2020 US Election (Part One)

[innonimatu]

UBI is a terrible idea, for a number of reasons. Didn't we had a thread on that some time ago?

 

[Lexicus]

Biden has officially entered the ring, have to admit I kind of thought he wouldn't, he waited longer than I thought he was going to.

 

[Gori the Grey]

No hurry in his case. The initial battle is for name recognition, and he already has that. The other early battle is for staff, and there will be some who would have held off committing to another candidate until he announced one way or another.

 

[rah]

He's liberalish? centre-leftish? It's hard to say. But his big thing is UBI so I hope he makes some coverage just to promote that. He's also weird/outside the norm/leftish on some other stuff, think he wants full decriminilzation of all drugs but I don't think he's as economically radical (outside UBI) as the Bernie/Warren wing. I think he's a smart guy and he has no chance and he wouldn't even make my top 5 probably, but I hope a few powerful people at least consider UBI because of his run in a best case scenario.

SS and Medicare are headed towards insolvency despite heavy taxation for them, so I doubt a bigger version in the form of UBI is likely anytime soon. Just not viable.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Yeah, to me UBI seems a heavy lift. I was tempted to make the following joke to this comment:

I don't think he's as economically radical (outside UBI)

Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln.

i.e. UBI is plenty radical because it runs against millennia of ideology (not just modern conservative ideology) that says pay is for work.

 

[Lexicus]

i.e. UBI is plenty radical because it runs against millennia of ideology (not just modern conservative ideology) that says pay is for work.

??? Most premodern societies were dominated by aristocratic elites for whom the idea of working for pay was deeply demeaning.

SS and Medicare are headed towards insolvency

No they are not.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The problem with a UBI is not that it gives pay without work but that in most proposals it is funded through taxes on productive work. It should be funded through land value taxes and Pigouvian fees on negative externalities like pollution. Land rents rightly belong to everyone equally, not to a privileged set of elites with government granted titles.

 

[Gori the Grey]

??? Most premodern societies were dominated by aristocratic elites for whom the idea of working for pay was deeply demeaning.

Most of the people in those societies worked for pay, often nothing more than the food to keep them working.

 

[rah]

No they are not.

It depends on your definitions.
The articles I was basing my claim on was comparing what is being taken in vs benefits being paid out and when these funds would be depleted.
https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare-spending-and-financing/
For Social security, it will be when benefits will have to be reduced
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html

If you would like to use a different definition, I'd be happy to hear them. But how they are funded will have to be changed for benefits to be continued to be paid.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The problem with a UBI is not that it gives pay without work

That may not be one of the problems with it, but it will be one of the problems with selling it.

 

[Traitorfish]

Most of the people in those societies worked for pay, often nothing more than the food to keep them working.

Most peasants produced their own subsistence. The elite extracted a portion of that by rent, sharecropping, taxation or tribute, but very rarely appropriated all product with the intention of passing a portion of that back to their workers. That doesn't really work, as a model, unless you're producing for market at a large scale, and most for-market production until relatively recently was carried out by forced labour- either slave, convict, or corvée. When peasants did work for wages, it was on a temporary basis at certain times of the year, and most usually for each other, rather than for elites.

 

[El_Machinae]

SS can easily be insolvent, because it was created in a system where commodified profits were quickly shuttled outside of the taxation base that allowed the payment of SS. If it's funded through a direct tax on wages, and the number of workers drops, it can quickly run into trouble if wages didn't track with growth. If SS were paid for out of new profits in the system, it would work just fine.

 

[rah]

From most articles I've read, the easiest solution would be to eliminate the cap on employee contributions. The cap on employer contributions could even stay the same. To me, this would be the most fair.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Most peasants produced their own subsistence

That's all I mean. That's a thing, deeply embedded in the Western mind: in the sweat of thy brow shall thou eat thy bread. A lot of people are going to balk at just giving bread and not tying it to work. I'm not saying it can't be overcome. I'm just saying the proponents of UBI are going to have to find a sales strategy for overcoming this association. It's deeply embedded. The freethinkers on a site like this can cast if off as an outdated relic: to get it voted in as a national policy is going to be a lift.

 

[Farm Boy]

Hands will always find work. The wings of flies are just so interesting.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Idle hands don't find work, they work elsewise. (Might be what you're saying with the fly-wing thing) And little fixed phrases like that are just evidence for how deeply embedded is this prejudice.

 

[Farm Boy]

When it's buried bone deep, the same sentiment echoed with different words across cultures, there's good reason to look for how the truth responds to different situations.

The definition of "work" is the wiggle word in this conversation. People are what they do not what they say, and they learn, and adapt, and change. What do we want them doing?

 

[Takhisis]

UBI is plenty radical because it runs against millennia of ideology (not just modern conservative ideology) that says pay is for work.

Hmmm, not quite. Sure, it's the spiel ‘hard-workers’ and whatever that bankers and investors and ‘producers’ and so on use to justify money generating more money, but those people aren't doing much ‘work’.

Simultaneously, in the specific case of the US you still have organisations who defend the cause of slavery.

And also ‘pay is for work’ when you have legal minimum wages below the minimum living wage just states outright, in legalese, that work does not entitle one to be paid fairly.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Hmmm, not quite. Sure, it's the spiel ‘hard-workers’ and whatever that bankers and investors and ‘producers’ and so on use to justify money generating more money, but those people aren't doing much ‘work’.

Oh, that's absolutely correct. But you're not going to get any leverage for UBI by saying "everyone should be allowed to work as little as rich people work, so let's take the rich people's money and give it to everybody." Again, I'm not engaging the logic of the rationale for UBI, just making my own prediction about how hard it's going to prove to sell it. Its proponents, I think, don't know what they're up against, what basically reflex-reactions of the Western mind presently are to certain ideas.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

i.e. UBI is plenty radical because it runs against millennia of ideology (not just modern conservative ideology) that says pay is for work.

Decoupling value from work is one of the coolest facets of it, but in Yang's case he's been phrasing it this whole time mostly as "machines/AI will take all our jobs and we will need money" which is uh... a belief, for sure, but doesn't really chip away at the idea of job = human value insomuch as he suggests instead machines will destroy us all and then we will have no value anyways.