Soylent Puppy Chow.
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You replied to a long comment of mine that detailed the very issue that you’re asking about here ???
Not rich, but depending on the UBI proposal you could live comfortably off this, particularly if you inherited a low maintenance family home with a large garden.
Furthermore, I can write up a realistic microeconomic model with disincentives from UBI as well. The pro-UBI case rests on simplistic modelling of disincentives.
I didnt think that was the idea. My impression, (and my impressions are often wrong) was that a UBI set a floor for compensation. One might hope that people will still have an incentive to work - its just that that incentive is no longer to merely exist. The minimum necessary for existence will be covered.
But perhaps you are right. Perhaps there are jobs which no one will do once they figure out that they dont have to do them. But is that any way to run an economy anyway? Reserve armies of labor are not necessarily optimal. And maybe we can hire more people to work out how to build robots to empty septic tanks or snake toilet lines.
Apologies if I’ve misread your post, but I don’t think “more people under one roof receive a multiplier effect on their benefit income” is a terribly valid reason to introduce means-testing to a benefits program designed to eliminate poverty, so I was curious if you had more material to back up that claim. At most I think it would be reasonable for a UBI program to factor in regional cost-of-living to ensure a more equitable distribution of end-result financial support throughout the country, but our existing benefit systems seem to get along well enough without more than a periodic federal-level adjustment. (I think it could be reasonably argued that a regional COLA would create a perverse incentive to move to areas on the edges of high-COLA regions, where the true cost of living isn’t as high as the average, which could contribute to additional suburban sprawl and put further strain on other social systems and infrastructure.)
The whole point of a UBI program, though, is that it’s a single amount that goes to everyone, regardless of how much they need it. The homeless vet I passed on the way to work would get as much as I would get, and so would Jeff Bezos. A single person living alone would get it, and so would each person in a multi-acquaintance apartment rental. One could perhaps attempt to mitigate a perverse incentive to produce large-family households by either holding a child’s UBI in escrow – or simply not disbursing a full UBI benefit to them – until they can legally start to claim it for themselves (using the dependent rules that are already in place for taxes seems like a good way to administer that), but a universal basic income, like a minimum wage, is there to provide a floor for people, not a ceiling; UBI just goes further by serving as a guarantee to every citizen that they deserve to exist even if capitalism doesn’t find them valuable. Means-testing that is rather antithetical to the purpose.
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And of course UBI will not keep pace with inflation. It won’t be enough to cover food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and medical care. And even as it shrinks the rich and conservatives will find ways of making it more difficult and degrading to obtain. Look for pauper’s oaths, work requirements, and a sliding definition of “basic” that means dark people get nothing while whites in Red States get something.
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That’s why I say it’s not necessarily a bad thing- it might accelerate automation of jobs that no one wants to do anyway.
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It might take some imagination. Isn’t civilization the act of rising above the law of the jungle?
I don’t propose ending all trade, just that associated with the basic necessities of life.
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…which is why the main prerequisite for fixing anything is to first break the power of the white supremacist plutocracy. Empowering the working class is not an optional extra.
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WTF Are you to say who gets to comment on the issues of the day?
As The Rock would say, “Shut your mouth, and know your role.”
I suppose that’s the question - does it? I confess I feel the same way but I don’t have any actual evidence to suggest that it does. Is it really a problem or is that just the nagging finger of the big nanny in our heads telling us that people have to work?
I genuinely don’t know.
I think this has been tried (in the UK at least something similar was attempted but as always, it was done in about the worst possible way).
As others have pointed out, it’s all very well learning a craft but at present unless the person teaching you sees some monetary benefit (or at least a lack of major harm) in teaching you and you see a monetary benefit in learning, it is very hard to justify doing that.
It becomes a lot easier to justify when you know that you don’t have to depend on your income from your craft to survive.
At present the problem is that you take your ceremonial trowel and plum bob or whatever it is master masons get and there is very little for you to do with your skill and expertise that justifies you obtaining it.
In a world where some people receive so much money that there is no conceivable way they or their descendants could ever spend it all while others are (through no fault of their own) left in a position where they can realistically do nothing of any economic value except consume (so that the first group of people get even more money), there has to be some better way of doing things.
I wasn’t specifically thinking of the rich but yes, the idle/unproductive in general. The idle rich can take care of themselves.
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I’m trying not to be longwinded. The bullet points:
I agree with you about most things, especially that the individual/collectivist distinction is counterproductive. de Cleyre is my fav Ye Old Anarchist.
The idea that anarcho-communism is baseline anarchism is axiomatic in NA, but would be unrecognizable elsewhere, e.g. Indonesia, Brazil, Italy, etc. Our beautiful idea is too big for any political program.
Does anyone still think Stirner or the individualists are capitalists? I hope not.
Some anarchists, generally syndicalists or platformists, have been explicit about anti-individual majoritarian policies.
I think that it is very interesting that one of the big concerns is that some people would be out in front of the telly for their entire lives instead of doing stuff.
I can’t imagine doing that; in my opinion, it would be a horid existence.
But… I could imagine backpacking through the world or spending years photographing nature or working on my poem. And in the end, most of that is exactly the same for the rest of society as me sitting on my duff watching TV.
So I guess if it brings people joy; as long as it is by choice and not an expected and directed choice… I kind of feel that they can do as they wish.
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Well shit you shoulda posted that. You came in hot!
I can’t imagine a UBI implementation that doesn’t function as an advanced cybernetic exercise, but I’m broke and hopeless enough to go for some totalitarian bread and circuses.
UBI has inefficiencies and it causes distortions. That’s where the idea to means-test comes from in the first place; to not use a spraying approach, but top try to aim for those in need.
“(…)a universal basic income (…) to provide a floor for people (…)”
Except it doesn’t, and I already explained why. You either end up with a way too low floor, so you cannot do all-in on UBI and need some other welfare programs as well OR you raise the floor for the neediest and end up paying a quite comfortable (way more than just avoiding poverty) income to others.
As I wrote; I did the math on this and once you do, the UBI doesn’t look all that elegant any more; it looks defective.
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When your piece against UBI features no actual evidence, or even an actual quote from a real person, then I’m going to question the basis of your ideological conclusion. Again, Rushkoff has no background in economics, has not referenced any of the actual pilot programs, and the thrust of his argument seems to be “if Uber’s for it, I’m against it.” It’s nonsense.
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I would say yes, it would be a problem, if a growing percentage of people did that in the long term.
But I also think that would not happen; my gut feeling is that the number of people who’d settle for a life of passive slobhood on UBI is quite small, and they aren’t especially productive members of the society in the current set-up either.
In any case, I’d think the positive effects of UBI would heavily outweigh the drain of both the couch potato demographic and the “drone” types.
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Maybe I’m thick, but I’m still failing to see how “people who pool their resources get more benefit from UBI” is a structural problem that means the entire concept is defective. We don’t set minimum wage requirements such that people who live with another employed roommate or are married to another employed person make less because they don’t “need” that extra money. The entire point of a floor is that it’s a thing you can’t fall beneath. Lots of people will end up being above the floor, either because they live with someone else, have a family, live in a place with a super-low cost of living, or just still want to hold down a normal 9-5 job. That’s fine. There is a specific question to be addressed as it relates to multi-child households and the distorting effect that minors having a full UBI payment sent to their parents would create, but “UBI is broken” is not the conclusion I think most people would immediately leap to when confronted with that question. Apart from that, you haven’t really presented any evidence for why it’s so flawed beyond “I’m an economist”.
Means-testing is a failed concept that has done nothing to actually improve the delivery of benefits programs, while doing a whole lot to improve the misery of people who are just on the outer edges of needing them. It has been used by whoever’s in power to arbitrarily start excluding whoever they please (read: the poors) from any given program by changing the means by which people are tested, and the administrative overhead of trying to make sure that only the really needy and actually deserving get benefits is a huge drag on the cost of the whole system. Just look at what Reagan and the Republicans did to welfare programs in the 80s and 90s, establishing often-counter-productive work requirements and whining about “welfare queens” driving around in fancy Cadillacs while decent, hard-working Americans were struggling to get by. Fox News had a whole segment for a while complaining about things like a person using their SNAP benefits to buy some shrimp, and that people on these kinds of programs aren’t really poor because they have a refrigerator, so why are we coddling them? And let’s not even start getting into the whole “we have to drug test welfare recipients!” crap that costs many times more money to administer than it saves by locking people out of benefits for smoking pot. Means testing is nothing more than a class warfare wedge issue.
Meanwhile, look at the uproar any time anyone tries to cut Social Security or Medicare, two programs which are essentially guaranteed to everyone in the US. Even Republicans tried to use the Medicare adjustments in the ACA against Democrats to score political points, and they want to dismantle the entire system. Universal buy-in makes eliminating a benefits program much harder, because everyone is invested in receiving it.
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Why would you assume this? Yes, COLA is a constant political negotiation, because technology changes people’s lifestyles unevenly, and the composition and geographic distribution of the public changes with time, but there’s no reason to assume that UBI would be designed without taking inflation into account… y’know, like virtually every other entitlement program.
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In a nutshell, “I don’t think other people are working hard enough, so I don’t think they deserve X”. So many conservatives need to stick to worrying about themselves.
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