Universal Basic Income thread

[pErvinalia]

I want my, I want my, I want my UBI.

Really. I want it. Just fucking give it to me. I figure I need about $7000 a month to live the way I want to, after taxes. So pony up, motherfuckers.

I'm not greedy. I'd settle on $2000 (about $3 US...) a month. Off the top of my head I could pay my rent, car insurance and rego, house insurance, fuel, food and probably save up the rest for car maintenance and the odd treat. These shitty new-economy online/sharing jobs, like Airtasker and Uber etc, could add a little bit on top every now and then when the right job came up. I make a few small bucks now doing photoshop or website jobs on Airtasker. If I had to live off that as a work model I would be homeless, but it's good to supplement any income a little bit.

[laklak]

One man's Basic Income is another man's Poverty. I have refined tastes.

That said, I'll take whatever they throw at me. I ain't proud.

[pErvinalia]

I think you don't get the B part.

Universal Biggly Income!

[pErvinalia]

holy fuck I'm watching a current affairs program now and they are using a robot to do open heart surgery. It still requires the surgeon to operate it, but eventually they will be able to do away with the doctor. Imagine the shock those doctors are going to get when they go from $300k a year to a $30k UBI a year...

[NineBerry]

I don't think doctors have to fear for their jobs very soon.

[Beatsong]

The graph is nonsense because it relates to people claiming no benefits. But the lowest earners in Britain - includes large numbers in full time employment - are highly reliant on benefits such as working tax credits etc. It's the loss of these that led to the conclusion in that article that it would be bad for the lowest earners.

I must be missing something, as a UBI replaces (and is usually meant to increase) current welfare payments. So I don't see how anyone could be worse off.

The graph says "comparison of net income for a single person with no benefits between the Basic Income system and the current income tax and NI system".

In other words, they're comparing how the situation of someone who receives no benefits now would compare under UBI. That's a nonsense because the entire lower-income end of the population DO receive benefits, even when they're in work. What would be much more enlightening would be an illustration of how the situation of someone currently receiving working tax credits, housing benefit, child benefit for four kids with a spouse on disability benefit, would change under UBI. You'd have to make the amount so high to match all that, that if you were still wedded to the "U" part it would take practically our entire GDP to do it. IOW, Communism. Which is fine, if we can just call it that and debate it as such.

Look at it this way: The current benefit cap for a single person with no dependents, outside London, is £257.69 per week. There are higher rates for people with dependents, couples and those living in London. But let's take that one for simplicity's sake, so we don't have to consider variations and complications of family situation.

Now, clearly the government brought in the benefits cap for a reason: because there were people getting more than that in benefits, and the tories and those who voted for them considered that wrong and that it should be reined in. So clearly there is a not insignificant number of people now who must be claiming that much, or close to it.

That means that to match what those people are currently getting, the UBI would have to be over THREE TIMES the £80 pw that the Greens were looking at. The £80 that was going to cost £321 billion and require £157 in extra taxes to make up the shortfall.

OK, the Greens were looking at retaining housing benefit with that. But a single person with no dependents, outside London, isn't normally eligible for a very big HB allowance. That would make up some of the outstanding £180 odd quid a week but not most of it (and it would depend on the individual's eligibility for HB - that's a maximum).

it's possible you may be able to come up with the number to make that work, theoretically. You're then left with the practical problems of what happens in a country within a globalised world when it tries to massively increase taxes on the rich.

Is there any evidence that the ordinarily rich (as opposed to the obscenely rich, most of whom don't pay much tax (percentage-wise) anyway) just pack up their lives and move to another country to avoid higher taxes? I assume there would be a point at which tax got high enough that some number of people would actually leave. But what's that number, and what's the evidence to back up the assertion?

I dunno. Certainly anecdotal evidence if you talk to people about the 70s in Britain, brain drain etc. I should point out it's not a factor I normally attach too much weight to. I tend to think we should get more from those who have it to run the country and we can't afford to be blackmailed by threats of them taking it elsewhere. But I'm not so cocky in that that I'm prepared to be careless about tax and see the rich as some kind of automatic solution to everything because they can just be bled infinitely to pay for it. It still makes sense to think carefully about whether what we're proposing is worth the money we'll need to pay for it. For me, building social housing, fixing the NHS, providing better educational opportunities for young kids are things that are worth taking on the anti-tax lobby about and just trying to get the money. Some vague notion of "civic equality" that a UBI is supposed promote isn't, given the incredibly large sums involved.

* - (it's too early in the day for my brain to think this through properly but is 'regressiveness' determined by absolute amounts or by relative amounts?)

[/quote]

Relative, in the sense I'm talking here.

[Svartalf]

I don't think doctors have to fear for their jobs very soon.

still be funny to see a surgeon having to become a country doctor because his job has been robotized.

[PsychoSerenity]

The graph is nonsense because it relates to people claiming no benefits. But the lowest earners in Britain - includes large numbers in full time employment - are highly reliant on benefits such as working tax credits etc. It's the loss of these that led to the conclusion in that article that it would be bad for the lowest earners.

I must be missing something, as a UBI replaces (and is usually meant to increase) current welfare payments. So I don't see how anyone could be worse off.

The graph says "comparison of net income for a single person with no benefits between the Basic Income system and the current income tax and NI system".

In other words, they're comparing how the situation of someone who receives no benefits now would compare under UBI. That's a nonsense because the entire lower-income end of the population DO receive benefits, even when they're in work.

In other words you didn't read the paragraphs below the graph in the document that explain they've already accounted for that. I'm sorry I didn't copy and paste the entire document into my post but I thought you might, you know, read it before continuing to criticise it.

[pErvinalia]

I don't think doctors have to fear for their jobs very soon.

Possibly not. But you'd probably have said the same for transport drivers not that long ago, and look how fast the self driving vehicle is progressing. A lot of mine sites are already using fully driver-less trucks. And the stakes and difficulties for artificial-like intelligence in automated vehicles is probably higher than for open heart surgery. At least whilever there is a mix of automated and non-automated traffic that isn't wirelessly networked.

[NineBerry]

I would have said it for transport drivers. Although I think that there too, automation will not happen overnight. Consider how many trucks there are on the road that are old and kaputt. Automated vehicles will be more expensive than kaputt trucks with Eastern European drivers.


Unless Eastern European truck drivers get an ubi.

[pErvinalia]

Up front perhaps. But automated trucks don't need to stop for speed and blowjobs in filthy toilets... Nor sleep.

[laklak]

Damn, just add a "p" to this and it's yours.



Plus, with that sleeper compartment you don't need to get your BJ in a filthy toilet.

[pErvinalia]

[pErvinalia]

Just saw a small news report on the ABC about some conference going on in Oz at the moment about UBI. I reckon this is the first time I've seen UBI talked about in general news by mainstream Australian media. Small steps!

[Scot Dutchy]

Five municipalities here are going to experiment with five different approaches to this problem of the future.