What I don't understand, if everyone is going to pay for UBI, can't you basically just leave the UBI and be at the same point?
I think UBI is a lot like "Helikoptergeld" (copter money) which you distribute to everyone instead of trying to get help (money) there where it's needed.
I would absolutely just follow my dreams if I get UBI, and that won't contribute to the GDP, but rather to society.
> What I don't understand, if everyone is going to pay for UBI, can't you basically just leave the UBI and be at the same point?
No.
I mean, if everyone paid a flat capitation equal to their UBI payment, sure, but if “everyone pays” because it is paid for out of general funds raised by a tax system which, even if it is a mix of various taxes, is approximated as a progressive tax on income, then, no, not at all.
In my (laymans) understanding of economics, increasing all these wages will increase prices of things those people consume too, which will basically result in a marginally change.
People will be paid to scrub the toilets. (The effect on wages would be interesting: unskilled but dead-end jobs would probably see substantial wage increases, while entry-level jobs with advancement potential might see decreases, at least relative to wages overall.)
Why not option 3: get the government into revenue-positive businesses?
Depending on your country's economic mix, there's almost certainly a private industry that's predictably profitable and also sort of undislodgable (for example, oil, telecom, or railways). Obvious targets for state takeover; keep the prices the same and run the profits into the state coffers, or use the pricing as an additional lever for social objectives (i. e. pricing petrol to the moon to encourage EV takeup).
UBI should be predicated on automation making it effectively impossible for normal people to participate in the economy.
> Several contemporary political discussions are related to the basic income debate, including those regarding automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and the future of the necessity of work. A key issue in these debates is whether automation and AI will significantly reduce the number of available jobs and whether a basic income could help prevent or alleviate such problems by allowing everyone to benefit from a society's wealth, as well as whether a UBI could be a stepping stone to a resource-based or post-scarcity economy.
As such, there's no reason to wait for a government to introduce it. UBI is already within economic and logistic reach, you just have to organize it. There are innumerably many ways to do that.
If you had enough capital, you could literally purchase a large tract of desert land and convert it into a modern self-sufficient town in a year or two. All the technology has already been invented, it's all off-the-shelf now.
> At that point just rob me already what’s the point of working anymore while some lazy ass can get by without competition in this world.
> What we need instead is assisted suicide for people who decided they can’t take it anymore in competing in this cruel world.
This is an incredibly cynical and disconnected thing to say. Life isn't a 'grind' or competition where your success is based on how hard you work, it's a cruel system built on exploitation and abuse.
There are plenty of people that work their asses off providing arguably essential services, yet are barely above the poverty line. Walmart is one of the largest employers in the US, raking in over 150B in profit, yet also has some of the most employees relying on social security programs to get by.
Yes life is a grind and competition. Open your eyes. This is the reality. We humanity have a built in kill switch in our head, greed. Rich or poor, young or old. Everyone thinks about themselves. This is what makes competition and free market work. Communism doesn’t work. You think more distribution will make us hold hands together and sing kumbaya near a firepit? Who’s gonna decide where and how much the distribution should go? There will be blood on the streets.
It is impossible for everyone in this Earth to live like an average Americans. The Earth will suffer.
They don’t have to work for Walmart. Please study programming or plumbing instead.
Meanwhile a lot of people in other countries would kill to have their standard of living. The only reason why they have the salary and standard living that they have compared to 3rd world country is because their country export inequalities, trash, made possible by their money printing machine backed by military power.
In communism everything is owned by the state, that makes everyone a member of the state which means we all get an equal vote in determining distribution and allocation. Communism is democracy taken to the logical extreme
And in practice, this effectively never happens (are there good examples of it happening?). Somehow the revolution keeps getting stuck in the totalitarian phase.
> So you're saying communism can't survive in the real world where foreign intelligence agencies exist?
I mean, this is an incredibly disingenuous conclusion. By that logic democracy is flawed and can never exist in South America, the Middle East, or any other number of places where the CIA staged coups and assassinated leaders.
It's hard for any system to thrive, regardless of its merit, when the world's de-facto superpower has dedicated billions into its destruction.
Amen sister/brother. I am right there with you, standing on the fringe of society.
Sadly, I do not believe assisted suicide will ever become a broadly accepted outcome. Too many people are afraid of death and willing to subjugate the freedom of everyone in order to defend their precious sensibilities.
If they make suicide painless and effortless more people would want to do it. Suicide is a win win situation for everyone. Less humanity, less population to feed, more organs to distribute, less pollution, also less competition between us.
The only thing that would stand against self assisted suicide coming to masses is those religious people.
If you distribute the UBI as things like subsidized food pantries, universal health care, and pre-paid apartment rents, it doesn't enter the market as dollars that crowd the existing dollar-denominated economy.
In a practical basis, this might result in many jobs generating very low salaries (since that can occur without quality-of-life compromise). Maybe we end up paying an unskilled telemarketer only $5,000 a year, but that's all "fun money" with his basic life expenses covered by the state.
In the long term, this could cause deflation, as a lot of "discretionary" products have to reprice to exist solely within the "fun money" budgets, rather than "we can charge $600 for a PS5 because plenty of people will skip meals to afford one."
Inflation is more complicated than people thinking "money is abundant". Current inflation is mostly caused by businesses increasing prices to increase profits, not by the general public perceiving themselves as having more money.
Ahh. Armchair economics strikes again. So, your pet theory disproves thousands of years of economic evidence that draws a direct line between money supply and inflation?
> Ahh. Armchair economics strikes again. So, your pet theory disproves thousands of years of economic evidence that draws a direct line between money supply and inflation?
> Sure, if you say so.
Economics is a social science, not a hard science based on empirical evidence. Denying that there's an incentive for the ultra-wealthy (e.g., billionaires, corporations) to fund and promote specific ideologies is to deny reality; similar to denying that oil and gas companies influenced climate and environmental research or Purdue influences medical research and practices, in the pursuit of profit.
> Economics is a social science, not a hard science based on empirical evidence
Social sciences are based on empirical evidence the same way hard sciences are; to the extent they are more problematic it is because they deal with complex and
in part, chaotic systems where isolating effects is difficult (a problem shared, often, with life sciences), plus they frequently deal with issues about which political, religious, commercial, and/ir identity issues are tied up (this is true for subfields scattered across the rest of the sciences, but it is true of almost every subfield of the social sciences).
Except it isn’t. UBI is paid for by workers producing items that they are then prevented from consuming so that those who refuse to take part in production can do so instead.
In other words it is a monetary illusion. The workers can’t be allowed to be any richer because there isn’t any extra production they can consume with that extra money.
Money supply is a flow, not a stock. There isn’t a fixed amount of money.
> UBI is paid for by workers producing items that they are then prevented from consuming so that those who refuse to take part in production can do so instead.
This is true exactly as much as it is true with “capitalism” in place of “UBI” (particularly if the UBI is, in the more direct sense, funded by taxes on capital.)
No true economist would disagree with the economists that are funded and pushed into publications by large businesses like Uber and small government lobbyists.
First of all UBI might obviate the need for minimum wage. Secondly in a pure UBI system any earnings are on top. Everyone gets the same UBI at all times. So you have this minimum base that will keep you alive and fed but nothing luxurious, and can work for anything beyond that.
> So… why would you do a bottom tier job for terrible compensation if it’s no longer necessary to survive
You wouldn't: bottom-tier dead-end jobs would see wage increases, because they'd still be necessary, but no longer have an economically coerced labor supply; Jobs that have too marginal economic value to be viable in the current minimum-wage set up, but which provide useful experience and thus are not dead end jobs woild become viable, and because more people would be able to take time out of dead-end jobs to do education and training, competition for entry level jobs in fields with advancement would be greater, likely suppressing wages in those jobs.
If you actually think about which actors do what and what their incentives are, this question really answers itself. Let’s take an example: cleaning toilets. Many people will stop doing the job. The owner of a small business will start cleaning the toilets themselves. They will clean the toilets less. A person with a higher wage will clean the toilets if it is still necessary to the business to keep them clean.
Small business owners already tend to clean their own bathrooms or delegate it as a minor task to an employee. This isn’t a particularly helpful answer
UBI seems great as someone pursuing the FIRE route. Let's say I need $80k for a comfortable lifestyle in my Midwest town. At a 4% safe withdrawal rate, I would need to save $2M to achieve that. But add in a $20k UBI for my wife and I and suddenly our required FI number is only $1M. Now that's not factoring in changes to tax rates, but it seems very unlikely that increased taxes would eat up all of it. I could see UBI saving me $500k+ in cost of retirement. Then add on to it you now have the insurance of a floor under which your income will never fall, even if the market crashes horribly.
Eg In Australia, there are 25M people. The annual cost of UBI per person would be around 30K (unemployment allowance) or 50K (Living wage)
This means between 750B and 1.25T in payments per year.
The current total welfare spend is approx 250B per year. Other spend is another 250B.
Funnily enough, revenue from income tax is roughly the same, around 220B.
So to pay for UBI from income taxes, would need a 300% to 500% increase across the board.
I cannot see how this happens without significant tax hikes or continuing the inflationary money printing approach.