "Okay, but how does that help me make rent or buy groceries for my family?"?
Basic Income (and other welfare schemes) are like that too, except for the rich. They're absolutely worse off if the economy grows 10% but their personal wealth and income declines by 20%.
Personally I'm a fan of UBI, but I sell it as (1) welfare is the right thing to do, and (2) UBI is the most efficient way to do it.
I'd probably start with something less than $1,000/month though. I'd offer a package deal to employers and the rich that looks like this: the government will pay healthcare costs and provide $500/month to each adult and $250/month for each child, and in return we abolish the minimum wage.
Are they worth X though? What if they produce X-1 in value? Would you hire someone who cost more than they produced?
Someone's wage has an absolute ceiling at the level of "this is how much value I produce per hour". No one will hire you for more than that. And currently, there are some people who cannot be hired at minimum wage.
A UBI (and national health insurance) would help a lot with wages though. With less fear of losing their job, employees would have more bargaining power. They'd also have more resources to spend on commuting or time off work for interviews. By expanding the number of potential employers a person has access to, you indirectly allow them to bargain for higher wages, even without explicitly setting a minimum wage.
Alternatively, it's "you cannot hire employees who are less valuable to you than this arbitrary threshold."
If someone wants to work for $1 / hour and someone else wants to hire them for $1 / hour... what right does a third party have to prevent them from doing business with each other?
People need money to live. Some of them need money more desperately than others. Some are willing to work long hours under shitty conditions for almost anything.
So, if you have 1 job, and 2 people need to work to survive, then the salary for that job will approach zero because those people have no other choice.
We, as a society, realize that is a bad outcome for everyone, and so we say "Look, I know you /could/ hire someone to clean your toilet for $1 an hour, but that isn't the true cost of toilet cleaning because we don't live in a truly free market and there are larger factors that might force people to accept that wage against their will. Therefore, we're going to say that $X is the lowest you are allowed to pay to overcome the inherent coercion in jobs."
One of the beauties of UBI is that, at least theoretically, low wage jobs will have salaries that actually come closer to the true market clearing price of the job itself. To be clear, it is likely that the true cost of toilet cleaning is closer to $3 or $4 an hour, but people with no options would take the job for $1...and there are a ton of those people out there. Under UBI there might not be people that desperate any longer and so they would only take the toilet cleaning job if it paid more...closer to the true market value of having clean toilets.
Yup, good summary. The coercion angle is one more reason why maintaining "full employment" is a pro-labor policy. By keeping the number of job openings larger than the number of people looking for work, you create bargaining power for workers to increase wages.
The UBI angle works both for and against worker negotiating leverage. On the one hand, workers know that their entire income isn't on the line if they quit, so they have more leverage. On the other hand, they know that they're getting X from the government, and while they need Y to live, they'll accept work at Y-X.
The problem is that the labor market has never been "liquid" enough to be truly competitive. There are far too many externalities in play in labor for that ever to be the case. (Location, ability to work, skill levels, are all basic externalities that keep labor markets from being liquid. In the US market because health care, retirement, and other basic are employer-connected, those further externalities prevent liquidity for labor.)
If people had the right not to work, you'd have a more liquid labor market. If people's basic necessities were met before needing to work, you'd have a more liquid labor market.
Until that day, minimum wage are basic hacks to try to present some of those labor externalities as a basic deserved negotiating position.
I'm currently on an Amtrak train between Philadelphia and NYC.
Especially in leafless winter, the sheer uglyness of this swath of in-disrepair America is almost shocking.
Abandoned factories and houses. Lifeless downtowns. Trash along the tracks. Non-sweet graffiti.
Paying people to do nothing when there is so much to be done seems crazy to me. It's not like we have figured out how to solve these problems with AI or robots yet.
I could listen to an argument for paying people to participate in FDR-style public works programs. Building a bicycle lane network. Planting flowerbeds. Demolition and recycling and then re-urbanization or re-forestation of those crumbling factory grounds. And so many more things that would make this a better place to exist.
If you want to point to the single concept that has to be re-examined to understand basic income it is this one:
"Paying people to do **nothing** when there
is **so much** to be done seems crazy to me."
It speaks to the foundation question of value for capital that is pounded into our heads (in the US at least) from birth that if you want to make it you need to get a job that pays well. And it forces us to ask the very important questions and re-examine some of our assumptions.
Some of the things I have thought about when considering BI have been, is it really "nothing" we are paying for? Lets say you're living in a neighborhood without any jobs available, and without jobs and property taxes your educational infrastructure is lacking, and without a job in the first place your mobility is lacking. However you do find employment in selling illegal drugs, the market is wide spread, the risk is low for the street level dealers. Now into that market your provide a basic income for the youth who can now pursue their interests without participating in some form of underground economy. Can you see paying people to not participate in that economy?
When I think about BI I have come to think about removing worry rather than paying for 'nothing'. IF you look at income disparity versus economic efficiency, economies grow when there is incentive to get ahead but they begin to contract once that disparity exceeds a threshold. If the bottom of the economy is worried about where they are going to sleep and eat tonight, they aren't very efficient or contributory to the overall GDP, if the top end of the economy is keeping all of its wealth bottled up in trading games with other top end users, it isn't contributing to the overall GDP either.
If you force disparity to zero, you essentially get communism, if you leave disparity unconstrained forever you appear to get monarchistic type trapped wealth. If you change the rules of the game so that people can be wealthy or not, but the total difference between maximum wealth and minimum wealth is constrained to 2 orders of magnitude rather than 4. Perhaps you get a better system overall.
Money represents value created. If you simply hand out money, say in the form of BI, without it being in exchange for value created, you are simply deflating the value of money. This will cause inflation. And you'll end up back where yo started - the recipients of BI have more money but its buying power has been reduced, canceling each other out.
I'm with the parent comment. There is so much work to be done in this world - we should first try to tackle those before taking the BI shortcut.
I find this argument unconvincing not just because the evidence doesn't support it (and it doesn't), but because this claim is the same one made whenever anyone proposes anything to put more money in the hands of the poors.
Every time, it's the exact same argument, "if you give the poors more, everything will cost more, and they'll be right back where they started." And, well, we didn't always look like this. Obviously it's possible for there to be a different equilibrium in society, one with less disparity. So something has changed.
Seems like there should be ways to change it back, even to the disparity we had (overall, I know life was horrible for PoC) in post-WWII America. That'd be a step up from this.
I see it a bit differently, instead of thinking of it as 'money representing value created' I think of it as 'money represents value received.' I realize the difference may seem like semantic hoops but to illustrate how I see it, consider this scenario.
A dozen people erect tents and lean-to shelters out of ad-hoc materials on a city street to stay out of the weather while they sleep. They use the gutter (or not) as an open air latrine. If a BI system is providing them with some money which they can apply toward a system of shelters or temporary living space, I "receive" an environment where I'm more productive because I'm not worrying about the people living on my doorstep. That is worth a lot to me, and I can unilaterally start giving money to anyone sleeps in front of my house so that they can get a room at a hotel or shelter bed but it doesn't change the systemic reasons that person is sleeping on the street. Now if I give them a BI stipend and combined with wages they get from working they can find a shelter, then not only are they better off but I am better off as well and the economy as a whole is more productive.
That is achieved by capturing some of the excess wealth being generated by the economy and directing it toward the quality of life improvement for everyone (the homeless are housed and I don't have to dodge their encampments on the street and city services are more able to cope with people living in expected places and provide garbage and sewage services.
Maybe the question is: who will employ the people in these areas where employment is low and the level of poverty is high? And what will those employers be doing that generates enough income to employ these people?
Your comment hints that the government (federal or state) will be the employer and the work will involve public works of some kind. So far, neither have been interested in actually doing these kinds of projects despite the need. Maintaining such project is also a concern: in an area where the income of the population is tied directly to public works projects, what happens when these projects come to an end and the population returns to unemployment?
The current regime explicitly excludes those who do not have income. Whenever we talk about helping people in poverty in the US, we inevitably circle back to tax breaks. If these people have little or no income to begin with, in what way will tax breaks help? If so many decisions are going to be made based on "the market deciding", how will they participate without enough income? If we look at broadband access in these areas, we'll see vendors complaining that there's no point in rolling out service if no one can afford it.
Basic income will allow these people to participate in the market and, hopefully, in their local economy. They will decided what projects deserve funding based on the way they spend their money.
Wouldn't the most logical thing be for people to reinvest their BI in the illegal drug trade? It's not like there isn't precedent for that kind of thing happening elsewhere:
"And some projects aimed at reducing poaching by alleviating poverty have backfired, said Duffy. For example, one program in Ghana was intended to decrease poaching by paying a premium on crops, on the theory that hunter-poachers would focus instead on farming. They did for a period, but then used the money they’d earned to buy more sophisticated weapons that they used to shoot more lucrative species [1]."
Beyond that, everyone seems to ignore the inflationary nature of BI. What will happen to the economy in real, not nominal, terms?
Would that be bad? ChuckMcM was arguing that BI would allow someone to worry less about where they would sleep and when they would eat. That they use their money to get more money should be good. Your opposition seems to be based on implied immorality of drugs.
It's possible that a basic income would help with the rest of these, by taking the edge off the (currently very high) opportunity cost of spending time on community improvement for working class Americans.
It would also move money back into these economies in a way that support some of the kinds of industrial district revitalization that you see in more urban areas nowadays.
All in all, the capitalist in me wants to say that you'll get better results if you just give people money and let them figure out how to dispose of it, rather than letting some government bureaucrat off in the state capital or wherever try to figure out how best to use the money. The latter option is worryingly similar to the root causes of the worst of the prosperity-destroying waste that went on in places like the Soviet Union. And I do think you'll see people (mostly) put the money they'd get from a basic income to good use. It's not like anyone enjoys living in a blighted town; it's just that they're living under economic conditions that leave them with little other choice, aside from maybe doing like I did and contributing to the blight by moving out of town.
You need more than BI and warm bodies to improve your crumbling city infrastructure. There's a whole lot of skillsets that go into infrastructure development, including some type of organizational structure.
It's very hard to acquire those skill sets if you need to choose between having enough money to pay the bills, and spending time and money on acquiring those skills. Or alternatively, it's a lot easier to attract people with those skills into your community if you have the money to pay them for their skills.
My point remains, I think you'd see people in blighted areas sink a lot more of their resources into community improvement if the opportunity cost of doing so weren't as cripplingly high as it is now.
Right, at the very least, it's hard to improve a community when most of that community's members are working 60+ hour weeks just to provide for basic necessities.
Most companies don't have incentives to care about the communities their employees are from, or the skills to help. It's not deemed productive or efficient in current corporate interests to use corporate wealth to ensure their employees have healthy home lives in healthy communities. (Shareholders, C-Suite, board members most companies certainly care enough about their home lives/communities right now, but outside of the investor class there's very little financial empathy and little incentive to have empathy because that stuff doesn't necessarily show up on a quarterly report.)
Frankly I guess we have a fundamental disagreement, IMO public works (which is what the original comment was talking about) are best conducted by the public sector, not by John down the street in his spare time. Now, I do agree John will probably make his neighborhood just a nicer place to be if he has time & discretionary income.
We already pay people to do nothing, in the form of dividends and capital gains. And we pay them a lot.
I'm a fan of UBI in that I believe we have the ability to provide everyone with the basic necessities of life, and providing it without demeaning means-testing and the attendant labelling and stigma seems the right way to do it.
But I'm not a fan of only giving money. That money ultimately comes from the corporate economy, which owes a large debt to the common purse. For example, we pedestal google, amazon, etc, but they wouldn't exist without the DARPA (government) funding which created the internet, and even more basic research before that, law and order to protect it, education to allow people to even read it, a road network to allow it to spread, I could go on.
And then there are what should be commonly-owned monopolies like land, radio spectrum, etc, etc. So I think corporations, rather than just paying this "common debt" in taxes (which they don't appear too keen to do), should be part-owned collectively.
So, we should have some kind of Universal Basic Income, but it should come in the form of dividends derived from Universal Basic Ownership, eg a system something like all companies should be 30% owned by a Universal wellfare fund which everyone gets a share of.
I agree that we should stop paying people to do nothing: Right now that's the super-rich who might be getting another tax cut for Christmas.
We have so much idle capital that is currently only being used to take over the competition rather than for innovation and investment. Am I alone in seeing the general public and local communities have more of a stake in what infrastructure and things we need, and should be more economically involved?
I think you have the wrong concept in your head. You've missed other portions of the larger economic system, by focusing on an individual atomic result as a platonic hypothesis of personal meaning. The presumed psychological effect, rather than broader the aggregate realities.
As easily as one might complain of rewarding mediocrity and paying into an unredeeming, bottomless void that bears no fruit, another might complain that a civilization founded on the threat of starvation and death by exposure isn't very civilized at all.
Take these two extremes on their own, and it's pretty easy to understand that a wide, ignored middle-ground exists, that rhetoric neglects. On one hand, a person is met by an offer to participate in society, in exchange for the obvious benefits society has to offer. On the other hand, stepping off the treadmill for too long risks permanent demotion, and a life sentence of perhaps animalistic subsistence, pan-handling, living off stolen cat food in a shanty town under a bridge, or worse, maybe suicide and unspoken realities in between.
I always though that as long as the US has a social program, it should be CC style (although there is also an argument for something like Teach for America, a 6'4 50 year old lumberjack might help prevent unruly classes), because (and here I cannot help but sound insanely old) making something gives you a certain amount of pride that helps you in many ways - you can be an ex drug addict who is trying to get permission to just see the kids just once a week, but you build that cabin, or cleaned that grassy knoll, or fixed that fence, or whatever.
Making something that objectively makes your country a better place, beyond just building a little cabin, might given you some sense of pride & stake/ownership in your country, as well.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "CC Style?" You make a lot of sense with this post. Even UBI will not replace the human drive or need to create or feel satisfaction, and people will pursue that in healthier ways in their Survival Mode is taken care of (imho).
Following that maybe-pessimistic-maybe-realistic vein a bit further, that might not be such a bad thing.
Crime is a huge problem in poor communities, dealing with it is hideously expensive to taxpayers, and one of the major motivators behind it is economic stress. Wouldn't it be sweet if people who are currently motivated to commit crimes were instead motivated to do nothing?
You might be surprised to learn how many people get into jobs like drug dealing because it's the career option in their community that pays better than minimum wage.
Crime also tends to correlate negatively with wealth redistribution, not positively. Correlation != causation, natch, but it's also the case that if your causative claim were true, then one would expect the correlation to be positive rather than negative.
If victimless crimes like gambling, high interest lending, drug use and adult prostitution were all legal, there be less of a reason for organized crime to exist.
My feeling is that this sort of things should be regulated at a neighborhood level, so that it is possible to not have them in some neighborhoods where they are unpopular, while still being accessible in other not-too-distant areas where people do want them.
In any case, such trade is not a crime that would go away with basic income. People will have MORE to spend on vices, actually.
I think there are plenty of people on disability who also use opioids. That would be a lot harder without that money.
Doesn't it depend on the crime? Someone breaking in and stealing my television to sell for drug money isn't envious of my TV; he just needs to get high. Someone engaged in a hit-and-run isn't envious of my car, they just can't afford car insurance and know that if they stick around they're very likely going to lose their license, car, and the ability to get to work.
Sure, some crime is due to just people being too lazy to get a job, but it's not a universal cause.
Money is useless without power.
I think all this talk of BI in isolation hides the socio-political dimensions.
The problems you describe are a result of market forces. The ability to do something about it is vested in a political system. Throwing money around won’t solve that.
I would argue that people without money lack power and are pretty much excluded from the political system. They often live in areas where the state level policies are making it difficult to vote (shorter voting hours, fewer polling places, more documentation requirements). Giving them income provides them the ability to become more involved.
Great point; a lot of the infrastructure we are so proud of on both sides of the aisle, was built back then. We generally agree we need to invest in infrastructure, too.
So will most of the Baby Boomers. A 20 year economic plan that gets through a major demographic shift which then needs a new plan anyway sounds pretty good to me.
One way to look at it is that people wouldn't, in fact, be paid to do nothing. They would be paid for the valuable service they provide; using their knowledge and experience to select products and services.
For the most part the poor in the USA already can get access to food stamps, medicaid, section 8 and a number of other programs that provide a safety net - especially if there are dependents in the household. For the middle class a reduced income tax rate would be much more effective than a UBI when it comes to saving money and having more for personal spending. The idea of giving a UBI to the rich strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Again paying people not to work while the rich continue to amass more wealth due to technology and capitalization seems to me a great way to create a permanent under class. The idea that government printing money to "take care of its people" strikes me as a naive experiment in socialism that is bound to fail.
> In a sense basic income would be an improvement over this in that the money would be going to everyone instead of primarily to the rich.
Quite the opposite.
The people who benefit the most from quantitative easing and inflation are people who are in debt. The rich tend to be net debtholders, not net debtors, so they're the ones primarily harmed by quantitative easing and an increase in the money supply.
It's stunning that anyone who has witnessed per asset class appreciation (consider wages an asset class as well) since the GFC could believe what you said.
Inflation obviously helps those in debt but QE didn't inflate anything except risky asset classes objectively held by the wealthy. Even by the feds own studies & public communications by the chair woman inflation continues to remain "subdued" almost 10 years after.
Wages have stagnated & only recently picked up, GDP has been the lowest post-recovery ever, net household debt is again at new highs, interest rates at forever in the history of human civilization lows. Meanwhile every single risk seeking asset class primarily owned by the wealthy has appreciated to levels last seen at prior bubble peaks.
QE helps the rich & if it helps anybody else it's an accident. Sadly by the time non-rich households are able to participate in risk seeking asset classes they are so expensive that when objectively measured against historical readings future returns are flat to negative. Uncle Warren said "the fool does in the end what the wise man did in the beginning" & QE will guarantee the non-rich fall into the same foolish traps.
> It's stunning that anyone who has witnessed per asset class appreciation (consider wages an asset class as well) since the GFC could believe what you said.
Between the two of us, one has a degree in economics from one of the top universities in the US and is posting under an established, identifiable handle. The other is posting from a brand-new throwaway account.
I'm willing to accept that I might be wrong about things sometimes, but when a random, anonymous person on the Internet says they're "stunned" by me paraphrasing an established economic principle, I'm going to be pretty unconvinced unless they present some compelling evidence and solid analysis.
As for the rest of your comment, even if one takes your statements about the current state of the world at face value, it doesn't leave you anywhere. You can't generalize entire economy of the last ten years and assume that it reflects the effects of quantitative easing (and no other confounding factors).
I don't really want to litigate the post-2008 economy here, because that's pretty off-topic. In the context of the orginal statement - the claim that "basic income would be better than EQ because QE primarily benefits the rich" - yes, it's pretty clear that that goes against a rather straightforward and established body of both economic theory and empirical research.
More than $4.5T in bonds bought in multiple policy regimes over years and have been halted for sometime but we can't use that as a benchmark? I suspect it has something to do with not aligning with your narrative.
How about Japan pre GFC since they started QE in March 2001[1] meanwhile CPI in japan since 2001 has remained near 0[2]. Is 17 years enough data points? Which QE regime that resulted in any meaningful inflation or wage growth would you like to discuss? I'm afraid any I'd bring up from G7 sovereigns would be marginalized due to your credentials.
Buying bonds does not help out anyone other than the rich. Artificially reducing interest rates makes borrowing easier which companies take advantage of[3] to buy back stock[4] which adds buying pressure to risk assets. Fewer shares to buy[5] helps the "E" in the P/E through financial engineering.
Who buys those corporate bonds for the juicy yield (besides the ECB & BOE)? Hedge funds & those who have disposable income that can be allocated to risky assets via pensions & mutual funds. Not part-time workers or FTE's that live pay check to paycheck which most do[6].
QE doesn't primarily benefit the rich, it ONLY benefits the rich.
So net debtors benefit if there is inflation before they have to make payments. The more inflation there is before you make payments, the greater the benefit to the debtor. As inflation naturally occurs over time, this benefit is less pronounced for debt where the principal repayments are amortized - the most common type of debt regular Americans have (e.g. car loans and mortgages). The US has averaged about 2% inflation over the past 10 years which is not very substantial.
On the contrary, central banks buy financial assets with the money they print from QE. This directly benefits investors who hold those assets as the central bank buying increases the prices of those assets.
To add to this, it is very hard to argue that QE has not been good for those who are rich and have bought and held financial assets over the last 7 years or so. It is harder to say whether it has been beneficial for average individuals.. on the one hand, they can borrow at much lower rates, but on the other hand, certain asset prices have skyrocketed. We also need to consider the number of companies that have been able to keep employees on the payroll due to being able to finance debt at lower rates when the economy was doing poorly... in general, QE was good for everyone in the short term. The better question is, who does it hurt in the long term.
Economists perhaps but central bank governors don't feel they've hit any sort of limit. They all say over & over they remain "prepared" to "respond" & have an array of "tools" at their disposal. Not to mention some of the largest central banks are still actively engaged in aggressive QE & negative interest rate policies.
Don't confuse a slight ny-fed tighetning with central bank prudence. They have none. Aggressive interventionism is a policy that will never go away & will likely become even more aggressive in the future.
You’re dreaming if you think it will get more aggressive. Most economists are extremely concerned about hyperinflation, or at least 1970’s level double digit inflation as a result of QE. The “economists” I was talking about was not people employed by the fed. Go read any economic open related to QE.
The historical pattern is each time an economic downturn occurs they use more aggressive interventionism. The next time is different? No.
The "economists" you're talking about don't matter. They have no voting power over monetary policy. All fed govenors that control monetary policy at all the major central banks speak daily about how inflation is subdued, possibly a long-term phenomenon, & indicates plenty of slack in the labor force. If I drank every time Janet Yellen said "inflation remains well anchored for the foreseeable future" in just 2017 then I'd be passed out asphyxiated. Ben Bernanke himself just recently authored a piece indicating the next series of tools to use in future crisis since rate cuts won't have as much impact at historical low levels (surprise more aggressive! price fixing & negative rates in the US). He did a tour in Japan discussing the use of "Helicopter Money" in the next crisis. Basically anybody that has any ability to control monetary policy is running away from what you think & say at an accelerating pace. They have a deep bench of folks to maintain that groupthink too so don't expect one of your enlightened economists to be in a position of power any time soon.
Economists don't matter in determining real life, real world monetary policy. Fed governors & politicians do.. repeat that to yourself in front of a mirror because you are confused.
Remember QE didn't just happen. It was TARP, QE1, QE2, Operation TWIST, QE3 (open ended). Across the pond it was QE, Corporate bond buying, negative interest rates, yield pegs. It always progresses every single time. In fact, the burden of proof is on you to find an economic down turn with decreasing interventionism on behalf of the central banks.
Japan started QE in 2001. Now they have over 1 quadrillion (yes that's real not me being tongue in cheek) in debt primarily owned by the BOJ & the BOJ now owns a stunning >70% of the entire domestic ETF market & are still buying at record clips. They are outright buying stocks! The SNB is actively buying stocks.. in fact they own a shit ton of Apple. Why is the SNB printing money & buying Apple? Look it up they issue the equivalent of a 13d form.. it will blow your nips off at how much more extreme they get every single day. I can cite every single thing & will if you don't believe me but simple google searches from the central banks own research firms are where I get my data.
The next crisis will have any or all of the following MORE EXTREME central bank "tools" deployed: capital controls, selling bans, negative rates (possibly on depositors), outright buying of stocks via ETF's, outright buying of corporate debt by the NY-FED, price fixing of 10 year treasuries, helicopter money.
They're already on it. (Sad to say. 20 Trillion national debt, and climbing.)
How 'bout taking some of that fresh money to set up a new department of Federal officers who drive around and break windows? Think of all the business that would generate! That would really boost the economy.
One serious question though: since the Federal government is printing all the money they need, why should they collect income taxes? If we're going to ignore fundamental economic consequences, what's a little more fresh ink? Let's just party 'till the walls fall in, right? (A: it's all fun and games until the velocity of that money increases and hyperinflation comes calling.)
Printing money doesn't necessarily increase the debt, it depends on who that money is being loaned to. It could actually reduce the debt relative to GDP via inflation.
Outside of the "how to pay for it" question (which has never been addressed beyond vague "tax the rich" promises) there's another problem: how to save people from themselves. One could think of this as an annuity, and try to cash it in for total cash value today (e.g. lump sum payment): get $200k today, and sign over the rest of the checks you get for life. Then what do you do with bankrupt folks? Sorry, you had your chance, now you starve in the streets? Of course not -- so you still need another safety net for those people.
> Then what do you do with bankrupt folks? Sorry, you had your chance, now you starve in the streets?
The institution of bankruptcy already answers, in general outline, the question of what to do with bankrupt folks: in short, cancel debts that aren't payable without excessive hardship. UBI should obviously be payable only to the beneficiary (except in the case of legal incapacity), who might contract to pay an equal amount to someone else, but such a contractual liability would be as subject to cancellation in bankruptcy as any other debt.
How would BI work with immigration? I could see that creating a lot of social problems if immigrants are percieved to consume more in BI than they contribute in taxes.
No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP.
If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy.
If you have the same people, with the same wealth, buying and selling stuff to each other, that grows the economy.
If you have the same people buying and selling stuff faster, they may still retain the same wealth but the economy will grow even further.
The size of the economy is about the number of transactions, and printing money or borrowing money can definitely grow the economy (IF that money gets used to accelerate economic transactions).
> If you have the same people buying and selling stuff faster, they may still retain the same wealth but the economy will grow even further.
At the expense of future growth. All of the money borrowed must eventually be paid back, which reduces growth by reducing that same money supply (increasing taxes to pay for it reduces the money supply similarly). It only makes sense to borrow when the future rate of return is greater than the interest rate of the debt, i.e. it'll take more than 8 years to see any return on investment from UBI.
Government finances are different than personal finances. You can’t print money. You can’t tax all economic activity. You can invest a small portion of the next few generations earning potential to build productive assets now.
The only place I can think of that has done something similar is the oil and land rights of the native people of Alaska, who get checks somewhere in that range. How has this turned out for them?
There's also native American communities receiving casino licensing rights. There are quite a few news articles about those cases, in the perspective of extrapolating UBI effects. Here's one such article: https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...
If we can't expect people to be employed such that they can support themselves, then we'll need to look into alternatives like this.
When you say "wealth transfer", from whom to whom? In this case you could argue the transfer is from the federal government to individual constituents, I don't think you can follow the dollars further then that. IMHO, it'd be refreshing to see a "wealth transfer" the benefited that bulk of the population, rather than an elite few (i.e. banking bailout during the housing crisis).
If you think taxes are stealing, you don't have a problem with hipsters. You have a problem with governance of civilized society over the last hundred years (much longer for most of the world, since the signing of the 16th amendment in 1913 in the US).
Absolutely not. There's no such thing as individually made profits that don't rely on a ton of collective factors. It
s not stealing if it wasn't yours in the first place. It's ours.
> There's no such thing as individually made profits that don't rely on a ton of collective factors.
You're confused. Depending on a factor does not mean that this factor owns what you produced. Example: To make ice-cream, you depend on cows. Cows do not own your profits.
Bad example, because we don't acknowledge the concept of animals owning things in the first place. The above argument is a moral one; arguing that closing the wealth gap is stealing (often) ignores that most "self-made" people depend on the labor of others and the recources we all use in society.
That's where the concept of taxes comes from. You use the services that the government provides in order to create value. As such, the government claims part of the value that you created.
Ideally, then, the government reinvests into other services that future generations will also be able to use to create value.
We can have a disagreement over how much the government should be able to claim from individuals, but I have seen very few people advocate for no taxation.
Gun pointed at face, "no sir, this is not a robbery! Clearly you must realize that it was not you who made that iPhone! What a laughable concept! Truly sir you must realize that it was never yours to begin with, and as such it belongs to me and these cheery fellows with whom I am redistributing your wealth. Robbery, pish posh!"
You can be dismissive about it all you want, but you're the one who has a fundamental disagreement with how civilized society has been run for the last hundred years (or longer if you look outside the United States).
Your satire fails to hit the mark of making someone look ridiculous, because they are describing a long-established status quo. Society isn't going to think someone describing the status quo is ridiculous or crazy for defending the status quo.
Does it make a better work for a lot of people? Does it give a lot of people freedom? Does it give a lot of people more access to their basic human rights?
Then bring on wealth transfer.
Watching out for the rich and their tax rates is possibly the very last item on my list of priorities for "how to structure the world".
That's not a fair comparison. Irrespective of whatever negative social effects a Basic Income may or may not have, Alaska Natives are dealing with the consequences of their ancestors being enslaved, losing 80% of their population to disease, and their culture being attacked and almost destroyed by Imperialism.
Seems like that would fuck someone up way more than any Basic Income. In this case, BI basically exists _because_ of that.
Here is what I calculate
250m[1] * $1000 * 12 = $3,000,000,000,000
Now take away the people on social security - 56m
Now take away the people currently employed - 145m
Give us around 50 million people, at a cost of around 600 billion per year. Wow, thats a lot BUT if we now look at cost for existing social welfare programs - 927 billion.
Means we would save around 300 billion per year!
Of course families would require more, but this does not seem quite as crazy for a country that has a 18 trillion GDP.
Except those social welfare programs would still be essential. If you're poor and get sick, or you're disabled, you get a lot more (and need a lot more) than $1000/mo from today's social welfare programs.
Also, your math doesn't make sense. You say we currently spend $927B on social welfare programs and propose BI as a complete replacement for those programs. But that number includes Social Security, and you subtracted the people on social security from your list of people. Social security cost $917B by the way, almost all of our social welfare spending.
You also can't just subtract all the people currently employed. A large portion of people on welfare are employed.
Assume you give $1000/mo to all people below the poverty line as a replacement for all current social safety net programs (including ETC and SNAP and Social Security, but not or Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP). There are currently 43.1 million Americans living in poverty. But, keep in mind many Americans are only above the poverty line because of government assistance. According to the link I gave, without any government assistance it is estimated 79.1 million Americans would be in poverty.
You wind up with ~$949.2B, which is close to what we're paying currently.
It would also involve cuts to various groups. For instance, the average retiree gets ~$1,300/mo from Social Security.
There's actually a larger issue I forgot to mention: what you're talking about isn't actually BI. In your computation you assume we're only paying $1000/mo to those who are not on Social Security and are not employed. But the whole point of Basic Income is that it goes to everyone. What you're talking about is just a different form of welfare, and completely unrelated to what this system is proposing.
Whether this estimate is accurate or not is less relevant than the question: If the US economy were boosted by a basic income (or any change, in fact), what percentage of that economic gain would go into the pockets of the people who have been capturing 90% of all growth over the last 20 years?
If the answer to my question isn't a very high percentage, then such a program would never even be discussed in Congress.
Perhaps the correct question to posit is the following - is making people more dependent on the government ever going to truly empower people and their communities or will it eventually lead to disenfranchisement? Look at what happened with all the government sanctioned urban renewal projects in the 1970's. You had the government claim land by eminent domain in many inner cities with the idea that they would renew that area and folks would be able to move back to their homes. Instead you had large numbers of those folks who had been living with very little government assistance for generations move into housing projects en masse. Those projects are now hotbeds for drugs and crime, the residents never got to move back to their houses and it has created generational dependance on welfare. Don't trust that company scrip in other words - especially when the company is the government
Let's say someone is comfortable enough with BI in their twenties, and never bother to get a substantial ("real") job. Are they effectively stuck that way for life?
Older, with no work experience, and maybe having children, are they really going to be able to launch a career from scratch?
Is $1000 per month too high to start with? Okay, then start with $100 per month. Too low? Okay, then go up to $500 ... settle on an amount > $0. Also, eliminate all other welfare programs and require attending at least one 3 hour class per week (or teaching a class or do 3hrs of volunteer work). Financial feasibility, check. Getting people to do more than smoke or gamble, check. What more do you want?
And it would cost 3.6 Trillion (300M adults x 12k), so where does that come from? I'm all for basic income, but id love to see a way this to actually be funded. Ideally from the corporations that are gaming the tax laws. Or is it reducing social security / medicare / other welfare etc?
>Other nations, such as India and Switzerland, have discussed experiments of their own in the coming years.
It may not be called basic income but it exists already in Switzerland. I know people that haven't worked since a decade and still receive their monthly payments.
- Effect on crime
- Effect on drug addiction
- Effect on family outcomes
- Effect on education opportunities
I'd gladly pay more taxes if I could draw a direct link between UBI and a safer, happier society.