Basic income

No, I get it, you put words in my mouth so you can have someone dumber than you to argue with - not everybody has such an easy time self-actualizing

― El Tomboto, Saturday, March 19, 2016 5:51 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

B-)

my genuine confusion here is that I am postulating that UBI probably needs to be part of a combo package that includes a certain amount of WPA type stimulus jobs and this is being taken as me saying that no we need to guarantee 100% employment because shitty jobs are what make people real, or some other indefensible nonsense. So I'm left to make the assumption that you've decided to characterize my position in the stupidest way possible because what's the fun in arguing with someone who agrees with you?

lol i agree with you 100%.

the only think i don't agree with you is that we are arguing.

so what did you mean by "literally nothing to do all day"?

I was trying to say there are some people, quite possibly a significant percentage of people, maybe even whole communities (like the former company towns being gutted by globalization, as in the article referenced) that aren't just going to suddenly be healthy happy places if UBI gets implemented. To some extent demand created by UBI cash will revitalize some things here and there, for sure, but I don't think it's helpful to assume that there are just natural entrepreneurs or undiscovered showbiz talents lying all over the country just wishing they had more time to work on their dreams instead of making stuff at the plant. Again, SOME people leave the workforce in UBI experiments; certainly not all, so why would we assume it's okay that in those places where almost all of the jobs are disappearing, UBI is a panacea?

I don't think it's helpful to assume that there are just natural entrepreneurs or undiscovered showbiz talents lying all over the country just wishing they had more time to work on their dreams instead of making stuff at the plant

see i strongly disagree here. i feel like this approach drastically underestimates the creative value of millions of people. for one, this is the whole reason we have the personal computer revolution in the first place. people dropped out of the standard workforce to focus on a passion project, playing with computers, which had very little practical application at the time. now they are running the world.

where by standard workforce you mean undergrad

also it's important to remember that Trump will lose

what will you give me on this?

I think probably as much as there are people who measure their happiness and worth by whether they're traditionally "gainfully" employed, there are people whose jobs are killing them who would happily stop doing them in order to raise children, look out the window, get enough sleep not to be sick all the time. And probably a lot of the people in the former category are men, because patriarchy is bad for everyone. And likewise a lot of the people in the second category might be women.

If you want to have a job so badly for your self-definition and you live in a place with no jobs, at least with UBI you won't starve to death or become homeless while deciding to either re-envision your self-worth or move.

Imagine having enough time to post in threads like this all day

It is glorious.

Although I worked a few unpaid hours this morning unfortunately, because my employer squeezes extra productivity out of me without compensation as a condition of my employment.

there are people whose jobs are killing them who would happily stop doing them in order to raise children, look out the window, get enough sleep not to be sick all the time. And probably a lot of the people in the former category are men, because patriarchy is bad for everyone. And likewise a lot of the people in the second category might be women.

― If authoritarianism is Romania's ironing board, then (in orbit), Saturday, March 19, 2016 7:07 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a really good point. domestic work has long been defined by capitalist patriarchy as not "real work" for it does not produce surplus value/capital. some socialist feminists argue the division of labor actually began with child-breeding, introducing concepts of property (child and wife being property of the husband) which are now repellent to us but have survived as law for hundreds of years and is still practiced to this day.

as traditional gender roles are challenged and society as a whole grows less patriarchal we are going to have to completely redefine work in the future, UBI or no.

Yes. The idea that "sitting at home" and "having nothing to do" are at all synonymous has got to be a function of moving all work outside the home, including devaluing childcare and domestic work and also the fact that agriculture and manufacturing are p much only done on an industrial scale in our time. For people with children, farmers/gardeners, home owners with significant upkeep responsibilities, and people who make or do things by hand, there's no idleness associated with being home.

Tbh I feel like Americans, with our mostly invented history of pioneering and our glorification of frontier self-sufficiency and blah blah whatever, should be even easier to sell on the idea of going back to making and doing as valuable and admirable!

One of the things I find most attractive about UBI is that guaranteeing some basic life needs would give ppl the time to spend caring for each other and being in community. Which is also work that capitalism erases, because it requires you to believe that caring is something you should buy.

One of the things I find most attractive about UBI is that guaranteeing some basic life needs would give ppl the time to spend caring for each other and being in community.

Ugh. I'll be at the office.

Caring for my demented dad (24/7 because he tends to get lost taking a walk, or shit himself, or both) pays EUR 123 a month. And it's the nursing care insurance that pays; you don't get unemployment benefits from the state if you don't prove you're looking for paid work. So I have a job interview for a part-time job next Friday, the same day my dad gets released from the hospital because he also has diabetes and is getting a toe removed on Wednesday.

Putting my dad in a nursing home otoh would require one signature and zero future investments, because I live in a cushy welfare state. I don't know, I'd rather have the UBI.

strangely basic income might happen as a result of us living longer and longer lives. when most people died by 30 there maybe wasn't enough time to wise up to "success" and "innovation" mostly coming from inherited privilege. but if you live long enough you see the game of musical chairs better for what it is? thus leaving you more susceptible to the logic of absolute egalitarianism? although i guess the evidence of elderly americans so often voting 'republican' kinda dispels the basis of that hope

hang on I just need to make sure EUR 123 a month wasn't a typo. What in the hell.

Mainly robots xp

"Personen mit erheblich eingeschränkter Alltagskompetenz – das sind vor allem an Demenz erkrankte Menschen – erhalten in der sogenannten Pflegestufe 0 Pflegegeld... Das Pflegegeld beträgt 123 Euro im Monat."

"People with significantly limited everyday skills - especially those suffering from dementia - are rated 'care level 0' and receive a care allowance... The allowance is 123 euros a month."

xpost

christ

i'm on some sort of UBI, i get paid 1000$ (CAD) to work on my own film projects 20 hours a week, I'm assigned a mentor who checks on that (learning a lot from that mentor). Plus it gives me time to fill in other hours with more lucrative jobs (sound recording on advertising shoots, directing some corporate videos). Since I got that program a few months ago, it gives me a base to invest in recording material and I can take the time to build a proper portfolio and network that now allows me better jobs, I'll probably even make the provincial union! Honestly, if one day I kinda make it it will be thanks to that little modest program, the idea that something like an UBI will automatically make people lazy seems a bit odd from this (lucky) perspective. Maybe i'm way off base, i don't know.

i would definitely just sit around at home and read

I had about two years off that I funded with severance/savings and some freelance stuff, and I used it to sleep, read, cook, garden, talk to people, and get deep into volunteer work with 3 different organizations. After 15 years of going full corporate and struggling to get by while ALSO never having enough personal time, it was a beautiful revelation to just be in control of my day. Also when you have TIME, you can do things on a lot less MONEY ime--my life was totally cheap except for NYC rents.

Overall it was way healthier and more humane than any other period in my life. I had perspective, I had peace, and except for financial emergencies near the end, I had a blissful time. Highly recommend! UBI! UBI! UBI!

discussion itt is more on a utopian wavelength but good longish read on how much a ubi may cost

http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2014/01/13/could-we-afford-a-universal-basic-income/

seems like the most thorough example of these i've come across so far. he calculates that at current levels of tax revenue the US could afford a UBI of just under $4.5k. wouldn't give you 'liberation from coercive capitalism' as lagoon put it upthread but would help the shit out of the working poor and low-income families, and he makes it sound like a good chunk of the middle class wouldn't be too much worse off, too

To summarize, our proposed funding for the UBI comes from these three sources:

Eliminating most existing means-tested welfare programs—Temporary Aid to Needy Families, SNAP (food stamps), the Earned Income Tax Credit everything else other than Medicare and CHIP would raise about $500 billion per year.

Eliminating middle-class tax expenditures and the personal exemption would add another $635 billion in funding

Giving Social Security beneficiaries of all ages the choice between the benefits to which they are presently entitled, or the UBI, but not both, would add about $18 billion in funding and reduce the number of UBI claimants by about 57 million.

Those three sources of funding would be sufficient to provide a UBI grant of about $4,452 per person, or 17,800 for a family of four, which is about 75 percent of the official poverty income for such a family. Who would win, and who would lose from this proposal?

The number of families and individuals who fell below today’s official poverty guidelines would decrease greatly. Healthcare programs for low-income families would be unaffected.

Replacing today’s jumble of means-tested programs with a UBI would sharply decrease marginal effective tax rates for poor and near-poor families, thereby providing enhanced work incentives. The ranks of the working poor would fall effectively to zero.

Most middle-class households would receive more from the UBI than they lose in tax benefits. No Social Security beneficiaries would suffer a loss.

Those currently receiving the smallest Social Security benefits would be able to increase their incomes by opting for the UBI.

Financing the UBI in this way would not require raising anyone’s marginal tax rates. Some middle- and upper-income households that currently have large itemized deductions could experience an increase in their average tax rates.

Let me emphasize that this is not a research paper. The numbers in this post come from official sources wherever possible, but I have not crosschecked them thoroughly for internal consistency, and in some cases, I have filled in the gaps with back-of-the-envelope estimates. Furthermore, all of the tax and expenditure estimates are static, that is, they assume no changes in earned income as a result of introducing a UBI.

the connection between UBI and arresting climate-threatening industrialism seems way too obvious for so many to ignore, no? shouldn't that always be one of the primary points, obviating whether or not "we" can "afford" it?

i don't follow

pay ppl to stay home - fewer cars on the road?

back of the envelope calculations of the number we could get to for "free" by eliminating means-tested programs and middle-class tax expenditures are useful thought experiments I guess but are already conceding pretty much the entire game to the current conventional wisdom. US GDP is like $18 trillion, we have the collective national cashflow to afford way more than $1 trillion in basic income.

Yeah, figuring out how much we could "afford" by eliminating all current "entitlements" misses the point.

what's the point?

I think the point is that in order to keep the ball rolling as jobs disappear, we will need massive wealth redistribution, not just a re-jiggering of the current allocations.

Yes but $4450 per person is nothing to sneeze at and we could do that right now by repurposing existing bureaucratic infrastructure

xp- oh, the robots thing again. zzz

can't find it now but i read some tax guy recently saying the gains from cutting red tape aren't that big, that if you removed them and put the money back into transfers it would add something like 50$ per person per year. he was also saying income testing just requires writing a few lines of code.

$4450 isn't nothing, but it's not an "income." I mean, I'm pretty out-of-touch out here in the Bay Area, but I don't think $4450 goes very far anywhere in this country.

I guess I'm fine with re-jiggering, if that makes sense (and it sounds like it does), but I wouldn't call it a UBI.

HHS poverty line in 2015 was $11,770 for a single person and each additional household member adds $4,160

the gains from cutting red tape are going to come out to $0 unless you wanted to fire a shitload of government workers as part of the plan and pretend that would actually increase effectiveness, which it wouldn't, and seems like missing the point entirely

Also most of that money comes from politically impossible stuff like ending the mortgage tax deduction and closing other middle-to-upper-middle class tax loopholes

imo that's one of the tensions in all anti-poverty/welfare programs. like, we already raise way more than enough tax $$$ to end poverty, but so much of it is holed up in exemptions & benefits needed to sweeten the deal for the middle class to get em on board in the first place. and even libs in the middle class only care so much about the poor when it comes down to it. like even nordic countries have like 5-8% child poverty rates and govt spending is like 50% of gdp

The Tax Justice Network estimates the global elite are sitting on $21–32tn of untaxed assets. Clearly, only a portion of that is owed to the US or any other nation in taxes – the highest tax bracket in the US is 39.6% of income. But consider that a small universal income of $2,000 a year to every adult in the US – enough to keep some people from missing a mortgage payment or skimping on food or medicine – would cost only around $563bn each year.

A larger income, to ensure that no American fell into absolute abject poverty – say, $12,000 a year – would cost around $3.6tn. That is a big number, but one that once again seems far more reasonable when considered through the lens of the Panama Papers and the scandal of global tax evasion. Because the truth is that we have all been robbed, systematically, by the world’s wealthiest people, for decades. They have used those stolen dollars to build yet more wealth for themselves, and all the while we have been arguing with ourselves over what to do with the leftover pennies.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/07/panama-papers-taxes-universal-basic-income-public-services

if we raised taxes, though, grover norquist might have to get a real job. we can't have that; surely, the entire western project would collapse

he could become a vape spokesman

ratchet income

Any opinions on this book?
http://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the-future

silby mentioned it upthread iirc

It's good. Hand-waves intersectional politics as you might expect but in a way that acknowledges they know that's what they're doing and feel bad about it. It's polemical in a good way.

Just finished this, really liked it, and would strongly encourage anyone who hasn't to give it a read. Articulated a lot of the problems I felt with Occupy and contemporary leftism in general without ever condemning or really even diminishing them. Ditto electoral politics, even. I was already on board with the UBI, but it definitely convinced me that simply yearning for a return to and expansion of social democracy just isn't going to cut it. Casual googling hasn't produced much discussion; I'd be very interested to read some strong critiques.