Let's say that basic income happens in the US at $15k a year per individual. Do you think this would satisfy people? You don't think eventually people would say that $15k year was inhumane? So long as some people have more jellybeans than others, there will always be the "poor" and unrest. mk, didn't you propose something like this to b_b and myself as we were having a beer in Royal Oak a while back? -a basic income that everyone received no matter what your total income was. Also, wasoxygen, I wonder what your take is on "basic income?"Wonder how long it would actually take this to happen in the States given today's political climate.
-This wouldn't happen in the states.
I see it as an inevitability. The US is inefficiently subsidizing vast populations of workers that work full time at less than a living wage. i.e. you work 40+ hours per week at Walmart, then get subsidized housing, healthcare, and possibly food assistance. This is federal subsidization of an otherwise unsustainable corporate strategy. We have constantly gained productivity over the last century, but that hasn't translated into less necessary work to provide for the essentials of living. At some point, we have to ask whether or not this is how we intend to spend all gains in productivity, and if work is how we fulfill the public contract of sympathetic coexistence. $15k is in the neighborhood. It would have to be pinned to inflation.
The difficulty with a basic income is that it provides no necessity to strive, and it does not incentivize effort. Just cranked through Tom Hartmann's "Screwed" and one of the points he makes is that liberty without opportunity is tyranny. You can have all the rights in the world but if you are not in a position to better yourself , you're in the same treadmill as if you were in prison. He's a bleeding-heart liberal all the way, but his basic rights are: - livable minimum wage - free education through college matriculation - single-payer healthcare - strong labor unions …in other words, Germany.
I find that money is a very bad incentive. That is why the current generation of 16-30 year olds are rather lost in what to do, we've had money shoved down our throats as the reason to do anything... Rather, everyone has things they want to do in life naturally. Usually it's based off of what they grew up doing or what they care about now. Everyone has things they would do with their time, and I don't mean just play video games or watch media endlessly. About minimum wage, it doesn't really help too much. Raising minimum wage does help some in the short term, but the market will simply readjust after about 6 months or so and the CPI will go up accordingly, so those making minimum wage will be in almost the same position soon.
16-30 year olds have not had money "shoved down their throats" by the workplace. There's an important distinction there - reward for effort outside of your family is very different from reward for existence within it. By way of comparison, my generation was expected to work after school. I got my first after-school job in 4th grade, and held one or more through matriculation of college. The one summer I wasn't "working" I was mixing in the clubs 50-70hrs a week while also pursuing 20 credits… it didn't feel like "work" because I was being grossly underpaid. Compare and contrast: if you graduate now, you'll be expected to take an unpaid internship. When I was in college, engineering majors could get $18-20 an hour as co-ops years before they had a degree. Yes, everyone has "things they want to do in life naturally." Many of them require money. It's foolish to presume that money is its own incentive; it's a means to an end. Which is why when I say "liberty without opportunity is tyranny" that "opportunity" is the ability to strive. The ability to strive means providing for more than a bare minimum of resources. Discretionary resources are called "money." You're also flat out wrong about minimum wage. It helps a lot. "The market will simply readjust" is a common, unfounded libertarian talking point. The minimum wage has been raised. If the two were positively correlated, a graph of real minimum wage vs. CPI should be complimentary.
sigh, another advocate for that tired, old, increasingly out-dated exchange of labour for wages. Jobs are an rapidly disappearing premise. It is high time to move forward. Nothing is static, everything is in transition, even the universe itself, and economic systems need to keep pace or be tossed aside.
Who said by the workplace? You have money shoved down your throat by school, society(family/friends), and the media. The biggest consideration most people have when considering careers is how much money will they make. The media constantly pushes things like a getting a higher paying job means you'll be happier and will be like a different person because of the stuff you'll be able to have. You need only look to see the emphasis on money being most important, the reason to do things, all around us. I agree that it's foolish to think of money as an incentive, but that's my point. Our society today pushes money as the biggest incentive for anything. I'm not saying money isn't necessary or isn't required to do what you want, but it's bad at motivating people to do things worthwhile. Money alone does not make something worth doing. It makes more sense too when you think about how corporations justify things based on money, by pushing money as being important and reason enough to do anything, it helps society accept corporations using money as justification and reason. Raising the minimum wage does not reduce poverty. I do honestly wish it was that easy. Minimum wage helps in the short term at best. Your links don't really prove anything in the bigger picture as the first only looks at the restaurant industry which is more more inelastic than other industries. Raising the minimum wage does make it harder to employ people, especially when it's a small company. Look at the affect of people getting laid off because of obamacare's health cost increase. More costs per employee means less employees being hired. Of course you also need to consider how it will affect jobs being outsourced. The higher the min wage, the more outsourcing that will occur. That said, we should be increasing the minimum wage at least along with the rate of the CPI increasing. If that isn't done, the minimum wage effectively goes down each year.
agreed, money is only a medium of exchange and local green dollars, credit/debit cards and bitcoins are but a few of the variations on that theme. Minimum wage is a stalking horse and never has a COLA - cost of living allowance - attached to it so them become useless very quickly as prices increase. It also only addresses those who hold jobs and jobs are a disappearing premise in this modern age while there are a host of other things a person can be doing to create value for themselves and their communities which I have already mentioned above.
I said "livable minimum wage." The only place one can receive wages is through labor. "Wages" are, by definition, an arrangement between employer and employee. You do not. You have the idea of money shoved down your throat by all of the above. That's not what I'm talking about: we're not discussing the ideation of money. We're not discussing the cachet of money. We're not discussing the adulation of money. We're discussing the practical use of money, which is as a medium for the exchange of goods and services. Your school does not pay you. Your family and friends do not pay you. The media does not pay you. Employers pay you. In a way, we're in agreement: You argue that the carrot is being dangled and it doesn't make you want to plow. I'm arguing that they used to feed you the carrot which made it a lot more motivating. The 16-30 year olds have been told they should like carrots, but they've never, you know, gotten a carrot. Thus, you say "money isn't motivating." I say "especially when you aren't given any." ;-) Your study says that an incremental increase in the minimum wage does not raise the poverty level. Granted and agreed. Which is why I said, and pardon my bold, a livable minimum wage. To be really clear, I also said This is not a "$2.27 an hour" discussion, this is a "Henry Ford Doubles Wages" discussion. In that discussion, linking to Newsmax* and citing discussions about Obamacare are not useful. "Obamacare" does not directly put more spending power in workers' pockets. It does nothing to foster a "living wage." But what's really funny to me is we're having this discussion in which we're arguing for the elimination of wages entirely in favor of "basic income." Which, for my family of three in my city of Los Angeles, is $39k a year before taxes. A livable "minimum wage" in Los Angeles is about $23 an hour. The study you list talks about the difference between $7 and $9. Do you see why I said "LIVABLE" minimum wage? Do you at least see why I said "wage?" * * * * Related, keep your eye on the ball here: Newsmax lists nine medical device manufacturers and an auto parts company and says the layoffs are, and I quote, " increased costs for health insurance and, in the case of medical manufacturing companies, a new medical-device tax." Which is a whole 'nuther can'o'worms.Who said by the workplace?
You have money shoved down your throat by school, society(family/friends), and the media.
Raising the minimum wage does not reduce poverty.
liberty without opportunity is tyranny. You can have all the rights in the world but if you are not in a position to better yourself , you're in the same treadmill as if you were in prison.
When something costs more, people buy less of it. This hypothesis is not hard to back up with a high school economics textbook, and I think there is a bit of an onus of explanation on the person who argues that there is a special exception when the "stuff" is labor and the "people" are employers. If you have ever comparison shopped for car repair, plumbing, or lawn care you are experienced with this price sensitivity. There are arguments to be made for special exceptions, using terms like monopsony, but they require a good deal more nuance than relying on the textbook demand curve. I think we have to be especially careful in certain situations when the benefit of some thing is visible and obvious, but the downside is obscured or invisible. It's very easy to see a new stadium and celebrate it, walk in it, cut ribbons for it, and sell the naming rights for it. It is very difficult to see the costs -- distributed and dispersed as they are through an entire district's tax structure: a can of Pringles removed from a shopping bag to keep the total under $20, forty cents instead of sixty left in a tip box, a homeowner with a property tax bill a tenth of a percent larger. Even if we do struggle mightily to imagine all these tiny costs, it is easy to dismiss them as trivial. Yet in total they equal the significant cost that it takes to get the benefit of the stadium. The shopper may value the stadium's existence more than his Pringles, but it is likely that no one thought to ask. Here's the classic text: Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas So it is wise to be on the lookout for hidden costs. In the case of minimum wage, the downside is easy to imagine -- reduced employment prospects for low-skilled workers -- but devilishly hard to measure. Here kleinbl00 provides a study, one of the many on both sides of this controversial subject, which states that "City minimum wages don't hurt the employment prospects of low-wage workers." The study looks at city-based minimums in San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington, D.C. Rather awkwardly, the authors recognize that in one of the three test cases, minimum wage caused no benefit as well as no harm, because D.C. used a low minimum of $5.25 per hour. This solves the problem posed by the jeering libertarians: "If minimum wage is so great, why not make it $100 per hour?" Obviously, making labor too costly will cause it to be underconsumed -- fewer jobs. As we reduce the number from $100 per hour to something closer to the market rate, we reduce this effect, to the point where it becomes small enough to be lost in the error bars of salary surveys. We can't be sure there is no effect on consumption until the minimum reaches the market rate, at which time there is no benefit either. In practice, the legal minimum wage is always $0 -- that is what you earn if you cannot provide enough value to an employer to cover the cost of a (legal) salary. (Which motivates the basic income discussion.) So minimum wage benefits those it benefits -- the ones who enjoy a higher wage. (Surely no one thought this was in dispute!) A large enough increase would even justify a claim that "It helps a lot" if you are doing benefit analysis instead of cost-benefit analysis. Minimum wage also imposes costs, not only in the reduced willingness of employers to spend more for the same labor, but also in the likely outcomes that employers will modify non-monetary benefits, rely more on automation, or outsource to compensate. One sometimes finds the rather incredible claim that employers will simply "absorb" the costs of higher wages without making any adjustments, as if they won't notice the change. Peculiar then, that the primary punishment for wage law violations is a fine. FLSA already has exemptions recognizing that certain classes of workers -- like babysitters, farmers, and "Homeworkers making wreaths" (?) -- would be more harmed than helped by minimum wage. Do we want to assume that this list was compiled with the neediest prospective workers in mind (think: inner city minority teenager looking for a starter McJob)? Exactly. Thanks to everyone for their comments on this interesting and important subject. I don't mean to be rude by referring to kleinbl00 in the third person, but I assume he ignored me as well as muted me when I made bold to ask him for evidence on another statement, and went so far as to entertain myself looking up factoids like the Pope's alleged income of $200 million (or is it $0?).You're also flat out wrong about minimum wage. It helps a lot.
I am not so sure. Here is another talking point emitted by wild-eyed libertarians when they are not screeching about the gold standard and "ending the Fed":I got my first after-school job in 4th grade, and held one or more through matriculation of college. The one summer I wasn't "working" I was mixing in the clubs 50-70hrs a week while also pursuing 20 credits… it didn't feel like "work" because I was being grossly underpaid.
I don't think I am going out on a limb to suppose that kleinbl00's 4th grade job, like my summer lawn-mowing gigs, was paid below minimum wage. I only made pocket money, but crap jobs in high school gave me something to do besides watch TV and convinced me that I sure didn't want to be cutting grass as a career.About minimum wage, it doesn't really help too much.
Only someone not on the minimum wage would say such a thing.
You are ignored and muted because you view antagonism and snark as civilized debate. When your antagonism was objected to, you doubled down. When your questions were answered, you changed questions. You aren't debating, you're snarking, and you're not worth my time. The only reason you're reading this (because I didn't bother with your screed beyond skimming it) is so that you can be absolutely clear as to why you will receive no further responses from me.
Only someone not on the minimum wage would say such a thing. Raising the minimum wage matters, a HELL of a lot, to EVERYONE on it. And all those people are poor. It's the simplest easiest way to begin to address the income inequality problem.About minimum wage, it doesn't really help too much.
It really isn't that simple. By raising the minimum wage, the power remains in employer's hands. A basic income is a far better option, it helps the poor immensely and will not make employers higher less or outsource more. We just passed a $600 billion military spending increase. If that were a basic income, it would be $2000 per person equivalent to $1/hr min wage increase.
an excellent point. The problem is not the amount of money required, but the current distribution and small minded view that a person's worth is defined solely by their bodies and how well they can exchange their labour for wages in a time when jobs are disappearing at an ever escalating rate.
doesntgolf made that point above. I think it depends on basic income's exact impact on the work force.
I linked to some objections in another article. In principle, helping poor people out is probably the most justifiable purpose I can imagine for "public funds." And simple, unconditional cash transfers appear to be a very effective way of fighting poverty. But the objection to Argument 3 in that article is compelling: "we do not have any way of setting up mechanisms for income transfer that can only work in the way we would want them to." Government will administrate the program. And government has an unfortunate tendency to assist the well-off at the expense of the poor. Giving everyone with a pulse an annual stipend sounds too simple to mess up. But the devil is in the details. For example, surely felons will be excluded, and a majority of incarcerated felons are in for non-violent offenses, many of them drug offenses. An annual sack of cash will be an irresistible carrot for politicians to wave around and threaten to modify every election year. There will be, as always, unexpected consequences: · This will be a new incentive to have children. I think having children is great, but perhaps we should think twice before giving people who don't want kids a financial reason to. · There will be greater pressure to slow immigration. I believe that immigration is one of the greatest moral and economic wins for the country, and it should be expanded rather than reduced. · There will be greater incentive to keep suffering, terminally-ill people alive longer, making horrific tragedy more likely. · There is no way to avoid the fact that you are reducing the incentive for people to work. Most people work for money. Some people who now work for their basic income will simply stop. Others will work less, or put less effort into finding work, just like many people getting unemployment benefits now. Less work means less production and less wealth to go around. There is also a moral objection I can't talk my way around. People paying lower taxes will be getting their own money back, and perhaps more. The money will come from those with greater wealth. These wealthier people already have the option of giving to poor people. Many do. With some exceptions, most people do not condone forcibly confiscating wealth from a person even if the purpose is to give it to someone with less wealth. Even if I recognize benefits of providing a basic income, I don't see it as an automatic justification for an unjust action.
that is because you are stuck in the past and are still tied to the worn out old premise of exchanging our bodies/labour for wages and an economic system that has no more relevance than we accord it. . A UBI is about personal freedom, the freedom to choose how to spend the limited time we have in this life without worrying about destitution and homelessness and a job/career that insists you place it ahead of family, community and self and any other endeavour a person finds meaning and purpose in.
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You have mentioned the successful Apollo program as evidence of our ability to accomplish great things. When Kennedy announced the goal of sending men to the moon in 1961, he was a visionary. But Jules Verne was also a visionary when he wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. Both men were, like us, "stuck in the past" which was their present, a time before lunar travel became a reality. What made one vision a fantasy and the other a reality? Timing was part of it. The moon shot was simply unfeasable in 1865. But it also took a lot of planning, calculation, and work to make the Apollo program a success. It was far easier for Kennedy to say we should go to the moon than for thousands of engineers, machinists, chemists and other scientists and manufacturing workers to make it happen. (Side note: such professional workers relied on an army of secretaries, janitors, office suppliers, painters, and drivers to support their work. Would they all have continued working if they had the option of staying home and collecting a basic income?) I suggest starting by calculating how much $15,000 times the population of the United States is. It is quite a large number, far larger than the 109 billion in 2010 dollars the Apollo program cost. It is far larger than the "$600 billion military spending increase" (which is actually pretty close to the total U.S. military budget, not a spending increase). It is in the ballpark of the total federal budget of the United States. I am not saying a basic income is impossible. But I suggest that calls for UBI will be more effective if they are based on a plausibly realistic plan rather than simply accusing the doubtful of being "stuck in the past."
The immediate incentive completely depends on the implementation of Basic Income, and whether parents of children are given a full, partial, or no Basic Income for each child or the first X children, and in a more macroscopic perspective, flies in the face of consistent evidence that educating and bringing families our of poverty is the best way to get them to have fewer children. First of all, most Basic Incomes plans require citizenship as the only condition, but cash transfer programs in developing countries show that immigration to an community receiving cash transfers increases even if immigrants don't receive the transfer themselves, because the program increases the economic activity in the area. I have to say, I think the misaligned incentives would be less warped than the opposite ones that happen today, in which the chronically-ill may have not enough financial support, and the incentive is to cut their life short instead of trying to take care of them. This is in part because an asymmetric difference exists between taking care of one's own day-to-day needs themselves (much harder to do) and willfully taking one's own life (much easier to do) as a chronically sick person. The other way to look at this is that it would act as a subsidy for automation, as labor costs are purposefully pushed up. The immediate effect might seem to be a loss of productivity, but the long term effect might be the acceleration of the development of automation technology, and longer term gains in productivity.This will be a new incentive to have children. I think having children is great, but perhaps we should think twice before giving people who don't want kids a financial reason to.
There will be greater pressure to slow immigration. I believe that immigration is one of the greatest moral and economic wins for the country, and it should be expanded rather than reduced.
There will be greater incentive to keep suffering, terminally-ill people alive longer, making horrific tragedy more likely.
There is no way to avoid the fact that you are reducing the incentive for people to work. Most people work for money. Some people who now work for their basic income will simply stop. Others will work less, or put less effort into finding work, just like many people getting unemployment benefits now. Less work means less production and less wealth to go around.
Jobs and human employment are an increasingly archaic concept in an age where robotics, automation, technology and science are replacing the human component in the workplace at an ever increasing rate. Time to move forward or be left behind. Try thinking of a UBI as freedom to choose who to spend the limited time life accords us.
Agreed on children. With immigration, I think the established residents will protest (with reason) that newcomers are coming to snatch benefits that they (the residents) paid for. Hurdles like citizenship could reduce the snatching, but many countries provide paths to citizenship for immigrants, and the U.S. offers birthright citizenship. I would prefer not to see immigration opponents have any more ammo. People are less likely to be concerned if the cash transfers are coming from a source outside the country; in that case the boosted economic activity is a win for everyone. On the terminally-ill, of course you are right. Given medical costs, it's hard to imagine it would be profitable to keep someone on life support just to collect a basic income. Your point on automation is interesting. Perhaps this points to a future in which automation (which sounds less farfetched than "robots") provides so many of our needs so cheaply that we will spend most of our time in leisure, pursuing hobbies and consuming entertainment. We have certainly been moving in that direction since the days of the washboard.
I don't now if envy is that big of a deal when basic needs are met.
Paul seemed to think so. but who can trust Paul. in our society I think accusations of envy are often leveled against those pointing out injustice. or just to excuse bad behavior.
$15k is too much. We can't provide their entire living nor expect them to live alone if they have nothing but basic income. Something closer to $3k would be more reasonable. Enough to feed someone for the year so they have the strength and mind to properly function.
I think if you put a number to it you're missing the point. I don't think your number is wrong, and I don't think basic income is a viable social strategy, but I think if you start looking at it from dollars out you're not going to wrap your head around the problems and opportunities of the theory.
There'd be no more welfare, welfare programs and bureaucracy. I bet that would handle a chunk.
That's what promoters say. Following your logic, though, there'd still be welfare, SSI, etc -- it'd just start when the 15k was used up. Flat minimum income is just the sort of project I'm extremely skeptical of in general, but I can't tell if that's me falling prey to inborn biases or not.