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What are your thoughts on a Universal Basic Income?
With the incredible pace of automation and AI taking place across all sectors of our Global Economy, countries/governments/citizens need to start seriously thinking about how we can continue to survive when there are simply not enough jobs to be had. UBI is one option that countries have attempted to "beta test" with varying results. What is ~'s[sic] opinion on UBI and automation and AI "taking our jerbs"?
It's a problem that, unfortunately, I don't see a peaceful solution to. Weath and income inequality are spiraling out of control.
UBI may work as a stop-gap, but there need to be safeguards to prevent land owners from just raising rent. Otherwise it will just funnel money to people who already own property, which accomplishes the opposite of what it set out to do.
And lets be clear, AI is going to start snatching up jobs. A few new maintenance and R&D jobs will be gained, but it will be nowhere near as many and they will all be highly skilled.
Fot the most part unskilled labor will disappear and that's a problem.
The only long term solution I can see is a move away from capitalism, but good luck getting any traction on that. We can't even agree on basics like healthcare.
Edit: I'm speaking from a US perspective
I think the solution, rather than legal safeguards like rent controls, is to encourage more renters -- especially once they have some money in their pockets via a UBI -- to form renters' cooperatives and start purchasing the buildings they rent in. This isn't going to work for luxury places that make a significant profit, but those renters are probably already not worried about increased rents. Housing co-ops and community land trusts shift the power away from the rentier class and toward the working-class folks who make up the bulk of most communities. In short, it's about replacing profit-driven private institutions with community-driven, community-controlled institutions.
Interesting, that sounds like adopting socialism-lite within the current system. That's a really interesting proposal, but I can also see a lot of problems coordinating joint ownership among that many people and raising the initial funds.
It would almost require forming what's essentially very localized government to handle it
Edit: And I brought up rent as an easy to understand example, but the problems go beyond that
The difficulty really depends on the scale of the project you're talking about. Near where I live there are several trailer parks that have been bought out by their residents, and some fairly large residential buildings in the middle of one of the state's biggest cities, all of which use a cooperative style of ownership and management. If you were talking about all of Manhattan buying up their residences, or maybe even a single block, that would be too big to manage.
The "very localized government" is just the board, really; it's no different in that sense from forming any other kind of incorporated business or nonprofit, except that the Board of Directors has a much bigger stake in the outcome.
Raising the funds for purchase is the most significant problem in my mind, and there are a number of ways of handling that: working with credit unions to develop special loan programs, or working with state and local governments and whatever finance agencies exist to give residents (and workers, too; you mentioned that you're not just talking about rent, and neither am I -- this is a solution I would apply to most facets of private ownership) right of first refusal and better loan options.
AI is a hype machine, I agree. However, automation as a whole is a very real problem for society. Every sector can do more than ever before with fewer and fewer people at the helm. This results in semi-permanent unemployment for many, and UBI is one solution that really would address that problem well.
Every technogical change before has led to new jobs, and I don't think that will change with the introduction of AI.
The new problem we have is the rate of change is beyond what is economically feasible for humans to keep up with. It used to be you spent 4-10 years learning a trade or skill and that was a job for life. Now you can start college and be out of date before you even graduate. Pair that with the costs to get trained growing faster than inflation and it seems impossible for the majority of the populace to be able to get skills fast enough to stay marketable.
There's no reason to look at our prior automation and shifting jobs as a perpetual pattern. We've automated the growing of food; the extraction of raw materials; the creation of goods; the transportation of food/materials/goods; the sale of food/material/goods... We're already looking at almost everything society does. This isn't a sustainable pattern, it's a slow automation of all of labor.
People who go to college being out of date isn't the major issue here, it's the billions of people who don't go to college and can never compete with a 24/7 machine, but are required to to feed their family.
How would these billions of people get their allotted money without a worldwide wealth redistribution network?
I'm afraid I don't understand your question, or at least the point of it.
Sorry, my fault for being unclear.
I was wondering, since you said there were billions of people that needed money, how they would be getting that money without some sort of global apparatus to move wealth from where there's plenty, to where it's needed?
We have global capitalism, which means a global need for an income. If you're talking about a global apparatus to support UBI, then know that I don't really advocate for UBI, so I'm not one to clarify their goals with it. I don't believe that capitalism can solve its internal contradictions.
Ah, no worries, then. I imagine that capitalists will find a way to patch their system. They won't like it, and I'm fine with that.
We're already seeing the Internet/AI/Automation showing this is wrong or at least we're getting diminishing returns. Companies are making more with fewer employees, especially at the lower skill levels, but not exclusively. Netflix makes probably a magnitude more than Blockbuster did with a fraction of the employees, I'm pretty sure there were no surplus jobs created by Netflix coming to the scene. When burger flippers at McDonalds get replaced by robots this may create a few technician jobs but they are essentially a manager, not even close to a 1 to 1 replacement for the burger flipping positions lost.
See also: Cashiering, which is one of the biggest jobs in the first world. Where I live, Walmart has already lowered the number of manned lanes and added full-size self checkout (with a full sized conveyor). On an average day they have two cashiers (lane 7, the first non-self-checkout lane, and lane 21, the tabacco lane), and a person who handles issues with the self-checkout machines.
And that's for a physical store, not even talking about the huge boom in online ordering. Amazon may always employ hundreds or thousands of developers to work on their sales website, and maybe hundreds of engineers to work on automating the back end, but that pales in comparison to the huge number of retail jobs that they kill.
I briefly worked at bestbuy a few years ago. My primary job was to pull items off the floor and ship them to people's home. My job, and bestbuy.com, were in competition with literally every other employee in the store.
I agree with the move away from capitalism. It's gaining traction among the younger generations in the US but the older folks still fear the RED Menace.
You're very right about rent controls. UBI without those safeguards is just encouraging a new aristocracy
I think the answer isn't rent controls, the answer is to encourage the development of more affordable housing. One way to accomplish that would be via a Land Value Tax, which taxes the land no matter what is built on it, thus encouraging developers to create more housing in the same square footage, instead of wasteful (and expensive) single-family houses.
Agree with your points. I do think a UBI would send population back out into smaller cities and towns. It's cheaper and not everyone wants an urban/suburban life.
Not sure that it impacts your point directly, but I thought I'd point out that population density may flatten.
Something like a UBI will prove essential economically, governmentally, and ethically.
Just an introduction of self driving semi trucks could play havoc with our economy. Some may say, "yeah... but that will take over a decade to phase out the current fleet." So? By the time you're even one-tenth of the way there the glut of available drivers will suppress wages.
Retraining this number of people at the rate necessary... That's tough. Some may be interested, some may not see the benefit (older or less motivated). What I know is this is only one sector of the economy.
Now... Speaking from a US standpoint, I'm getting concerned this is all moot. If we want a future where a UBI is even conceivable, we need to not blow up trade.
I'm okay with a move to socialism. I'm not okay with our currency losing it's cache in world markets.
Back to UBI, if I'm a boss of a struggling employee, but I never felt right making a decision... The decision gets easier.
If I'm barely scraping by and unhappy with a menial job, maybe I quit.
How does this impact migrant labor? Farm help? How does UBI work if you're a farmer?
I want a UBI. I'm currently fairly comfortable in life. I'm no 1%er, but I'm above the wage average. There's no good reason success has to leave people behind.
We need to also discuss mental health issues and other parts of a strong social safety net. UBI is a big one, but that's not the only thing to discuss.
UBI i think is a great step forward for countries that currently use means-tested methods of welfare. Means testing really provides little benefit and a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy.
The problem in the USA is that UBI would be insufficient to cover other holes in our social safety net, namely education and medical care. I would propose a three-prong strategy to improving the USA's social safety net: Improved public education (more money for K-12 and free college), Medicare for all, and UBI via expanding Social Security to be all inclusive, instead of just the old and disabled.
I like the UBI-via-SS idea in the same vein as public-option-via-Medicare. It would require removing the cap on Social Security witholdings (and is unabashedly wealth redistribution), and as such I have little faith for it happening in the foreseeable future, but it could work.
On a separate note, you raise a good point about the unnecessary bureaucracy involved with means-testing. I feel like the only way social programs are going to go through is if they come hand-in-hand with efficiency efforts. There is a lot of waste in our current system, and we could be doing so much better.
I think it works great in theory but when you dig really into it that it might fall apart.
All of the tests that I know of are of small populations (relatively) with people in the area who don’t receive it. I feel that to achieve more accurate results, taking a small town and providing to every single person in it could be a more effective test.
I think it's definitely the way we have to proceed in the future. Automation is going to remove a lot of our current jobs, and the replacement jobs it offers will not be accessible by the majority of the population it puts out of work. We need a model that's no longer based on simply putting in hours.
Of course there's a lot of logistics to work out. Current trials are quite limited. But I think we can already start realistically implementing some changes in our social programs, such as getting rid of the need to re-qualify for basic housing help monthly, that will help transition to a larger change like universal basic income.
The article makes some huge assumptions to arrive at it's anti-UBI stance though. Most of their points are easily rebutted by a sane proposal.
Index UBI to poverty line, at a minimum. Any sane proposal does this, if not more.
This section suggests that the entire safety net gets replaced with UBI. While the majority of the programs can be (Including SSDI), anything related to medical care should not be, as medical care in the USA is insane, thus requires additional support.
This section basically states that means-tested systems work because they prevent people from "wasting" their money. The example he gives of the gambler blowing through the UBI and not being able to rely on food stamps is such a significantly insignificant problem compared to the fact that the average food stamp and housing programs don't properly support the people that need them as-is, in part because they are so hobbled by means-testing and that the average person can't re-allocate from one to the other as needed.
Ahh the "Doomsday Scenario." All I have to say to that is if the system falters to the point that UBI is untenable, we've probably got bigger problems. Transition to full communism or socialism probably required to fix that level of problem. None of our other social services were designed with a contingency plan, why should UBI?
The argument that we'd stop building roads/etc if we implemented UBI is a stretch at best. The answer is simple: UBI does not replace infrastructure spending.
To put it bluntly: Job Guarantees are a garbage-tier concept that just foster the creation of useless jobs, no matter how well-intentioned.
This makes about as much sense to me as does following a bunch of Ferengis playing Tongo. Which is to say, no sense. Evade!
So, in plain English, if everyone in the USA got a theoretical $1,000 worth of UBI per month, no pre-conditions, how exactly - in detail - would you stop basic necessities from going up by the exact amount of UBI, thus leaving everyone exactly where they were before?
In general, capitalism says that you charge whatever the market will bear for something. If that means you rent an apartment for $500 per month, so be it. $1500 per month, so be it. No moral quandries, it's just business.
The transfer of wealth section is actually the one I agree with most. UBI really only is valuable if the economy can be improved by reducing income and wealth inequality, in which case why not be more efficient about it? I tend to think expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would be better than UBI, but as long as we can agree that we'll all be better off with a more equal economy (Keynes FTW), the exact policy is just a technical argument.
It's a complete change from the current situation. We don't know its effects without testing it and its not something which can be tested on a small scale.
Effects such as a perfect safety net inspiring entrepreneurship, re-skilling and an artistic renaissance will never come about in small scale, time-limited trials. It's an all or nothing situation. Until a country fully embarks on the path of UBI we won't know the consequences, so it's hard to have an informed debate about it and very difficult to suggest implementing.
I think there are a lot of great arguments for it. Raising children and taking care of the elderly are often unpaid jobs; it would be nice to give people who do this work some compensation. A basic income would make it much easier to start a business, since your employees wouldn't have to depend on you as much. The economy could move more toward serving basic needs, as companies compete to get a piece of your UBI check.
I think the biggest problem is actually implementing it—making sure every single person gets a check, dealing with fraud, and keeping the system stable despite being run by potentially unstable governments.
Fraud isn't really a problem with a UBI, at least not significantly so. Sure, if someone is handing out national IDs willy-nilly that could be a problem, but the USA is doing pretty well overall in that matter, and other countries probably even better.
This is the bigger problem, it would need some sort of guarantee that it won't just be revoked at a moment's notice. Constitutional amendment would be nice, but very difficult.
Slightly off-topic here, but I do not understand the contention about national IDs in the United States. We already have social security cards (for those of you that don't know, it is literally a piece of fancy paper with a number and maybe your signature on it), which are incredibly insecure, whereas a government ID could protect your privacy and identity so much better.
Why do people keep equating the US to Nazi Germany when these are brought up?
I think the aversion to this policy is that the government has shown that they aren't the greatest at securing even their own employee's PII (and neither are corporations for that matter) so why would we trust them with a more invasive National ID? I mean a passport is basically already the best form of identification the US offers but it's cost prohibitive for a significant slice of the population.
I'm less scared of the loss of jobs due to automation because to me that implies production levels will stay the same, historically when new technology appears production levels rise as long as there is a consumer base to support it, and that's where my real worry is and where I think UBI is a solution to be considered. To sum it up I think UBI is good for a couple of reasons:
The real issue I think is in practical concerns:
UBI should, at a bare minimum, be set at the federal poverty level (about $12k in USA per individual). While some argue this "eliminates the incentive to produce" what it really eliminates is "incentive to sell your labor for poverty wages". It would force wages to rise overall, because nobody will work for a pittance anymore. To prevent low-income spirals and income traps (where you don't want to earn more because you'll lose benefits), set the taxation up so that it only begins taking away more once you're well above average income.
That's the beauty of UBI: There is no abuse. You give out money to everyone, and let them be autonomous and decide how to best spend it for themselves.
I think you raise a fair point but it still seems very difficult to me as you not only need to then calculate your taxes in such a way that your country's budget is financially solvent, but also so you hit that criteria without discouraging people from pursuing a higher income.
I somewhat agree but please humor me while I raise some points I've frequently heard to counter this: what if said autonomous people decide to use that money on things that are a net negative to society? Such as using it to fuel addictions or even to invest themselves in black markets such as drugs?
It might seem like a cheap question designed to undermine the UBI platform but I do think we need to have a concrete answer to this worry if UBI is ever to be pushed for in the public sphere.
I would simply argue this as such: UBI will not solve all of society's ills. Addiction treatment should be available to help those who suffer from those problems. If someone pursues criminal activity with their UBI, presumably law enforcement can deal with it the same way they deal with usual criminal activity.
And in the end, a very small number of abusers should not be the primary consideration when implementing a universal system.
There is no such thing, unless the income tax is over 100%. You could tax all income over $200,000 at 75% (no country in the world currently does this to my knowledge), and that's still an additional $0.25 per dollar that you didn't have before. Even if you're only earning a penny per dollar (at an extreme 99% taxation), that's an additional penny for you to spend that you didn't have before.
But at what point do people simply look at the graph of taxation level vs. income and decide it's not worth the effort or capital to go over a certain limit if the gains are going to be reduced by taxes? It might be 0.25$ more but wouldn't only really be worth if the effort required to obtain it is comparatively low?
At my (completely arbitrarily chosen) example of $200k income and 75% taxation, if someone decides to stop earning additional income, that's a GOOD thing.
Suppose a doctor decides they want to earn $200 an hour after taxes, and arbitrarily wants to stop working once they earn $200k. That will take them approximately 6 months. Afterwards, they can take a hiatus, and create demand for a replacement to fill their position the other 6 months. It turns 1 job into 2 jobs, while still paying high enough to warrant doing these jobs. While this earns less for the UBI than if 1 doctor worked full time for a full year, it also eliminates the cost of the UBI for an additional unemployed doctor.
While this is an extreme example, it would work this way across society. If people decide "no I've earned enough", that bolsters the job market, not hindering it.
The issue I see with that is that in higher-paid jobs it is often far more difficult to replace people wholsesale. An assembly line worker can be trained in a matter of weeks and likely doesn't need to look into the previous worker's work. Doctors take time to educate and settle down in their positions. A doctor leaving his or her position in a hospital or even a simple practice is often a big deal because the work they do is often so specific to them you can't just put any other person in charge.
It also doesn't address the fact that a big draw for corporations to increase their revenue is potential dividends for it's members/shareholders, and while unscrupulous corporate profit-mongering is a big problem it also leads to the creation of new goods and services, or to a wider availability of existing goods and services to more consumers.
You mean the rich people we're trying to take the income from? Good...corporations and those who own them don't need any more profits. They are the problem UBI is meant to help alleviate.
It really doesn't. It leads to mega-corp mergers, artificial price hikes on essential goods, and stock buybacks. There would still be plenty of invention of new goods and services even if (and perhaps especially if) we killed off all the mega-corps.
I personally think a Negative Income Tax makes more sense. I'm not the most qualified to explain it and its complexities, but the gist is this:
Agree on a minimum livable wage. If someone is making under that, compensate them to make up for it. If they're making above it, just tax them as normal, but don't compensate them.
I'm relatively optimistic for the future - it seems to me that we're stepping into a lot more of a fluid sort of world than we have been. People are staying in the same place a lot less; and I doubt that we're suddenly going to regress back to sticking in one general area (or two, if you have kids, as moving to the suburbs is popular among that demographic); it just wouldn't really make sense.
If tech hubs outprice everyone, then what's going to happen is people are going to leave them. There are thousands of other places where you can get just as much work done (albeit remotely, generally) and pay thousands less in rent a month.
While a NIT makes sense on paper, there's also the human factor. NIT looks and feels a lot like a handout, while UBI is universal, and while the upper-income earners will pay more tax than getting back in UBI, the fact that it's universal eliminates the stigma that gets associated with welfare programs.
I would also argue that NIT is means-tested (checking against current income), and thus requires more overhead to administer, while a UBI basically just requires cutting everybody a check periodically.
While that position definitely isn't irrational—at the same time, we should encourage people to earn more than what a NIT would get them.
Overall, my biggest reason to support either of them is to encourage people to take risk—which I think a NIT does better than a UBI for a few reasons.
I personally don't think any special incentives are needed. If someone decides they want to purely "live off the system", they'll be living modestly at best. Better than people currently below poverty line, but not as well off as say someone earning median income.
Exactly what I mean by incentive. You can't let it be a luxurious existence; just a sustainable and (hopefully) less stressful one than currently offered to low-income people.
You could actually, in the long term. If we could devise a way to fund it such that everyone lives as if they earned $100k today, I think society would be better as a whole.
Suppose we implement a UBI that provides a luxurious life. People no longer HAVE to work in order to survive. It opens the door for a new society, one where the respect the job confers is directly proportional to the value it provides society. If everybody is living a luxurious life, and nobody gains status because of the money they have, people will do those jobs because it becomes the new status symbol.
It will be a societal change, but eventually someone will step up as the neighborhood garbage collector, because nobody wants to live in filth. That person will be praised as a hero.
Did you hear about the Finnish UBI experiment? They canceled it because the participants did nothing with their lives.
Society as a whole would stagnate. No one will willingly deal with being a professor, tenured or not, if they can live a life of luxury. Educators in general would become less of a thing.
It's hard to say that a garbage collector would be looked upon fondly. They'd be looked upon as an oddity beyond anything else.
And a NIT/UBI that gets people off the poverty line doesn't mean that they still have to work to survive. It just means it's not a particularly lovely experience if they aren't earning funds in some way.
Aye, I am familiar with the study. They didn't cancel it, they chose not to extend it...two very different things.
In other words, they were unable to see societal effects because the trial was so small, and too short. If I was going to propose a 1st world UBI experiment, I would choose 5k people in a very large city at random (unemployed and employed alike), and give them UBI for 10 years minimum, but also tax them accordingly in line with what a UBI would need, to see the affects.
Finland also would not see the most drastic effects of a UBI, because they also have a strong social safety net compared to most other countries.
I strongly disagree there. I talk to a lot of educators and doctors. The majority of these professionals love what they do, and would continue to do so even if they didn't need to earn a living for it. In fact, in the USA, teachers basically earn barely-above-poverty wages, but people still choose to do that over something more lucrative.
Hence why it would be a social shift. People take for granted what garbage collectors do today. In a society where money has no meaning, all of a sudden people will respect the profession a lot more when somebody stepping up to do it is the only thing keeping their homes being filled with filth.
Oh I totally agree...right now even a poverty-level UBI would be a difficult thing to implement. Luxury UBI is a pipe dream for future society to contemplate.
I'd disagree, speaking as someone who has a lot of contacts in academia (Primarily STEM, Statistics and Economics). Most of my colleagues in it tend to complain that it's a bureaucratic hell, and that overall they wish they'd have done something else. It could be a problem primarily among non-liberal arts professors, but I have no way of observing that, really. Overall, universities over time have shifted a lot from what they used to be. (See: MIT, which went from paradise on Earth with "Think Different" more or less as their motto, to the university that opted to persecute Swartz because why not?)
And it's a bit misleading, I'd say, to imply that teachers generally choose to do it over something else. From the cases I see, one of three things happen:
A: They didn't know that they'd be paid so poorly, but only have the degree in education so that's what they're doing because they're left without options.
or
B: They're working at a rich, primarily white, school that pays quite nicely to maintain as great of staff as possible.
or
C: They're very much at-capacity while teaching. Teaching isn't something that - on average - requires a highly skilled worker, and in general doesn't have a huge barrier to entry.
Again, this is all anectodal, but I feel you're overestimating how much teachers in general care vs. just being without alternatives.
Heroism doesn't really exist, though. Very few people worship anyone because of their occupation. Even during WWII, for example, there were still plenty of people who thought soldiers weren't of need to be praised. I think that people won't fundamentally change their opinion on things, especially not that.
Mhm. It's something to keep in mind, definitely; I just don't think it's something we should aim to implement first or at all plausible to implement in the first fifty or so years of a UBI.
The issue I can potentially see with this is the same issue we have now. Minimum livable wage doesn't change as fast as the economy does. Admittedly, I assume this from how the actual minimum wage has stagnated, but I can see the research used being the same here.
How can we guarantee that the minimum livable wage is actually the minimum cost of living for a person's area?
Rural towns have extra cost to live than one would generally expect, as they have to drive further to seek work. So even if rents are low, you'd have to factor in the average commute to a decent paying job.
What type of job does minimum livable wage assume?
How is minimum livable wage calculated?
I'm seriously interested in this topic, but I don't quite understand what's expected.
You can't really do that. What will happen is that people who need to will move to lower-costing areas, those areas will rise in cost over time, and the higher-cost areas will drop in cost due to less demand. In the end, it will average out.
Minimum livable wage (for USA) is currently calculated as the federal poverty line. This link is a decent starting point: https://aspe.hhs.gov/frequently-asked-questions-related-poverty-guidelines-and-poverty
Commuting is - by and large - going to become increasingly irrelevant as more occupations go remote; and I'm fairly sure that overall rent would balance out a lot of the brunt of the cost, if not all.
I'm fairly confident vord gave a rather decent explanation for your other points.
Overall, it's a delicate issue that needs to be handled sensitively. We currently just need to experiment more on it, I'd say.
I think the commute has more of an impact than you think. Automation and remote work take a lot longer to be accepted in rural than urban areas.
I currently live in a town of about 5k people. Most people I know in this town either own their own business here and run it themselves, or they drive an hour to an hour and a half to work at a place with a decent wage and benefits.
Which means the rural level will be a lot harder to discern.
That's exactly the thing, right? If they're not wanting to do what's convienient, they can move or just keep doing what they're presently doing; no one will stop them. Nothing changes for them with an NIT except for them (possibly) getting a bit more in funds at the end of the day.
It's not a want, it's a need. There are not enough jobs in small towns to make it convenient. This is the same fallacious argument that tells people to just move to where there are more jobs.
I personally drive an hour each way to work for 13 dollars per hour. It's too expensive to move, and there's nothing closer with similar pay.
It's not a fallacious argument; if society is becoming remote-first, and people in rural communities refuse to do remote work, which can be done literally anywhere, they want to do local work. Nothing's stopping them from doing so.
https://remoteok.io/
Every job on that website (and trust me, it's far from just tech jobs) can be done from anywhere in the world. There are thousands of remote jobs you can do.
You may not want to do remote work, but the option is there. That fills the need.
I drove two hours at one point (drive to KC from upstate) for work every day. I know how rural commuting works. No, poor people can't always move, but they more than ever can get remote work.
I think you're putting more faith in the average rural person's ability to find remote jobs in fields they are trained in. It takes time and money to train yourself for something new. Most of the people who commute work in factories.
And those people can still keep working like normal, so what's the problem? A NIT/UBI doesn't change where they can work, nor does it mean their areas are necessarily going to change that much.
What it does change is quality of life.
UBI certainly has it's appeal but I don't know if we're asking it to solve the right problems. I don't see why we would use UBI to help joblessness or inequality as we have more well understood theories/methods on how to handle those. What UBI really promises is a greater standard of living. If that's what we want we should talk about UBI within that context.
But as far as joblessness and inequality go we could adjust the tax system significantly to combat inequality even with automation. Along with that I think a guaranteed income could help out with the joblessness. I just don't quite see UBI as being the wise solution to these problems when we know so little about what effects it would have.
I feel like it's a fantastic idea, and will be needed at some point, but there are some caveats.
First off, I'd like to take after The Expanse and just call it Basic. It shouldn't be a true "income" and functions similar to the food stamps system. It would be pre-budgeted to prevent abuse, but still allowing for some freedom in spending. You get x dollars for food, y dollars for housing/utilities, and z dollars for whatever else you want.
This would prevent abuse from both ends- housing providers could simply jack up the rates at the amount of a regular UBI, and people receiving regular UBI could simply abuse the cash they're given.
There would also need to be controls for affordable housing- people should be able to live, albeit not luxuriously, off of their UBI on its own. Just like the affordable housing initiatives we have today, we'd need to have some way to define how much housing can cost, within the housing budget for Basic.
I've admittedly not given UBI the deep consideration others have, but I am definitely in favor of it. I see it as a way to make sure people are taken care of until the endless march of automation and AI renders traditional scarcity obsolete. Otherwise, all we'll see is wealth concentrate into the hands of fewer and fewer people, with everyone else left to fight over the scraps.
UBI is epitome of socialism.
Is that just a statement or is that an argument for/against?
It is a statement. I am neither for or against UBC.
You must not know what either UBI or Socialism is.
I think I know but you are welcome to enlighten me.
The biggest problem with UBI, the one that has always plagued it in my view, is how are you going to pay for it?
Suppose you want to give 100 bucks to every adult (over the age of 18) in the United States (that would be "universal"). Well, there are 265.64 million adults in the US, so get ready for the $26.5 billion dollar paycheck. Suppose you wanted to increase that to the current local poverty line. Well, that'll depend on how large your family is, but for easy calculations let's just say that's $16k. Suddenly we're no longer giving a mere $26.5 billion but $4.25 trillion dollars. Where are you getting $4.25 Trillion to pay for this? You know that's more than what the US government requested to spend in 2018, right (US 2018 FY: $4.094 trillion)?
What programs are you cutting, because surely you must cut quite a bit. How are you planning on transitioning people from this current system to this new system while people in need are actively using and relying on the social programs currently in existence? Is the only reason for government going to be to pay for a UBI? Yikes.
The fact that none of these questions seemed to have come up when any of you have talked about UBI is a lot of why I oppose it. I don't think people are good at thinking about unintended consequences. If we're going to exclude people of a certain income level from collecting a UBI, then it isn't a U, is it? How are you planning on having people establish their income to exclude those who surely must be excluded?
I don't trust people to have done the dirty work to plan out for all the intricate spin-off effects that replacing our current social system with this massive, ham-fisted attempt to address unemployment or inequality. The most common response I see to these concerns is "well tax the rich," but something as serious and massive as this is going to push away a lot of our talented, educated people to other countries. It is an absolute fairy tale to believe you can give everyone $100k every year. It simply cannot be done. Do you want me to do that math to show the trillions it would cost? Because remember: $16k was a little bit more than our current national budget.
Edit: accidentally 50 billion bucks.
The UK's move to Universal Credit (which is not actually universal) caused a bunch of problems because people's first payments were delayed and they could not pay their rent or buy food.
I'm also not convinced that a UBI could adequately take over disability benefits. SSI is paltry as it is, so an increase to bring it up to the poverty line is better than nothing, but disabled folks often have greater expenses compared to abled people-- accessible housing, diet restrictions, supplies and equipment not covered by insurance, etc. Assuming that everyone has the same monetary needs (or that you can split it up into vouchers based on categories, like I saw someone suggest) seems dangerous.
As an Anarchist, I'm in favor of eliminating the concept of money altogether, which UBI does not.
However, it's a helpful idea for a more equal development of society while money still exists.
In my country, there is a program that is not UBI, but offers basic income to poor parents of children, under some conditions (the children have to be in school, the debit card they give can be used for almost anything, but there are a few exceptions which I think are basically alcohol and tobacco, and a few other rules). Since this programs' inception, we had a sharp increase in the number of children who can read and write, our country was taken out of the UN's "Map of Hunger", and lots of people rose above the poverty line.
Many of the beneficiaries of that program are now voluntarily giving up on using it, as the time they did use it helped them enough that they could get better jobs (or a job at all), their children graduated, etc.
This program is far from ideal, but its benefits are noticeable.