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?
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~*~.
Wow, if anything could convince me to be against UBI, it’s this.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400
billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government
spending.“
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
Okay, I think you’re misunderstanding this very badly.
Over half of the cuts you’re suggesting come from HHS (which is mostly Medicaid and Medicare) and Social Security. So you’re really talking about huge cuts to programs for the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
No, I’m talking about huge cuts to programs that often fail to help the elderly, the poor, and the disabled. HHS&SS is a massive money sink and if one doesn’t want to increase taxes for the sake of a demonstration (which I almost succeeded at), one has to cut from where the money is.
In the case of Social Security (which is not a Ponzi Scheme), you’re basically talking about a 1-to-1 replacement - cut out $10,000 per person, and then give everyone a $10,000 basic income. So all else held equal, there’s nothing there to complain about, right?
Except all else isn’t being held equal. Social Security is received by the elderly and by disabled people (not exclusive categories, of course) - groups that have higher-than-average medical costs. But you’re also making huge cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, meaning that many folks will have to start spending much more of their income on medical care. The net effect is that they’ll be much poorer.
My proposed cuts would increase the incomes of every SS recipient who’s getting less than $10k a year, while reducing the highest incomes. SS has a surprising degree of “not looting citizens to pay massive pensions to rich people” compared to the system in Finland, so there isn’t that much of free-lunchiness there but when it comes to tax money I’m totally going to reallocate it to poor people first.
You do say “The Singapore model could treat the entire population for around 400 billion, of which something like 200 billion would be government spending.“
That was actually my mistake. It would be $400B in government spending and around $1T in total spending; I had somehow misremembered the “public” numbers as “total” numbers and kept the ratio of public:total constant. Nonetheless, it’s way cheaper than the current system in the US.
The Singapore model is cheaper than the US model for a few reasons. First, because of the strong price controls the Singapore government imposes on the market. We can import that to the US, and it’s a good idea - but I get the sense that most libertarians and anarchists would oppose that idea.
I have no idea why libertarians would oppose an idea that would cut government costs while simultaneously reducing the distortionate effects of its involvement. Most libertarians I know agree that the Singapore system is the best state healthcare system in the world, and some have claimed that the same efficiency could be done with a totally private system as well. A hundred years ago a worker could get healthcare for an entire year at the equivalent of something like $150 in today’s prices before the government stepped in to stop such abominations, and a genuinely competitive market where the supply of doctors isn’t artifically constrained but actually matches demand would make things a lot cheaper.
Second, it’s much cheaper in Singapore because only 9% of Singapore’s population is over age 64, compared to 15% of the US population, according to the CIA World Factbook. Fewer old people to treat equals cheaper, but there’s no way to transfer that to the US system. (Nor is there any way to maintain that in Singapore - Singapore’s population is aging, and they won’t be able to sustain their current low levels of health spending).
The US is also having healthcare costs out of control, and SS costs out of control as well. That’s one reason why I want to privatize-as-in-privacy and deregulate healthcare; to make it both possible and profitable to use all genuine cost-cutting innovations people come up with, so they don’t need to resort to harmful forms of cost-cutting instead.
Third, the Singapore system relies on mandatory health savings accounts, in which (iirc) people are required to put 20% of their income into special accounts that can only be accessed to pay for medical care for themselves or their family members. It works for most people because most people are pretty healthy for most of their lives, so that by the time they get old, or suffer a catastrophic health problem, they have a lot of accrued health savings that they can draw on.
But how do you switch this over to the US? Imagine that Ed was a mover for 45 years, but recently retired - his back can’t take that kind of labor anymore. In fact, he’s going to need a series of back and knee surgeries to be able to remain mobile and not in constant agony. Ed did not spend that whole 45 years putting 20% of his income aside for medical expenses in his old age.
Now we’ve yanked Medicare out from under him, and replaced it with the Singapore system, which assumes people have large savings that can only be used on medical care. How’s Ed going to manage?
Multiply Ed’s problem times hundreds of thousands of people.
US surgeries are obscenely expensive. The system allows everyone to pass their costs to everyone else, which they promptly do. Furthermore, Singapore has a public catastrophic insurance precisely for people like Ed who have large bills they can’t pay. The big difference is in making people pay for their healthcare so they will ration their usage vs. making everyone else pay for everyone’s healthcare without even price controls intervening (downwards, that is; there are plenty of government interventions making healthcare artificially expensive). Western Europe is using “make everyone pay for everyone, but at least try to keep prices in check” and it’s better, but why settle for better when one could have the best?
And regardless, even though my calculations were incorrect, the UBI phaseout (or, in other words, income tax hike for honesty) could be increased to compensate for that. Doubling it so that the average american gets “only” $7000 more a year would provide enough money to give Singaporean healthcare to every single Ed.
Happily, there are much, much better ideas about how to pay for a Universal Basic Income. (I don’t agree with the flat tax idea, but the rest seems like a reasonable approach.)
While the link has merits, some parts of it are ridiculous. Payroll taxes are the same as income taxes, they are just hidden which is disingenuous and terrible; thus the actual income tax wouldn’t be 17% but instead 30%. Doesn’t matter that much though, as I’d totally do the same flattening of income taxes, just making them transparent instead of hiding a part in payroll taxes (seriously, this is something I will never understand of the non-hard left; why do people believe “employer pays x% of your wages” is not away from your wages? At least marxists understand it through the concept of surplus value.); and the UBI phaseout would be effectively a tax increase, I just called it by a different name to demonstrate that every taxpayer would be getting more money than they currently do.
By adding a 10% VAT one cuts everyone’s purchasing power by 10%, which is the equivalent of taking away 10% of their income. It’s not that hard. Thus the total tax is at ~40% and people are effectively getting only $900 a month’s worth because everything will be more expensive. No way around it. Still better than Finland or current US though.
(Finland is ridiculous and evil. We pay 24% VAT on most things meaning that in the US I’m like “omfg how is everything so cheap here” (except fucking healthcare, but I’ve got a nice insurance trick that gets me free-as-in-no-copays healthcare in the US for only $60 a year); then we have a 25% effective payroll tax for pensions which one is technically not allowed to opt out of (but I know a way to do it anyway because fuck that, I’m not going to get anything out of it so why should I subsidize some conservative baby boomer asshole’s tax evasion sangria in Portugal (if you’re living large on my taxes at least pay your own fucking share)), and then we have regular income tax which goes up to 50% when counting national and municipal taxes; if I made $100k a year in Finland I’d pay effectively $65k in various taxes (if I didn’t evade them, obviously; with a couple of legal tricks I could cut it down to $45k and that would make me an evil deadbeat bourgie who’s avoiding their responsibility, and I’m a person who finds “Work harder, millions of people on welfare depend on you!” sincerely inspirational).
Carbon taxes are neat, and I’d totally implement a big revenue-neutral carbon tax in my model to reduce other taxes (ideally replacing income taxes with something like the FairTax, although that would require adjusting the UBI upwards to compensate for the tax). Financial transaction taxes I don’t know about, as some people I trust to have a clue say they are terrible and others say they are good, so I’ll default to “no”.
So if I were to revise my model, it would feature a universal tax equal to something around 30% with no hidden components, correction for the healthcare miscalculation, and a slight adjustment to the SS cuts so people would have less cause to whine (perhaps making it so that everyone’s SS payments are cut by $8k so all recipients would gain $2k a year or more) combined with abolition of the mandatory pension system.
P.S. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It’s also the most effective anti-poverty program in US history. But yeah, we should totally throw it away and replace it with a program that’s never actually been tried on any significant scale. No way that could go wrong.
Social security is a ponzi scheme in the sense that it’s a clever way of early adopters to loot latecomers. Don’t get me wrong, I think Bitcoin is totally a ponzi scheme in some ways too, yet I like Bitcoin.
Objectively, the amount current pensioners have paid to SS is way less than they are getting out of it, when compared to what current young people would end up paying and receiving. There’s no way around it. Finland has a similar system and I’m very familiar with how it works and it’s totally a Ponzi scheme that enrichens baby boomers at the cost of my generation. (The system in Finland is a lot worse in that aspect, but the basic nature of PAYG schemes is the same.) When the argument for “it’s not a ponzi” relies on “Private sector Ponzi schemes are also vulnerable to collapse because they cannot compel new entrants, whereas participation in the Social Security program is a condition for joining the U.S. labor force.” I think it’s pretty fair to say that it has very significant ponzi-like characteristics. Or alternatively I could say that it’s just a tool old people use to loot young people. As far as such tools go, it’s amazingly non-terrible as it doesn’t pay rich people obscene pensions (Microsoft’s Elop will be entitled to way more finnish pension moneys from his short tenure at Nokia than a poor person who’s worked their entire life could ever get), but it’s still an unsustainable system whose taxes have been increased massively over time to keep up with the promises.
Also, I find it kind of funny that you say “we’ve been giving a certain amount of money to some people, which has reduced poverty, but we shouldn’t take the risky step of giving a certain amount of money to all people because who knows what would happen”
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!”
Don’t get me wrong - I favor UBI. But I think it should be phased in gradually, so if it fails we can back out; and I don’t think programs that have been incredibly helpful to millions of low-income people, me included, should be thrown away lightly.
I’ve lived several years on “programs that have been incredibly helpful to low-income people” and I’d throw them away very lightly if I got the chance to implement UBI instead.
Once when I had to deposit cash to my bank account while being on the equivalent of TANF, I didn’t do it directly because they would’ve reduced my welfare as it would’ve been “income” (they scrutinize bank statements to see how much people “deserve”) but I instead bought some expensive prescription drugs I didn’t need and told them to refund those to my bank account.
And then when I hit my copayment cap on prescription drugs earlier than I would otherwise have I received that money back a second time later that year.
And in theory one could even sell the drugs to make one’s money back a third time, but I didn’t do that.
Such programs are mostly harmful, they result in utterly perverted and distorted incentives that lead to such ridiculous tricks being the best option, and they waste huge amounts of tax money and create massive incentive traps that ensure people can’t improve their situation. Money is the unit of caring; if you care about people, give them money so they can afford what they need and that’s it, most of everything else is harmful. (bednets are an outlier adn should not be counted)
oldmancopper reblogged this from pervocracy
dplepage reblogged this from barrydeutsch
uncannyvalleyforge reblogged this from pervocracy
almostcoralchaos reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe
cats-22 liked this
starrcat reblogged this from pervocracy
turtles-allthewaydown reblogged this from pervocracy
letthechampagnesplash liked this
sleepingsitare reblogged this from absinthecocktail
fairandfatalasfair reblogged this from barren-and-trivial-words
not-a-lizard liked this
tentativelyassembled liked this
an-itch-in-my-teeth liked this
socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from barrydeutsch and added:
barrydeutsch reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
vulpineangel liked this
pratfins liked this
lalaithion reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:
wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from pervocracy and added:
shadowonthewaves liked this
ianthe16 reblogged this from lesbian-leaf
tenderpervs liked this
phenylalaniiine liked this
quickienewyork liked this
absinthecocktail reblogged this from pervocracy
collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
ilzolende liked this
here-or-in-a-jaeger liked this
khalimswill liked this
tapiopeltonen liked this
speakertoyesterday liked this
isaacfhtagn reblogged this from mugasofer and added:
spiralingintocontrol liked this
mugasofer reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
millievfence liked this
parentheticalreference reblogged this from ozymandias271
nonternary liked this
whitemarbleblock liked this
nextworldover liked this
metagorgon liked this
vaguely-none liked this
pervocracy posted this