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

tbf just guessing about that salaried professional thing because for all i know nyt economic op-eds are now tenuous piecework, so maybe they're down here building character with the rest of us

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

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 10:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― de l'asshole (flopson), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 11:05 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

should add: the same white supremacists are also libertarianish/don't want to pay 15% more taxes. between a racist rock and a libertarian hard place

my grandparents, who lived most of their prime age working lives in raw dog pre-welfare capitalism, talk about work that way. but i think division of labor-driven alienation has probably increased (or polarized) since then. my parents don't like work

i believe in the 'work is good for the soul' thing to some degree, i think everyone does tbh. but i don't think that precludes sympathy for people working shitty jobs or even support for UBI. also just practically if ur trying to convince ppl of this policy that will be paid for by raise income taxes on those who do work it's probably not a good idea to be like 'and then we'll lift false consciousness and everyone will stop working!', strategically

A robust welfare system should always be preferable given the choice. UBI runs the risk of the state abrogating any responsibility to make society better. Yes, we could build cheap, good quality subsidised social housing but here is $10k now run along and find a private landlord to take half of it. Yes, we could implement universal health care free at the point of delivery but here is $10k and we'll let you decide whether to spend it on food or medicine. We may have created an environment where rewarding paid employment is a pipe dream for millions but at least we're giving them enough money to avoid dying of 19th century diseases, etc. If there is no political alternative then you can take what you get but it should be resisted where welfare systems exist, as should most ideas tech bros and the Swiss agree upon.

Leaving aside self-worth through work, which is a real thing irrespective of whether people think it should be conditioned out, one of the key issues would inevitably be social mobility. Work is a hugely flawed system for solving intergenerational poverty but it can help. Unless social change goes radically beyond the simple provison of basic necessities as a right, there would be a huge risk of entrenching social divisions even further.

Youse guyses takes on this?:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income

I view UBI as a both/and plank in the post-neoliberal platform. Universal health care and the systematic redress of institutional racism are also important things to accomplish. UBI in the form of cancelling the existing US safety net and cutting everyone a check is not the point (or isn't my point, and isn't e.g. S+W's point in Inventing the Future which for better or worse is my manifesto on this topic). I view UBI as an important policy effort because mandatory participation in the market for labor is a shitty kind of freedom, and in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

I think the ycombinator project has a good chance of setting the political momentum behind UBI back by a decade when it blows up.

That might get the tech bubble crowd to move on to more useful and practical efforts like the robust welfare system discussed above, but it also might make them flounce off and resume the usual neo-feudalist bullshit

in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 1:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what?

i don't really get the experiment. what do you expect to learn from it? giving people money for a few months or even years, see if they quit their jobs, we've done that and not too much happens. but that's not really what a ubi is. it's the permanent and universal parts of it that make it interesting.

in developed countries the going rate for labor is approaching zero.

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 1:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what?

― de l'asshole (flopson), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 10:58 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like, capital is going to stop having a use for people who are new to the world of work and don't happen to have whatever the skill du jour is. Uber has a billion-dollar valuation because speculators think they can avoid getting regulated into oblivion long enough for self-driving cars to drive their labor costs down. Every fancy new factory being built in the US is heavily automated. Being "able and willing to work", to use a familiar canard, is increasingly less likely to be enough to ensure a person an autonomous, stable, and healthy life. (It never was sufficient, but it's what people seem to be talking about when they talk about the postwar period.)

It is weird that you had to explain that

my progress toward death is not going fast enough to outlast my economic independence.

Mass unemployment may be the inevitable result of market economics but it's not, in itself, inevitable. The infrastructure of the U.S. is crumbling around your ears but there is no political will to invest in large-scale public works that could bring millions into employment with the right training. An ageing population is going to require millions of carers and nurses, whether it is profitable or not. At the moment, most countries seem to be assuming that an endless supply of migrant labour will fill that gap but there is no reason why, with proper investment in education and decent rates of compensation, domestic workers couldn't meet those needs. Barring an unprecedented level of automation, people will still be required to do stuff. There needs to be a strong safety net but the idea that 'full employment' is no longer a realistic goal to fight towards doesn't seem like something to give in to.

like, capital is going to stop having a use for people who are new to the world of work and don't happen to have whatever the skill du jour is. Uber has a billion-dollar valuation because speculators think they can avoid getting regulated into oblivion long enough for self-driving cars to drive their labor costs down. Every fancy new factory being built in the US is heavily automated. Being "able and willing to work", to use a familiar canard, is increasingly less likely to be enough to ensure a person an autonomous, stable, and healthy life. (It never was sufficient, but it's what people seem to be talking about when they talk about the postwar period.)

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, June 1, 2016 2:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It is weird that you had to explain that

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 2:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's weirder to believe it imo. 200 years of technological unemployment fears being wrong doesn't give you pause?

if any of that that actually happens UBI will be a shoe-in... but in the same way marxism would have been a shoe in had wages never risen above subsistence and the profit rate tended to zero

200 years of technological unemployment fears being wrong doesn't give you pause?

not what anybody is actually talking about! Developed economies are exporting "labor" jobs in a race to the bottom and even knowledge work that has traditionally required years of formal training and education is being cost controlled by similar globalized outsourcing, by pushing temporary work visas to their very limit and by turning education systems into more and more "focused" (read: restricted) vocational gymnasiums. Technological unemployment fears are not what anybody is talking about when discussing the income inequality problem, it's the fact that working is now a subsistence activity and less and less a means to upward mobility.

There needs to be a strong safety net but the idea that 'full employment' is no longer a realistic goal to fight towards doesn't seem like something to give in to.

I don't disagree but the work opportunities you point out are seasonal-ish; there's not always a necessary demand gap for useful work that needs publicly funded intervention to solve.