Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income.
The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive.
I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.
To paraphrase that XKCD comic, "14 benefit programs?! Ridiculous! We need to create one universal benefit program that covers everyone! Now you have 15 programs."
I get the sense that liberals and conservatives have wildly different conceptions of what a Basic Income would mean in practice.
Conservatives and libertarians may like the idea of giving a single no-strings-attached check every month to everyone and anyone and sending them on their way. Liberals I imagine expect a basic income will be enough to guarantee food, clothing and housing and perhaps some means of allocating portions to those categories, which is more or less what we have now.
There are plenty of campaigners on the left - the UK Green Party is an example - that openly campaign for a BI in addition to most of the state benefits that already exist. And when it comes to implementation details, it's quite hard to believe that many left wing proponents actually would take the "well if the BI isn't enough for you to afford your social housing once we sell it off, maybe you should just move" route.
That's very misleading. The Green Party want to keep some of the existing benefits, but massively reduced (so disability benefit, for example, would drop to £30 a week). But since they plan to abolish more than one benefit, there would definitely be fewer than before.
Thanks for the helpful link. From what I can see they're undertaking to ensure that not a single disabled person would be worse off under their scheme with many better off, plan on keeping housing benefits in their entirety, intend a revised form of child benefit to similarly not leave families worse off and propose a pension scheme which is higher than BI and current basic state pensions in addition to retaining existing earnings related state pensions.
In short: they're proposing to abolish ~£37bn of targeted subsidies for working age adults but retaining ~£67bn of them. Pensions and child benefits get totally replaced, but by new subsidies that cost more than what they replace. I think this is a much better approach than eliminating all or nearly all the existing benefits as is often favoured by right wing BI proponents, but it leaves untouched or simply renames more than it eliminates, and ultimately they're proposing to balance their books far more from offsetting tax increases than by eliminating traditional targeted welfare subsidies.
Any bill to introduce UBI would almost certainly have to include the elimination of existing programs to get passed.
I don't dispute that many liberals would like to have UBI and the existing benefits (despite that being economically crippling). They're just extremely unlikely to get their way.
There is absolutely no way you could get rid of all of the other programs. If someone is irresponsible with their money (and there will be at least some), I doubt anyone wants families starving in the streets, which is kind of the way a bunch of the current programs are set up (at least in the US).
There's already a black market for WIC/EBT ("food stamps"). Replacing those with another program that would also have a black market seems less outrageous to me than supplementing them with another program with the same flaw.
Unless you plan on passing a universal benefit program that completely supplements the income of everyone relying on existing program then you are going to have to keep existing ones while cutting the benefits under those programs by a matching amount.
For instance if you currently get $1100 a month from benefit X then you would get $700 BI and $400 from benefit X.
The reason that the 15th program doesn't replace the earlier 14 is because each program is operated independently and according to the motives of its members (who don't buy into the plan to replace themselves).
A legislative mandate neatly solves that problem. The analogy doesn't hold.
> I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though.
Well, that's one of the major problems with this scheme: a whole lotta people will as well. In much the same way that we currently hear "I can't raise my family on minimum wage!" we will hear "I can't raise my family on my UBI!" Anyone who can't see how UBI increases will become a promise of every presidential hopeful hasn't been paying attention.
When the people realize they can vote themselves money... something something, I can't remember the rest.
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I also get a kick out of how people think welfare programs will be eliminated by UBI, and that's why it won't be so expensive to implement. So what happens when someone on UBI has their car break down or, as will often be the case, just flat-out doesn't budget properly and now they can't buy groceries? We're just going to let them starve? Of course not. There will be a safety net below the UBI.
Generally no (because it's a stimulus that can get the economy back on track by creating demand), but maybe yes in some very rare cases of deflation. However, most of the time governments can prevent deflation by printing money. We try to hit an inflation target of about 2% so it's very very unlikely we'd ever decrease it.
Japan did (does?) have a problem they couldn't print themselves out of called a liquidity trap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap It happened to us in 2008 and continues to be a problem.
The sum also depends on how much robots will make stuff cheaper. Remember buying clothes and appliances/electronics before the 90s?
These used to be major expenses, and much more expensive than today, adjusted to inflation (stuff got cheaper partially due to globalisation & partially greater automation).
You mean the clothes and the electronics made by Asian indentured workers in conditions close to outright slavery? I mean, don't get me wrong, I participate in the modern economy as much as the next guy, and the man who eats meat is brother to the butcher. But let's not get starry-eyed imagining that robots make our trousers and smartphones.
The idea is: They will. We're getting more and more automated every day. I think looking at and talking about UBI at this stage is much better than waiting until there aren't any more jobs left, and deciding we should have done something in the past. Lets experiment now, and get ahead of the curve.
>I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income.
Anecdotal experience. My anecdotal experience is the opposite where the liberals I know believe increasing the minimum wage is that "next big step forward." They won't even give the idea of Basic Income a chance.
> My anecdotal experience is the opposite where the liberals I know believe increasing the minimum wage is that "next big step forward." They won't even give the idea of Basic Income a chance.
UBI proponents have a lot of work to do putting together and coherently articulating a realistic, plausible route from where we are to where UBI hopes to get us. Most have been good at articulating a great picture of why a mature UBI system would be great, but much less good at painting a picture of how you get from here to there in a believable way.
I mean, there are details to work out, but the general idea is fairly simple, start with a small UBI and slowly increase it, reducing or abolishing most of the existing welfare mechanisms as you go.
While enough to live on would be great, I think people underestimate the benefits of a smaller UBI. Even if it doesn't completely solve wage slavery, it can still ease the pressure, letting people work fewer hours, save money, and waste less of their savings between jobs.
10k? That's almost the average income (or more, depending on how you count taxes) of the Czech Republic. If I had to choose between living in a 2nd world country and working and living in a 1st world country and not working for the same money, guess which I'd choose?
I am just amused by the "2nd world country" thing. I really fail to see how life in Central Europe is somehow of "lower quality"(e.g. Czech, Poland, Germany) compared to USA. I'd actually prefer living in Central Europe or especially Southern Europe over USA any day.
Well since you just bulked Czechia, Poland and Germany into one group, I can understand how you fail to see it.
Since you mentioned Germany, I'll use that. A Czech earns about a third of what a German earns. But everything costs more or less the same (except for housing, but the difference certainly isn't multiples). Gasoline costs the same (and much more than in US), vast majority of consumer goods costs the same, food seems to be cheaper, but that's because it's of lower quality.
Yeah, education is "free". As is government free to take more than half of what people earn.
By "2nd world" I mean "1st world prices, 3rd world wages" (yes I know 3rd world is something incomperable).
It's really Old World, New World and Other, which was labelled "The Third World". It's not supposed to be ordinal.
Media is advertising supported ( mostly still ) and it's therefore targeted at the New World, which breeds this curious resentment. But if one of these Worlds is to be the Second, I'd think it would be the New World.
Do you think an average person can afford a steak but for very rare of occasions here or something? No. The average person buys "on deal" cheap food from "discount store" - quality on par with average dog food. Fruit (except for apples) is almost luxury.
It always amuses me when I hear something like "10k USD is below the poverty rate". Do you think the living expenses are notably different?
> Do you think an average person can afford a steak but for very rare of occasions here or something? No. The average person buys "on deal" cheap food from "discount store" - quality on par with average dog food. Fruit (except for apples) is almost luxury.
It is the same for the poor here. I know, I grew up experiencing it.
Would you be happy with that life knowing that the opportunity for more was available and within your reach?
Not many would be content with such stagnation when they could (relatively) flourish.
Agreed. I'm fairly seriously liberal and my filter bubble tends very liberal too. There's somewhere between significant and overwhelming support for Basic Income within that group from what I've seen.
I think the author may have a conservative bias. For example, he writes: "The proposal died in part because of liberal opposition to a work requirement and obstruction by a well-organized welfare lobby, Moynihan would later write." If it's got a work requirement it's not really minimum income, is it? It certainly doesn't have the same properties as one - far from reducing bureaucracy, the proposal in question would've created a whole new bureaucracy around making sure people were working or seeking work and penalizing them if the bureaucrats decided they weren't trying hard enough. Oh, and it was specifically aimed at replacing welfare for single moms at a time of massive unemployment.
Basically, the reason he sees Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives is that he's hijacking the term to describe conservative policies of trying to punish people into work regardless of how realistic it is for them to find a job.
It's not disingenuous though. In my personal experience, many liberals do in fact oppose basic income.
Don't forget that public sector unions (ie. the people administering all the existing entitlement programs) are a major liberal constituency.
> I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income.
There are plenty of places in the country where $10k is more than enough to live on. One of the biggest benefits of UBI would be that we can start moving more people to the massive areas of our country where there's low COL and few jobs.
> I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year.
That's not basic, though. I don't think there are many towns (maybe none) in the USA where you can't stay warm, dry, safe, and clean with a soft bed and a healthy diet for $700 per month.
>Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs?
Because human services jobs employ thousands of people (a state like New York has 40k+ people in public sector social services and at least that many private sector) and control thousands of votes.
Democrats will have a hard time supporting it, because those unionized workers will get them voted out.
It's also very telling about what "basic income" really is. Conservatives don't give a shit about social welfare, this is just another scheme to enrich their pals and undermine the social safety net.
> Conservatives don't give a shit about social welfare, this is just another scheme to enrich their pals and undermine the social safety net.
Huh?! That makes no sense: how is giving everyone a sufficient income to survive undermining the social safety net? How is increasing taxes on the wealthy enriching their pals?
It will allow property owners to pull in higher rents and ultimately reduce the availability of things needed to support children -- good food, healthcare, etc.
The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive.
I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.