Universal Basic Income UBI - discussion, ideas

[Ifreann]

It is possible to provide all people with basic necessities, but it is impossible to provide everyone with luxury goods, one will have to take into account their labor or intellectual contribution to the economy. Apparently, the package of benefits for the existence of an unemployed bachelor can be attributed to the "package of essentials", but the package of benefits for raising his child can already be classified as luxury goods. And the state regulates the issuance of benefits, or public self-government (in a post-state classless society). Therefore, it is logical if it requires a labor contribution from those who wish to have a child - this is already a luxury, and not a basic package of personal survival.

There may be other requirements: literacy, breadth of outlook, knowledge of the psychology of education, the absence of congenital diseases. It is likely that such requirements for future parents will improve the quality of life of future generations.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Some kind of eugenics.

[Sumadia-Belgrade]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCivitas

ReCivitas Institute is a Brazilian NPO as crowd-funded Unconditional basic income pilot project in Quatinga Velho, Brazil. The project paid 30 reals a month to around a hundred members of the community for five years(2008 to 2014). In January 2016, ReCivitas launched a “Lifetime Basic Income” in the Brazilian village of Quatinga Velho, a project it hopes will serve as a model to other organizations. This new project Basic Income Startup which intends to make these payments permanent. As of January 16, 14 residents of Quatinga Velho have basic incomes, now set at an amount of 40 Reais, that they will retain for at least 20 years.

The directors of ReCivitas, Bruna Augusto Pereira and Marcus Brancaglione have also published several papers and books on the results of pilot projects. And made several speeches in Congresses, Initiatives, Universities, and Forums around the World advocating for a Universal Basic Income and experimental models like Quatinga Velho.

[Veldhaven]

I do like the idea of basic universal income. My problem withit is it's payment, it would cost trillions to provide people with a liveable income especially adjusted for inflation. Yes, you could tax people more but there is of course a finite amount of tax revenue and you have to provide other public services besides this.

Now, I would propose a full employment economy with a mandated liveable income. This way you push the expenditure from the government to private enterprise. Coupled with public healthcare, education, transport and housing most of the basic neccesities needed are affordable. I would also support regulating food prices to keep them affordable. There is no need to really provide luxury goods for everyone as these things are not really essiential in the same way. It is essiential for everyone to have a laptop and wifi? In some ways you could say yes, however the government doesn't need to provide this. With the aforementioned liveable income people would be able to buy this without sweating about it. Especially once you drastically reduce or eliminate rent.

[Haganham]

I do like the idea of basic universal income. My problem withit is it's payment, it would cost trillions to provide people with a liveable income especially adjusted for inflation. Yes, you could tax people more but there is of course a finite amount of tax revenue and you have to provide other public services besides this.

Now, I would propose a full employment economy with a mandated liveable income. This way you push the expenditure from the government to private enterprise. Coupled with public healthcare, education, transport and housing most of the basic neccesities needed are affordable. I would also support regulating food prices to keep them affordable. There is no need to really provide luxury goods for everyone as these things are not really essiential in the same way. It is essiential for everyone to have a laptop and wifi? In some ways you could say yes, however the government doesn't need to provide this. With the aforementioned liveable income people would be able to buy this without sweating about it. Especially once you drastically reduce or eliminate rent.

A large chunk of the cost would come out of existing welfare programs, as they would now be obsolete. There's no need for EBT, project housing, ect when you have UBI covering basic needs, and more importantly, no need for a paternalist bureaucracy to administrate it.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Some kind of eugenics.

scratch a communist

[Veldhaven]

A large chunk of the cost would come out of existing welfare programs, as they would now be obsolete. There's no need for EBT, project housing, ect when you have UBI covering basic needs, and more importantly, no need for a paternalist bureaucracy to administrate it.

That's true welfare would be rendered obsolete, however you still need other programs.

Housing- predatory prices could outstrip UBI (depends if you agree with a private housing market or not)

Healthcare- Public healthcare would still be needed otherwise this would be a large chunk of that UBI

Transportation- not neccesarily a large expense but encourages social mobility and enables people to spend their money across the country

One to start would be to force companies like Amazon and Walmart to actually pay their employees liveable wages, thereby reducing their welfare usage. If applied to most billionare companies that employ such low salaries, you would raise wages and the standard of living. The state wouldn't have to spend anything on this and could focus on the above mentioned services.

[Ainland]

Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax (NIT) is a fantastic idea and would help ensure people have the security of a basic income, whilst realising the benefits of capitalism. Everyone would have the dignity of a basic income, and the freedom to pursue innovative business ideas, volunteer work, caring commitments, family time, creative pursuits, or climbing the career ladder. You maintain the incentive to earn a lot, for those who want it, whilst affording dignity to those who have other priorities. I tbink it brings many benefits and, with increasing automation, could well become a reality one day

A much better approach than state handouts and filling in forms for various entitlements and benefits. Far better to empower individuals and let them make their own choices.

NIT is a better solution than standard UBI, which is unnecessarily and prohibitively expensive, and could be inflationary

[Sumadia-Belgrade]

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/10/30/20938236/basic-income-brazil-marica-suplicy-workers-party - More than 50,000 people are set to get a basic income in a Brazilian city

About 52,000 people in the small Brazilian city of Maricá in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro are set to receive a basic income set at roughly three-quarters of the national poverty line as part of a major new program to test basic income policies in the South American country.

The benefit, called the Renda Básica de Cidadania (Citizens’ Basic Income), is worth 130 reais per person per month; per recent OECD data, that’s around US$64 a month. For context, the Brazilian poverty line is set at 178 reais a month, and the minimum monthly wage for a full-time job is 998 reais; a family of four, each getting 130 reais each per month, would wind up getting over half a minimum salary from the program. Many families living just below the poverty line will be lifted above it. As of November, about half the eligible individuals will be enrolled, and enrollment is expected to be complete by early 2020.

Maricá program stands out for a few reasons. It’s not a pilot program, as with other basic income forays, it’s a policy being adopted across the municipality. Everyone who has lived in Maricá for at least three years and with low-enough income to qualify (well above Brazil’s minimum wage) will get the benefit. As a consequence, the scale is considerably larger than those of pilot programs. Finland’s pilot involved about 2,000 people; about 26,000 people total got aid through the Kenya pilot; 52,000 people are getting aid through the Maricá program.

More importantly, the Maricá program is indefinite and has a dedicated funding stream. Like a number of municipalities around Rio, Maricá gets a share of Brazil’s oil royalties; the country is the ninth-biggest oil producer in the world, just after Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The basic income program is funded out of the city budget, mostly from those royalties. That means it has a stable funding stream and is not reliant on taxes, much like the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend or the basic income program in Iran, which are both oil-funded and have proven pretty resilient.

Unlike those programs, though, the Maricá program is being set up from the beginning for evaluation. Researchers at the Jain Family Institute, a social and economic research organization based in New York, are working with Brazilian academics, primarily Fabio Waltenberg at the Federal Fluminense University, to evaluate the program, and have access to an unusual amount of data on what the benefit is spent on.

An important aspect of the Maricá basic income is that it doesn’t distribute reais: it distributes mumbuca. That’s a local currency, issued by the Banco Mumbuca in Maricá, that can only be used locally. You can stash mumbucas in your account at the Banco Mumbuca, or spend them with a card, or use your cell phone to spend and receive them. The city has offered an extremely small basic payment — about 10 mumbucas, or 10 reais, per month per person — to its poorest residents for a few years now, as detailed in the above video; the new program is a dramatic expansion of that initiative.

The usage of a local currency is a crucial feature of the project, says Paul Katz, a historian and fellow in JFI’s guaranteed income project. “The fear is otherwise the money might leave the city,” Katz explains, noting that most Maricá residents who work in the formal economy do so in the city of Rio. “The idea is [the money] remains there and forms what the broader left movement calls a ‘solidarity economy.’”

Beyond the desire to concentrate spending from the program in Maricá, the usage of an alternative currency offers distinct advantages from a study design perspective. Because all mumbuca transactions go through it, Banco Mumbuca will have detailed data on what exactly the funds are spent on, and how spending by recipients changed after getting the payments. That’s much better than some of the self-reported data other basic income evaluations have had to rely upon.

The use of mumbucas also allows researchers to easily pinpoint effects on inflation. A constant worry with large-scale cash programs like Maricá’s is that flooding in more money and stimulating more consumer spending will cause prices to increase, but there are thousands of factors that affect the spending value of a national currency, making the effects of any one program difficult to determine.

What’s more, limited experiments with a few thousand participants make conclusions about the macro economy hard to draw. Even if a 2,000-person experiment in Finland didn’t spark inflation, that tells us nothing about what a 5.5 million-person all-of-Finland policy would do.

The Maricá experiment is different: Any price effect will be localized to the city, because it’s the only place where mumbucas are usable, and being able to compare mumbucas’ trajectory to that of local currencies (which are quite common in Brazil) in other neighboring cities gives the evaluation an uncommon ability to draw conclusions on macroeconomics.

Recently, some researchers, like UC Berkeley’s Hilary Hoynes and Jesse Rothstein, have argued that too many basic income pilot programs and evaluations focus on topics where we already have considerable evidence, like whether giving out cashes reduces work effort, and not enough on questions that are not yet answered, like macro effects and “the psychological and political effects of universality.”

[Countesia]

I think at this present moment in time, guaranteed income would be more effective than full blown UBI

[Ayytaly]

UBI is useless if the rabid dog known as the market isn't muzzled and leashed.

[The Finntopian Empire]

It's a good idea for our current system and will be necessary eventually. It is better then welfare in my opinion, but a complete overhaul of modern society would be more beneficial in the long run.

[Ancaplstan]

In time UBI will happen as we will have more people then jobs. Especially when considering AI and robotics.

Which would never happen, because there is infinite amount of work. People would just move to other sectors of economy like they always did.

[Ancaplstan]

Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax (NIT) is a fantastic idea and would help ensure people have the security of a basic income, whilst realising the benefits of capitalism. Everyone would have the dignity of a basic income, and the freedom to pursue innovative business ideas, volunteer work, caring commitments, family time, creative pursuits, or climbing the career ladder. You maintain the incentive to earn a lot, for those who want it, whilst affording dignity to those who have other priorities. I tbink it brings many benefits and, with increasing automation, could well become a reality one day

A much better approach than state handouts and filling in forms for various entitlements and benefits. Far better to empower individuals and let them make their own choices.

NIT is a better solution than standard UBI, which is unnecessarily and prohibitively expensive, and could be inflationary

NIT is better than UBI and welfare but it's still bad, because the very idea of paying people for nothing is stupid and is basically subsidizing poverty.

[Ancaplstan]

I think UBI should just be enough to prevent absolute poverty (the inability to purchase basic needs such as water, food, or any form of shelter). Maybe a tiny bit left over, but really it should just be to allow people to worry less about the risk of dying from financial problems.

That's will still cost ridiculous amount of money and paying people for doing nothing isn't the best idea. It's basically subsidies for poverty.

[Rakhalia]

In time UBI will happen as we will have more people then jobs. Especially when considering AI and robotics.

Which would never happen, because there is infinite amount of work. People would just move to other sectors of economy like they always did.

There is always only ever enough useful work as the infrastructure permits. Currently the infrastructure to permit human employment is preparing to contract massively rather than expand. I'm critical of UBI for my own reasons but this is a terrible refutation of the argument presented.

[Ancaplstan]

It flat out doesn't work from what I can tell. Even the pitiful covid stimulus contributed to inflation we're seeing now, and it wasn't much that was actually given out on an individual basis. The larger economy has to be backed up by productive machines that'll do all of the work, if it isn't people. But lots of jobs can still only be done by humans.

Inflation is caused by corporate profits and price gouging, not the stimulus.

You just shown how ignorant of economics you are. That guy is 100% correct. Not only inflation statistically correlates with money supply LITTERALY ALL THE TIME the inflation also changes from time to time alot. Sometimes, especially during economic recessions prices even deflate amongst all if the economy. So did everyone became generous during the Great depression? Also before the gold standart was abolished the price deflation was a common thing, but after the government untied USD from gold and started money printing we get 2% each year at best. I guess this is just the coincidence and everyone just decided to be greedy by exactly 2-3% more each year...

[Western Theram]

I heard Germany was going to start doing this supposedly starting next year. I think it’s a good idea. With a UBI you’ll have people paying off their debts and rent which will in turn benefit the economy with less people living in poverty and more people start applying for those jobs that people say no one wants to work.

[Western Theram]

I think UBI should just be enough to prevent absolute poverty (the inability to purchase basic needs such as water, food, or any form of shelter). Maybe a tiny bit left over, but really it should just be to allow people to worry less about the risk of dying from financial problems.

That's will still cost ridiculous amount of money and paying people for doing nothing isn't the best idea. It's basically subsidies for poverty.

Sounds like a bad understanding of poverty. Poverty is a trap that’s hard to get out of. It’s not as simple as “get a job” first they need a place to live so they can take care of their basic needs like hygiene otherwise they’re not going to get hired. With rent soaring and the minimum wage not increasing to match inflation a UBI is the next best thing.

[Ancaplstan]

I heard Germany was going to start doing this supposedly starting next year. I think it’s a good idea. With a UBI you’ll have people paying off their debts and rent which will in turn benefit the economy with less people living in poverty and more people start applying for those jobs that people say no one wants to work.

That logic is just flawed, because it assumes, that this practice somehow generates wealth, which it doesn't do. There is exactly the same amount of goods and services in the economy. The only difference is how it's distributed and which behavior it incentivises. And UBI even without progressive tax subsidizes poverty and fines rich (ei more useful people) to society. Subsidization of poverty will encourage more people to lower their productivity in favor of rest. Same goes for fining higher income. Even with proportional tax UBI gives more benefits to people with lower income (since they earn less it accounts for most of the money they have) and for those with higher income it comes as a net negative (because the amount they pay in tax is way higher, than UBI).

[Krasny-Volny]

First of all, I'm not sure if there's already thread like this, if there is, I'd ask administrators to move my posts to the adequate section.

Well, I'm kind of supportive of Universal Basic Income (UBI) idea, so I thought about opening a thread about the idea.

My version of UBI would be similar to that of the american politician and entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who argued that people need some kind of base in their life, so they could build their future with the chance of not constantly thinking and being bothered by the basic needs of living, eating and having clothes.
I also support excluding other government programs like healthcare, state provided pensions, government agencies... basically whatever we agree that we don't need as a collective community, in turn to finance UBI program.

I'll discuss this further down the thread, so I invite you all to join discussion and provide your opinions (as long as you keep it civil, please) and sources on this topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS9wOdenEys - Andrew Yang explains UBI in short on Joe Rogan podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMsKLVmZJK8 - Discussion with Andrew Yang on his view about UBI and other socio-economic problems of the USA.

Eh, I don't know. I know there are people out there who need food stamps and disability payments, and people who do need to draw unemployment benefits. Especially if they have dependents.

I think that's good enough. I don't think a UBI for literally everybody regardless of disability or employment status is necessary.

I'm a semi-skilled manual laborer. Highest I ever made was >$35k a year. I never once struggled so much I thought I needed an additional payout every month just to stay afloat, even when I lived in a pretty expensive city. If I had trouble with basic needs of eating, living, and having clothes I was unemployed and could simply draw unemployment. When I was working I could always afford rent, food, and work clothes. Maybe there are people in California, Hawaii, or NY who can't survive that way - the cost of living is much higher there. But I've lived and worked in the Southwest, Midwest, and the Deep South and never had any problems.

I watched a financial literacy video the other day where a young lady down in Florida was complaining about how she worked 40 hours a week at Applebees and couldn't afford to fix her car and was $30k in debt. They showed pictures of her apartment, which had plenty of pawnable high end items. You know you've been there when you start evaluating your personal possessions to sell, like I've had to do. I don't think it ever entered her mind. She had nice clothes she didn't need. She ate out, despite her proximity to grocery stores. She had a car which she couldn't afford to fix, but didn't need, either. She lived close to downtown and could've walked to her job.

I would've sold the car for scrap, pawned all my useless electronic shit except for the smartphone, quit eating out and make a grocery budget, and never bought another shirt again. Then gone to see a credit counseler. Maybe moved out of the nice apartment and found a cheap motel with month to month contractor rates. That's financial literacy, many people - especially Americans - simply lack it.

Call me a cynic, but I think a lot of the reason people think they need a UBI is because they live in an exceptionally expensive area like the ones I named above or they're like this young lady and just want to keep up with a middle class lifestyle they simply cannot afford.

[Ancaplstan]

My main issue consistently now with UBI is that while it provides cash to buy commodities, it's still leaving most everything a commodity. Something to be bought and sold. I reject the idea that housing, hopefully until the day I die, should be a thing bought and sold as a commodity on a market. Same with healthcare. A basic goods garaunteed would greatly expand the framework that one can have to live in dignity.

It’s also within the UN Declaration of Human Rights so you could argue in the name of human rights we should do this.

Just because some morons in UN declared smth a human right doesn't mean it is.

[Western Theram]

I heard Germany was going to start doing this supposedly starting next year. I think it’s a good idea. With a UBI you’ll have people paying off their debts and rent which will in turn benefit the economy with less people living in poverty and more people start applying for those jobs that people say no one wants to work.

That logic is just flawed, because it assumes, that this practice somehow generates wealth, which it doesn't do. There is exactly the same amount of goods and services in the economy. The only difference is how it's distributed and which behavior it incentivises. And UBI even without progressive tax subsidizes poverty and fines rich (ei more useful people) to society. Subsidization of poverty will encourage more people to lower their productivity in favor of rest. Same goes for fining higher income. Even with proportional tax UBI gives more benefits to people with lower income (since they earn less it accounts for most of the money they have) and for those with higher income it comes as a net negative (because the amount they pay in tax is way higher, than UBI).

>richer people are automatically more useful because they aren’t poor.
And if helping the homeless dude out on the street who literally cannot afford to work means taxing billionaires like bezos (who isn’t really that useful) I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. In fact unless bosses start paying their employees a living wage they are t going to get much production done. Good pay=good productivity

[Dumb Ideologies]

UBI is a bureaucratically simple way of ensuring that everyone at least theoretically has enough to get by, which then ideally opens up more administrative resources to trying to assist those still in poverty due to addictions or other mental health issues. Much preferable to the current bollocks of complex and contradictory arrays of benefits and sanctions regimes that are obsessed with the risk of accidentally giving money to someone that "doesn't deserve it".

[Zaeylia]

The idea behind U.B.I. dates back further than Yang, it dates back even before Georgism. As an advocate of a "Directed Economy", I can safely assure you of an error pattern in these. They view "wealth" in fiscal capital or at least hold dear the belief that "wealth redistribution" should be enacted through money itself. That's a major issue.
States today don't directly control their national/central banking/reserve system. The state government can usually go no further than appoint a figurehead "Governor-Executive". Instead, the government must send "signals" to the central bank in order to manipulate the national monetary policy. I don't think I need to explain how that might be a problem on it's own.
Regardless, I support a Universal Basic Capital- for example, in the 19th century you had a lot of "free peasantry" appear as opposed to "tied peasantry". The difference is that the former owned their parcel of land and had the right to reap any and all rewards which came from it (food). Nowadays, off the top of my head, maybe a better UBI framework would involve distributing basic, physical needs to everyone? Starting with maybe, shelter?

[Ancaplstan]

>richer people are automatically more useful because they aren’t poor.
And if helping the homeless dude out on the street who literally cannot afford to work means taxing billionaires like bezos (who isn’t really that useful) I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. In fact unless bosses start paying their employees a living wage they are t going to get much production done. Good pay=good productivity

On the free market the only way to earn wealth is by providing other people with something they are willing to pay for. Hence in the free market the richest people are those who helped society the most. Obviously the modern economy is not a free market. Some people did not earn their wealth by homesteading production and trade. Bezos and largest top managers are most likely one of them, since their businesses are the largest subsidies recievers. Now I also don't really understand what do you mean by "can't afford to work" working on a job is supposed to make money isn't it? Well if you are so dead sure that paying higher wage for workers will actually benefit the business why don't you use this information as an entrepreneur on a market. Loan of get some seed capital and use this useful piece of information to outcompete others.

[Ancaplstan]

Sounds like a bad understanding of poverty. Poverty is a trap that’s hard to get out of. It’s not as simple as “get a job” first they need a place to live so they can take care of their basic needs like hygiene otherwise they’re not going to get hired. With rent soaring and the minimum wage not increasing to match inflation a UBI is the next best thing.

Poverty is a trap and UBI and all of the stuff you mentioned makes it even more dangerous.
If you are not going to work to the office and the job doesn't require any qualification or experience you will get hired pretty much regardless or how you look. Unless there is some artificial barrier that doesn't allow you to negotiate the price with the employer in order to outcompete more qualified and experienced workers like minimum wage...
Raising minimum wage will only hurt people it's supposedly should help. Why would I pay some inexperienced street bum, when I can hire someone who is more familiar with the workplace? And I can't hire both, because that wouldn't be profitable, because I'm forced to pay so much. Minimum wage creates unemployment and its not refutable by any experience (not that the experience says otherwise), because the demand curve IS ALWAYS DOWN-SLOPPING. And effective price floors ALWAYS result is surplus of various significancy, depending on how much higher the floor set over the equilibrium.
And UBI, considering how much it would cost will be ridiculously inflative, unless the government will put it instead exiting welfare (which will neither happen).