Yes, it's a given that poverty is eliminated. I don't think there is any data that show UBI will cause employment rate to rise, or to decline. You look at Alaska permanent fund and the experiment in Canada and elsewhere and the data pretty much indicate overall employment didn't change. Overall hours didn't even change. There is a real measurable increase in part time jobs, which means there is an offset to that elsewhere. You can guess that college kids probably stopped working and stay focused on education, that some women used the fund for childcare and became part time workers, that a very small % of people just stopped working all together. The key is overall there is no changes to employment.
Anyone buying into Yang is living in a fantasy world where flooding the poor with money doesn't raise the cost of everything and negate the value of the dollar as time moves on. I am still waiting for the UBI lovers to explain a realistic plan for keeping prices from skyrocketing when businesses and landlords know they can charge more because there is more cash out there.
No doubt it's not going to be easy. Alaska is the first state to do this. I don't think countries in Europe is going to be the first place to do it at a nationwide level. They already have a robust social safety net, so a basic income is less of a need. There is also fear that UBI would take away from their current social safety net. It wasn't a painless transition, to put it lightly, during the past job disruption revolutions. And that disruption was on much much longer timescale. We don't know the long term effect (I think overall positive for optimists like me), but we do know the current disruption is on a much shorter timescale. And I think we are pretty sure it will have major social, economic and cultural impact as we again transition to a even more modern society. I don’t know how we should handle it in the short term... ubi seems to be a good newer baseline level of social safety net here in the state to absorb the transitional negative impact.
Isn’t oil revenues from taxes? I think the largest revenue from oil in AK is production tax and royalty. And that’s fine. If people want a lower baseline life expenses, they can move. Their choice. The ubi give them that capability to not be stuck in place. If the gov uses local expenses in determining payouts, it’s going to be a another layer of gov involvement with more politic, expense, complexity, perceived unfairness and “handout” to richer cities... so on. I think it becomes less attractive and downright poisonous to large segment of the population.
Well, we could make the US a less attractive place to discourage immigration . So yes, absolutely it will become another pro. I think the hard line citizen requirement is clear cut enough for this to not be an effective political hindrance.
Yeah, yeah. All the candidates are going to promise things they can't deliver because we're pretty certain to have a divided Congress in 2021. Medicare for All probably ain't happening. GND probably ain't happening. That's not going to stop me from voting for the ideas I like. I'm not sure why we would worry about inflation for UBI and not worry about it for Trump's big tax cut. Which is not to say it won't have any effect on inflation or the economy more generally, but we can handle it. I haven't seen what Yang is thinking about how he'd have the dividend move with inflation, but I like the idea of pegging it either to the inflation rate or PPP. So, if the extra money increases prices and pushes inflation up, the dividend goes up with it. Will this create a vicious cycle of hyperinflation? Maybe, but I don't really think so. Instead I think with a higher willingness to pay, people will consume more but because of the forces of competition companies will have to provide more value to capture it. For example, rents will go up but it'll be because people move into nicer apartments. The extra money pushes the demand curve up, putting upward pressure on price, but the super-normal profits incentivize more supply, pushing the supply curve to the right and pushing the price back down toward normal profits.
I think that's another compromise to avoid. You need to keep it simple and pure or you're going to screw it up with bureaucracy. It might make the expensive metropolises even more expensive. People living there with good jobs will have a little more money to pay for nice housing, etc. People living there with lousy jobs will find that UBI check goes a lot further in Maine or whatever. San Fran, Seattle, etc will still have an economic disparity problem to contend with because the house maids and uber drivers still can't afford to live there. But things would probably get better for small town America.
Sort of, yes. But it's a tax that the majority of residents don't pay. It's easy to support something when it's basically free money coming from someone else. A national UBI wouldn't work that way - there's not enough money to just soak the rich. It would have to ultimately be paid for by the middle class. Sure - I get that view. But if you want UBI, it has to have support of the people. How do urban areas feel about it when they realize they have to pay more taxes and they get less relatively-speaking than rural areas? People in urban areas get higher incomes to counter their higher living expenses. Now you'd be telling them that they'll pay higher taxes to essentially transfer wealth to rural areas that pay lower taxes as-is. It would essentially be a mass wealth transfer from the wealthy & urban states to poor & rural states. Each decision like this - while maybe fair - is going to affect support of the idea. That's why I'm saying a smaller, more homogeneous country will be the first place to try it - it's easier to get widespread support in places like that. It's a lot harder here where the details like this (whatever decision is made) are going to piss off large groups of people.
Unless you plan to finance this mostly with massive debt, there is no extra money for middle/upper class people because it's going to have to be paid for with taxes. Whether it's a VAT or whatever, it's going to come out of the pockets of those same people. One of the flaws with the arguments about UBI is that it's going to inject a ton of new money into the economy and create spending/jobs. All the money is just being taken out of other places. Poor people get UBI but lose their welfare benefits and pay higher prices through VAT, etc. He's not proposing financing this through debt, so it's really just redistribution of money rather than new money coming into the economy. That redistribution has value in providing a more consistent income floor and changing people's behavior/opportunities, but it's not some big economic boost from new money.
Would only disagree IF it was a real redistribution. For instance, really getting $1000 that a family could spend in the US versus a company buying back 3 shares of its own stock, or some 0.1% dude sticking the $1K in an offshore account and forgetting about it for a few generations.
Yang contends that UBI is supposed to pay for itself in part through reduction of other government expenditures and through VAT style taxation of the Amazons, Facebooks of the world. I don't know the math behind the former, but the VAT would seem to hit the upper and middle class more, so poor and lower middle class will end up better off. I think you are right that the redistribution raises the floor for the poor and lower middle class (or the soon-to-be due to automation).
The oil revenue is a tax on production of oil + royalty from public land "rental". We all paid for some of it when oil & gas companies pass a portion of that expense to the public. But the public doesn't directly pay that portion of the tax, so the public doesn't "feel" it. UBI that is paid for by a value add tax (part of Yang policy) on production of goods and services by (especially large technology) companies is the same. We all paid for part of it when companies pass a portion of that expense to the public. But the public doesn't directly pay that portion of the tax, so the public doesn't "feel" it. If it's solely paid for by increasing tax on income, impacting middle class, it's not going to fly. Since it's being marketed as a tax on production and services, something that companies can't "write-off" or "hide" and that people see the "legal cheat" by large corporation to avoid taxes (including the POTUS), I think it stands a much better chance of winning wide support. I don't know if all the $ add up, but Yang or any proponent of UBI cannot make this about taxing the middle class or it's dead. They would be smart to reduce the payout or increase VAT tax first if necessary to make the number work. I add that any social safety net is a transfer of wealth. Some form of wealth transfer is always beneficial in a large society, and a lack of it to support some baseline of living for a mass population would be dangerous to all. Part of the current problem is is that the capitalist system of natural wealth transfer isn't occurring and is in fact slowing down as more wealth is being concentrated more and more toward the top. https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/ It would be easier than you might think. Andrew proposes funding the Freedom Dividend by consolidating some welfare programs and implementing a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 10%. Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction. A Value-Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the production of goods or services a business produces. It is a fair tax and it makes it much harder for large corporations, who are experts at hiding profits and income, to avoid paying their fair share. A VAT is nothing new. 160 out of 193 countries in the world already have a Value-Added Tax or something similar, including all of Europe which has an average VAT of 20 percent. The means to pay for the Freedom Dividend will come from 4 sources: 1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of the Freedom Dividend because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits. Additionally, we currently spend over one trillion dollars on health care, incarceration, homelessness services and the like. We would save $100 – 200+ billion as people would take better care of themselves and avoid the emergency room, jail, and the street and would generally be more functional. The Freedom Dividend would pay for itself by helping people avoid our institutions, which is when our costs shoot up. Some studies have shown that $1 to a poor parent will result in as much as $7 in cost-savings and economic growth. 2. A VAT. Our economy is now incredibly vast at $19 trillion, up $4 trillion in the last 10 years alone. A VAT at half the European level would generate $800 billion in new revenue. A VAT will become more and more important as technology improves because you cannot collect income tax from robots or software. 3. New revenue. Putting money into the hands of American consumers would grow the economy. The Roosevelt Institute projected that the economy would grow by approximately $2.5 trillion and create 4.6 million new jobs. This would generate approximately $800 – 900 billion in new revenue from economic growth and activity. 4. Taxes on top earners and pollution. By removing the Social Security cap, implementing a financial transactions tax, and ending the favorable tax treatment for capital gains/carried interest, we can decrease financial speculation while also funding the Freedom Dividend. We can add to that a carbon fee that will be partially dedicated to funding the Freedom Dividend, making up the remaining balance required to cover the cost of this program.
I don't think a VAT would have been my first choice. But even VAT will functionally take tax dollars from the upper quintiles and give it to the lower ones. They will spend more money on things, so they will pay more in absolute dollars on tax. So, yeah it won't be "extra" money, but it'll be money that a lower quintile person will spend in the economy instead of earning a return for an upper quintile person. If it doesn't net our as more cash for a middle to upper class person after taxes, that's fine. The whole point, for me anyway, is to reduce the country's wealth disparity.
Yeah, Yang's math is interesting - but it's also flawed. txtony posted the whole thing so I'll respond in more detail to the specifics piece by piece: So this part is fine - but it really means no/little new money for the poor depending on the specifics. They are just replacing one type of benefit with another. The new one has more freedom/choice, which is a good thing in a free market world, but it also means money that was previously required to be spent on, say, food, could now be spent on a new video game. So that means... This part is suspect. If the poor are just replacing one type of money with another, they aren't magically going to have more money to spend to take care of themselves or avoid jail or whatnot. The studies in the last sentenace are fair, but again, they don't account for the fact that he's simultaneously taking money away too. As a standalone thing, there's nothing wrong with a VAT tax. However, it's basically a different form of a sales tax, and it's a regressive tax. That means more of the burden of it ultimately falls on the poor/middle class than the wealthy. So if your goal is to redistribute money to a safety net, this is not at all the most efficient way to do it. You're just taking from one hand and putting it in the other. You'd be better off just raising income taxes on higher incomes. This goes to my point that it's not deficit financed. This is the same math that GOP tax cuts use and never actually holds up. If it was really shifting money from the wealthy to the poor, it might have at least some merit (though well over-stated), but as noted above, it doesn't do that as much as one might think. So most of this is all fine and are the typical ways to subtly tax the wealthy - and it would help do what this whole thing is supposed to do. It's just a small piece of the total pie. And carbon fees are, again, going to be paid by consumers and likely ends up as a regressive tax (any tax that falls on consumption tends to be regressive).
I'd point out that most current welfare benefits for people are temporary and/or means tested. You can get unemployment in Texas for a half-year and only if you meet criteria. For an individual, replacing a temporary contingent benefit for a permanent benefit without contingencies will be new money.
I can't agree or disagree with this as there are just too many factors to allow us to prophesize what will happen to the classes. For instance, a middle class family who has one adult child.That gives this family $36K a year that they can save up and invest in a future business. It maybe something that they may have been contemplating for a while but don't have the funds.
If what Yang says turns out to be true (gloom n doom), we have no time for testing or wait for the next administration to implement it. There has been reports that for communities who lost a lot of manufacturing jobs (not just US) also have increased suicides, drug addiction and mortality rate. The UBI is not just to get money into peoples hands but also to increase overall health for communities.
i'm ambivalent about UBI, but i'm provisionally in the #YangGang. i appreciate that may cause some of you to step out.
i can only suggest that you listen to him on who's paying for this and how. If all these companies use autonomous trucks, they will be saving 140B a year in delivery operating cost alone. With the current tax structure, how much taxes do you think they will pay? Most of them pay zero and that is where we get the money by getting a sliver of any automated transaction. If we get a slice of every google or facebook ad, robot mile, etc, nothing needs to come out of your pocket. This is no different than the oil money Alaska is getting
Basic income conversation is fun. I wonder how many would take that basic income future earnings to jg wentworth. People cashing it out for lump sums and credit promise-to-pay shenanigans makes it curious to me. $2,000 coke binge amongst friends will get us to day 3 or 4 of 30 at best. Are you a US citizen? Lets party! See you at the party richter!
