Rushkoff is the master of the shitty hot take.
Because I’m not completely unaware of history or current events.
We’ve seen the New Deal and Great Society unwound and largely destroyed over the last forty years. Even the Democrats have jumped to the front of the line to “end welfare as we know it” helping to turn what was supposed to be a UBI into a shredded safety net that doesn’t even guarantee heat during killing cold, enough food to survive on for three weeks out of the month, public housing which, if you can get it at all, has a ten year waiting list, so on and so forth. The minimum wage is not enough to live cover essentials and an apartment in any State. Public education is being gutted, and higher education means taking on crippling lifelong debt. Medicare and Medicaid are about to be eliminated, and the Public Health Service was essentially destroyed decades ago.
I could go on just listing the examples for hours.
And you blithely say “Oh, well, it’s a negotiating process”
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lol okay bro
Automatic COLA increases wasn’t added to Social Security until 1975, but keep believing that the New Deal Social Security was perfect as-is.
Depends on what kind of boss you have. Most companies I’ve worked with reward intrapreneurship handsomely. Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Or maybe you’re working for the wrong company.
And if you don’t work with a company like that, you don’t TELL your boss anything. You just go off and start your own company.
There are all sorts of problems with capitalism, but bringing good ideas to market isn’t one of them.
If you don’t understand how to get other people to fund development of your invention, chances are pretty good that you’re not going to fare any better in any other imaginable economic system.
The general career path for a technocrat is is to work for startups, developing personal experience bringing other peoples’ good ideas to fruition. That gives you the experience to recognize an actual good idea, an understanding of what kind of team you need to bring a great idea to market, and how to raise money even though you don’t have enough to do it yourself.
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How much of your pants can you tuck into those bootstraps, my dude?
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I think they are selling these
They seem to have the lack of insight that being brought up comfortably middle class and sheltered from the worst of the world can give you. Even then, becoming too ill to attend school/college at 17 con bring you to the real world fast. I just wish that I knew then what I know now, and took two years off to recover instead of being pressurised into going back to education or work as soon as I was back on my feet after six months.
On the other hand, years of physical illness because of relapsing and the ptsd from being an easy target for fascists may have given me the time to read enough to know that the game is rigged from the start.
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I like the article, but not the choice of excerpts. Rushkoff’s criticism of UBI depends on making the case for a focus on ownership, over income.
UBI also obviates the need for people to consider true alternatives to living lives as passive consumers. Solutions like platform cooperatives, alternative currencies, favor banks, or employee-owned businesses, which actually threaten the status quo under which extractive monopolies have thrived, will seem unnecessary.
Had Andrew Johnson not overturned the original reconstruction proposal for freed slaves to be given 40 acres and a mule as reparation, instead of simply allowing them to earn wage labor on former slaveowners’ lands, we might be looking at a vastly less divided America today.
Likewise, if Silicon Valley’s UBI fans really wanted to repair the economic operating system, they should be looking not to universal basic income but universal basic assets, first proposed by Institute for the Future’s Marina Gorbis.
The concept of “universal basic assets” is shorthand for a variety of things that we could do to increase the prevalence of public ownership, so that we can directly tackle wealth inequality. I’ll admit that it’s a harder prescription, compared to the rather-easily swallowed UBI, but the diagnosis is correct.
If you look at how much seniors received in today’s dollars back then, you’d smack yourself awake. It wasn’t until the mid-'70s that both SS and average wages stated lagging so badly vs. inflation! You can stop pretending that the outlook for SS has been “improving” in any way since.
Take a deep breath, meditate, and recall Ronnie Raygun’s raiding of the “Social Security Lockbox” for extra credit. Sadly no, you CAN’T trust the government, at least in its current form, to properly adjust UBI for future needs.
Snarky asides aren’t debate, “bro,” and no one here claimed or implied ANYTHING about government is perfect. I actually support your basic position but your method of putting it forward stinks.
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Braying like a donkey and ignoring the evidence is not debate.
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To be fair, “if Uber’s for it, I’m against it" is not a bad rule of thumb.
Granted you probably want to check exactly why this particular thing Uber is in favour of is bad but as a starting point, it’s ok.
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This is at best, a giant hedge, with ‘in it’s current form’ doing a hell of a lot of work, and at worst, one of these self-fulfilling prophecies where edgy distinction-heighteners admit that we could do XYZ, and XYZ would make people’s lives better in the present, but since XYZ wouldn’t end capitalism as we know it, we can’t possibly support XYZ because it would only delay our Historically Inevitable socialist future.
Listen to yourselves: oh, we could give money to the millions of people who labor in child-rearing and home-making for no wages, but why would be work to remedy a historic theft of labor when we could re-hash a bunch of half-baked ideas about the Owership Society for the next forty years? I mean, it’s not like this labor is going anywhere, amirite?
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Nope! It’s simple reality; “hedge” my left butt cheek.
Am I for UBI? Yes.
Will our current government administer UBI properly? No.
Can we change that? Yes.
Our government, in its current form, not only is incapable of running a UBI program with anything approaching sanity, the concept, itself, is antithetical to many, if not most Congresscritters. If you think SS is doing well, you need to stop drinking dry cleaning solvent while you smoke carpet lint (pick one or the other).
You can stop trying to place words in my mouth now; you’re not as good at it as you think you are =).
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I think SS is doing better than it would have if it was left untouched from the moment of its creation. The original program didn’t cover as many people (spouses, minor children, disabled), didn’t account for COLA increases at all, didn’t include medial entitlements like Medicare or SCHIP, all of these things have been added under the provisions of the original law whenever the political coalition that originated that law has been able to muster control of the government. The point is, we have been continually tweaking how SS works from basically day one, of course it and any other entitlement programs can be modified to better account for inflation, provided the branches of government are controlled by the right people.
Now this is where the leftist pundit teleology kicks in, and we get the neat story that Democrats are out of power because they were insufficiently leftist, ignoring both the massive re-structure of politics along racial lines after the CRA passes and long-term migration patterns have us headed for a situation where 30 percent of the population picks 70 percent of Senators by 2050. It can’t possibly be that left-leaning politics have been on decline for the past 40 years due to a combination of bigotry and structural features of US Federalism, it must be Late Capitalism!
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Consider several alternatives:
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Means tested, with reduction in payout based on income. Say we have it so that for every dollar you earn, you loose a dollar in UBI income. Say someone is working a minimum wage job. Why would they continue working at all? If you make it loose 50 cents on the dollar or 25 cents on the dollar it makes it a bit better, but it’s still a backwards incentive.
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Means tested with a cliff. Once you hit say, 24K in earnings per year, you loose your UBI. People would never accept pay raises above the 23K mark. People would actively quit because loosing the UBI would make that a very bitter promotion. Again, you could phase it out, but that only makes it marginally better.
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Tax income (other than the UBI) slightly higher, and eliminate the standard deductions. Everyone gets the UBI check. It’s offset by slightly higher federal taxes. There is no income cliff, there is no disincentive to work from dollar one to dollar one million. I’d like to see a revision and simplification of the tax code at this time too, but that’s more of a personal thing.
I think if we means test the checks, it is going to cause a permament underclass of unemployed people who don’t have the ability to create any income or get off the UBI - it isn’t a UBI, it’s a persistent welfare state. It will also cause resentment between the people who do not get the checks and the people who do. It will be an incentive for people to NOT work, and not to make “partial incomes”. It would eliminate a lot of the potential economic improvements and eliminate the potential for the small businesses to spring up and create an economic boom.
Basically, if you means test the UBI, it leads to slavery.
If you do not means test the UBI, it leads to freedom.
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