Anonymous asked: If UBI was implemented now, before the robot utopia, who would do the lousy jobs that need to be done? I mean, who's going to be a janitor or a plumber when they can get UBI for doing nothing?
Being a janitor or a plumber will have to pay more than the Universal Basic Income and offer some sweet perks. The job market can still exist without the “work or die” threat, it’ll just look very different.
Of course this means that hiring a janitor or plumber will be very expensive, but that’ll be all the more motivation for people to invent robo-janitors.
(Which means that former janitors will take a pay cut when they go from janitor pay to UBI, but the whole point of UBI is that it’s not poverty level and living on it is not a disaster.)
…Yeah, as before, I’m not 100% sure the math works out here, but I like to think there’s some way of transcending “we have clean toilets because we threaten people with starvation!”
I’ve also seen explanations of UBI which I think have some merit, which is just that a janitors salary + UBI is more than UBI which is usually supposed to keep you just above the poverty line, and not much else. So your janitor in a lot of cases would look at the situation and go well, I can quit my job and live just above the poverty line and be okay, but I could also keep working as a janitor and make twice that!
So the really big impact that UBI would make is that people would be more willing to leave jobs where they were being mistreated, or wouldn’t be put in the position of needing multiple jobs to survive.
Okay, this is a slightly different meaning than I thought. My understanding of UBI is “if you make less than $x, UBI will make up the difference,” not “everyone gets UBI in addition to whatever else they make.”
The second interpretation solves some problems, but makes the “where the hell is this money actually coming from” question even harder.
The average person gets a $10,000 UBI and a $10,000 increase in taxes, for a net gain of $0.
The UBI (or a negative income tax, which is a slightly different implementation of the same idea) is phased out gradually, so that you don’t get cliffs with an effective marginal tax rate of 70% or 80%, and so you always earn more money by doing more work. This is hard as hell to do with multiple welfare programs, because you have to coordinate sixty different programs, some of which only apply in some states, and it’s a huge hassle. The simplicity of only having one welfare program to do that with is one of the advantages of UBI.
Or or or or or we could just abolish all the useless and/or outright harmful programs! That way we wouldn’t need to raise taxes that much, if at all, while still being able to give people $10,000. Of course, that’s politically impossible because a lot of those programs buy a massive amount of votes from asshole rentiers, but the US could totally afford to give everyone a “free” $10k a year (compared to the status quo) if it actually tried to solve the problem.
2 weeks ago · 180 notes · source: pervocracy · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from barrydeutsch and added:I’ve lived several years on “programs that have been incredibly helpful to low-income people” and I’d throw them away...
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barrydeutsch reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Wow, if anything could convince me to be against UBI, it’s this. Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS...
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lalaithion reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:Negative income taxes and Basic guaranteed incomes are the exact same scheme with different names attached. They’re...
wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from pervocracy and added:The first thing is commonly referred to as a negative income tax (NIT), and the second is UBI. Most versions of NIT...
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collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:So, assuming you are right about the uselessness of those programs, cutting that many jobs/programs at once would...
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isaacfhtagn reblogged this from mugasofer and added:Well, America spent 601 billion on the military last year. Lets start there
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mugasofer reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
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If the public school system forces kids to clean, I will Not Approve.
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