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.
How much do we spend on useless and/or outright harmful programs?
To pay $10k to all residents would require approximately 3.2 trillion.
Department of Health and Human Services spends 1.1 trillion. Healthcare is harmful. The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending. This would free 900B.
990B goes to social security. There are 65M beneficiaries suggesting that if all social security payments were cut by $10k a year on average it would free 650B, for a total of 1.55T so far. This would redistribute from the high-receiving people to the low-receiving people but it’s tax money and a ponzi scheme so it’s totally fair.
Defense is 560B. It’s harmful, lots of pork and inefficiency and cronyism, and then there’s also the “going to other people’s countries and killing them for no good reason” thing. Cut by 300B and nothing of value will have been lost. 1.85T
Department of Agriculture is 150B. Most of it harmful. Cut 120B, especially from subsidies. Farms can live or die on the free market, and poor people deserve to get money instead of food stamps; 1.97T.
Department of Commerce is 10B. Let’s cut it by half. 1.975T
Education is 80B. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Higher education won’t get cheaper by subsidizing it, and children’s education will be affordable with the basic income; remove 65B for 2.04T
Energy is 30B. Let’s say 10B of that is actually easy to cut. 2.05T
DHS is 50B. Kill the evil motherfucker. Cut it all. Reallocate 10B for the not-evil parts from somewhere else, but I just want to see DHS gone. 2.09T
Housing and Urban Development is 30B. Let’s leave them 5B just in case they might have a reason to exist. 2.115T
Department of Interior is small in comparison, at 15B. Cut 5B just because. 2.120T
Department of Labor is 40B. We’re going to drop 35B and downsize it to OSHA, and OSHA alone. OSHA will have its budget multiplied almost 10-fold. 2.155T
Transportation is 80B and produces an oversupply of roads. Roads are harmful. I’m an anarchist, I hate roads. Remove the road moneys of 40B and then there will be no reason for the government to exist. (disclaimer: I’m most likely not serious about that one, only about the number; toll roads paid for by their users are nice) 2.195T
EITC is 70B and its entire point is to be replaced. 2.265T
DOJ needs to end the war on drugs and adopt nordic policies towards prison terms (minimize them), and just cut the fuck out, thus saving 10B for 2.275T
Cut wages of federal employees by 25B to compensate for the free $10k they would be getting; focus especially on the most lucrative (=overpaid) jobs. 2.3T
All in all, we’re only missing 900B from being able to give everyone $10k, and we haven’t even touched state budgets. Since we’re neck-deep in fantasyland already we might as well sail the cutters to the states as well. 20B goes from replacing cash assistance. 150B from removing Medicaid as Harmful. 10B from other forms of social spending. We’re now at 720B. California spends 50B a year on education, which can be cut back somewhat as the basic income extends to children as well (or provides vouchers) and I’ll just assume the other states have enough slack in their budgets to cut a total of 220B from so now we’re at 500B. That’s the equivalent of taking the UBI away from the richest 15% of the country.
If we introduce a gradual phaseout to deal with that part, the average american will lose about $1500 of their $10k. Done. That’s it. No new taxes, other than the phaseout and some shifting from state taxes to federal taxes. A lot of utterly impossible fiscal magic, but it’s ~*~theoretically doable~*~.
So, assuming you are right about the uselessness of those programs, cutting that many jobs/programs at once would probably cause a giant employment crisis and an economic recession(at least).
And freeing that many people to productive activities and giving that many people that much free money to pay other people in exchange for productive activities would cause a giant economic boom. It would be a huge shock to people who have gotten comfortable on tax money, and it would also hurt people whose uncomfortableness is partially alleviated by tax money in harmful ways and whose situation wouldn’t immediately improve even with the free money, that’s true and I won’t sugarcoat it. (Also a reason why I think it could be eg. phased in over a period of 10 years so that every year only 10% of those changes is applied and thus the shock would be lesser.)
I don’t have an exhaustive calculation and am instead working on my mathematical intuition (the power of which I have some proof about but I’m not willing to expose that proof for privacy reasons), but considering that we’d be dismantling harmful and distortionary stuff, in other words, ways of destroying value (I haven’t touched things like the EPA, NASA, ADA, basic research, OSHA, etc. because those are very legitimate in comparison to agricultural subsidies and the other harmful shit), the economy would be expected to re-equilibriate in a more valueful equilibrium.
Keynesian concerns wouldn’t apply as it wouldn’t cause a contraction in demand, only a reallocation. Monetarist concerns wouldn’t apply as we aren’t fucking around with the money supply any more than it already is being fucked around with. Remember, the annual amount of “free” money to people would be roughly 4 times as large as the 2009 stimulus package, and it would be allocated to things people value the most, greatly revitalizing economies all around the country, especially in the poorest places (rural and urban alike) (Washington DC is an outlier adn should not be counted).
All the economic concerns that favor giving money to poor people (because they increase demand and recirculate the money and it trickles massively sideways) would be expected to happen, while simultaneously a lot of social problems (those caused and worsened by not having money) would be alleviated far better than the harmful programs currently do (in aggregate; there would be losers as well and not all losers would be well-off people and that’s sad). Poor people with shitty credit ratings would nonetheless be better able to invest as they would know they can pay with their UBI and any work pays. Uber drivers would be a bit more prime for their car loans and their cars would be less expensive. Deaths from poverty NOS would plummet as $5,000 would no longer be a debt a person can’t foresee ever paying off.
At the same time it would cause a great increase in the supply of available labor as bureaucrats would lose their jobs and poor people would no longer have to choose between working and benefits. Yet it would not be catastrophic to the working poor because the free money would more than offset any wage decreases, while the massively boosted demand for value-creation would increase the amount of jobs available. Minimum wages could be abolished as people could be trusted to reach a sufficiently consensual agreement when they have the UBI to fall back on if employers ask unreasonable things. This would mean that all the work worth doing gets done. (in theory, market failures aside)
Obviously I’d combine this with massive deregulation to fix the problem of “Scott’s paranoid rant” where complex bureaucracy renders people unable to work (partially inevitably built-in because many of the bureaucracies would’ve been abolished, but those that would need to remain would to be adjusted to be less harmful and as I said, we’re neck deep in fantasy land and thus can do it), and thus people would be more free to just do it when they have a business idea in their neighborhood. Poor people may be lacking in many things, but ingenuity is not one of them, and opening the doors for applying that ingenuity entrepreneurially, not criminally or in navigating welfare, would be a huge boon to them.
TL;DR: I think most of what the government does is broken window fallacy compared to UBI.
2 weeks ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 180 notes · source: pervocracy · .permalink
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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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isaacfhtagn reblogged this from mugasofer and added:Well, America spent 601 billion on the military last year. Lets start there
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If the public school system forces kids to clean, I will Not Approve.
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