Comment on [deleted]
sj_zero 11 months ago
The case for UBI is based on false premises.
First, it's not cost-effective. Kind of giving everyone a living wage is going to cost more money than any government spends on anything right now. Simple arithmetic will prove this.
Second, it will destroy jobs. By design, some proportion of people with UBI will choose not to work. We don't just work to get a paycheck. We work to be productive, that's where the money to pay workers comes from. Without workers there won't be productivity, with less productivity the economy shrinks, and the shrinking economy has less jobs.
Money at that point doesn't matter because money is meaningless. If you're trapped on a desert island with a million dollars, all you've really got is a pile of cotton or plastic (depending where your money came from). Money represents a stake in productive output of an economy, so you can give more money, but there isn't as much productive output. More on this later.
So you've got the most expensive program ever, and it harms economic output, it will not save government spending. The argument is that because you won't need to spend as much money administering the program it will save money, but when the cash outlay is so much higher, there's no reasonable level of savings that could save enough money to justify it. You could save 100% of welfare savings and you'd still be doubling government budgets to implement UBI.
You can say "we'll get rid of all other government programs!", and I call bullshit. If you say to people "You're going to get UBI, but if you get sick you pay out of pocket now!", Many people will want to opt out of that, and as for other social programs, some people don't need money, they need help. Someone with down syndrome or someone born into an abusive family that is developmentally stunted isn't going to be ok without help, regardless of the amount of money you hand them, because they aren't competent to live on their own.
Finally, it's just the raw economics of the thing. We got a taste of a form of UBI during covid. I will grant you that it isn't exactly the same since there was a global pandemic that also contributed greatly to things, but as a natural experiment it largely proves many of the predicted problems. A lot of able-bodied people took the money and refused to work, driving down supply while demand stayed the same, causing shortages followed by rising prices. Stocks also rose despite the economic catastrophe as people took their "free money" and used it to gamble in markets.
Morally, it looks a lot like slavery; stealing from the working through taxes and inflation to hand to people who often could work but don't want to. People who would continue to work would often be people with families to support who can't just hole up in a dorm with 5 other single guys and play COD all day.
This argument is not a lie, and it's not purely emotional. It's based on my perspective and concerns regarding Universal Basic Income (UBI). I've presented logical reasoning and observations to support my viewpoint, addressing potential economic and social consequences of implementing UBI. While you may hold different opinions on this topic, this argument is a valid expression of my perspective and concerns. It's essential to have constructive discussions and debates about complex issues like UBI to explore various viewpoints and find common ground where possible.
PizzaMan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s not really the point of it at this stage. So you fundamentally misundertand the purpose of it.
The purpose is to help people stay financially stable, especially as more and more jobs are automated and sent overseas.
The more and more that basic necessities are handled through automation, the more and more that humanity as a whole should benefit. As of right now that isn’t the case, busines owners just fire people one a job is automated and move on. Only the rich reap the benefits of automation, and that should not be the case in a day and age where so much of our basic necessities are highly automated.
If I recall, pretty much all of the UBI studies have shown the opposite is true. People actually are employed at higher rates in places with UBI.
That’d be true if automation weren’t a thing, but it is.
Your local cereal factory produced countless tons of cereal with a small handful of workers. Enough to feed thousands of people a day, every day. Same goes for your meat products, all kinds of veggies, etc.
If we are at 50% automation now, what do you suppose humanity would look like 1000 years from now when it is closer to 99% or even 100% automation of all basic necessities? If everybody loses their jobs because the robots are cheaper, who is going to be able to pay for their necessities?
It’s better that we set a precedent now than to have to start the fight from scratch then.
You seem to only be looking at the negatives. There is a huge benefit from people refusing to work like that, and that’s leverage in the job market. Vertical mobility was significantly better during the aftermath of those handouts because people were able to refuse shit deals on salary, even if only for a short period of time.
Fast forward to today, and we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in our history.
…wikipedia.org/…/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID-1…
There was a lot more to it than that.
If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think the stock market should exist in the first place. It incentivises businesses to be greedy, to cut corners, and it turns what should be customers into products. We’ve all seen it first hand with Reddit’s horseshit that they were doing to prepare for IPO.
Corporations should only compete on their actual product, not a casino.
But to address your actual concern about people wasting the money, there is a subset of people that will always waste money when they have it. And there is always going to be another person that thinks something is wasteful where another person does not. People should have the freedom to decide for themselves.
With that said, knowing that there will be waste no matter what, a society is better off when people are well fed, housed, and healthy. And UBI studies show that society is better off in those sorts of areas.
Do you have an actual figure for how much of that covid money was wasted on gambling? Because I’d wager it was pretty low.
That’s why we shouldn’t have an income tax. All taxes should be disbanded and replaced with two types of tax. A land tax, and a pollution tax.
sj_zero 11 months ago
I don't really think your reply strongly addressed any of my core points about UBI. It isn't cost effective and nothing in the entire post addresses that. In fact, it seems like the only point close to addressing it proposes a major tax overhaul that would have major knock on effects, in my view turning the world into a neofeudal society where only the super rich can be landowners and everyone else is a renter.
Since I work in automation, to me the idea that we are going to end all jobs due to automation is an idea that isn't rooted in reality. The thing is, automation is incredibly capital intensive, and people often don't realize that. You need to design and build the automation, then you need to maintain it and keep all the spare parts, and if your needs change then you've got to completely change the way you look at things. Part of the reason automation is so competitive for so many things in the west is that we've made human beings so uncompetitive. Creating a underclass of non-workers that the workers have to support is only going to make this problem worse.
That being said, increasing worker productivity through automation is actually one of the ways that worker wages rise, and historically speaking increases in worker productivity helped create more jobs that paid better, since you don't just work for money, you're producing a product or service that people would want since human desires are virtually unlimited but productivity is limited. There's things that can't be automated either because the product is too complicated or too niche, or because one of the USPs of the product is that it's produced by hand.
Of course I'm looking at the negatives, OP is so blindly and religiously positive about UBI that all I can do is that.
"Lowest unemployment rates in history" -- That's a lie. Not your lie, the state's lie. In the 1970s, 96% of ablebodied men worked, and today more like 60% of ablebodied men work. The lie works because of the way the modern unemployment rate is calculated. Instead of seeing who can work and who is working, they only look at who wants to work and has tried to work relatively recently. In order to have a super low unemployment rate, all you need to do is completely blackpill people into not even trying to work for long enough. If we didn't need people working, if this automation problem was as big as people pretend it is, we wouldn't be importing cheap labor from india and mexico en masse.
If the stock market didn't exist, something would. House prices reached all-time highs as well. In Canada, the average house price nation-wide reached $850,000. In a sense, inflation might be even worse for tangible objects if people didn't have this useless thing to dump their money into.
People will NOT be "well fed, housed, and healthy" if we implement UBI. Prices will rise, putting basics out of touch of many people, and more importantly, all those nice social programs you support will be eliminated. That's why OP thinks it'll save money, because you implement UBI to the exclusion of all other social programs. No more public medicine, no more public housing, no more social work, all of that eliminated and instead you just get a check in the mail. As I've already said in my original post, a lot of people need more than just a check in the mail. I'm inclined to think you agree, since you breathlessly went on about how great many social programs are in another post in this story.
PizzaMan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The studies show that it generally is.
washingtonpost.com/…/stockton-universal-basic-inc…
futurism.com/denver-homeless-people-money-working…
It would actually significantly decrease the tax burden of your average American, because it’s not a tax that the rich can easily pass on. They can’t just move land like they can their wealth. And land use is correlated with wealth.
If you own a tiny plot of land, then your tax burden will be basically nothing. My dad owns a single family unit home with an OK sized yard. He would only pay about $1000 in taxes a year if I recall.
I’m aware it isn’t at 100% yet, and my argument isn’t based on that.
The argument is that as more become automated, more of the benefit should be shared by humanity as a whole.
Worker productivity and wages have been divorced for decades. Wages have stagnated.
But those things generally aren’t basic necessities. And again, technology is only going to get better.
I said ONE OF not THE lowest rate.
You pulled that number out of your ass.
And that’s a fine way to do it, because some people are homesteaders, some are caretakers, etc. If somebody isn’t on the job market then it doesn’t make sense to count them when doing a census of the job market.
My mom is a stay at home mom. She isn’t counted toward unemployment and the labor department’s definition count that correctly.
That’s not how it works. There isn’t some central power that is 100% responsible for the decisions. Our government’s priorities and decisions are fractured.
You seem to be confusing the concept of a stock market and a regular market here.
The studies show that they are though.
I agree that people need more than just a check in the mail. But the enemy of progress is perfection. UBI is progress towards something better, so I support it. Our existing social programs, when funded, are also good. And that’s because we don’t have UBI. Something is better than nothing. There are definitely some that could potentially be eliminated or more restrictive if UBI became a thing.
But just because UBI becomes a thing doesn’t mean everything else gets deleted. Healthcare still needs to become nationalized because of the disgrace that is private heathcare. UBI doesn’t change that regardless of its implementation status. But for the most part, many public programs could be reduced.
How about you hold me to what I say instead of what other say, otherwise you’ll just keep talking past me.
sj_zero 11 months ago
I apologize in advance, this is a lot of stuff, but I had to source data and then analyze it. Man, you don't need to reply to everything... or maybe anything... The process was interesting at least.
The studies saying UBI is cost effective are wrong, and they're designed to be wrong.
They aren't universal. They instead pick and choose who to give the money to, and if you're not the target you don't get the money. I witnessed this myself with a friend of mine who was initially selected for such a study before being kicked out for having a solid blue collar job. Some people think that UBI shouldn't actually be universal and instead should be means tested where as your income rises your UBI is slowly cut off, but I think every piece of extra bureaucracy you add diminishes the benefits of it being universal basic income.
They don't cover every part of what UBI would entail. They don't raise everyone's taxes to pay for it, it's just free money from a black hole of money.
They're temporary. The people know this money is a temporary measure as part of a study and that fact will cause them to behave differently than if the money was a guaranteed thing in law. Of course given a temporary boon you'll use it differently than if you are given a permanent one.
They are a micrometer measuring a continent. Small studies fail to recognize the impact of large scale changes. Giving everyone free money for existing would be a major societal change that would have effects you won't measure on the micro level because they'd be macro changes.
Implementing a truly universal basic income of conservatively saying $10,000/yr for the adult population in the US of 260 million people would cost about 2.6 trillion dollars per year. That's something you'd need to really work miracles to get such a return from that we can call it "cost effective". 2.6 trillion dollars is about every dollar the US government gets from personal income tax.
I did the math, and you have a point with respect to the land taxes, if we assume a flat rate. To replace the income tax, payroll tax, and corporate income tax with a land tax, applied to all land that's privately owned, that's 3900/hectare in land tax annually. To actually balance the budget would be 4650/yr per hectare, or about 1880/acre, and many homes are built on 1/8th acre plots, so individual homeowners would be paying a pittance -- they'd pay more for a month of good fiber internet than for a years federal land taxes, about $235. Add another 30% or so if you're going to add UBI. There's other nice things about it, that it would mean considerably less effort employing people or running businesses since the tax would be fixed to a certain person who owns a certain piece of land, and individuals would get to take home more of their pay. Given that a 1/8 acre plot of land is normal for housing, that could be a pretty trivial cost.
It indeed would mean different people are paying the taxes. Further research suggested to me that it might have a problem of it's own -- $1880/acre (or another 30% if we want UBI) is much more than many farmers make in net revenue per acre on many farms (the average profit per acre being about $29), which could cause the farmers to fold, and if nobody else wanted the land as would likely be the case for large swaths of land it would probably revert to the federal government, causing the government to own a bunch more land and each individual landowner paying more in taxes, perhaps considerably so. It's a big burden. Furthermore, it would mean that rural landowners would end up carrying the bulk of the weight with respect to supporting the Federal government. If instead you did it by some other metric, perhaps charging one urban tax rate and another rural tax rate, you could crank it up so urban people pay significantly more per acre you could drive down the rural rate and help reduce the pain for farmers. A final problem would be that many of the richest people would come out significantly ahead under this scheme. If you're a tech billionaire and all your property is intellectual, you pay no tax to speak of, and if you're running a factory maybe you pay a few thousand dollars per year, you'd definitely see people lashing out at the super-rich who ended up paying virtually no tax under this system.
Looking at it further, I don't know if you could balance things in any sort of reasonable way. Urban centers make up 3% of America's land, and that makes up 81% of the population. To balance things reasonably between urban and rural taxpayers, intuitively it seems like you'd need to tax city land at absurdly high rates to keep farmers from going out of business, which returns us to the neofeudalism problem, since property in cities would need to cost so much to counter the problem of farms that only the rich could afford their annual payments, even with the elimination of income tax.
If we limit our land taxes to that urban 3% of the country, we'd be looking at a required tax of about $150,000/yr per acre, and if you section it off into 1/8th acre segments, we'd be looking at about $20,000 per year... In an otherwise tax free environment that might not be so bad, actually. It would definitely mean that people who make more would be in a better position to buy property, but welcome to life. The other problem is that it would affect rental prices a lot since besides the cost of renting the house you'd need to cover that $20,000 per year (and yes, the land lord would pass that onto the renter). If you split that 1/8 acre into a number of further subdivided units it could work out for low income people, and of course you wouldn't put the entire tax burden on just that 3% of the country, the farmers would be expected to pay some land taxes.
Another option is land value taxation (LVT), a type of property tax that taxes only the value of land, not the value of buildings or improvements on the land. LVT is based on the idea that land is a scarce and fixed resource that derives its value from its location, accessibility, and public services, rather than from individual effort or investment. One thing that makes this more complicated is that you'd need to have something set up to routinely calculate the value of the land alone, and that seems like it could be subjective and changing. For example, if you owned a house far out of town it might be considered to be low land value, but what if someone set up a housing development and a shopping mall nearby? Would that mean that suddenly it's considered desirable land because it's close to other stuff? Maybe an algorithm could be used to calculate land value without bias and without using an army of bureaucrats just for this little thing.
Sort of seems unfair that your taxes would be related to someone else coming in and building a thing. You never had a choice in the matter of who builds what where, yet presumably a home you built because you could afford to live there in a low tax region could be thrown into a high tax bracket because someone builds a thing. In this way, you'd end up actually creating a state mandated gentrification factor.
You could set it so your taxes are indexed to inflation once you buy a property, but that would incentivize buying up a bunch of property in low tax areas since you'd own it for very little tax so you could hold it until the city caught up and then you could just rent out houses on that property and make a huge profit because the tax is locked in as if there isn't a city nearby.
Ultimately, the problem is that there's just too damn much money that needs to get extracted from people. Income taxes balance it somewhat by taking up to 50% of every new dollar someone makes as they make more but leaving their first few dollars alone completely, but in this case you'd be taking the same from people whether they made a lot of money or a little.
One nice thing about a land tax system is to balance the budget all you need to do is distribute the predicted cost of running the government through all the different acres of land.
The more automation there is, the more the benefit is shared by humanity as a whole. I mean, it's pretty neat that I can have this conversation with you using a data center I can privately own and operate. That being said, I do recognise that there's some serious wealth and power inequality at the moment, it's a big part of many of my various views.
Wages have indeed stagnated, but I'm not sure UBI would have the effect of incentivizing wages not stagnating. It's secular cycle and we're in a particularly bad part of that cycle in part because of the baby boom. A lot of people blame the baby boomers for everything that's happened, but they were already having to deal with the changing world by the time they just came of age in the late 60s and early 70s.
I didn't pull the number out of my ass, it's pretty well established: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
I'll admit I didn't get the numbers exactly right, but still -- peaking at 86% in the 1960s, today it's 68%. That's a huge difference, and so you can't compare the unemployment rate when 86% of ablebodied men are working to the unemployment rate when 68% of ablebodied men are working. Unfortunately, the stagnating wages are a big part of the problem, for a lot of men it isn't worth going through the hassle if they can survive in other ways.
I should mention to preempt the argument, I know that many more women are in the workforce than there used to be and so that does balance the effects out somewhat -- In the 1960s, more like 35% of women worked, today it's closer to 60%. There's arguments to be made about this fact, that it's good, that it's bad, but in some ways it also just further shows that it's an apples and oranges comparison.
People have always been caretakers or homesteaders, so it doesn't seem an apples and oranges comparison to look at the 1960s and today the same. It does seem an apples and oranges comparison to compare the unemployment rate where most people are trying to get a job to an era where most people are discouraged workers who aren't even trying.
Kinda is how things work, though, isn't it? If there was no need for workers, we wouldn't be importing them. It would be more ideal for the people who live in a place to see wages rise so companies could maybe try to lure some of those discouraged workers out of their doldrums, but instead importing low wage workers and implementing UBI seems more likely to further cement low wages.
A stock market is where people trade shares in companies. The shares can be bought and the more shares you own the more control you can exercise over the company. It's one form of market, but it's not the only one, and it's not the only one where people try to make money. House flippers have been driving up home prices for profit for years, and crypto markets are open 24/7 and decentralized. So if stock markets didn't exist and you either owned the whole company or nothing then people would find other stuff to dump money into.
Implementing UBI would mean having extra money sloshing around. Some of that extra money would reach the stock market, and if your hypothetical universe without a stock market existed then that money would reach normal markets, driving up the prices of goods we actually need. In that sense the stock market is almost beneficial, acting as a money sink so extra liquidity doesn't end up driving up the prices of tangible goods.
If you want to keep most of the social programs, that's your opinion, but it's not the opinion of many people who advocate for UBI. One justification for UBI is that other social programs would be eliminated. If we're not going to eliminate all other social programs (perhaps even most other social programs besides cash welfare), then that means the cost/benefit has that much more to go.
On a related topic to all this, we need to balance the budget permanently, and soon. Thanks to irresponsible spending, the amount of money we're paying bankers for the privilege of having lent us money in the past is more than the military budget, and eventually it'll surpass all discretionary spending. If we don't fix this problem, forget about UBI -- we won't have any social programs at all because we'll be sending all the money to bankers. Talking about adding as much spending as the entire personal income tax haul, we're also far behind on just taxing what we spend in the first place.
A lot of people say that government debt isn't like normal debt so we shouldn't worry about it because such debt can help grow the economy, but economists have repeatedly found that a debt/GDP of over 100% reduces economic growth, so that argument is not something one can rely on forever, and particularly not when the gross debt to gdp is at 126%, a higher level than at the end of world war 2.
https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-growth-decade-studies
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S
Here's some other sources of information I used:
A look at the 2022 federal budget, CBO: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58891
Top 10 largest landowners in the US: https://www.proag.com/news/top-10-largest-landowners-in-the-u-s-revealed/#:~:text=The%20nation's%20largest%20private%20landowners,Four%20Sixes%20Ranch%20in%20Texas.
The 2023 farmer return is projected to be about $29 per acre: https://www.agweb.com/news/business/taxes-and-finance/2023-farmer-returns-projected-25-acre-80-lower-2022#:~:text=The%202023%20farmer%20return%20is%20projected%20to%20be,2019%20when%20the%20return%20averaged%20%2429%20per%20acre.
In total, there are 1.3 billion acres of private land: https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-week-mapping-private-vs-public-land-in-the-united-states/
Productivity is disconnected from wages: https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-growing-employer-power-have-generated-a-productivity-pay-gap-since-1979-productivity-has-grown-3-5-times-as-much-as-pay-for-the-typical-worker/#:~:text=Productivity%20and%20pay%20once%20climbed,released%20ahead%20of%20Labor%20Day.
America to soon spend more on debt maintenance than defense: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/10/11/america-may-soon-be-spending-more-on-debt-service-than-defence
Brookings institute paper on UBI and how it has major flaws similar to what I've been saying: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/UBI-ESG-Memo-082319.pdf
Land use in the United States, showing urban land use is about 3%: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/land-use-america-agriculture-nature-urban/
Urban vs. rural population, showing that urban population makes up 81%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/985183/size-urban-rural-population-us/
The cost of land use restrictions: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18110/revisions/w18110.rev3.pdf
sj_zero 11 months ago
It seems to me that the reality is that there's going to be a sovereign debt crisis soon, and a lot of the stuff we consider normal is going away. The idea that the way things are is somehow because western countries are special is borderline racist -- we're not special, we just had some big wins thanks to technological innovations and in America the post-war boom. The effects of both of those are fading, and much like countries like Venezuela that offered many social programs only to collapse and now nobody has anything, the west is going to have to pay the piper soon.