Comment by cebert
11 hours ago
It’s unfortunate that we can’t seriously consider universal basic income in the United States. If we provided every adult citizen with $13K annually during their working years, it could offer support to those unable to find meaningful employment without forcing them to declare themselves disabled just to survive. That label can take a real toll on a person’s psyche and limit their belief in their ability to grow or find better opportunities. We also have to be realistic and realize AI is positioned to replace a significant number of jobs in the next decade. A safety net like UBI will only become more essential moving forward.
That would require a total rethinking of our economic system. I doubt this will happen without any catalyst like war or revolution.
Not necessarily. The US government already spends >2000$ per adult per month. It would require a total rethinking of the role of government.
Spends on what? It's not like you can disband the military, not build roads and bridges and eliminate medicaid just because you send out a $1000/mo UBI payment.
If you want to consider just social assistance then the US government spends about $950B annually, and that works out to $2800 per year per citizen. To make it a livable amount you'd have to at minimum 5x that expenditure (and a lot more than that in urban areas).
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Not just a total rethinking, but rather a total redevelopment to find an economic system that is just as stable as capitalism in a free market (without fiat).
Socialism fails 100% of the time given sufficient time, UBI is tied to socialism.
If your food production yield is dependent on maintaining your supply chain which fails under socialism, you basically run into a hysteresis trap under socialism where this fails, and everyone starves to death.
Its like the ending of Daybreakers, where blood becomes increasingly scarce, and the dynamics of it all force some unwilling sacrifices which start a chain reaction.
Just an FYI, Money-printing/non-reserve debt issuance is a catalyst for war/ revolution.
I agree. Some libertarian economists noticed that endless growth demands slavery-like conditions and the economic collapse one way or another. They are trying to back away without using the s-word and invent half-baked solutions like UBI.
UBI by itself will not solve the problems. It will only drive exorbitant inflation. Implementing UBI requires socializing many institutions and nationalizing big companies. People who control the biggest portions of the economy will not give their power up without a war.
> Some libertarian economists noticed that endless growth demands slavery-like conditions and the economic collapse one way or another.
Which economists? That doesn't sound libertarian at all. Libertarians who support UBI typically do so because they see it as a pragmatic alternative to inefficient welfare systems. They certainly wouldn't support abandoning market based economics.
those unable to find meaningful employment
I don't want to pay to feed freeloaders. If you want to, that's what charities are for.
Even with 100k / month basic income, the landlords would simply raise their rents to 200k / month. Because why would they give up their generational wealth?
In this model, does the current existence of people in poverty basically serve as a ballast that gives everyone else's "above poverty" money a higher, stable value?
Would it ever be possible to not have poverty without making everyone's money worthless?
You can always increase the labor by making more people and making more of them participate in the market. That is good because you can then start flattening the differences in income by taxation, so everyone gets richer (can afford more services) and you can also control the economic disparities.
The assets story is a different beast. They tend to be finite and the worse the economic disparities curve is the higher their price becomes.
How many condos are there andjacent to upper east side of Central Park? Let’s say 100. That number is fixed, and 1 million people on this planet want one. If they all had the same salary the rental price of the condos would be close their (same) monthly salary. Now because the economic disparity is huge there is a super low number of people that have super high income, but they are still more than 100. So these lets say 1,000 /1,000,000. These thousand folks can drive the rental of these condos to almost infinity.
More safety equates to less people willing to work slave jobs for slave wages. They're just gonna make disability bucks harder to access.