Ask Lemmy

I've soured on it recently, if you gave everyone $1000 a month then your landlord is just going to raise your rent by $1000.

If full socialism is out of the picture, and we could enact something like UBI I think we should expand disability and social security for those who can't work and then do a universal guaranteed jobs program for those who can work because:

1. It's way more politically viable. It's going to be almost impossible to convince a majority of Americans to "pay people to sit around all day". They'd be way more open to it if they're doing a job.

2. We could use the labor on fields that the market doesn't value, such as building green infrastructure or social work for low income individuals. This would go along with expanding the definition of a job to any work that is benefiting society. If you're a parent spending all your time caring for a young or disabled child then that's a job and you should get paid for it.

3. It you increase the wage for these guaranteed jobs that effectively raises the minimum wage since the private employers have to compete with the government. Why work at McDonald's for $10 an hour when the government is paying $15. If you raise UBI that may decrease wages as employers will use it as an excuse to pay less.

4. Even for people making above minimum wage it gives the worker more bargaining power since your employer loses the threat of throwing you onto the streets. This is also true for UBI but only if it's enough to fully cover a comfortable life which I don't think will happen due to the inflation it may cause.

5. It increases production which can help to increase supply and cover for the increase in demand giving people that much money will cause so inflation is checked more.

6. People neeed a job, as in the expanded definition I gave above, it's a big part of how people make meaning in there life. The best case for someone not working would be they just play video games all day, worst case they turn to drug use.

Yes

It's an interesting idea but I'd like to see it tried somewhere else on a large scale first.

You could cut down or outright remove various government assistance programs so there would not necessarily be more money for the poor, just not a bureaucracy to figure out if you qualify for this and that assistance.

Yes, it could coexist. Not sure why you'd think it would not. I still want more than a cubicle apartment and cheapest food.

Yes.

Let's say 50k is average income

Basic income is 10k

The average person would get 10k in UBI but pay 10k more in taxes

They will have 50k dollars

Someone that makes 100k would get the 10k in UBI but would have to pay 20k more in taxes.

They will have 90k dollars

Someone making 15k (federal min wage) would get 10k in UBI and pay nothing in taxes

They will have 25k dollars

This is simplified, but the idea is that all three people still made 165k combined. Just the person at the bottom got some help.

UBI does not increase the total amount of money in the economy. Just moves it from the rich to the poor.

The average person is still going to have the same spending power

UBI only exists to solve a problem of capitalism. Other systems could have a UI like communism. But it's the flaws of capitalism that needs it to correct itself.

Social programs exist in capitalism and have existed for years. They are just a complex way of solving a basic problem. "How do we get poor people money?"

Personally, I'd be for UBMI (Universal Bare Minimum Income). Everyone should be provided bare minimum from the society. Food, water, shelter, etc. If you can afford to pay it back, great, if you can't, that's fine too. But when people talk about UBI it's always "how much??". And it should be the bare minimum to survive and not be forced to run the capitalism rat race. If you're content to sit in a small shelter and eat 3 meals a day, the government should give it to you. The government gives it to people who break the law and are no where near as deserving

Yes.

I support UBI.

But then we should also change the way job contracts work. Because currently, "work" is mostly considered to be some 40 hour stressful thing.

A few days ago, I saw a post about negative income tax which is something that had occurred to me independently. Wasn't surprised to learn that someone with more brains had actually given it some serious thought and that it had an actual name.

That would be the sort of thing I'd be interested in being implemented, so that those who are on little to no income - especially those who can't simply "get a (better) job" for whatever reason - don't fall below the poverty line.

This is not to say that the UK benefits system (where I am) doesn't work at all, but it's often coupled with the expectation of getting the recipient back into work or to getting a better job where you don't need them any more.

It would be nice if that part went away.

UBI is the only solution to our corrupt politics. It disempowers the state and empowers individuals. You can stop relying on promises from fake heroes to help the poor, and completely eliminate poverty and crime.

AI and robotics is often cited as a catalyst for UBI. But it is deeply connected to political corruption. Our asshats will tell you that tech oligarchy deserves all our money, and nationalism means our weapons, oil oligarchs need to be given the rest of our money, and what little US manufacturing there is, needs to be protected so that you pay through the nose for stuff. All of this is BS. Let robotics/AI/China deliver us cheap stuff, and UBI afford not only to buy the cheap stuff, but let us have our time freed up in order to design/sell even more productively made stuff/tech that can improve the lives of those who will pay us for it.

UBI does not stop the rich from getting richer. It grows economy significantly, and all money trickles up to the rich. UBI does disempower the rich from stealing your money, through war and war posturing. AI, without UBI, needs to be weaponized as national security that includes the same media disinformation on your tolerance for warmongering empire that makes you/us poorer.

Every disgusting demonic evil inflicted on Americans by politicians is entirely the result of oppression and fearmongering to support unethical evil out of fear of homelessness, and healthcare access. You cannot support a sustainable world if society is on the verge of collapse and there is some war you idiotically are made to tolerate. Misery gives you no time to cure your stupidity. UBI frees us all into doing something useful instead desperately clinging to a job that does not produce anything worthwhile or competitive. 5 recruiter calls per day offering you a better job cures your stupidity.

Only as a replacement for any and all existing government welfare programs. Welfare and charity and investment are all best done decentralized and local as possible but what we have is so inefficient that this would be a huge improvement.

In my mind, a UBI would replace a lot of welfare and retirement programs and would absorb much of their budget. What would we need the whole food stamps system for if we guarantee everyone an income? What would we need social security for if you have your Universal Basic Income?

Since it's universal, we can do away with all those systems we have to make sure you "deserve" it. We can eliminate entire data centers, close entire offices. Those people (mostly office worker accountant types) can go work in some other part of the government like school systems, the FDA, the FAA, something that actually helps make society go. That should free up some budget.

Do an actual goddamn audit of the Pentagon, if we find some bullshit pet projects we don't actually need costing taxpayers billions of dollars we bust a general down to recruit and find or invent a way for him to die for his country.

Capitalism may not be able to survive alongside a UBI but I think a largely free market economy can. I'll always have my housing and food needs bet but I'd like to have an Xbox so I'll go get a job to get money to pay for one.

I tend to support it because who says no to free money, but I'm not informed enough to form a strong opinion one way or another.

Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn't companies just subside the income by raising their prices?

Not necessarily. Companies need to set prices they can compete with. Customers might just go to the competitor otherwise.

This is provided that there is competition. Monopolies can set the prices how they want, because there’s no competition.

I'm going to wait and see - there are always unintended consequences and sometime those are bad enough to kill and otherwise good idea. Other times they mean you need to tweak with the simple program to make it work. And as always politicians will have their hand in the whole thing and might completely mess up the implementation until it looks nothing like the name.

The trajectory we're headed we're going to need it or something like it.

With improvements to AI and physical automation there will be a metric fuckton of people out of employment completely and there are only so many jobs for the rebuttal of "the people will still need to maintain the robots and check the AI"

Unfortunately with our concept of ownership there will be massive resistance to it as "I own the machines that make the products/increase productivity, why should you get anything from my profit?" They're going to have to relearn the lesson Ford learned about "well paid employees are your customers" the hard way.

As it stands, at least in America, "The Century Of The Self" has lead to a complete atomization of society, every business is entirely independent from society, every individual is separate from society, so each individual owner won't see the need for a well paid workforce/population at the owners "expense" actually being beneficial to their own existence. They'll think "someone else" should deal with that issue, or worse "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" :/

Yes, full support from me. Multiple localized tests of UBI have been shown to drastically improved people's lives. I think there are multiple other measures that would need to be put in place too in order to help minimize corporations just obliterating it's usefulness by raising prices.

I'm not as informed as I'd like to be, but my understanding is that things like VAT taxes can help get around online retailers like Amazon dodging taxes, as well as CEO to base worker pay ratio caps to ensure the people in a company that are actually producing the profits get rewarded for doing so. The CEOs could keep giving themselves raises, but it would come with the requirement of actually giving everyone in the company a raise too, which, quite frankly, is what should happen when your employees do a good enough job to bring in record profits.

My understanding is that Alaska already has something similar in nature to a UBI where every citizen gets a dividend from the state each year based on taxes collected from certain businesses. This is a dim recollection from me and I am probably completely mistating how it works/where the money comes from.

Yes, I am in support of UBI.

Yes-ish. While there are some good results from small scale tests, I'd argue that the effect it'd have on a macro level isn't fully understood. I'm all for testing it out large scale so we can get some reliable data there as well. And if it turns out that it doesn't result in inflation or corpos eating up the extra, then I'm all for it.

Yes... BUT I'd actually encourage people to consider an even better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.

As you point out, giving people money is no guarantee that their spending power will be enough to cover their needs. I've heard it said that any UBI which is sufficient is unaffordable, and any that is affordable is insufficient. I think it's still a policy we should experiment with, and I think even a small UBI could elevate poverty. But a more effective alternative is to try and provide essentials directly, free of cost.

What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare; and free food. Some of these -- like housing and food -- sound shocking and difficult, but to an earlier generation, so would the others. And we already have some of these programs for the very poor. The key to executing them is to bypass markets. Markets will always raise the cost of essentials because the demand is unlimited. Instead of paying private landlords for housing, the state or non-profit entities need to own the homes. There will still be costs associated with maintenance, but there need be no dividends or investor profits. Same with food. We might not be able to make everything in a grocery store free. But if you have well-run local gardens, they'll actually produce a substantial amount of food that you can just put in baskets by the entrance and let people take from.

Unlike UBIs, which are inherently inflationary, UBS programs are deflationary. By offering free goods they create competition against market prices and make the stuff people still pay for (with a UBI) cheaper.

If you'd like to see how all of this works, go check out the tabletop RPG my friends developed at c/fullyautomatedrpg, or the world guide for the setting at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources.