Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment.
The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems:
1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.
If you do it via the money printer, it's a self-own in terms of inflationary impact.
If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
2. Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.
The USA did this during the COVID era. We basically implemented UBI. We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way. For the first 6 months it was awesome. And then shortages started spiking and inflation started creeping in. We ultimately had to roll it back.
I don't think these problems are fundamentally solvable.
Instead, we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing. This will create lower prices for basic goods and create employment opportunities so people can have what they need for cheap, under the financing of their own effort.
> If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens
We may have different definitions of "rich" here. I don't think you can call them the most productive citizens. I think most extractive would be the more accurate label.
And the stimulus checks were short lived, not universally distributed, and came in under $1T. The majority of the money spent was on other sources, even if you want to include the boosts to unemployment in the "UBI" category. As others mentioned it's also conflated with other factors like supply chain failures and massive business loan fraud.
> Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.
This is not actually that hard because they're only expensive on paper.
Right now you have a slew of means tested programs with phase outs that amount to high marginal tax rates on the poor. Meanwhile we try to do the opposite with the tax system and have higher marginal rates on the rich. These largely cancel out, if not impose higher marginal rates on the poor than the rich.
With a UBI you can use a flat tax system because the UBI rather than the tax system is what makes it progressive, which has the added benefit of simplifying the tax system. Then everyone is paying the same tax rate, which puts a higher "tax rate" on low and middle income people but only on paper, because you've eliminated the benefits phase outs and they get to keep the UBI, which more than offsets it.
The result is that you have a small tax increase on the rich and a small increase in transfer payments to the poor/middle class, but the main benefit is the dramatic increase in simplicity and the reduction in bureaucracy and administrative overhead for administering all of the separate programs it would replace.
> Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.
Except that the average person doesn't actually have any more money, since it's all transfer payments. Someone making $30,000 got some additional money but someone making $70,000, even though they do receive the UBI, has still received less money than they paid in tax to fund it.
And this is what already happens, but much less efficiently, through various existing means-tested programs that would no longer be needed.
1. It's important to remember that having struggling poor people is expensive for the system. Emergency shelters, health issues that go untreated until they need emergency intervention, desperation crimes like theft (affecting policing and prisons), foster care, drug use intervention. These are all expenses that are reduced by a system like UBI. If you keep people healthy and fed, you can keep them peaceful and working and the program pays for itself.
2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.
> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing
"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.
While I agree with many of your points, I feel like blaming item shortages on COVID payments is ignoring the massive impacts that panic buying and shutting down ports and factories had on the situation. Yes there was more money floating around, but people were purchasing items like it was the end of days and we had factories worldwide shuttering randomly due to COVID outbreaks and various government mandates which threw supply chains out of wack.
> We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way.
This is often quoted and either comes out of ignorance or is intentionally misleading. Assuming it's the former, M1 in the US is not a good measure over the time span you are quoting, because there has been an accounting change that significantly expands of what kind of accounts are considered to be in M1.
> 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere.
Depends on the level it's set at, but as it's "Basic" it would just cover basic needs. It would replace unemployment benefit, the non-contributory portion of old age pensions, child benefit, and maybe a few other things. It would also simplify bureaucracy - no need to assess people's circumstances. There have been pilot programmes which showed other benefits, e.g. the Dauphin experiment resulted in improvements in people's health, and a recent experiment in Kenya resulted in people setting up businesses, boosting the local economy. Yes, rich people would get it too, but that would be paid for through increases in higher rates of income tax.
Your comment beats me to it! I used to be in favor of UBI, but every point you make is valid. And the so-called Modern Monetary Theory of printing unlimited sums of money without triggering inflation either doesn’t work conceptually, or requires too many ancillary policy changes to ever be an option.
I think a good solution looks more like good old-fashioned workers rights laws that we see in Europe, which includes sector-level wage bargaining. And I would also like to see a federal jobs guarantee that would cause upwards wage pressure in the private sector, while providing a livable minimum wage for all who are able to work.
One huge hole in your plan: the shortages weren't because people suddenly had more money, they happened because a huge percentage of production and international shipping came to a halt. Demand helped but it was not a majority of the problem.
There's a third problem that people perennially ignore: once you institute it, even if circumstances change dramatically, it's politically untenable to stop the program. Even putting aside inflation, even putting aside financing it, this is a tiger you can't dismount.
I feel like that reality and its implications are missing from most discussions of UBI, not to mention the inverse: it becomes politically beneficial to give away more money, even if it isn't sustainable.
This strikes me (a total ignoramus) as the generally balanced and correct take.
One question I have is, how much of that inflationary period has been due to supply issues that would have occurred regardless of stimulus checks?
I share your skepticism about the "lol just tax the rich" approach. I'm not sure how true it is that taxes "hobble our most productive citizens" (what are you alluding to about china?), I generally just think rich people inevitably outmaneuver the government trying to tax them, and that rich people really shouldn't be "earning" that much to begin with (because I think their earnings in most cases has fuck-all to do with their actual "productivity"). I imagine there are plenty of smart people who have thought up other ways of socializing the fruits of economic growth in, idk, better ways.
>If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens
It's a double stretch to say that (1) the "rich" are the "most productive" members of society, and (2) that imposing progressive taxation on them somehow harms the economy.
Yeah. The easier money is to get, the more willing people are to pay higher prices.
There might be a 0 to 1 issue (people stuck at 0 need some kind of traction) that is at least improved in a practical sense with a small UBI although we still need productivity to continue increasing in order to drive prices down
> The USA did this during the COVID era. We basically implemented UBI. We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way. For the first 6 months it was awesome. And then shortages started spiking and inflation started creeping in. We ultimately had to roll it back.
Yup. And don't forget where most of that money finally ended up - as absolutely massive corporate windfalls. That COVID money went through the economy like shit through a goose and ended up where it always does, in the hands of those that are good at making money.
>"Yes, of course giving people money makes their lives better. It especially works when a very small subset of the population receives such treatment, such that their relative income is higher than those outside the experiment."
I've never seen a UBI experiment which demands that the participants pay more in taxes and forfeit all other welfare benefits in exchange for the payment. Every "experiment" so far has been measuring the happiness impact of the upsides without any of the downsides that would be necessary to make the program work.
> Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
I’m confused why you think China taxes the rich to take over the poor? Their taxation system is less redistributive than most western developed countries.
> you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
It speaks volume that we assume that China's rich, who largely earned their wealth through nepotism and party connections are a unfairly taxed meritocratic elite.
the golden years of Western society happened during a period of intense competition with a socialist system , that resulted in large scale copying of socialist redistribution policies(unions, state controlled monopolies etc) without any decay of complexity always assigned to those policies. And many democrcies have now majorities of "rebellious" retro movements that try to reenact that past without grasping the core.
Liberal free market always decays to gilded ages, decays to retro rebellions or a retry of socialism, resulting in a redistributing period. The liberal part of the policy loop has run its disastrous course. And It has produced very little, for the titanic scale it's been scaled too. A crispy planet for a electronic opiate system for everyone.
> The easiest place to take it is via the money printer
FWIW: the easiest way to get people to throw you into a "junk economics" bin is to use terms like this. "Printing money" is, at best, an inside-the-echo-chamber shorthand for macroeconomic finance policy that is only going to confuse real economists trying to understand what you're talking about. Most of the time, though, it's just a signal that you don't know what you're talking about.
> You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.
universal basic dividends.
a % of shares in all companies should go into a public equity fund.
dividends from this fund are then distributed to everyone equally.
we already contribute to the wealth of these companies, if we search on Google or post on Twitter, why should we not get a share in the success of those companies?
Above Dunbar's Number[1], we require vast bureaucratic scaffolding. The purest example is the military. Ranks; uniforms; courts martial. People at scale tend toward tyranny. Every. Single. Time.
Our purported globalist saviors are not our friends, and ideas like UBI end in tears.
Decentralize. Empower individuals. Minimize the number of people whose job it is to boss everyone else around. And then ensure those bosses are traded out at a regular frequency.
Aristocracy in its explicit and implicit forms is an idea that is really no longer needed, so let's break the habit.
> If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
What hogwash, if there's anything that's apparent today it's that the rich do not get there either by working hard or by being more smart. They just happen to have rich parents. Why are we ok with billionaires like elon musk who spend most of their day tweeting to control society changing amounts of wealth?
The richest families in the world pay 8% income tax. To pick a random rich guy, Bill gates makes $98M/year. You could literally tax him 90% and he'd still be making more per year than most Americans make in their lives.
> Instead, we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing
Tell me Atlas Shrugged is your favorite book without telling me Atlas Shrugged is your favorite book.
>If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens.
Here's where I call BS.
>Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
Isn't it a wee bit apples/oranges to say this about a totalitarian communist country with a converging set of issues (population pyramid, needs to import food, stressed water reserved, pollution)... nah it's definitely the rich people, we need to protect them! /s
When has UBI actually every been tried? I don't think any trials really qualify as "Universal".
IMO the universal part is the hard part and changes it drastically. Compared to a small limited trial of giving people money, where does it all come from when it's actually universal? And what are the effects on the overall economy when it's universal?
I'd like to make food stamps automatic for everyone. It makes pretty good sense to me. Everyone who has a driver's license or is enrolled in school or is registered to vote gets food stamps. The most hateful southern baptists in my family who are still screaming about Obama's death panels can still agree that donating to food banks is a good idea. I can understand people who say "I don't want to pay higher taxes to support other people." I think that's a shitty philosophy, but I can understand where they're coming from. But if we make food stamps universal, then those people get the benefit they're paying taxes for and some of them will stop complaining. It ensure a basic level of public health and removes the stigma from receiving and using food stamps.
After we take care of that and instill the idea in everyone's mind that automating the basic necessities is good for everyone, we can work on housing, healthcare, and higher education.
Most of these are either fairly short-lived limited pilots, or aren't really "UBI" (e.g. Alaska's $1,600 a year hardly qualifies as UBI as it's just enough to buy groceries with, never mind rent or any other basic needs).
A large population with basic needs met and nothing particular they have to do is untested. I don't really know how that will end, but I fear it may not end especially well. Let's be real: no one works at McDonalds because they have a great passion to fry burgers. SpongeBob was a lie! Would extra income from McDonalds be enough to motivate people to do this kind of stuff anyway? Perhaps. It's currently unclear.
I'm somewhat skeptical that large changes are afoot though; current AI systems aren't really good enough for most things and it's unclear what future developments will bring. And you can't automate frying burgers or stock shelves in the first place (well, not without huge investments that just aren't worth it).
I don't think anyone is doubting that giving people money improves their lives. That seems to be the conclusion of these studies. However what is seemingly _never_ studied is how to finance such an operation. The money has to come out of the system somewhere. Is it with new taxation on XYZ, or slashing services somewhere else etc.
Universal Basic Income has never been tried, because all the trials lack "Universal" component to it, they are limited in scale.
Once you start giving out free money to millions of people the only result is inflation, and people receiving UBI would not be better off at all.
In fact, the closest thing I can think of that would be similar to introducing UBI was "500+" program in Poland, which, as the name implies, was about giving families 500 PLN monthly per each child that they have. As you might have guessed, inflation in Poland has been brutal since then.
I would like to counter with first hand observed real world evidence.
Raising the minimum wage near where I live (Seattle area) has raised the prices of everything. Rent seeking land owners raise their rents, which passes through to everything and absorbs the water trying to sate the parched desert.
IMO either directly supplying what UBI is supposed to provide, or encouraging local supply to match the market need, thus driving down cost with competition as demand is finally met are how consumer welfare / buying power can be increased.
"Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time"
Depends on how we define "works" and also on the scope. All of the examples given involve small sample size programs that end rather quickly, programs that are not universal but based on some need, or programs funded by state owned natural resources (oil).
I appreciate the examples and some of them history around them. I don't agree with the title since most of these are small, short programs, and they are usually not universal. These sorts of tests do nothing to explore macroeconomic effects if everyone recieved the same money. They also don't explore longterm sustainable funding solutions.
Americans spend 1/3rd of their income on cars, and 1/3rd to 1/2 on housing.
UBI is not going to fix this. It will just move the prices of these nessecities up like we saw durning the COVID stimulus.
America and most of the developed world is stricken with a supply problem. Car dependency is resource intensive and housing is in such short supply that it costs 2x what it would in an efficient market. Any attempt to fix it on the monetary side via ubi or minimum wage is a waste of time. Although, if we did fix it, then UBI would be great, but probably not really necessary.
As long as we dont increase housing stock (at least in the United States) if we implement this more universally, the money will just further increase the value of real estate and make homes more expensive.
In the US, we gave money to people during the pandemic. Worker shortages in low-skill labor resulted and inflation hit 10%. I think that's the major flaw - young, childless people without responsibility see no reason to work, when they can watch Netflix all day, either paying their mom some token rent or sharing a flop house with a bunch of friends.
UBI is the weirdest thing. I'm certainly no fan of an economic system which casually threatens each of it's member with starvation and homelessness if personal misfortune strikes. But universal basic income is something different than support for someone in need. It has to be paid by someone, but this someone isn't ever mentioned. It's somehow the government. But government needs to be funded, too. So ultimately it's an attempt make everyone hand over responsibility of our lives and livelihoods to some opaque sustenance function, without thinking or asking any questions.
Any money given to non-property owners will eventually be extracted by the property owners. UBI given to everyone will eventually lead to the same effective poverty we have now and much wealthier landlords.
The surface of the Earth is no longer every person's birthright. Every damned square inch is "owned", with rare exception. The "frontier" is no more. The wide open spaces are no more. The commons is fully fenced.
I see UBI as a hack that attempts to address this new reality. Instead of a place to plant your flag, you get a stipend.
And an aside: If you don't like the UBI, then alternatively how might you feel about putting limits to land ownership ? Rather than perpetuity, how about replacing ownership with 99-year leases ?
Ignored often: $$ at the lower end make a much bigger difference than same $$ at the higher end.
Tax wealthy individuals a few hundred $/month extra, and it'll hardly be a blip on their radar (although they might make a stink politically).
Give poor people a few hundred $/month extra, and it could transform their lives.
In short: those $$ have a much higher ROI if spent on the lower end of the population. And thus a much higher bang-for-buck when trying to maximize a population's overall well-being.
If you give 500 people a few thousand dollars (in cash or in kind) it makes them better off. If you give everyone a few thousand dollars you cause inflation.
Sam Altman diverting the salaries of folk replaced by AI into his own pocket: "Yeeeerrrrs… I think we should replace those salaries with taxes paid by the people who still have jobs left and don't y'all think I'm just such a wonderful guy for saying such a socially progressive thing?"
What the hell is everyone smoking? Is there no systemic awareness left in the world?
Analogy: Town of houses. Everyone gets help building a house, can fix it up however they like, etc. One day, some person tries to take many house lots, to build a massive temple to themself. As a corrective mechanism, other townspeople repeatedly throw that person into the river, until the person is cured.
The problem with UBI is the vibe — I did not get it so, obviously, no one should
I could post about inflation or hobbling the prime mover class but mostly when I think about people getting money it just sort of feels icky so I make sure to be vocal about my opposition to it on the grounds of my lived experience whenever it gets brought up
[+] [-] CityOfThrowaway|2 years ago|reply
The issue with UBI is that enacting it at scale has two huge problems:
1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere. The easiest place to take it is via the money printer and the second is from the rich.
If you do it via the money printer, it's a self-own in terms of inflationary impact.
If you do it by taxing the rich, you wind up hobbling and punishing your most productive citizens. Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
2. Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.
The USA did this during the COVID era. We basically implemented UBI. We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way. For the first 6 months it was awesome. And then shortages started spiking and inflation started creeping in. We ultimately had to roll it back.
I don't think these problems are fundamentally solvable.
Instead, we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing. This will create lower prices for basic goods and create employment opportunities so people can have what they need for cheap, under the financing of their own effort.
[+] [-] logicfiction|2 years ago|reply
We may have different definitions of "rich" here. I don't think you can call them the most productive citizens. I think most extractive would be the more accurate label.
And the stimulus checks were short lived, not universally distributed, and came in under $1T. The majority of the money spent was on other sources, even if you want to include the boosts to unemployment in the "UBI" category. As others mentioned it's also conflated with other factors like supply chain failures and massive business loan fraud.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|2 years ago|reply
This is not actually that hard because they're only expensive on paper.
Right now you have a slew of means tested programs with phase outs that amount to high marginal tax rates on the poor. Meanwhile we try to do the opposite with the tax system and have higher marginal rates on the rich. These largely cancel out, if not impose higher marginal rates on the poor than the rich.
With a UBI you can use a flat tax system because the UBI rather than the tax system is what makes it progressive, which has the added benefit of simplifying the tax system. Then everyone is paying the same tax rate, which puts a higher "tax rate" on low and middle income people but only on paper, because you've eliminated the benefits phase outs and they get to keep the UBI, which more than offsets it.
The result is that you have a small tax increase on the rich and a small increase in transfer payments to the poor/middle class, but the main benefit is the dramatic increase in simplicity and the reduction in bureaucracy and administrative overhead for administering all of the separate programs it would replace.
> Diminishing effects. A bit more money is great when everybody else in your local economy didn't get it. But when everybody gets it, things just become more expensive.
Except that the average person doesn't actually have any more money, since it's all transfer payments. Someone making $30,000 got some additional money but someone making $70,000, even though they do receive the UBI, has still received less money than they paid in tax to fund it.
And this is what already happens, but much less efficiently, through various existing means-tested programs that would no longer be needed.
[+] [-] breadbreadbread|2 years ago|reply
2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.
> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing
"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.
[+] [-] tnel77|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsbinz|2 years ago|reply
This is often quoted and either comes out of ignorance or is intentionally misleading. Assuming it's the former, M1 in the US is not a good measure over the time span you are quoting, because there has been an accounting change that significantly expands of what kind of accounts are considered to be in M1.
See the description below the graph of https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL and the notification in https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/h6.html#2746 (the item from December 17, 2020 in case the anchor doesn't work properly).
If you want to make arguments about monetary supply in that time period, it's better to use M2.
[+] [-] DonaldFisk|2 years ago|reply
Depends on the level it's set at, but as it's "Basic" it would just cover basic needs. It would replace unemployment benefit, the non-contributory portion of old age pensions, child benefit, and maybe a few other things. It would also simplify bureaucracy - no need to assess people's circumstances. There have been pilot programmes which showed other benefits, e.g. the Dauphin experiment resulted in improvements in people's health, and a recent experiment in Kenya resulted in people setting up businesses, boosting the local economy. Yes, rich people would get it too, but that would be paid for through increases in higher rates of income tax.
[+] [-] phmqk76|2 years ago|reply
I think a good solution looks more like good old-fashioned workers rights laws that we see in Europe, which includes sector-level wage bargaining. And I would also like to see a federal jobs guarantee that would cause upwards wage pressure in the private sector, while providing a livable minimum wage for all who are able to work.
[+] [-] EasyMark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EA-3167|2 years ago|reply
I feel like that reality and its implications are missing from most discussions of UBI, not to mention the inverse: it becomes politically beneficial to give away more money, even if it isn't sustainable.
[+] [-] b450|2 years ago|reply
One question I have is, how much of that inflationary period has been due to supply issues that would have occurred regardless of stimulus checks?
I share your skepticism about the "lol just tax the rich" approach. I'm not sure how true it is that taxes "hobble our most productive citizens" (what are you alluding to about china?), I generally just think rich people inevitably outmaneuver the government trying to tax them, and that rich people really shouldn't be "earning" that much to begin with (because I think their earnings in most cases has fuck-all to do with their actual "productivity"). I imagine there are plenty of smart people who have thought up other ways of socializing the fruits of economic growth in, idk, better ways.
[+] [-] andrepd|2 years ago|reply
It's a double stretch to say that (1) the "rich" are the "most productive" members of society, and (2) that imposing progressive taxation on them somehow harms the economy.
[+] [-] criddell|2 years ago|reply
Japan has being doing this for decades now and, AFAIK, there hasn't been any terrible consequences. What are they doing differently?
imf.org says Japan's dept to GDP ratio is 214% and the US' is 110%.
[+] [-] mrbgty|2 years ago|reply
There might be a 0 to 1 issue (people stuck at 0 need some kind of traction) that is at least improved in a practical sense with a small UBI although we still need productivity to continue increasing in order to drive prices down
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ryandvm|2 years ago|reply
Yup. And don't forget where most of that money finally ended up - as absolutely massive corporate windfalls. That COVID money went through the economy like shit through a goose and ended up where it always does, in the hands of those that are good at making money.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|2 years ago|reply
I've never seen a UBI experiment which demands that the participants pay more in taxes and forfeit all other welfare benefits in exchange for the payment. Every "experiment" so far has been measuring the happiness impact of the upsides without any of the downsides that would be necessary to make the program work.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|2 years ago|reply
I’m confused why you think China taxes the rich to take over the poor? Their taxation system is less redistributive than most western developed countries.
[+] [-] Log_out_|2 years ago|reply
It speaks volume that we assume that China's rich, who largely earned their wealth through nepotism and party connections are a unfairly taxed meritocratic elite.
the golden years of Western society happened during a period of intense competition with a socialist system , that resulted in large scale copying of socialist redistribution policies(unions, state controlled monopolies etc) without any decay of complexity always assigned to those policies. And many democrcies have now majorities of "rebellious" retro movements that try to reenact that past without grasping the core.
Liberal free market always decays to gilded ages, decays to retro rebellions or a retry of socialism, resulting in a redistributing period. The liberal part of the policy loop has run its disastrous course. And It has produced very little, for the titanic scale it's been scaled too. A crispy planet for a electronic opiate system for everyone.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ajross|2 years ago|reply
FWIW: the easiest way to get people to throw you into a "junk economics" bin is to use terms like this. "Printing money" is, at best, an inside-the-echo-chamber shorthand for macroeconomic finance policy that is only going to confuse real economists trying to understand what you're talking about. Most of the time, though, it's just a signal that you don't know what you're talking about.
[+] [-] mouzogu|2 years ago|reply
universal basic dividends.
a % of shares in all companies should go into a public equity fund.
dividends from this fund are then distributed to everyone equally.
we already contribute to the wealth of these companies, if we search on Google or post on Twitter, why should we not get a share in the success of those companies?
[+] [-] 7e|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exe34|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitty1e|2 years ago|reply
Therein lies the rub.
Above Dunbar's Number[1], we require vast bureaucratic scaffolding. The purest example is the military. Ranks; uniforms; courts martial. People at scale tend toward tyranny. Every. Single. Time.
Our purported globalist saviors are not our friends, and ideas like UBI end in tears.
Decentralize. Empower individuals. Minimize the number of people whose job it is to boss everyone else around. And then ensure those bosses are traded out at a regular frequency.
Aristocracy in its explicit and implicit forms is an idea that is really no longer needed, so let's break the habit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
[+] [-] smegger001|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr_user|2 years ago|reply
What hogwash, if there's anything that's apparent today it's that the rich do not get there either by working hard or by being more smart. They just happen to have rich parents. Why are we ok with billionaires like elon musk who spend most of their day tweeting to control society changing amounts of wealth?
[+] [-] schwartzworld|2 years ago|reply
Won't someone think of the poor billionaires.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/09/23/...
The richest families in the world pay 8% income tax. To pick a random rich guy, Bill gates makes $98M/year. You could literally tax him 90% and he'd still be making more per year than most Americans make in their lives.
> Instead, we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing
Tell me Atlas Shrugged is your favorite book without telling me Atlas Shrugged is your favorite book.
[+] [-] analognoise|2 years ago|reply
Here's where I call BS.
>Look at China's economic situation right now to see how ultimately unproductive that can be.
Isn't it a wee bit apples/oranges to say this about a totalitarian communist country with a converging set of issues (population pyramid, needs to import food, stressed water reserved, pollution)... nah it's definitely the rich people, we need to protect them! /s
[+] [-] zooq_ai|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SirMaster|2 years ago|reply
IMO the universal part is the hard part and changes it drastically. Compared to a small limited trial of giving people money, where does it all come from when it's actually universal? And what are the effects on the overall economy when it's universal?
[+] [-] tuututututu|2 years ago|reply
After we take care of that and instill the idea in everyone's mind that automating the basic necessities is good for everyone, we can work on housing, healthcare, and higher education.
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
A large population with basic needs met and nothing particular they have to do is untested. I don't really know how that will end, but I fear it may not end especially well. Let's be real: no one works at McDonalds because they have a great passion to fry burgers. SpongeBob was a lie! Would extra income from McDonalds be enough to motivate people to do this kind of stuff anyway? Perhaps. It's currently unclear.
I'm somewhat skeptical that large changes are afoot though; current AI systems aren't really good enough for most things and it's unclear what future developments will bring. And you can't automate frying burgers or stock shelves in the first place (well, not without huge investments that just aren't worth it).
[+] [-] woofcat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Detrytus|2 years ago|reply
Once you start giving out free money to millions of people the only result is inflation, and people receiving UBI would not be better off at all.
In fact, the closest thing I can think of that would be similar to introducing UBI was "500+" program in Poland, which, as the name implies, was about giving families 500 PLN monthly per each child that they have. As you might have guessed, inflation in Poland has been brutal since then.
[+] [-] mjevans|2 years ago|reply
Raising the minimum wage near where I live (Seattle area) has raised the prices of everything. Rent seeking land owners raise their rents, which passes through to everything and absorbs the water trying to sate the parched desert.
IMO either directly supplying what UBI is supposed to provide, or encouraging local supply to match the market need, thus driving down cost with competition as demand is finally met are how consumer welfare / buying power can be increased.
[+] [-] giantg2|2 years ago|reply
"Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried over and over Again. It Works Every Time"
Depends on how we define "works" and also on the scope. All of the examples given involve small sample size programs that end rather quickly, programs that are not universal but based on some need, or programs funded by state owned natural resources (oil).
I appreciate the examples and some of them history around them. I don't agree with the title since most of these are small, short programs, and they are usually not universal. These sorts of tests do nothing to explore macroeconomic effects if everyone recieved the same money. They also don't explore longterm sustainable funding solutions.
[+] [-] J_Shelby_J|2 years ago|reply
UBI is not going to fix this. It will just move the prices of these nessecities up like we saw durning the COVID stimulus.
America and most of the developed world is stricken with a supply problem. Car dependency is resource intensive and housing is in such short supply that it costs 2x what it would in an efficient market. Any attempt to fix it on the monetary side via ubi or minimum wage is a waste of time. Although, if we did fix it, then UBI would be great, but probably not really necessary.
[+] [-] ernestipark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monero-xmr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] febeling|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroderf|2 years ago|reply
I see UBI as a hack that attempts to address this new reality. Instead of a place to plant your flag, you get a stipend.
And an aside: If you don't like the UBI, then alternatively how might you feel about putting limits to land ownership ? Rather than perpetuity, how about replacing ownership with 99-year leases ?
[+] [-] RetroTechie|2 years ago|reply
Tax wealthy individuals a few hundred $/month extra, and it'll hardly be a blip on their radar (although they might make a stink politically).
Give poor people a few hundred $/month extra, and it could transform their lives.
In short: those $$ have a much higher ROI if spent on the lower end of the population. And thus a much higher bang-for-buck when trying to maximize a population's overall well-being.
[+] [-] ls612|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orangesite|2 years ago|reply
What the hell is everyone smoking? Is there no systemic awareness left in the world?
[+] [-] neilv|2 years ago|reply
No one can have more than $X of wealth.
Analogy: Town of houses. Everyone gets help building a house, can fix it up however they like, etc. One day, some person tries to take many house lots, to build a massive temple to themself. As a corrective mechanism, other townspeople repeatedly throw that person into the river, until the person is cured.
[+] [-] jrflowers|2 years ago|reply
I could post about inflation or hobbling the prime mover class but mostly when I think about people getting money it just sort of feels icky so I make sure to be vocal about my opposition to it on the grounds of my lived experience whenever it gets brought up
[+] [-] pydry|2 years ago|reply
It's also not a particularly new idea. The Roman empire had UBI in the form of Cura Annonae.