Universal Basic Income Gains Support In South Korea After COVID-19 (nikkei.com) 132
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Nikkei Asian Review: The debate on universal basic income has gained momentum in South Korea, as the coronavirus outbreak and the country's growing income divide force a rethink on social safety nets. The concept was thrust into the spotlight in the country when Gyeonggi Province Gov. Lee Jae-myung proposed a basic income of 500,000 won ($430) a year per person this year. He aims to gradually expand the figure until it reaches 500,000 won a month -- roughly the equivalent of South Korea's social welfare payments. An annual $430 payout means the program will cost $21.3 billion a year, which likely can be funded through budgetary adjustments. But a monthly $430 will cost $256 billion, which is over half the national budget.
"We cannot get to 500,000 won a month right now," Lee said. "But we can get there in 15 to 20 years by bolstering taxes on land, which is a public asset, carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and digital services developed using data we have produced." Basic income "will be a major topic in South Korea's next presidential election," Lee said. Lee is advocating distributing basic income in the form of a regional currency -- an experiment Gyeonggi Province already tested with coronavirus-linked assistance. Each resident received 100,000 won, about $85, in a regional currency, which needed to be spent in three months, allowing the entire sum used for the program to be recirculated back into the local economy. "Fourteen progressive lawmakers submitted a bill last week that would create a new committee to discuss how basic income can be funded, with plans to start distributing 300,000 won a month in 2022 and at least 500,000 won a month in 2029," the report adds. "The lawmakers envision diverting some regional taxes to a special budget to fund basic income. Shortfalls could be addressed by streamlining redundant social benefits and reviewing tax relief programs."
"We cannot get to 500,000 won a month right now," Lee said. "But we can get there in 15 to 20 years by bolstering taxes on land, which is a public asset, carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and digital services developed using data we have produced." Basic income "will be a major topic in South Korea's next presidential election," Lee said. Lee is advocating distributing basic income in the form of a regional currency -- an experiment Gyeonggi Province already tested with coronavirus-linked assistance. Each resident received 100,000 won, about $85, in a regional currency, which needed to be spent in three months, allowing the entire sum used for the program to be recirculated back into the local economy. "Fourteen progressive lawmakers submitted a bill last week that would create a new committee to discuss how basic income can be funded, with plans to start distributing 300,000 won a month in 2022 and at least 500,000 won a month in 2029," the report adds. "The lawmakers envision diverting some regional taxes to a special budget to fund basic income. Shortfalls could be addressed by streamlining redundant social benefits and reviewing tax relief programs."
Benjamin Franklin said (Score:4, Insightful)
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
I eagerly await the end result of this experiment.
Medicare killed the US! (Score:2)
Re:Benjamin Franklin said (Score:5, Interesting)
That was when money was a tangible item. Now it is not. We can just dump a bunch more 1s and 0s into the accounts of the mega-banks, and boom, more money!
Now, I'm sure you'll whine about inflation, and that's definitely a concern. But what always gets largely ignored during any of /.'s heated debate on UBI is the fact that for the bulk of the population, it amounts to a short-term loan. That's not really something that has a massive impact on the country's finances.
If it's funded in part through payroll taxes, I'd expect to get a $1k UBI credit on the first of the month, then lose $600 in each of my two paychecks later that month. (I make plenty of money, so I expect that I'll be paying more than I'm getting.) This really isn't going to drain the country of its money.
Where UBI shines is if I lose my job, the first of the next month that $1k hits my bank account, and there aren't any paychecks to take it from. That's an instant lifesaver, at a speed that makes unemployment seem silly.
There second place UBI shines is it gives people with no money instant liquidity. Poor people spend money. That is the economy. In study after study, we've found that the most effective form of social welfare is to give people money and let them spend it on what they think they need. The vast majority of people aren't drug addled deadbeats. They're folks who need a little help. They're a mom who needs car repairs, a dad who needs medicine, a fresh-eyed 20-something who has a business idea that won't make money for the first couple of years it takes to get established.
Giving folks like this food stamps just doesn't address their needs. Give them $1k a month, and they'll spend it on what they need to get ahead.
Ultimately, we need everyone engaged in the economy. When people fall out of the economy, it suffers. By concentrating all the wealth at the top, we've removed that money from the economy. Sure, it's in companies and the stock market, but it's not driving the economy the way retail shopping, home construction, travel, and restaurants do. In the economy, every time a dollar changes hands it tends to get taxed. Give poor people more money to spend, and they'll spend it. And that means more taxes collected, which means more money to fund stuff like UBI.
That's like the antithesis of the stock market.
Re: Benjamin Franklin said (Score:2)
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People need to start talking about _deflation_ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:People need to start talking about _deflation_ (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF, it's as if Byzantium and al-Andalus never existed. Never mind that we can also recognize progress made outside former Roman territory, and count Arabia and Persia proper, the Gupta Empire, or the Tang and Song Dynasties... loci of technological innovation and imperial power shift, and people who study these things call bullshit on the whole notion of a "dark age" [wikipedia.org] (unless they're just referring to periods without much of a historical record).
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The fall of the Roman Empire and subsequent period formerly known as the "dark ages" had nothing to do with deflation.
That period is no longer called the dark ages by most historians because we now understand the accomplishments of people during that time. Progress did not stop.
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We could do that then, only because we didn't have fast travel and a global communication network. While a lot of Europe stagnated, a lot of Arabia and China flourished. If you look at the poorest countries in the world today, the ones with the most dysfunctional governments, you'll still find people with cell phones and satellite dishes.
FFS, North Korea has very competent nuclear and rocket engineers. Somalia has a tech industry. Bangladesh has a biotechnology institute.
Kings and the Catholic church hoardi
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I guess you could consider it a short-term loan. But it's a loan that you don't have to pay back.
That's what the entire concept of a UBI hinges upon. If people continue working and generatin
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Bob Marley said :
"A hungry mob is an angry mob"
I suspect he had more direct experience with his topic than Franklin did with his.
So what? (Score:2)
You're locked down. Can't spend any of it.
Basic Math (Score:5, Informative)
Let's try some... In the USA: 330,000,000 people
Let's give them all $100 a month.
330,000,000 x 100 = 33,000,000,000 $33 Billion a month.
10 months = 33,000,000,000 x 10 = 330,000,000,000
So, in a year, 396 Billion dollars just to give everyone a paltry $100 a month. A basic living wage is roughly $3000 a month for a decent suburban middle class lifestyle. So multiply that 396 Billion times 30. Lets say 400 Billion x 30 then. 400B x 30 = 12 Trillion Dollars
So you somehow expect to find half the GDP of the USA just lying around under the couch cushions every year? You run out of other people's money awfully quickly, even if somehow you had only half the people getting UBI. Or even halved the UBI and kept it Universal. Especially when a not insignificant portion of the population now fails to produce anything at all. Seriously, how does anyone expect communism to actually work?
"Take it from the rich" is what I usually hear. But even if you took the $625 billion away from the richest 5 people in the world, you get about 5% of the way towards one year of UBI just for the USA. Expand that out globally, there are over 7 billion people in the world. It just doesn't work.
Change my mind.
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How are we currently doing it? Just use whatever revenue source we're using now, and celebrate the reduced complexity and overhead. Between the stimulus checks, all the unemployment/FEMA hacks, PPP, etc we've basically been doing it for a few months, just less uniformly and more complicatedly.
Of course you need to cut the $3000 into a third (a living wage ddoesn't need to be suburban middle-class style), but cutting 2/3 off the total still adds up
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Of course you need to cut the $3000 into a third (a living wage ddoesn't need to be suburban middle-class style)
The left is very specific about this. A living wage is at least as much as a $15/hour job earns you. $30000/year assuming 2 weeks unpaid vacation.
So yeah....
The left is notoriously bad at math tho. Their math is 330,000,000 people, $1,000,000 each, costs $330,000,000. See? It barely costs anything to make everyone a millionaire, which is why they are so angry that they arent getting what they want and that it must be racism, and they are also retarded, the real reason they arent getting what they want
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The left is very specific about this. A living wage is at least as much as a $15/hour job earns you. $30000/year assuming 2 weeks unpaid vacation.
We just paid every person collecting unemployment a full-time living wage when we sent out $600/week stimulus checks to them ($15/hr x 40 hrs/wk = $600/wk) without doing anything... How long until they have a convincing argument that people that actually do things should get the same $15/hr as a federal minimum wage?
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A basic living wage is roughly $3000 a month for a decent suburban middle class lifestyle.
The Federal minimum wage is around $1200 per month. If you have two adults working full time, it's $2400. And you should look at the number of working-age people in the US, not the total population. It's 130 million people.
So if we give every qualified worker $400 a month that would work to $624 billion per year. For comparison, the defense budget is $704 billion. The GDP of the US is $21 trillion, so that $624 billion is just 4% of it.
From purely numbers standpoint it works out.
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You want to give out $400/month...
You want to specifically give it to the people that least need it... the people with gainful employment.
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"working age" "people with gainful employment"
There are many working age people that aren't working. He's simply pulled out retirees and children.
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Quote>So if we give every qualified worker $400 a month that would work to $624 billion per year. For comparison, the defense budget is $704 billion. The GDP of the US is $21 trillion, so that $624 billion is just 4% of it.
From purely numbers standpoint it works out.
No, it doesn't.
The federal budget is $4.79 Trillion, it's 13% of the US budget.
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There is a problem that skinflint employers will pay their workers less, if they know wages are subsidised. Which means the benefit goes to the employers, not the workers.
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The Federal minimum wage is around $1200 per month.
The federal minimum wage is irrelevant to this discussion because it is not a living wage. It has not kept up with inflation for something like three decades. If it had, it would be over $15/hr. If it had kept pace with increases in total executive compensation, it would be over $30/hr. The wealthy are robbing us of our lives in exchange for chicken scratch.
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Let's try some... In the USA: 330,000,000 people
330 million is the entire population, but there's no reason to give UBI to minors ("Minors not miners!" ... "You lost me."). According to a quick Google query, the "adult" population of the US (18 and over) is 209 million. I'm sure we can whittle it down a bit for other dependents, like still in college, etc... But in any case, you're right, it would be a big number.
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>Change my mind.
Okay
Please redo the maths by removing the following people.
1) 1%ers get the UBI payment but immediately have to pay it back in tax. Please remove them from the 330 million US population.
2) Average workers get the UBI payment but immediately have to pay it back in tax. Please remove them from the 330 million.
3) Unemployed workers can get the UBI or the current dole. Since UBI is less than the Dole. Please remove them from the 330 million.
4) The prison population (0.7% in the US) costing an
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This was my thought too (Score:4, Informative)
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Marxism relies on capitalism to work, i.e. it won't work in a post-automation world. It doesn't help the workers if they own the factory when the one next door full of robots makes the same commodity products for a fraction of the cost.
Having said that there is so much disagreement over exactly what capitalism and socialism mean in Marxist terms I suppose you could argue it.
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What, half the price of the military budget, which contributes next to nothing? Sounds like a deal to me.
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What, half the price of the military budget, which contributes next to nothing? Sounds like a deal to me.
Do you have any idea how many people depend on the military spending to feed their families? Here's a mental exercise - eliminating the defense spending puts every soldier out of work, along with every private contractors on military bases, along with every defense contractor, plus everyone that supplies materiel to those defense contractors, plus every landlord that rents them housing, plus everyone that sells them food (gorcery stores and restaurants), etc.
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Salaries and benefits for our grotesquely bloated military is less than a quarter of the Pentagon's official budget, and most of those people would much rather be doing something of benefit to society. The military has one of the worst multiplier effects of anything the government does, put that money into NASA and you see a 7 to 1 return instead of 2.something to 1. At 7 to 1 the government is also now making money off taxes generated by the additional economic activity to boot.
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Do you have any idea how many people depend on the military spending to feed their families?
Yep, and it's disgusting. They're basically already on welfare with the caveat that corrupt military contractors get a cut and the welfare recipients can be sent off to die in stupid wars. Less military personnel+contractors is a good thing. They don't really produce anything of value for society. Theoretically they'd be given UBI checks and a wide open work schedule, so they'll be fine.
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A basic living wage is roughly $3000 a month for a decent suburban middle class lifestyle. So multiply that 396 Billion times 30. Lets say 400 Billion x 30 then. 400B x 30 = 12 Trillion Dollars
Question - so you want to award every woman that chooses not to abort their child $3,000/month for 18 years? That's going to hurt Planned Parenthood's revenue stream...
You have redefined the "basic" in Universal Basic Income to mean "a decent suburban middle class lifestyle".
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UBI is the liberal version of conservative heaven. It's just as much of a religious movement. People on the right believe that some deity will provide them heaven, people on the left believe "the rich" will pay for UBI.
In the USA as much as 47% of all individuals pay no federal income tax whatsoever (I'd provide a link to source, but don't want to argue over credibility, so google it and find the source you trust to verify). That means in the US the upper income half is already supporting the lower half of
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So, just expanded welfare then?
UBI has the keyword right in the name: Universal. When we start saying take from the richest and give to the poorest, it's just an expanded welfare program at that point.
Your scenario only disincentivizes people from making over $25,000 or over $150,000, which in both cases drives down the capability for the system to work. If I'm a fast food worker making $15,000 a year and I get the opportunity to take a factory job making $30,000 a year it would essentially be a $5,000 pay
It'll come to the US. (Score:5, Insightful)
First, other countries try it out, work out the kinks, and figure out how to make it effective.
Meanwhile, The republicans pack the court with 5 partisan justices. Roberts has lost all control Come election day in November, it looks like Trump initially wins because democrats are MUCH more likely to vote by mail. That night, the numbers look in Trumps favor. Trump declares all mailed in votes fraudulent, declares victory, and orders all mail-in vote counting stopped. The republicans back him because.. well, that's what they do. It goes to the supreme court which issues a 5-4 ruling in his favor. Roberts objects but he's lost control. Millions of legitimate votes go uncounted.
Fast forward 4 years. Republicans are happy but 55% of the public has lost faith in democracy at the national level. The ACA is dead. Nobody with a pre-existing condition can get health insurance. Social security is privatized. Medicare is cut to the bone and medicaid doesn't even exist anymore. People are starving to death and dying in the gutters due to medical conditions like during the victorian era. Roe v. Wade is dead and all all reproductive health choices are made by the states. Abortion is illegal in about half the states and about a third of the states have straight-up outlawed birth control. Taxes are cut to the bone but spending on the military has ballooned. Exploding deficits are causing inflation and interest on the national debt is skyrocketing, making it impossible to sustain. The only two options: default or mass-scale money printing followed by a period of hyperinflation. It becomes clear that the US is no longer the world leader, taken down by self-inflicted wounds. Massive numbers of productive, educated people and professionals are leaving for Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Most of the wealthy people have decamped for other countries and taken their fortunes with them. Capital controls are put into place in order to deal with this, ending the long run of civil liberties enjoyed by US citizens.
If recovery is even possible, it takes generations for the US to get back what was dismantled. And recovery isn't guaranteed. The collapse of the USSR has shown this - once the productive, educated and wealthy people flee, the recovery takes over a century.
Eventually, some long time down the road, society takes control back from the conservatives. But, like everything in history, when the pendulum swings it goes in the other direction. Having given conservative rule a try and watched it fail, the country gets behind socialism and stuff like a UBI.
I'd really rather not see this come to pass, but I'll give it a 50/50 chance. We're right on the edge of real trouble like we haven't seen since the 60s.
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That said, I agree with you that we are at a junction in history where we should think harder than usual about the coming elections and how the future will be affected by the outcome.
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Honestly, I just hope that whoever wins, it's a landslide. If it's Biden, it needs to be so overwhelming that the right-wingers have no choice but to accept that society gave them the middle finger. If Trump wins, it needs to be decisive enough that we, as a country, have absolutely nobody to blame except ourselves for the outcome. A close election will be VERY bad this time around.
Yes, t
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According to polls at the moment, Biden has a slim lead. By slim, it's looking like 4 or 5 percent ahead, possibly less depending on which state you're looking at.
That margin may play out in the actual vote, but polls aren't always an accurate predictor. And even so, polls that close don't scream landslide. It's close enough that it wouldn't be completely unreasonable to assume the electoral college could swing the opposite direction of the popular vote again.
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I'm not really a fan of UBI as an idea. I much prefer capitalism.
Which economic system do UBI recipients spend their money in? I'm glad you said this upfront so I knew not to read the rest of your long post.
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"but spending on the military has ballooned"
What makes you think Biden will spend less? According the news 500 senior military brass want Biden in the White House. They are not backing Biden to shrink the military industrial complex.
By the way, it was the Democrats threatening to pack the court, which means add extra justices, all hard left, until the decisions go their way. Franklin Roosevelt made that same threat, and one middle of the roader shifted his presumed vote on a couple of important cases to pre
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The same thing happened regarding fiscal responsibility in the 80s. The republicans used to be the "low taxes and small government" while the democrats were "high taxes and large government". They offered different visions of government but ultimately both were fairly good about balancing spending vs taxation.
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You want fiscal responsibility? There's only one game in town, and it's the Dems.
Question: Which party was it that kept the federal government shut down until they got an extended national debt ceiling vacation of TWO YEARS?
Answer: It wasn't the Republicans. [forbes.com]
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What makes you think Biden will spend less? According the news 500 senior military brass want Biden in the White House. They are not backing Biden to shrink the military industrial complex.
They are backing Biden because he is not Trump.
No need to over-complicate things.
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I recall an interview with Pelosi when Obama was elected, heralding century of Democratic rule.
The hubris was palpable.
I see the same coming from the right, of the Providence of Trump and the new GOP.
"In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends"
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So...... you feel that Trump is pretty much the same as other republican presidents? No. I completely disagree. Neither Bush nor Reagan talked like this. I NEVER thought any of those presidents were threats to democracy. Even during the height of the Gore/Bush election where the supreme court ha
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And Gore took it like a man, conceded, wished his opponent well and urged the country to unify behind the leader. THAT'S leadership.
Seriously? Gore waited 6 weeks to concede - Gore conceded December 13th [history.com] - after he exhausted all conceivable (and frankly several inconceivable) challenges to the election results in a certain county in Florida.
Are you going to give Trump six weeks to concede and then hold him up as an example of "leadership"?
Re: It'll come to the US. (Score:2)
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You lost me at:
Trump declares all mailed in votes fraudulent,
How does that happen? When did Trump suddenly become a dictator? States, not the Federal Government run the elections, the President can not simply declare votes valid or invalid. If the President could do that, the 2000 Gore v. Bush election might have looked a little different.
Walk me through the legal process that enables Trump to declare all mailed in votes fraudulent...
Re:It'll come to the US. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you asked, Trump will declare that the fraudulent mail in votes are a threat to national security, and use that loophole in the constitution to enact whatever he wishes to correct it, because the national security excuse provided for in the constitution does not actually have any checks or balances on it to ensure that some real threat to national security actually exists, the threat apparently only needs to exist to best understanding of the president.
Trump has used and abused the "national security" excuse on multiple occasions during his presidency already where it had no basis in objective reality, and there is every chance that he will do so again on election night unless he has the popular majority.
Re: It'll come to the US. (Score:2)
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Walk me through the science that justifies keeping the schools closed...(Teachers being scared isn't science)
Watch the Democrat lawyers carefully, methodically remove every protection that enables us to trust "vote by mail":
- Don't require postmarks
- Make vote harvesting legal
- Loosen delivery deadlines
- Challenge laws that require matching signatures on votes
- etc.
Democrats are fighting everything that makes vote-by-mail safe, setting the stage for challenges if they don't like the election results.
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Neither do polling stations.
The polls are open for two, three, or more weeks in most US states, if everyone can and does vote on the same day, can we cancel early in-person voting?
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Most people vote on election day.
And in particular, most people try to squeeze in voting after work rather than taking the time off of work to do so, so around dinner time the numbers rise well into the thousands by my observations.
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Democrats, for example Hillary Clinton, are telling Joe Biden to never concede, to fight every decision... [nbcnews.com]
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You would say that based on what, exactly? Because the evidence says voter fraud in general is extremely rare, let alone voter fraud by mail.
If mail voting is good enough for our military, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us?
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You say that like the evidence is actually going to matters to Trump. If as the election evening goes on he feels there is even the slightest chance that he could lose, he'll simply insist that fraud has happened on a massive scale as an undeniable fact, try and pass an executive order barring any further mail in votes from being counted while maintaining the position that the election is invalid. By the time this might otherwise be successfully challenged, it will be too late.
He will retaliate swif
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You will never see a 60/40 election result.
In 2016, the Electoral College results were 302 to 227, or 57% to 43%, and Hillary and countless Democrats refused to accept those results because they wanted to pretend that the popular vote meant something (because Hillary beat Trump in the popular vote by 2%).
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I'm astutely aware that a landslide democratic victory is profoundly unlikely to materialize.
That doesn't change anything that I said, however.
Carbon dioxide emissions for UBI? (Score:2)
Hang on a second, I thought those taxes were supposed to go to offset the pollution, not to finance more people to pollute (which will happen, UBI is more than likely going to result in population explosion)? And what happens when companies go green and stop burning fossil fuels, you're going to blame those green companies for sinking UBI funding?
Path to Prosperity (Score:2)
Politicians will promise anything to get votes (Score:3)
Promising UBI is just a way for politicians to grab some votes. It's completely unachievable, but most people cannot do the basic math to realize that. Let's assume $3,000 per month per person in the US, so a politician promising such UBI is pretty much saying "every US citizen will get $3,000,000 from the government at birth". If the same politician came out with "vote for me and everyone will be a millionaire", they would get laughed out of the election, but somehow promising UBI, which is mathematically more ridiculous, doesn't draw anywhere near the same response from the populous enamored with the utopian idea.
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Re:About time (Score:4)
Been hearing that all my life. Meanwhile, automation has been creating jobs all my life (and I watched the first man to walk on the moon live). I work in IT, that's part of the whole mass of jobs automation has created. Not to mention sales, shipping and marketing of automation tools, mechanical and electronic. Or fueling or providing energy and infrastructure (repair & service) for all those things. Automation has been such a blessing for creating jobs.
Your may be set, but the middle class is shrinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Been hearing that all my life. Meanwhile, automation has been creating jobs all my life (and I watched the first man to walk on the moon live). I work in IT, that's part of the whole mass of jobs automation has created. Not to mention sales, shipping and marketing of automation tools, mechanical and electronic. Or fueling or providing energy and infrastructure (repair & service) for all those things. Automation has been such a blessing for creating jobs.
Sorry, you need to get out more. You work in IT and I work in big tech. Life is good for us. 30 years ago, there were a LOT more middle class jobs for those who made different decisions than you and I. The number of middle class jobs are dwindling and the ones that are created are becoming more specialized. You can see this in IT alone. 20 years ago, if you knew your way around HTML, you could get a job easily. Now, employers are demanding more and focusing more on hiring data scientists and specialists with much greater education than mine. All development roles are becoming full stack (a huge mistake, but a different topic) So yeah...jobs are being created in my company, but more are specialized, elite jobs that are harder to fill. The entry-level QA tester roles has been replaced with QA software engineers...who, in reality, are just testers who script on occasion and suck at their job, but the company is doing all they can to not hire people who cannot code, even if their job doesn't require coding. The barrier to entry rises each year in tech. Also, the economic data indicates this. The number of middle class households is shrinking. More living wage jobs are being destroyed than created. Many roles are being automated or semi-automated or the roles have been shifted so a smaller number of highly skilled individuals replace a full team of semi-skilled...or a role gets almost completely automated and handled by a less skilled technician at lower pay. You see this often in medicine and law as well....entire fields like paralegal, legal secretary, and radiology are rapidly declining.
So yeah...that's life, jobs come and go... Here's the difference between an individualist and a collectivist. I suspect you're an individualist who believes your success in life is because of your good choices, hard work, and general virtue and value in life. I know that my success in life is based on me making some good choices, but also getting very lucky to be introduced to a lucrative field at a prime time. My continued success is partially due to my skills and decisions, but mostly due to the fact that I picked a successful employer. Now you and I can debate how merit vs luck give us our status, but I know that my success is based on my company selling goods and services. I am confident your employer's success is based on selling goods and services. I need everyone around me to succeed in order to pay their bills and thus for my company to get sales.
The more people have money in their pockets, the more they shop at my employer's customers. So yeah, I can afford to pay more taxes because I'll be getting more bonuses and raises and my company sells more services and my RSU shares will go through the roof as will the share prices of most successful businesses. It's economic stimulus from the ground up. We're used to stimulus from the top down...welfare for banks in the case of TARP. Welfare for the affluent in the case of perpetual tax cuts that primarily affect the wealthy. It doesn't work too well because the wealthy are good at saving. The middle class spends a greater share and circulates the stimulus much more effectively.
There are hundreds of benefits to UBI. However, I will focus on the benefits that appeal to me as a fiscal conservative. A little extra spending means my shares go way up. My employer makes a lot more profits. Wages can be frozen and thus most costs are frozen. More people can afford to leave the workforce if they have small kids or are in poor health,
Re: Your may be set, but the middle class is shrin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Your may be set, but the middle class is shrin (Score:5, Insightful)
An annual $430 payout means the program will cost $21.3 billion a year, which likely can be funded through budgetary adjustments. But a monthly $430 will cost $256 billion, which is over half the national budget.
South Korea proposes a plan that will, in twenty years grow to be over half the national budget - that seems entirely reasonable and practical.
"We cannot get to 500,000 won a month right now," Lee said. "But we can get there in 15 to 20 years by bolstering taxes
on land, which is a public asset, carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and digital services developed using data we have produced."
Oh fantastic - they'll just tax anything and everything more, and that will make it all work out... And here I was thinking they hadn't thought it through...
Re: Your may be set, but the middle class is shri (Score:2)
I like the taxing carbon emissions part -- carbon emissions are trending downward in the developed world. As the technology that enables it improves, that will only amplify. In other words, it's a revenue source that is drying up, so they'll have to tax something else.
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I've spent a lot of time in Seoul, it's crazy expensive and half the country lives there. Imagine living in Miami or Austin or San Diego on $300/month (which according to cost of living calculators, it's cheaper to live in those cities than in Seoul.
Re: Your may be set, but the middle class is shri (Score:2)
Yep. Tiny apartments in high-rise buildings cost between 500K and several million USD. Cost of raising a kid: 300K to the age of 20. Fruits seem to be made of gold, and at the moment, after the exceptionally long monsoon this summer, veggies are also crazy expensive.
The proposed amount won't do sh*t. But Governor Lee is not serous anyway - he is one of the likely contenders for the next presidential election and is simply catering to his base with statements like these.
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How much of what you buy is made in, or have parts made in S. Korea? Tax the multinaitonals.
Of course, what we really need is a world-wide taxing authority, so they can't ... what did I just read, "Double Dutch with an Irish topping?" or have a mail drop in the Caymans as their "head office"?
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You're the one that needs to get out more. I've swung between engineering, science and IT jobs my whole life.
You post about things like "data scientists and specialists"... guess what, that and the training that creates, the people that support them, is automation creating jobs. Doesn't invalidate what I said, it proves it.
A week ago two big guys and a truck stopped by to install new fridge, they come from local store that sells kitchen, entertainment and laundry appliances. Another guy came by a few d
It's still a net decline in middle class jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
You post about things like "data scientists and specialists"... guess what, that and the training that creates, the people that support them, is automation creating jobs. Doesn't invalidate what I said, it proves it.
A week ago two big guys and a truck stopped by to install new fridge, they come from local store that sells kitchen, entertainment and laundry appliances. Another guy came by a few days later with replacement door for one that had dent. All those guys jobs are "automation creating jobs", even for heavy movers!
.
Yeah, but take big tech companies. Instead of 100 engineering openings, they now have 20 general engineering, 10 data scientist, and maybe 10 more specialist positions...higher pay, but not 2x, so the company is hiring less people and paying less for payroll. My employer is hiring a dozen data scientists and downsizing QA and operations....units that have much much larger staffs, by 10-20x...because of efficiencies they invested in.
Unemployment applications are going up. Low skilled middle class positions are decreasing in number. Those heavy movers...there's probably only 75% of them, per capita as there was 30 years ago. There are less middle class households that can afford to replace their fridges. There's natural consolidation and probably only half the number of appliance stores as there was 30 years ago. Consolidation isn't even bad. It's just the natural end of capitalism...monopoly. I see this in software. My linked in contacts....10, 15 years ago, I had never heard of most places they were going to....now all of my linked in friends that are good at their job are going the same few employers: Google, Facebook, Amazon, or some other big tech household name....no longer startups or niche businesses, just the big names. That scares me, personally.
However, as the business world gets more efficient, they simply will need to hire less people. There will be less employers as inferior companies go out of business or get acquired. We will run out of jobs...probably much more slowly than I think we will, but the data indicates as much...and the worst part is that jobs that pay a living wage are going the fastest.
I'm doing well, you're doing well....but the economic data shows most of the productivity gains are going to the 1%. Most of the profits are going to them. A much greater share of the money earned each year goes to them. If Jeff Bezos completely automates his warehouse, he can layoff an army of people and replace them with robots and a few engineers and specialists...at greater profit to him, investors, and the board.
Every decade, staying in the middle class gets harder. It's more of a hustle today than it was 10 years ago. I'm motivated and hard working. I'll make it through to retirement in 25 years, but those last 10 may be tough.
I worry about society as a whole and my kids. I'm fine. I'll be comfortable for the rest of my life. My kids are very young, but I see fewer and fewer paths for them to out-earn me. I very easily out-earned my dad without making a lot of good decisions (I grew up poor and didn't know any better). My kids are going to have to get into an elite school and make far fewer mistakes just to earn the equivalent income I did when I was 24. They're going to have a lot more competition for all those jobs that automation creates. They're going to have a lot more expectations placed on them than I did.
With automation, UBI is inevitable. I am convinced we will need it at some point. Maybe not today, maybe not 10 years from now, but at some point, the middle class will become so small we'll have no one left who can afford to buy our products. The number of billionaires will increase. The number of sub-living-wage jobs will increase. The number of comfortable, middle class jobs will go down.
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I do not know if this is practical, but my idea is that you try to spread the work out. What I would want to avoid is for people who have jobs to work their butts off, to generate enough surplus to pay for other people to be completely idle. There are many things wrong with this dystopia.
1) People already work so hard that it is bad for their health and home life.
2) Complete idleness is not good for you either. You get brain rot, or something.
3) The distinction between those in work and those on UBI creates
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Speaking from the perspective of someone who has sold many RSUs worth hundreds of dollars each and who has been given some decent bonuses, I'm going to bet your bonuses have been relatively small and if you do have any RSUs with your current employer, they're probably not worth much. I'm also going to suggest that you look into the tax liability you would have if you actually did cash out those RSUs at a high per-unit price and were also receiving hefty bonuses before you start championing the flawed notion
The welfare and laziness argument is bunk (Score:2)
UBI simply expands welfare to more people, we've seen the last 3 months of UBI in the US, it destroyed and delayed the restarting of the economy because people simply won't go to work if they get more for sitting on their ass than going to work. It's now estimated that 20M Americans simply won't go back to work because unemployment benefits are as good or better for them.
You know better. You know UBI doesn't make you comfortable. Your life is no fun on UBI alone. Few want to sit on their ass and live with the bare minimum. Most want a nice TV, car, food, etc. They're happy to work for it.
Stop the judgmental nonsense. I know it's natural to want to judge and hate those on welfare. I've moved past it long ago. Some people are lazier than me. I don't really care. I want them buying my products. I don't care if they're human garbage. Their money is as green as a
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I recall a story from an accountant that used to do the company aaudited ccounts. He was a bit slow getting into computers. When he finally did get the work automated on computers, he had hoped that this might save time, and make the job easier. But he complained that, far from it, there seemed to be even more work to do, just to keep up. Part of his problem is the seemingly irresistible tendency for tax rules to get more complex over time, and a corresponding tendency for more data and reports.
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I watched the Moon landing. With my first wife.
Automation "creating" jobs? Really? Tell that to the 43% of Americans with no college.* Tell that to the people whose jobs have been moved offshore, where they can pay sweatshop wages.**
The vast majority of "new jobs" bring created the the GOP and Rupert Murdoch (owner of the WSJ) love to brag about are "service jobs" that pay crap, not the factory jobs that were often unionized, that paid good wages... and I'll bet that, after I adjust for inflation, you make
Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)
This is related to automation that will make a number of jobs redundant.
Automation has been happening for 300 years.
The "jobless economy" has been predicted for just as long.
The steam engine, automatic loom, and McCormick Reaper eliminated millions of jobs. But even more jobs were created.
Pre-COVID, we had a full-employment economy. So there is no reason to believe that "This time is different."
Most jobs require real human intelligence. We are nowhere near automating that. When we finally do, it will change human existence so profoundly that "jobs" will be the least of our concerns.
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Economists decided to look into it. Low and behold, we could do away with up-to nearly 50% of jobs in the USA
Extraordinary claims lacking citations are nearly always made-up bullcrap.
Do you really expect people to believe that greedy profit-seeking capitalists are employing twice as many workers as they need?
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Pre-COVID, we had a full-employment economy.
Only people who believe the published unemployment rates believe this. But those rates are deliberately deceptive, and this fact is extensively documented. Therefore, only people who aren't very smart believe that we had full employment. Further, it doesn't actually even matter if everyone is employed (which they weren't) if not everyone is earning a living wage (which they weren't) even working multiple jobs (which many were). If you have to work multiple jobs just to lose money, then the system can best b
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Don't try to ruin my country because you are afraid of life.
Corporations are ruining OUR country (it is not "yours" — and if you think it is, I'll fight you for it) with capitalism. And here you are, waving pom-poms for them. Environmental devastation! Economic cannibalization! GO TEAM!
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
People like to read about countries other than Trumplandia, you know.
Can't wait for cross-over episodes of Portlandia [wikipedia.org] and "Trumplandia" ...
FALLACY; there is no wedge (Score:4, Insightful)
Slippery Slope is a fallacy that is heavily misunderstood. Logically, you have to make each step towards the extreme and at each of those steps you have to decide to go to that extreme. The fallacy is in the false assumption that ANY step will take you to the end point (which is usually undesirable; hence the use of the fallacy.)
For sake of argument, lets call UBI a communist scheme. A real communist's policy can be heavily rooted in communism and by adopting it you are not a communist nor does it lead to communism. To assume it does is illogical.
FYI, Social Security actually was written by a real registered card carrying communist who worked for FDR, who took good ideas from anybody as well as appearing more moderate since there was a visible active communist party in the USA at the time.
Gavino, you sir, are a scared white man who wrongly thinks your advantages are at risk when you'll still have significant advantages as will you children; your grandchildren not to much, because they likely will be mixed race. Not that the extra benefits and wealth will not give them some leg up over the other colored people.
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FYI, Social Security actually was written by a real registered card carrying communist who worked for FDR
Are you referring to Frances Perkins? [wikipedia.org] LOL, remind me, what communist organization was she "registered" with?
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Indeed. Be wary of Friedman and his idea of a negative income tax. Or Hayek and his ideas of provision if a country was wealthy enough. Or Nozick's entitlement theory of justice.
Marxist. Every single one.
I swear the cries of communism mimic the cries of racism from the left.
But a thought experiment for you- suppose without taking anything from anyone, all people were independently wealthy. No one needs to work. The whole system falls apart then as well.
So without exploitation, the system cannot work.
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I keep hearing this nightmare scenario where the entire population will just couch potato their way through life, but I just don't think people in general are as lazy as folks like yourself assume. I know if I got in on a UBI, however high it was, I'd still be going to work. I'd just use the UBI money to improve my life, as would most folks that I know. An EXTREME UBI would allow me to take longer breaks from work to do the projects I've wanted to do for years, but I'd still be working. Just not for som
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Its a little more than $1/day - it's meaningless.