"Freedom" thread or something

Equality 7-2521 wrote: Well you don't in any way faithful to what people mean by a UBI. I guess I should say that I prefer it in many respects to the more traditional welfare/taxation system.

Padraic wrote: JJLehto wrote:   Hm, Pat I never thought about inflation. Intriguing point. Surprisingly I've never heard that point raised, at least not from Libertarian articles and they think of course think everything will cause hyper inflation I think you may have answered your own question. This $ should not just be printed and handed out, that'd be a problem. It is, as you said, redistribution, just as we have now. Maybe the impacts wouldn't be much different? While we think of it as "giving out money" it would be from taxes and not from nothing. Though it's redistributive in nature, it's still an injection into the "spending economy", which is the actual cause of inflation.  By this I mean, if you printed $1 trillion dollars and buried it in the ground, it wouldn't cause inflation because it didn't actually make it into the "real" economy/market. That said, it's also redistributive not only in the sense that it comes from revenues, but that sending a check is, for the most part, money that already being spent anyway, or money that poor people already have in the form of food stamps and other welfare programs - so it's more a reshaping or making delivery of those dollars more efficient.

That last part is certainly true, and that's generally the argument I've seen, that is indeed a restructuring of what we have now.
Hmmmmm maybe I'm just struggling with the idea, I guess I just don't see how it may cause inflation. Not saying it can't, but as you said it's pretty much just a re structure of the system, and the money that would be spent would be anyway, just under welfare programs.
Maybe I have the dumb today, well every day

The problem with UBI as I see it is that it wastes a lot of money on people who don't need it. UBI in its most basic form means that every citizen gets a basic income, regardless of whether they already have an income and how high it is. How is that basic income paid for? Taxes. Most personal taxes are directly or indirectly income-dependent, so above a certain level of income you have people who spend more money on UBI than they get in return. These people don't need the UBI; they already have a decent income by themselves. So all this UBI money that goes towards them is wasted money that could be better used by either lowering taxes or giving it to the people who actually need it. Aka what Michael Tanner is proposing.

So as weird as it is to admit (I'm far from a libertarian), the radically libertarian Cato guy is better at being left-wing than the actual left wing.

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: These people don't need the UBI; they already have a decent income by themselves. So all this UBI money that goes towards them is wasted money that could be better used by either lowering taxes or giving it to the people who actually need it.

TGM: Orb wrote: As a lefty, I think the UBI's a pretty good idea. In that it takes away the sort of thing our gov't's currently doing, which is gating traditional welfare measures behind a mass of finicky and unreasonable qualifications (my personal favourite being people having their benefits docked for not filling out an online questionnaire on positive thinking which returned completely randomly generated results...), supposedly designed to distinguish people who 'deserve' jobseekers allowance from people who don't. Similarly the bollocks drugs test measures in various parts of the States. Or the weird exploitation of housing benefit by landlords here or the idea of coupons valid for specific things from supermarkets instead of cash benefits, which the conservatives have been floating (which should surely really upset conservatives just on the ground of how incredibly anti-competitive it is). I sort of understand a preference for targeted welfare but I think in many ways that attaches a load of patronising, dehumanising conditions to state handouts and allows gov'ts on the right to use the mechanisms for handouts to completely undermine the benefits framework without any actual lawmaking. Edit: I'm surprised that Hayek is a fan, though. And I think it'd be an interesting way forwards for the right wing to replace a load of governmental stuff with a simpler but still humane measure. Not that I think the money behind the right wing would be especially interested in anything which would give people in jobs which pay bugger all a little more leverage against exploitation.

I don't think the left wing is really interested either. The idea is usually to implement programs that make the poor think that you're helping them while in reality using them to payback business interests and propagate a political agenda.

Padraic wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: These people don't need the UBI; they already have a decent income by themselves. So all this UBI money that goes towards them is wasted money that could be better used by either lowering taxes or giving it to the people who actually need it.  But that's essentially what the UBI would do for high earners - lower their total tax burden.

Yes, but it causes more bureaucracy than actually lowering their taxes.

TGM: Orb wrote: By the same token, giving that money even to those who don't need it has a lot of advantages in terms of giving people who are currently stuck in the dichotomy between inadequate benefits or sh*t jobs an actual capacity for bargaining with employers on terms beyond life or death and it means when you have a debate about the levels of welfare you can have it based on more universal facts than the niche special cases it always tends to run on at the moment.

I'm probably just not getting it, but I don't see the connection between UBI and these two things.

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: TGM: Orb wrote: By the same token, giving that money even to those who don't need it has a lot of advantages in terms of giving people who are currently stuck in the dichotomy between inadequate benefits or sh*t jobs an actual capacity for bargaining with employers on terms beyond life or death and it means when you have a debate about the levels of welfare you can have it based on more universal facts than the niche special cases it always tends to run on at the moment. I'm probably just not getting it, but I don't see the connection between UBI and these two things.

Well:
Benefits dichotomy:
there's an issue you get a mixture of situations where low-paid employment would exclude you from targeted benefits to basically no net gain, which is the often exaggerated welfare trap (some people reckon it's the welfare system at fault, myself I think it's the job pay not being adequate without welfare support). By having a UBI, you don't have any situation where someone by improving their income gets disqualified from benefits they need to supplement that income.

Terms of employment:
Currently we've got an odd mixture in the UK at least of the government essentially making up the slack from supermarkets employing people at less than a living wage. Similarly, benefit providers have both promised jobs for people doing unpaid work (G4S at the Olympics being the most egregious example) and threatened people with withdrawing their benefits if they refuse to work unpaid for a supermarket. Currently some exploitative employers are exploiting the conditionality of benefits to basically bully people into doing things for terrible terms and no real advantage - take away that conditionality, and you offer that thing.

Discussing benefits:
Discussion of benefits here is largely based on scandal stories which are misreported by the Mail, the Times and the Sun and other such scumbags with an agenda of making the poor suffer for their own amusement. They take a fringe case where someone receives a silly amount of housing benefit a year because they live in London and landlords are sharking the rent, or where someone receives a lot of child support because they have a lot of children and we don't want to let them starve. These fringe cases get reported as if they're representative of a culture of benefit fraud, or of overly generous benefits, while the reality of how much people on benefits get is kept extremely nebulous by the range of different sources. It becomes very hard to have an informed discussion just because different people get wildly different benefits depending on a huge number of factors, and because certain sections of the media deliberately and consistently misrepresent them.

I mean, I have some reservations about UBI but I think for what it offers in those few areas at least it may be worth a shot.

Padraic wrote: Yeah I think I convinced myself it's not.  Someone else here can make the argument if they want to.

haha
And sincerely I'm not saying its impossible, just I struggle to see inflation being a major issue.
With the number of smart people and economists that advocate it in some way (including limited government leaning ones) I am inclined to like the idea



Edited by JJLehto - May 22 2013 at 17:51

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: The problem with UBI as I see it is that it wastes a lot of money on people who don't need it. UBI in its most basic form means that every citizen gets a basic income, regardless of whether they already have an income and how high it is. How is that basic income paid for? Taxes. Most personal taxes are directly or indirectly income-dependent, so above a certain level of income you have people who spend more money on UBI than they get in return. These people don't need the UBI; they already have a decent income by themselves. So all this UBI money that goes towards them is wasted money that could be better used by either lowering taxes or giving it to the people who actually need it. Aka what Michael Tanner is proposing. So as weird as it is to admit (I'm far from a libertarian), the radically libertarian Cato guy is better at being left-wing than the actual left wing.

Glad someone sees it!!!
The whole libertarian = right wing bs is, well bs.
Its been my opinion that a true liberal should espouse libertarianism, at least in some manner.

As for the UBI thing, it's true and Friedman called it the negative income tax....since once you hit the point that the UBI would exceed taxes spent it is a "negative tax" but it is pretty wasteful and if you want to be populist, it also is basically a few thousand bucks thrown to the rich as well.
Tanner said it, let's not think of it as utopia or the perfect answer but it has to better than the current way.

It would eliminate every bureaucracy with their staffs that have shop around prices, review applicants, blah blah blah, and it would slash the IRS staff needed since we would have a flat tax. Issuing the UBI doesn't really take much.