Basic income

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.

Assorted links here, clicked a couple, one combining withering slams on their style with a lot of aca-Marxist lingo.

https://www.urbanomic.com/rocket-men-left-right-ordinary/

http://futurism.com/images/universal-basic-income-answer-automation/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/business/economy/universal-basic-income-poverty.html

i claim no expertise on any of these things, although i am interested in UBI and i don't think it's an idiotic idea. but this seems like a shitty, misleading article:

Its first hurdle is arithmetic. As Robert Greenstein of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, a check of $10,000 to each of 300 million Americans would cost more than $3 trillion a year.

well, yeah, but what about a check to 210 million americans a year ($2 trillion)? that's the # of americans above the age of 18. although giving $10,000 to an infant could lead to interesting results. apropos of nothing, last night I enjoyed a DIPA beer, one of the heaviest DIPA's in New York state, i believe.

Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes. Cut it by half to $5,000? That wouldn’t even clear the poverty line. And it would still cost as much as the entire federal budget except for Social Security, Medicare, defense and interest payments.

http://i.imgur.com/L7MBjsB.jpg

the FY13 budget was about 3.5 billion. social security (808 billion), medicare (492 billion), defense (625 billion), and interest payments (221 billion) add up to $2.1 BILLION!!!! that's almost 2/3 of the budget! so gtfo with this sentence that says that cutting a $5000 check to everyone (and remember, that's 300 million everyones, not just people of working age) "would still cost as much as the entire federal budget"...except for the 2/3 of the budget you chose not to include. wtf at that. honestly that's the most of the reason i'm even making this drunken post. fuck that, and fuck whoever failed to edit this at NYT. wtf

Thinkers on the right solve the how-to-pay-for-it problem simply by defunding everything else the government provides, programs as varied as food stamps and Social Security. That, Mr. Greenstein observes, would actually increase poverty. It would redistribute wealth upward, taking money targeted to the poor and sharing it with everybody, including you and me.

As Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and onetime top economic adviser to President Obama, told me, paying a $5,000 universal basic income to the 250 million nonpoor Americans would cost about $1.3 trillion a year. “It would be hard to finance that in a way that wouldn’t burden the programs that help the poor,” he said.

cool, it's larry fucking summers. so now the choice is framed between defunding everything else (food stamps and SS), or nearly doubling taxes. (earlier in the article the only mention of the possibility of raising taxes is framed as: "Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes."

Work, as Lawrence Katz of Harvard once pointed out, is not just what people do for a living. It is a source of status. It organizes people’s lives. It offers an opportunity for progress. None of this can be replaced by a check.

this probably isn't worth mentioning but i really hate all of this, this line of thinking. the word "worthless" to describe people is emblematic. fuck people who think this way.

How about subsidized employment? The government could subsidize jobs as varied as school repairs and fixing potholes. “This would provide employment while doing things that improve productivity and improve people’s lives,” Mr. Greenstein said.

Perhaps we could expand the earned-income tax credit, the country’s most successful antipoverty tool, which increases the earnings of low-income workers. Or take the idea pushed for years by Edmund Phelps from Columbia University: Instead of providing a subsidy to workers that phases out as their income rises, why not subsidize workers’ wages instead?

these aren't terrible ideas, but aren't they subject to the same unbreachable obstacle mentioned earlier in the article, that it would raise taxes?

anyway, as always, please school me, i don't know much about all this. but if NYT is going to trash UBI every few weeks, they should bring on someone who can make good points.

more drunk Karl Malone in this bitch imo

Paul Campos fisked this one too: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/05/bad-arguments-against-a-universal-basic-income

He calls them out for the same issue re: counting the eligible population, also blows up the nonsense about the labor force and how many people are working (hint, it is not eight out of ten people).

The NYT apparently felt the need for this piece because of UBI ideas percolating in the tech sector, which IMHO is basically the snake eating its tail of dumb economic discourse in this country

nytimes editorial pages increasingly off the rails, seemingly no basic standards of competence required for its contributors

i guess some of the numbers in that nyt piece are misleading. UBI skeptics gotta step up their game. this guy, an ecumenically polite canadian tax/welfare economist, is currently my favourite https://twitter.com/kevinmilligan. imo an actually good robust welfare state is better than UBI, but question is if that's politically realistic/sustainable

re: the nyt article, while it seems bad, it's not trivial to calculate and impossible to do in short space. there's always something you can leave out to make it seem cheaper/more expensive. i expect future pieces to be met with endless tedious rebuttals over whether prime age labor force participation is 81% of 76% and such, but that isn't really a zinger either way.

i posted some longform good faith/show-your-work efforts to calculate cost of a basic income upthread fwiw

One trouble with the actually good robust welfare state is it is means-tested, and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody. I probably posted this point already but whatever.

Drunk KM OTM

and the 1/3 or so of the US electorate that are white supremacists will never support it. UBI is in part a Trojan horse to help the most marginalized by helping everybody.

yup

"this probably isn't worth mentioning but i really hate all of this, this line of thinking. the word "worthless" to describe people is emblematic. fuck people who think this way."

ok, yeah, but capitalism inherently conditions people to think this way! ubi is not simply an economic equation, but requires a radical reshaping of the structure and values of western society. so we'd better get started!

hearteningly even within capitalism it is kind of off-putting when salaried professionals talk about about the soul food of Work as if everyone in a call center or a mcd's rejoices each day to have escaped the brutalizing corruptions of leisure, and ime even those born to the hu$tle can tell

a few weeks ago in chipotle the team leader made all the frontline staff do a cheer. it was terrible for everyone in the building