I read a study arguing that each time someone utters the letters U, B, and I, currency devalues itself by one thousand fold, chunks of the sky rain down on metropolitan centers, and everyone instantly becomes fat, lazy, and uninterested in any activities except playing video games.
To be clear, I have no issue with most people working while others do not and live off the system. I think most people will still want to do that something.
UBI isn’t going to do that.
You can point to a handful of small scale studies that show more money works, and yes, on a small scale that is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
This does not work when everyone has that same income. It’s not a matter of 99% of people making smart choices, because I concede that the vast majority of people with sudden access to additional income would spend it wisely.
The issues are twofold.
A) when the people who’ve made it their career to suck every penny out of every possible person know that there are suddenly more pennies to be had, they’re going to raise prices. It’s frankly foolish and shortsighted to expect prices to remain the same or only raise a little. This issue is not raised with small scale experiments. So regardless of their obvious success, they’re not telling the whole story.
2). UBI does absolutely nothing to address the problems it’s actually trying to solve. All it does is print a check every month as a bandaid for some serious problems that will certainly persist. You can’t fix housing without building housing. Individual healthcare will still be tied to your job. College education will be prohibitively expensive and require staffing a lifetime of debt, and we’ll still throw away an obscene amount of food, and people will still go hungry. The only thing that will probably get better is more children will have a secure diet.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will. Because even if UBI happened, the people who want all the money the working class has aren’t suddenly going to think it’s ok to leave dollars unspoken for.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there. Rent prices will go up to accommodate the new found freedom of spending. And that’s the stuff you have a choice on. You think Comcast will see people with so many extra dollars a month and think “well our customers don’t have another option but we’ll let them keep all that money?”
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
The claim of UBI leading to runaway inflation is a myth given by reactionary propaganda.
UBI would represent a major advance for the working class. Advocating against it seems impossible to reconcile with any attitude that is not accelerationist.
Much of your commentary seems to reproduce mythical tropes such as of the “welfare queen”.
Seeking meaningful contribution to society is a robust human tendency. Doing so under constant threat from greedy employers is not necessary.
I responded to the text of your comment, and my concern about your opening sentence is not its lacking truth, as much as the litany of untruthful claims you later made in contradiction.
I would think UBI would be implemented to track inflation. I also assume it would be funded by progressive taxes, not just spinning up the printing presses (which would cause inflation). Effectively, it would be a wealth redistribution program cycling money from corporations and the rich down to the poor.
I really don’t trust the government (which is pretty much captured by corporations) to implement it well though. They’d probably give everyone just enough money to barely survive, without health care, in a van down by the river or something.
If you check my post history everywhere, I’m pretty anti-UBI. But the reasons you pitched are both problematic to me.
You “A” point… I don’t like capitalism, but when there isn’t a monopoly, increased customer-base doesn’t have the effect you’re thinking without scarcity. More people able to afford more means more businesses can compete for business. The price increases would come from paying for the increased worker leverage, and those wouldn’t be drastic.
The opposite effect is true in some sectors. Studies suggest (consistently) that UBI cause so-called “wealth-flight”, which reduces the value of housing and reduces the cost of living… But also reduces quality of life by reducing availability of things. The thing is, a little bit of socialism would counteract wealth-flight, as would a situation where the wealth is not in a position to leave freely.
Your “2” point is false. There are a lot of MAJOR cons to UBI, but studies suggest UBI would have a positive effect on housing affordability and worker leverage. Other than healthcare, your concerns don’t seem to match the models and the studies. My add-on concern, however, is addiction. Poverty starvation isn’t a risk under most UBI plans, but addict starvation still is.
When “what can I afford to pay” is one of the dominant market forces on anything but luxury, capitalism becomes dangerously fragile and businesses know it. They want to maximize profit, but they do so against demand and competition.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will
Most economists don’t think UBI would cause all that much inflation. Increasing a customer-base is not the same as increasing demand. There’s no addition of scarcity. Food prices don’t go up if we don’t run out of food - and we have so much food going to waste that isn’t going to happen. Same with housing and rent. The question isn’t “how much can the sucker afford to pay me”, it’s “how much can we get for this?”. Affordability is only one factor in that, and generally considered a “problem” to all parties when that factor applies. So long as businesses are not MORE consolidated (see above UBI concerns) prices are still market-driven - driven by competition and acceptability.
It’s valid to not LIKE capitalism. I hate it. But we should still understand it before criticizing things.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there
This is simply not factual. One thing people miss is that college profit margins have been on a slow decline (and in the single-digits since 2016). They’re NOT charging more based on how much they think they can sucker out of people. They’re charging what they do based on the friction of “making enough money to thrive” and “charging low enough that people are willing to come here”. Yes, cost of college might go up slightly, but not in the way you’re talking. Again, the issue is that “affordability” is a terrible market force and rarely the one these types of businesses care about.
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom
There is no study or model that says UBI will give us LESS financial freedom. The real argument is that it won’t give more financial freedom to most Americans, and the cost is prohibitive for that limited gain.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
Short of “no questions asked unemployment benefits for life”, there aren’t really any solutions to many of the problems on the table. Ultimately, all Americans, all humans, deserve a life of all necessities AND some luxuries.
At this time, nobody is seriousliy trying to solve for luxuries except UBI, and nobody is seriously trying to solve for organic worker-leverage except UBI (unions will never be the full answer).
I’m fairly confident that corporations would argue that corporations are people, and therefore should get their allotment of UBI at a rate of one full income per stock share, and they’d probably win that argument too, considering the state of our legislature. Then they would argue that actual people getting their share of UBI is harming corporate profits and get UBI cancelled for everyone except the largest corporations. We still have land reaping subsidies not to grow crops from the New Deal, and all that land has made its way into the hands of the wealthy.
I never said you didn’t. Money is a great way to barter labor for luxury when you exist in a system where you can never starve. Nobody is saying the government should cover Wagyu beef for every meal, or free yachts for people.
Agreed! This thread is specifically following that “cash in hand” is not what guarantees people quality of life - housing and food are. If someone has all a reasonable quality of life provided for free, “extra cash” is less urgent.
I mentioned elsewhere that I think a government run supermarket would do a lot of good for grocery pricing. My thought was that we’d all get EBT (no means-testing) and the government could save money by running its own supermarket, while simultaneously forcing down the prices of private supermarkets. That is a good compromise that lets us keep a cash basis for food stamps (like everyone seems to prefer over vouchers) while still preventing any concerns people have with EBT affecting prices.
There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
A badly designed instance may be bad, regardless of the class of designed entities to which the instance belongs.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
In the US at least, the primary taxpayers are also the highest cost of living. Many of those in poverty in places like Manhattan or Boston are likely to have their economic position unaltered from UBI (and in the case of Yang’s plan, would have to opt out of UBI). The common answer I see to this is “move to a Red state”. I don’t want to tell a poor minority they need to move away from their family to Arkansas to make ends meet.
Many UBIs are inordinately financed by the poor and/or middle-class. This is not a win to me me.
I’m of the position that the biggest problem with the economy is “market inefficiency”, or to be specific, the profit margins of businesses. The reason the “everyone has housing and food” cost would be $2T, but a conservative UBI would be $4T is the $1T going in the pockets of an entire chain of middlemen, wholesalers, and resellers. If we fix that, UBI becomes less important because we’ve already started socializing. If we don’t fix that, I don’t see UBI being effective.
advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
You have also attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
For the sake of solving the needs of the many, UBI is demonstrably proven more expensive than socializing. I gave reasons and numbers. THIS is the bullet point that made me stop supporting UBI. Socialism, even light-socialism, is just dramatically better at achieving the goals with less societal disruption.
For the sake taking money from the rich, UBI is irrelevant. To quantify better than I have before, it’s irrelevant because it is a mechanism to distribute money, NOT to fund it. The “how to fund” part of UBI would more effectively be used to inject money into non-means-tested social programs that are targeted at problems to solve.
UBI is vaporware. This is not an argument from ignorance. I am actually proposing that a reasonable large-scale UBI might well be entirely impossible. The MINIMUM cited cost for a bare-bones $1000/mo UBI wouldn’t just rise to being the single most expensive social program in US history, but it will be 5x the cost of our military spending and at least 3x more expensive than our current welfare spending. Again, for a barebones UBI that simply isn’t enough money for many households to survive.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
I cannot change how you decide what is terrible. You hold a belief that UBI is terrible. The belief is yours. As long as you hold it, your challenge to me is meaningless.
I repeat my objection about the appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
UBI is simply a regular transfer of money to each household. It works by doing exactly as it does, providing money to households.
What do consider as personally convincing for UBI?
Such is the crux of your participation in the discussion.
For most of the population, the meaningful difference from UBI would be expanded security, against loss of income. Those who are currently in poverty also would benefit more immediately, from additional income.
Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting.
The amount of food being discarded exceeds the amount needed to resolve insecurity and deprivation.
No other observation is required.
All of your statistics are only sidestepping the obvious observation.
UBI is simply the net transfer of money from those that who have too much food to sell, to those who have too little money to buy food.
Once the disparity is resolved through a more favorable distribution money, which is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange, the commodity market for foods would be used for the hungry to purchase food.
The problem of cost is illusory, because the commodity of food is not genuinely scarce, and money is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange.
The same principle applies to other commodities, such as clothing and housing.
I read a study arguing that each time someone utters the letters U, B, and I, currency devalues itself by one thousand fold, chunks of the sky rain down on metropolitan centers, and everyone instantly becomes fat, lazy, and uninterested in any activities except playing video games.
Yup I died because you said it, so thanks for that.
If not myself, then someone else. Blame the system, not the individual.
If it had to he anyone, im glad it was you!
To be clear, I have no issue with most people working while others do not and live off the system. I think most people will still want to do that something.
UBI isn’t going to do that.
You can point to a handful of small scale studies that show more money works, and yes, on a small scale that is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
This does not work when everyone has that same income. It’s not a matter of 99% of people making smart choices, because I concede that the vast majority of people with sudden access to additional income would spend it wisely.
The issues are twofold.
A) when the people who’ve made it their career to suck every penny out of every possible person know that there are suddenly more pennies to be had, they’re going to raise prices. It’s frankly foolish and shortsighted to expect prices to remain the same or only raise a little. This issue is not raised with small scale experiments. So regardless of their obvious success, they’re not telling the whole story.
2). UBI does absolutely nothing to address the problems it’s actually trying to solve. All it does is print a check every month as a bandaid for some serious problems that will certainly persist. You can’t fix housing without building housing. Individual healthcare will still be tied to your job. College education will be prohibitively expensive and require staffing a lifetime of debt, and we’ll still throw away an obscene amount of food, and people will still go hungry. The only thing that will probably get better is more children will have a secure diet.
And none of that assumes prices would inflate the way they absolutely will. Because even if UBI happened, the people who want all the money the working class has aren’t suddenly going to think it’s ok to leave dollars unspoken for.
The cost of college will steadily increase by about the amount kids are expected to have been able to save by the time they get there. Rent prices will go up to accommodate the new found freedom of spending. And that’s the stuff you have a choice on. You think Comcast will see people with so many extra dollars a month and think “well our customers don’t have another option but we’ll let them keep all that money?”
UBI is just a ticket to absolute dependency on a government check for 99% of Americans, and less financial freedom.
Address the actual problems, don’t just slap a half baked bandaid on it
The claim of UBI leading to runaway inflation is a myth given by reactionary propaganda.
UBI would represent a major advance for the working class. Advocating against it seems impossible to reconcile with any attitude that is not accelerationist.
Much of your commentary seems to reproduce mythical tropes such as of the “welfare queen”.
Seeking meaningful contribution to society is a robust human tendency. Doing so under constant threat from greedy employers is not necessary.
Something is not propaganda because you disagree with it.
I also make it clear in literally my first sentence that people living off the system without working is fine, but that most people probably won’t.
I’m not sure you actually read the post you’re responding to.
Something is not scientific fact because you declare it to be.
There’s scientific facts, economic reality, and then there’s the pipe dream that suddenly corporations will be less greedy just “cuz” under UBI.
I have heard many different opinions about UBI.
I have never heard any suggestion that it would make corporations less greedy.
Perhaps your objection is directed at a strawman.
I responded to the text of your comment, and my concern about your opening sentence is not its lacking truth, as much as the litany of untruthful claims you later made in contradiction.
So no, you didn’t.
I did. Your comment is littered with mythical tropes. Even the opening is suspect, due to the suggestion of people wanting to “live off the system”.
Most want simply that their lives be not dominated by systems that are abstract, absurd, or inhuman.
Even if some cope differently than you, perhaps consider not judging so narrowly.
I would think UBI would be implemented to track inflation. I also assume it would be funded by progressive taxes, not just spinning up the printing presses (which would cause inflation). Effectively, it would be a wealth redistribution program cycling money from corporations and the rich down to the poor.
I really don’t trust the government (which is pretty much captured by corporations) to implement it well though. They’d probably give everyone just enough money to barely survive, without health care, in a van down by the river or something.
If you check my post history everywhere, I’m pretty anti-UBI. But the reasons you pitched are both problematic to me.
You “A” point… I don’t like capitalism, but when there isn’t a monopoly, increased customer-base doesn’t have the effect you’re thinking without scarcity. More people able to afford more means more businesses can compete for business. The price increases would come from paying for the increased worker leverage, and those wouldn’t be drastic.
The opposite effect is true in some sectors. Studies suggest (consistently) that UBI cause so-called “wealth-flight”, which reduces the value of housing and reduces the cost of living… But also reduces quality of life by reducing availability of things. The thing is, a little bit of socialism would counteract wealth-flight, as would a situation where the wealth is not in a position to leave freely.
Your “2” point is false. There are a lot of MAJOR cons to UBI, but studies suggest UBI would have a positive effect on housing affordability and worker leverage. Other than healthcare, your concerns don’t seem to match the models and the studies. My add-on concern, however, is addiction. Poverty starvation isn’t a risk under most UBI plans, but addict starvation still is.
When “what can I afford to pay” is one of the dominant market forces on anything but luxury, capitalism becomes dangerously fragile and businesses know it. They want to maximize profit, but they do so against demand and competition.
Most economists don’t think UBI would cause all that much inflation. Increasing a customer-base is not the same as increasing demand. There’s no addition of scarcity. Food prices don’t go up if we don’t run out of food - and we have so much food going to waste that isn’t going to happen. Same with housing and rent. The question isn’t “how much can the sucker afford to pay me”, it’s “how much can we get for this?”. Affordability is only one factor in that, and generally considered a “problem” to all parties when that factor applies. So long as businesses are not MORE consolidated (see above UBI concerns) prices are still market-driven - driven by competition and acceptability.
It’s valid to not LIKE capitalism. I hate it. But we should still understand it before criticizing things.
This is simply not factual. One thing people miss is that college profit margins have been on a slow decline (and in the single-digits since 2016). They’re NOT charging more based on how much they think they can sucker out of people. They’re charging what they do based on the friction of “making enough money to thrive” and “charging low enough that people are willing to come here”. Yes, cost of college might go up slightly, but not in the way you’re talking. Again, the issue is that “affordability” is a terrible market force and rarely the one these types of businesses care about.
There is no study or model that says UBI will give us LESS financial freedom. The real argument is that it won’t give more financial freedom to most Americans, and the cost is prohibitive for that limited gain.
Short of “no questions asked unemployment benefits for life”, there aren’t really any solutions to many of the problems on the table. Ultimately, all Americans, all humans, deserve a life of all necessities AND some luxuries.
At this time, nobody is seriousliy trying to solve for luxuries except UBI, and nobody is seriously trying to solve for organic worker-leverage except UBI (unions will never be the full answer).
deleted by creator
I’m fairly confident that corporations would argue that corporations are people, and therefore should get their allotment of UBI at a rate of one full income per stock share, and they’d probably win that argument too, considering the state of our legislature. Then they would argue that actual people getting their share of UBI is harming corporate profits and get UBI cancelled for everyone except the largest corporations. We still have land reaping subsidies not to grow crops from the New Deal, and all that land has made its way into the hands of the wealthy.
Without capitalism, we don’t really need UBI because we can just go more socialist.
You don’t need “more money” if society guarantees your quality of life with no strings attached.
You still need a system of currency as individuals should be allowed to use their skills to barter.
I never said you didn’t. Money is a great way to barter labor for luxury when you exist in a system where you can never starve. Nobody is saying the government should cover Wagyu beef for every meal, or free yachts for people.
deleted by creator
Agreed! This thread is specifically following that “cash in hand” is not what guarantees people quality of life - housing and food are. If someone has all a reasonable quality of life provided for free, “extra cash” is less urgent.
I mentioned elsewhere that I think a government run supermarket would do a lot of good for grocery pricing. My thought was that we’d all get EBT (no means-testing) and the government could save money by running its own supermarket, while simultaneously forcing down the prices of private supermarkets. That is a good compromise that lets us keep a cash basis for food stamps (like everyone seems to prefer over vouchers) while still preventing any concerns people have with EBT affecting prices.
There are real risks of a badly-designed UBI, and it unfortunately locks us more into capitalism instead of less, but innovators giving up on innovation is not one of them.
A badly designed instance belonging to any class may be bad, regardless of the class.
I advocate for UBI, and also, I advocate for UBI that is not badly designed.
Whether the working class seeks to leverage its advantages to depose capital depends on the will and resolve of workers as a class, but in the meantime, advocating against saving, improving, and empowering workers is some combination of apologia and accelerationism.
Not many “designated entities” cost more than quarter of a nation’s GDP, nearly the entire current tax burden of that nation and wouldn’t meet most people’s economic burden. The problem with a UBI is how much of a systematic overhaul it really is. The cost to simply feed, clothe, and house all Americans is an order of magnitude cheaper than a modest UBI. About the only win UBI might have is by “tricking” the Right into supporting it when they’d go nuclear against something reasonable… But the loss UBI might have is by “tricking” the Left to support it when it secretly reads like a Right Wing fantasy. Pro-capitalism, excuse to remove or hobble other protections. And “personal responsibility” BS when an addict uses the UBI check to buy alcohol or fentanyl instead of food.
Got an example? I used to be a HUGE fan of UBIs, but every time I read one, I struggled with these massive gaps. The three biggest issues I see with UBIs are:
You overplay here. I actually agree that the one unquestionable benefit of a UBI is worker leverage. But I think questioning a MULTI-TRILLION-DOLLAR plan that might do nothing but create worker leverage among one class of workers is extremely reasonable, far from apologia. And on the contrary, I think a UBI plan could itself be accelerationism.
And I say “one class of workers” because I mean it. The farther someone gets from their State’s minimum wage, the less leverage a UBI would provide. I’m not talking people making $1M/yr, but people making $45,760 (the US Median Wage). Someone making that much money doesn’t get much (any?) labor benefit from a UBI, but they are likely to be contributing to it in their taxes. See my problem?
EDIT: I’d like to re-summarize. For the cost of every UBI I’ve seen, we could afford to provide food, clothing, homes, and healthcare to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while still having billions or even trillions to spare. A check for $1000/mo, even $2000/mo can’t afford all those things.
The cost is the same. Money is the commodity created as the universal exchange. There is no other kind of asset suited for universal distribution that would empower everyone to access the essential commodities distributed through markets.
In fact, framing the issue in terms of cost is misleading. UBI is not the creation of any new resource or asset with intrinsic value. It is simply a political declaration, enforced administratively, that corporations and oligarchs may not hoard to such a degree that others are needlessly deprived.
Before replying to your points, I’d like to clarify that you missed the opportunity to win the discussion with a single answer. I’ll offer that again. Show me an actual UBI plan that I would not see as broken or secretly a Lib-Right utopia. Yang’s isn’t it. I’m not against the concept of a UBI. I’m against every version I’ve ever seen, and YES the price of every version of it.
That’s simply untrue. Medicare is proof of that (approximately 143% higher per capita cost for equivalent benefits). Social Infrastructure that does not seek profit will consistently beat infrastructure that does by a large margin. Every day of the week. No need for marketing costs, for wholesale costs, etc. No need for stock prices or a happy board. Hell, I just have to compare the price of my wife’s garden-to-table tomato sauce vs the price of buying a jar. $5 in tomato seeds and 5hrs total of her time makes us about 100 jars of sauce. Even including the price of the jar and transport, there is a gap between material+labor cost and retail cost larger than the cost itself. UBI continues to feed that gap, but socializing can whittle it down. There was once a day that capitalism was about “we can be more efficient at scale, so it’s cheaper to buy groceries than make them yourself”. B2B still works that way. But consumer purchases do not, and never will again.
We could feed every American a balanced diet for approximately $25B/yr with socialized groceries. We can house every American for approximately $100B/yr (extrapolated cost to end homelessness by the homelessness rate) by making government housing something “not just for the poor”. Universal healthcare is conservatively estimated to cost about $1T/yr in the net (progressive estimates argue it’ll overall be a net societal gain within a year or two due to how much money the government has to subsidize various parts of the healthcare industry anyway)
Combined with incidentals, that’s less than $1.5T. Where a $1k/mo UBI would cost $4T and nobody honestly estimates it will solve the above problems.
With all due respect, I don’t know what you’re trying to argue now. Of course UBI is not the creation of a new resource or asset. It’s just a plan that taxes America to redistribute wealth blindly. And the fact that Jeff Bezos will probably get a larger check from UBI than he is taxed is on nobody’s radar.
I’ve yet to see a UBI that would cost oligarchs even a penny, and nowhere in the UBI philosophy would it hit corporations at all. And it’s not “simply” anything. The “simply” political declaration against oligarchs is a strong millionaire tax. The whole goal of UBI is to fund people, so I find it interesting that you just described it in terms that didn’t even mention that.
You are framing discussion around an appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
Your tactics are not supportive of productive discussion.
You also have attempted to negate conceptual relations that are essentially beyond controversy through statistics and Gish gallops.
Why are you going this direction? Can we please keep to good-faith?
My complaint is that UBIs don’t work, and my citation are UBIs that are genuinely terrible. I keep offering you the opportunity to show one that isn’t terrible so I can effectively steelman UBI instead of strawmanning it. If there were a good UBI, I wouldn’t resist it.
Not really. Trying something that you can’t quality for 10X the cost of a confirmed solution is absolutely worth resisting. We have a clean, price-tagged way to solve all but 1 of the problems that UBIs actually try to solve. How exactly does it “not support a productive discussion” for me to invoke that fact? Are you looking for a “yes man”?
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ve been fairly consistent, but for the sake of dismissing your accusations of gishgallop, let me summarize my points.
Those are my bullet points. Please feel free to show me any point above where I seem to have moved away from that, and I will either concede them or defend why they are relevant. One thing I agree is that neither side should be gish gallopping.
And more importantly, if we’re going to toss around accusations. I keep challenging you to define your UBI. And I continue to do so. Are you pushing for a UBI that guts Welfare, that takes that $1.2T welfare pile to help fund? Are you on-board with “pick food stamps OR UBI” strategies? Are you pushing for a specific tax on the rich? What is your reasoning that the distribution would go smoother to put $1000 in a homeless person’s pocket than to give them a house and food without being shamed? Does you have any plans/answers for drug addiction?
I have spent a lot of time educating myself about UBI because I care about the redistribution of wealth and the QoL of all Americans, and also because I CARED about UBI. I’m genuinely open-minded that I could go back to supporting UBI, but I need more than accusations that I’m gishgallopping by someone who isn’t actually engaging at all.
So please, give me the benefit of good-faith like I’m giving you. Engage me with reasons.
EDIT: And let me ask you another question I should’ve asked earlier.
Is UBI the goal for you? Sometimes I end up in discussions where end goals differ. Maybe you don’t care about the quality of life of the poor nearly as much as the idea of everyone getting that $1000 check. Obviously if “I want UBI” is your end goal, it’s going to be hard for us to have a discussion. My goals are quantitative and flexible. If yours are qualitative and inflexible, of course we’re not seeing eye to eye.
And that’s OK. I have to admit that I would prefer Universal Socialized Healthcare even if it wasn’t as efficient as the ACA. To me, the goal is Socialized Healthcare whether or not it’s better for individuals. I have few philosophies where the plan is more important than results, but I can respect them.
I cannot change how you decide what is terrible. You hold a belief that UBI is terrible. The belief is yours. As long as you hold it, your challenge to me is meaningless.
I repeat my objection about the appeal to purity and an argument from ignorance.
UBI is simply a regular transfer of money to each household. It works by doing exactly as it does, providing money to households.
What do consider as personally convincing for UBI?
Such is the crux of your participation in the discussion.
For most of the population, the meaningful difference from UBI would be expanded security, against loss of income. Those who are currently in poverty also would benefit more immediately, from additional income.
The amount of food being discarded exceeds the amount needed to resolve insecurity and deprivation.
No other observation is required.
All of your statistics are only sidestepping the obvious observation.
UBI is simply the net transfer of money from those that who have too much food to sell, to those who have too little money to buy food.
Once the disparity is resolved through a more favorable distribution money, which is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange, the commodity market for foods would be used for the hungry to purchase food.
The problem of cost is illusory, because the commodity of food is not genuinely scarce, and money is simply the universal medium for commodity exchange.
The same principle applies to other commodities, such as clothing and housing.