Universal Basic Income thread

[pErvinalia]

There's a growing collection of analysis to suggest that in a lot of welfare systems it would be cheaper to provide everyone a basic income (around about the poverty level) and get rid of a bunch of welfare systems and bureaucrats. Obvious examples would be unemployment benefits and old age pensions. Then there is the intangible value of operating a system that is fairer and gives disadvantaged people some minimum certainty and dignity. Would you support it? If you would, under what conditions would you support it? If you wouldn't support it, why not?

[Tyrannical]

I think any country that did offer a basic income would soon find itself flooded with immigrants, migrants, and refugees. And that would be the end of it.

[pErvinalia]

Well you'd have to have a workable immigration policy. You obviously can't let millions of people into your country.

But I often think about the case with Australia and New Zealand. We have reasonably open immigration, although it's been tightened a bit in recent years. Imagine if New Zealand instituted a UBI. Probably hundreds of thousands of Australian dole recipients would probably be on the first plane over there. They'd have to institute some controls if UBI was introduced.

[cronus]

OK in principle. But there's usually a catch with ideas too good to be true. Free and easy money would not be spent wisely methinks. At least with the sort of people I've mixed with over a lifetime.

[pErvinalia]

Past experiments suggest otherwise. I'll post some links later.

The reason it seems too good to be true, isn't necessarily because of any rational analysis, it's because of ingrained conservative moralising that everyone has to work to survive, or die. The bollocks moralising that getting something "free" from society is inherently wrong. Well, more accurately, that the lower classes getting something free is inherently wrong. Conservatives are fine with the upper classes getting heaps of actual welfare and general economic benefits.

Basically, if it is cheaper to do away with the bureaucracy, then it's not a case of any 'money growing on trees' kind of thinking. It's a simple calculation.

[cronus]

Academic studies don't usually foresee the real world issues with things. Why would all those folks on low paid mind-numbingly boring menial jobs bother when for a few dollars less they'd be time wealthy?

[pErvinalia]

Who said anything about "academic studies"?

Remember, automation is going to increasingly remove the needs for humans to do those menial jobs.

And removing people from the need to do shit jobs frees them up to get better educated and/or pursue other vocations that can add to society intellectually or artistically.

[NineBerry]

A good implementation of a basic income is done so that people earning little at the end get that little on top of their basic income while the people earning a lot pay more in taxes compared to today so that they have then in the end the same net income or less compared to today.

Today, many social security systems are made so that when people earn a little income, they loose social benefits and have less net income on a dollar earned compared to what high income earners pay on taxes.

That is a huge incentive for people to take low income jobs.

[Animavore]

We have reasonably open immigration, although it's been tightened a bit in recent years.

Lol! No shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia ... facilities

[piscator]

Australia should step up and solve the Syrian/Eritrean World Immigration Crisis. They have plenty of room for the lads, and later for their families still stuck in whatever humanitarian hellhole their military-aged sons left them in.

[Brian Peacock]

At the moment the UK is underwriting the banks to the tune of £8000 pa for every man, woman, and child. At least if they gave every man, woman, and child £8000 pa people would buy stuff and boost the economy. Of course the UK is borrowing a big chunk of that 8k each so they could say make the unearned wage c. £3000 pa, which would at least pay your rent for a year if you were a low earner, or be worth a nice holiday if you were a high earner.

[piscator]

They're only underwriting the banks with the Crown's munny, which probably came from looting some raja or plying the opium trade anyway. It can't be taxpayer munnies going to prop up the munny system


As larger and larger segments of the workforce are displaced by machines, a UBI will be talked about more and more seriously. Until then, I'll work people like animals to get what I want.

[laklak]

I'm with piscator on this one. It's going to happen at some point, so we should wait and see how it's implemented elsewhere. Let somebody else debug the system. Or maybe we'll be grubbing a subsistence living by then, in which case I'll be the warchief of a bunch of coastal raiders.

[Tyrannical]

universal basic income but combined with universal basic work requirements. I don't think requiring all non retirees to work 20 hours a week is unreasonable.

[Forty Two]

"There can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. … [This is] no privilege but a legitimate object of desire … [that] can be provided for all outside of and supplementary to the market system." FA Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944). But, any Progressive will tell you that such classical liberal Austrian school economics has, as we know, been proven wrong by Keynesian economic theory.