http://www.businessinsider.com/finland-to-end-basic-income-experiment-2018-4

When I first saw this story, I wanted to follow it with great interest. I was doing everything I could to make sure to keep track of it so I didn't forget about it when the results were announced. I didn't expect it to end this quick however. It doesn't look like it was too successful thus far, enough so that they pulled the plug to replace it with something more incentive based.

Since there are people from the region on the board, as well as proponents of this sort of entitlement, I would like to hear your thoughts on it.

It's an interesting concept. My issue is that it may not alleviate the problem for people who need the most help--those with mental illness, disability, or other unusual circumstance. But then, that isn't really the point either.

It looks like it wasn't carried out in the manner or duration it was intended, the article doesn't appear to state why they stopped it and that analysis would be released...someday.

Just because this one failed does not mean it cannot work.

It just needs more time and refinement to work out how it needs to work, and how to make it benefit everyone.

 jhe90 wrote:
Just because this one failed does not mean it cannot work.

It just needs more time and refinement to work out how it needs to work, and how to make it benefit everyone.

Sounds like every argument for communisms.



*being cheeky mate.... not having a go with you.

Eh. It was an experiment. Experiments end and conclusions are drawn. Looks like they're moving on to another one. Sad to see that it didn't go according to the original plan. I do hope to read the results though if they're ever published.

I don't think it's fair to say that it "failed". At least not yet.

Indeed, there's nothing saying they failed. I'm wondering if they learned some key detail quickly and are going to apply that to a new experiment.

Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

 whembly wrote:

 jhe90 wrote:
Just because this one failed does not mean it cannot work.

It just needs more time and refinement to work out how it needs to work, and how to make it benefit everyone.

Sounds like every argument for communisms.



*being cheeky mate.... not having a go with you.

To the Gulag with you comrade.

 Spinner wrote:
Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

Asking the hard hitting questions we all need answers to.

 Spinner wrote:
Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

Oh you.

But yeah it Finishing doesn't really mean that it failed

though it ending early may point to it or is just incomplete which would be kind of a fail

hopefully they learned something from it.

 Spinner wrote:
Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

Here is your Basic Exalt Stipend. Well played Sir!

 Desubot wrote:

 Spinner wrote:
Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

Oh you.

But yeah it Finishing doesn't really mean that it failed

though it ending early may point to it or is just incomplete which would be kind of a fail

hopefully they learned something from it.

Indeed, government "pilots" and "consultations" don't only end because they failed to achieve their stated objective, sometimes they end because it looks like they were going to and achieving the stated objective was never the actual point of them existing(they're a lovely way to avoid actually doing anything of substance or impact and are usually inconclusive enough that they can be spun whichever way is most convenient). I'd be interested to see the data and the reasoning for pulling the plug, since prior feedback from it had apparently been positive.

Oh, yes, elected officials will pull the plug on a successful program in a heartbeat if it furthers their political agenda.

For example. Colorado instituted a program that gave free reliable birth control to poor women. Over the course of five years the abortion rate in the state was halved and welfare expenses were reduced by more than enough to cover the cost of the program.

Then the Republicans took control of the state legislature and chopped the program. Not because it failed, but because it was working and in so doing making them look bad.

And I have no doubt the Democrats have done it as well. Just because I don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen; I'm sure there's someone here who can fill in the details I don't have.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

 Spinner wrote:
Why is this thread not called "Basic Income Finnish'd"?

Oh you.

But yeah it Finishing doesn't really mean that it failed

though it ending early may point to it or is just incomplete which would be kind of a fail

hopefully they learned something from it.

Indeed, government "pilots" and "consultations" don't only end because they failed to achieve their stated objective, sometimes they end because it looks like they were going to and achieving the stated objective was never the actual point of them existing(they're a lovely way to avoid actually doing anything of substance or impact and are usually inconclusive enough that they can be spun whichever way is most convenient). I'd be interested to see the data and the reasoning for pulling the plug, since prior feedback from it had apparently been positive.

In the original article I posted, they said they were going to launch something similar that was more incentive based. To me, it smacks of the number of people who tried to find employment was probably much less than they had anticipated. I remember when the story first broke that they were implementing this program, they interviewed some of the participants, to show how they were going to gain employment while reaping this benefit. One of the people interviewed said that they planned to collect bottles from the beach nearby, paint them and sell them locally. If THAT was the typical kind of "employment" that was being sought, then I'm guessing they wanted to push for more taxable income in whatever employment was sought. Personally, I figured it would end this way, just not nearly this soon.

 Just Tony wrote:

In the original article I posted, they said they were going to launch something similar that was more incentive based. To me, it smacks of the number of people who tried to find employment was probably much less than they had anticipated. I remember when the story first broke that they were implementing this program, they interviewed some of the participants, to show how they were going to gain employment while reaping this benefit. One of the people interviewed said that they planned to collect bottles from the beach nearby, paint them and sell them locally. If THAT was the typical kind of "employment" that was being sought, then I'm guessing they wanted to push for more taxable income in whatever employment was sought. Personally, I figured it would end this way, just not nearly this soon.

I think it's much more mundane than people not trying to find work. Note that the people who received this had already faced LONG term unemployment. So there are probably chronic reasons behind why those people are unemployed that some extra money isn't going to fix. The amount of money received, about 700 dollar a month isn't nearly enough to use to follow a study or training when you also have to pay rent, water and electricity, food etc.

These people already had great difficulty finding work before the program. Getting some extra money isn't going to magically create more jobs for them.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
These people already had great difficulty finding work before the program. Getting some extra money isn't going to magically create more jobs for them.

Besides, it wasn't really that much extra - the idea with "basic income" is just that it would replace all or most of the different social security payments you can apply for. Instead of visiting several bureaucrats to apply for unemployment benefits, rent subsidies and so on there would be a standard sum. Less bureacrats, less hoops to jump through, fewer forms to fill, more time to maybe find a job.

Except ofc many of our worst-off unemployed live in some backwoods where there's no jobs to find, in a house they can't sell because no one wants to move there.

Yeah, reading the article it smells more of someone not like what it might say rather than it failing in and of itself. The Finnish government did a 180 on this last year after elections and decided to toss it rather than expand it to include all unemployed, and then harshly punish the existing unemployed by increased hours working or lose benefits.

Basically they went from a carrot and stick to a smaller carrot and flanged mace.

I'm not surprised it ended, welfare is a political mess at the best of times. And this experiment was pretty out there - picking a random set of unemployed people and giving them money no questions asked, and later expanding that to give them the same money no questions asked feels more like an economics lab experiment that somehow blundered into millions in government funding than an actual policy option.

I mean, how do you have a universal basic income when you're giving it to a couple of thousand people. There's nothing universal about that.

That said, this does show a key problem with any kind of universal basic income - in order to fund UBI you have to unwind a few hundred schemes, from welfare to housing allowances, from subsidized electricity to pensioner discounts on property rates. Doing that in one big sweep is near impossible. Failing to do that all at once means you won't have anywhere near the money to actually pay for UBI. The problem isn't that UBI can't work*, the problem is getting there from where we are now.




*Can't work at some point, in the medium to long term future. I don't think we're there yet.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

In the original article I posted, they said they were going to launch something similar that was more incentive based. To me, it smacks of the number of people who tried to find employment was probably much less than they had anticipated. I remember when the story first broke that they were implementing this program, they interviewed some of the participants, to show how they were going to gain employment while reaping this benefit. One of the people interviewed said that they planned to collect bottles from the beach nearby, paint them and sell them locally. If THAT was the typical kind of "employment" that was being sought, then I'm guessing they wanted to push for more taxable income in whatever employment was sought. Personally, I figured it would end this way, just not nearly this soon.

I think it's much more mundane than people not trying to find work. Note that the people who received this had already faced LONG term unemployment. So there are probably chronic reasons behind why those people are unemployed that some extra money isn't going to fix. The amount of money received, about 700 dollar a month isn't nearly enough to use to follow a study or training when you also have to pay rent, water and electricity, food etc.

These people already had great difficulty finding work before the program. Getting some extra money isn't going to magically create more jobs for them.

That wasn't really extra money though. Sum is about what they would have received anyway. What was different was that it was not deducted at all if you went to job. As it is if you don't get full 8h a day, 5 days a week job but have to settle on odd jobs here and there it's quite possible that after taxes and unemployment/housing support fees gets reduced you ended up having same or even LESS money than without work. Obviously not great incentive to find a work...Find a work, get 200€, lose 250€. Gee thanks a lot. With new system that 200€ would be 200€ extra period.

Real example: About 10 years ago or so I went for summer job. Was unemployed at the time. I had calculated my yearly income don't quite exceed the limit so I was safe. Yey! Extra money and get required time for school to graduate. Fast forward end of the period. Boss was about to come back from holiday and my work end. Except he got seriously ill on last week. Over 40 degrees fever and whatnot he picked on the vacation. I was asked would I be willing to continue a bit. Sure no problem. Except I calculated what I would earn and realized that I could do work for 4 days. On 5th I would actually end up PAYING for doing work. I would still have been willing to do it provided they dont' pay for me or I get hefty paydrop for last week. Hell give me just dinner on the last week and I'll do it. Silly as hell but...

So basically if you search no job it's +-0 pretty much(might have been bit less actually. Been a while since I was unemployed so I don't recall exactly how much I received back then). If you get job, even if it's like 4 hours per week, you will benefit.

tneva82 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

In the original article I posted, they said they were going to launch something similar that was more incentive based. To me, it smacks of the number of people who tried to find employment was probably much less than they had anticipated. I remember when the story first broke that they were implementing this program, they interviewed some of the participants, to show how they were going to gain employment while reaping this benefit. One of the people interviewed said that they planned to collect bottles from the beach nearby, paint them and sell them locally. If THAT was the typical kind of "employment" that was being sought, then I'm guessing they wanted to push for more taxable income in whatever employment was sought. Personally, I figured it would end this way, just not nearly this soon.

I think it's much more mundane than people not trying to find work. Note that the people who received this had already faced LONG term unemployment. So there are probably chronic reasons behind why those people are unemployed that some extra money isn't going to fix. The amount of money received, about 700 dollar a month isn't nearly enough to use to follow a study or training when you also have to pay rent, water and electricity, food etc.

These people already had great difficulty finding work before the program. Getting some extra money isn't going to magically create more jobs for them.

That wasn't really extra money though. Sum is about what they would have received anyway. What was different was that it was not deducted at all if you went to job. As it is if you don't get full 8h a day, 5 days a week job but have to settle on odd jobs here and there it's quite possible that after taxes and unemployment/housing support fees gets reduced you ended up having same or even LESS money than without work. Obviously not great incentive to find a work...Find a work, get 200€, lose 250€. Gee thanks a lot. With new system that 200€ would be 200€ extra period.

Real example: About 10 years ago or so I went for summer job. Was unemployed at the time. I had calculated my yearly income don't quite exceed the limit so I was safe. Yey! Extra money and get required time for school to graduate. Fast forward end of the period. Boss was about to come back from holiday and my work end. Except he got seriously ill on last week. Over 40 degrees fever and whatnot he picked on the vacation. I was asked would I be willing to continue a bit. Sure no problem. Except I calculated what I would earn and realized that I could do work for 4 days. On 5th I would actually end up PAYING for doing work. I would still have been willing to do it provided they dont' pay for me or I get hefty paydrop for last week. Hell give me just dinner on the last week and I'll do it. Silly as hell but...

So basically if you search no job it's +-0 pretty much(might have been bit less actually. Been a while since I was unemployed so I don't recall exactly how much I received back then). If you get job, even if it's like 4 hours per week, you will benefit.

Sorry, you misunderstand, perhaps because of my wording. It's extra money in the context of them keeping it if they get a job. But that extra money isn't going to pull long term unemployed people out of unemployment because those people are almost never unemployed because they wouldn't get enough money. These people are unemployed for reasons (skill set, age, job market demand) that go far beyond some extra numbers on a paycheck is what I'm saying, hence 'extra' money isn't going to help.

Your example is a great... example of the reasons beyond extra money. There are structural issues in the current day job market that need fixing before schemes like the extra money one would actually have some effect. Extra money won't magically create viable jobs for people who have already been unemployed for years.

Assuming, of course, that everyone on long term unemployment is on it because of those reasons, and not to collect benefits. I think it's the nature of any entitlement that there will always be people to abuse it.

Everyone (in the UK) has got this image of the professional unemployed benefits claimant based on TV programmes like Rab C Nesbitt or Shameless. There probably are similar characters in any country's TV in the world.

IDK what proportion of the unemployed really are like that. I would guess that the majority of the unemployed are unemployed for "good" reasons, and deserve social help.

I don't think the presence of a minority of freeloaders invalidates the basic pronciple.

I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years. Several companies are having trouble getting people to apply and there are people that have sat on unemployment for years. I know some personally, it isn't because of some physical or skill issue that bars them from applying. And I doubt that my locale is the only magical place where that sort of thing happens.


I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

 Just Tony wrote:
Assuming, of course, that everyone on long term unemployment is on it because of those reasons, and not to collect benefits. I think it's the nature of any entitlement that there will always be people to abuse it.

Sure, some people will always abuse a system. But lets not assume the majority is doing so because there is nothing to back up some assumption like that. So let me rephrase: most people in long term unemployment face structural problems that go beyond something some extra money would fix.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years. Several companies are having trouble getting people to apply and there are people that have sat on unemployment for years. I know some personally, it isn't because of some physical or skill issue that bars them from applying. And I doubt that my locale is the only magical place where that sort of thing happens.


I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

Your issue sounds more like a company issue to be fair. If the job pays like gak or has gak conditions, why take a hit like that? From personal experience, a 40 hour a week back breaking and mentally exhausting minimum wage job sometimes just doesn't appeal. To be fair I did a job like that, but it wouldn't be a long term job for people who like their physical health. Those kinds of jobs offer a disproportionate wage in relation to the demands of the job.

Is that an issue with unemployment being to lenient or companies having unrealistic expectations of their employees?

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
Assuming, of course, that everyone on long term unemployment is on it because of those reasons, and not to collect benefits. I think it's the nature of any entitlement that there will always be people to abuse it.

Sure, some people will always abuse a system. But lets not assume the majority is doing so because there is nothing to back up some assumption like that. So let me rephrase: most people in long term unemployment face structural problems that go beyond something some extra money would fix.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years. Several companies are having trouble getting people to apply and there are people that have sat on unemployment for years. I know some personally, it isn't because of some physical or skill issue that bars them from applying. And I doubt that my locale is the only magical place where that sort of thing happens.


I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

Your issue sounds more like a company issue to be fair. If the job pays like gak or has gak conditions, why take a hit like that? From personal experience, a 40 hour a week back breaking and mentally exhausting minimum wage job sometimes just doesn't appeal. To be fair I did a job like that, but it wouldn't be a long term job for people who like their physical health. Those kinds of jobs offer a disproportionate wage in relation to the demands of the job.

Is that an issue with unemployment being to lenient or companies having unrealistic expectations of their employees?

In the US, unemployment is done by the state, not the feds, so it depends on who you are asking. In Pennsylvania, they make you sign up for their job site and put in a minimum number of applications per week, otherwise you lose your benefits. Unfortunately a lot of these are minimum wage jobs doing retail work, so if you are like me and lost your factory job that paid well, you made more on unemployment than you did working retail. I applied to my minimum of 2 places per week while I had a friend line up my current job, which can actually support my family.

Some of the unemployment is supported by the federal government as well. The unemployment tax that your employer pays pays some to the state and some to the federal government with a credit for paying towards the state UI that takes care of most of it.

I will say, in New York, for the first x amount of time you have to take a job in your field if it's offered to you. After Y amount of time you have to take any job.

The biggest issue is if you do anything 'productive' including volunteering or taking a 1 hour shift somewhere, you lose 1/4 of your weekly pay for any day in which you did something.

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years.

Isn't there a 26 week limit in Indiana? I know that was extended temporarily during the worst of the recession, but how does "years" happen?

There is a program (Not sure if it's in all states) where if you were going back to school to learn a new trade that the unemployment time is extended. Don't think it would go on for years though.

 Ouze wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years.

Isn't there a 26 week limit in Indiana? I know that was extended temporarily during the worst of the recession, but how does "years" happen?

They probably switched from unemployment to social security disability.

 Inquisitor Lord Bane wrote:

In the US, unemployment is done by the state, not the feds, so it depends on who you are asking. In Pennsylvania, they make you sign up for their job site and put in a minimum number of applications per week, otherwise you lose your benefits. Unfortunately a lot of these are minimum wage jobs doing retail work, so if you are like me and lost your factory job that paid well, you made more on unemployment than you did working retail. I applied to my minimum of 2 places per week while I had a friend line up my current job, which can actually support my family.

Its similar in the Netherlands, to qualify you have to apply several times a week, as well as needing to have had a job for at least 40+ weeks in the last year etc. The bottom end of the job market really sucks for similar reasons over here. Part time is considered employed but when I did part time I got scaled back to 10 hours a week, which left me with 450 dollars a month in the end. You can't survive on that, but savings helped me manage until I got a much better paying one. If I didn't have that part time job at the time I could have gotten twice as much from unemployment, but well technically I was employed

 Just Tony wrote:

I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

Yeah. Thats why I feel ALL social welfare should always have strings attached.

Usually they have the wrong sort of strings attached where they make it worse off if you work some,

 skyth wrote:
Usually they have the wrong sort of strings attached where they make it worse off if you work some,

Those 'strings' attached all too frequently become hoops to jump through for the majority of honest people, as well as costing the state more money than just not having those strings. Bonus points for the strings being handled by a private third party company when it comes to waste.

 skyth wrote:
Usually they have the wrong sort of strings attached where they make it worse off if you work some,

Yeah, that's the big problem almost universally with that kind of stuff everywhere it seems. My sister is single and has two kids and recently lost her job because central Illinois is an inhospitable economic shithole unless you work for the state or in healthcare. As it stands, she can't find a job that would pay close to the one she had previously, and if she takes just any job she can find for the sake of having a job, she loses what little assistance she is getting.

Not only is there no economic incentive to try, there's an actual penalty. But hey, my family keeps voting Republican all the while because bootstraps, amirite?

Ouze wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years.

Isn't there a 26 week limit in Indiana? I know that was extended temporarily during the worst of the recession, but how does "years" happen?

Prestor Jon wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I myself was on unemployment in '09 due to damn near everyone laying off at the time. I needed it, and took advantage when I needed it. I also got off of it the first second I could find work. There are some people in my local area that have been on it for years.

Isn't there a 26 week limit in Indiana? I know that was extended temporarily during the worst of the recession, but how does "years" happen?

They probably switched from unemployment to social security disability.

:You can apply for extensions. I'm not sure what the max is, but the 26 week thing is for each iteration of Unemployment. That rule actually went into effect AFTER I got off of Unemployment. I didn't have to apply for any extensions when I was on it, and I think I was pushing a year when I did it, or at least close to it. But I also was constantly looking and took the first job I could find that paid more than $11 an hour, and bode my time until I was called back to my previous job. Because "bootstraps" apparently.

The extensions were relaxed during the worst part of the recession, but the most extreme elements were all phased out in 2012. You can get extensions now but they are nowhere near for years, and they have all sorts of restrictions. The first level is like an additional 14 weeks, and after that it's like,6% unemployment is required. Pretty much only Alaska.

So far as "each iteration", I'm pretty sure most states require at least some work before you can get benefits again. You can't just get unemployment for the max, get an extension, burn it, and then apply over again and start anew. You need to have worked at least x quarters to be eligible again for a year and then have lost that job through no fault of your own.

I've never gotten unemployment so I could be mistaken, but I don't think people coasting for years on unemployment is really possible any more.

 daedalus wrote:

 skyth wrote:
Usually they have the wrong sort of strings attached where they make it worse off if you work some,

Yeah, that's the big problem almost universally with that kind of stuff everywhere it seems. My sister is single and has two kids and recently lost her job because central Illinois is an inhospitable economic shithole unless you work for the state or in healthcare. As it stands, she can't find a job that would pay close to the one she had previously, and if she takes just any job she can find for the sake of having a job, she loses what little assistance she is getting.

Not only is there no economic incentive to try, there's an actual penalty. But hey, my family keeps voting Republican all the while because bootstraps, amirite?

I sometimes wonder if those things are in there as a poison pill by certain parties to 'prove' they 'don't work' and should thus just be ended.

Some people are just convinced that there is a major epidemic of benefits cheats. Wanting to axe social services because some people cheat the system is like wanting to ban baseball because sometimes a player gets beaned.

Rather than simply being outraged that people stay on unemployment (and welfare in general) for "too long" we could ask why this is happening. Why are people willing to settle for low income while creating a resume gap that makes it even more difficult to find work in the future? Are they just hopelessly lazy, or could there be another reason? Could it have something to do with the alternative being working a job for wages, wages that are subsidized by taxpayers to keep corporate profit margins healthy, with little or no hope of advancement and a long-term outlook of being made permanently obsolete by a machine? Perhaps people look at these jobs, recognize that these "jobs" are soul-crushing destruction of humanity that adds nothing to society besides fueling our collective masturbation over the idea of "hard work" and "bootstraps", and don't want to participate? Nope, must be laziness.

Fix the broken capitalist system, stop allowing companies to pay poverty-level wages and leave taxpayers with the bill for welfare services to make up the difference, and maybe people will be less interested in staying on welfare. At least until guaranteed unemployment starts to become a significant percentage of the population, and the choice becomes universal basic income vs. the execution of the wealthy (and the politicians on their bribe lists) followed by universal basic income.

 Peregrine wrote:
Rather than simply being outraged that people stay on unemployment (and welfare in general) for "too long" we could ask why this is happening. Why are people willing to settle for low income while creating a resume gap that makes it even more difficult to find work in the future? Are they just hopelessly lazy, or could there be another reason? Could it have something to do with the alternative being working a job for wages, wages that are subsidized by taxpayers to keep corporate profit margins healthy, with little or no hope of advancement and a long-term outlook of being made permanently obsolete by a machine? Perhaps people look at these jobs, recognize that these "jobs" are soul-crushing destruction of humanity that adds nothing to society besides fueling our collective masturbation over the idea of "hard work" and "bootstraps", and don't want to participate? Nope, must be laziness.

Fix the broken capitalist system, stop allowing companies to pay poverty-level wages and leave taxpayers with the bill for welfare services to make up the difference, and maybe people will be less interested in staying on welfare. At least until guaranteed unemployment starts to become a significant percentage of the population, and the choice becomes universal basic income vs. the execution of the wealthy (and the politicians on their bribe lists) followed by universal basic income.

I mean, not wanting to do a job just because it is a "soul crushing destruction of humanity" (hyperbole much?) is kinda lazy, yeah.

It's not laziness, though. Taking that part time Walmart gig will likely cause your overall benefits to drop, though. It's survival.

 feeder wrote:
I mean, not wanting to do a job just because it is a "soul crushing destruction of humanity" (hyperbole much?) is kinda lazy, yeah.

I think there's a difference between "I don't want to do anything to help myself" and "I don't want to submit to torture for the sake of some smug billionaire getting to masturbate over 'hard work' every election season". One is a rejection of working at all, one is a recognition that throwing away one's life into a black hole of despair that provides zero benefit to society is not a good thing. Give most of these people a decent job and they'd probably take it. The problem is that we have allowed decent jobs to disappear in favor of borderline slavery, and many people have little or no hope of anything better.

And it's not really hyperbole. Look up stuff like Amazon's warehouses where the employees have GPS trackers monitoring their exact positions at all times and can be disciplined (including being fired!) for taking a route that is a few steps longer than optimal.

 Peregrine wrote:

 feeder wrote:
I mean, not wanting to do a job just because it is a "soul crushing destruction of humanity" (hyperbole much?) is kinda lazy, yeah.

I think there's a difference between "I don't want to do anything to help myself" and "I don't want to submit to torture for the sake of some smug billionaire getting to masturbate over 'hard work' every election season". One is a rejection of working at all, one is a recognition that throwing away one's life into a black hole of despair that provides zero benefit to society is not a good thing. Give most of these people a decent job and they'd probably take it. The problem is that we have allowed decent jobs to disappear in favor of borderline slavery, and many people have little or no hope of anything better.

And it's not really hyperbole. Look up stuff like Amazon's warehouses where the employees have GPS trackers monitoring their exact positions at all times and can be disciplined (including being fired!) for taking a route that is a few steps longer than optimal.

I suppose, if one defines their life around the job they do. But that's a Live to Work vs Work to Live mentality. I'm in the latter camp.

Yeah there are absolutely insane Amazon warehouse stories. From having timed bathroom breaks that for some stations means you can barely reach the bathroom and get back, let alone use it, to people fighting over who gets the smaller items, because smaller items=easier to pack and reach your absurd hourly package sorting goals.

 feeder wrote:
I suppose, if one defines their life around the job they do. But that's a Live to Work vs Work to Live mentality. I'm in the latter camp.

That's something you only get to do if you have the privilege of a decent job. If you're working multiple jobs (including spending time commuting between everything, often on slow and horrible public transportation) just to be able to eat every week you don't really have that option.

 feeder wrote:
I suppose, if one defines their life around the job they do. But that's a Live to Work vs Work to Live mentality. I'm in the latter camp.

From personal experience being in the latter camp, a 10-12 hour a day minimum wage job makes work significantly bleed into your life, from still being barely able to afford to do anything nice, to having little free time and just facing physical and mental exhaustion after work. I'm glad I got out before suffering a breakdown I was inches away from.

 feeder wrote:

I suppose, if one defines their life around the job they do. But that's a Live to Work vs Work to Live mentality. I'm in the latter camp.

That's the problem though: Some places you get the very real choice between "Live to Work" and "Don't Work", because it's a buyer's market on labor and everyone knows it. I listen to the insane expectations that friends/family have to deal with that work gak jobs in places like that, and I ask them why they put up with it, and the answer is usually "come find a better job around here."

And yeah, sure, you can ALWAYS move, soon as you figure out how to afford it on your $10/hour (if you're lucky). Especially when moving to some place that offers improved economic opportunity, which will almost always be more expensive, because improved economic opportunity.

Rural America is very much so an economic wasteland aside from anywhere within driving distance of a medium to large city. And I'm not so sure about those either.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Yeah there are absolutely insane Amazon warehouse stories. From having timed bathroom breaks that for some stations means you can barely reach the bathroom and get back, let alone use it, to people fighting over who gets the smaller items, because smaller items=easier to pack and reach your absurd hourly package sorting goals.

Yeah. Amazon do have a few horror stories.

One in UK was called before parliament as they often had ambulances called to the side, including someone giving birth I think....

feeder wrote:Some people are just convinced that there is a major epidemic of benefits cheats. Wanting to axe social services because some people cheat the system is like wanting to ban baseball because sometimes a player gets beaned.

Yeah, from what I read about social services those usually benefit more than they cost (as they reduce cost in other parts of society) and the rate of abuse (cheating) is usually rather low and insignificant in comparison to all the benefits. Per euro/dollar (or your local currency) it also benefits the economy much more than another tax cut for the rich. In the grand scheme of things a few lazy bums could technically be ignored but people would rather make things harder for everyone (and pay even more for that "feature") than just ignore a few cheaters.

Disciple of Fate wrote:Yeah there are absolutely insane Amazon warehouse stories. From having timed bathroom breaks that for some stations means you can barely reach the bathroom and get back, let alone use it, to people fighting over who gets the smaller items, because smaller items=easier to pack and reach your absurd hourly package sorting goals.

And those warehouse workers still need government benefits to survive while Amazon makes over $300000 per employee per year (and their shareholders benefit from that too). Go capitalism!

I remember on the bus one time my wife and I saw a lady reading a book the cover of which was something like 'getting every dollar you can out of welfare'. Looking over her shoulder we could read the blurb on the back, which argued that every person is entitled to using any trick they can to get everything possible out of welfare. It pissed me and my wife right off.

A day or two later we were telling friends about it, full of righteous anger, and a bell went off in my head, and I wondered how that the attitude in that book caused me to be outraged on a moral level, but the exact same attitude applied to tax avoidance didn't. Both were just people working with the rules they were given to try and get the most they could out of the system. But I accepted tax avoidance as just something people did, I even worked in a tax office that was pretty aggressive in creating tax avoidance set ups. And the reality is tax avoidance costs government far more than welfare manipulation ever could, so my different level of outrage wasn't based on the scale of each problem.

I actually still don't know the exact answer to this. The best I've been able to come up with was normalisation, everyone I knew paid taxes and wanted personally to pay less, but I knew barely anyone who'd ever been on welfare, not even on part welfare. So perhaps people who are familiar with life on welfare, because they're on welfare and/or grew up around people on welfare, perhaps to them it's just a normal thing to talk about working welfare to get a little more, and they are outraged that middle class people invent mechanisms to reduce their taxes?

Whatever it is, I think it showed to me I had some very moralistic ideas that actually didn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective. And while someone else's exact stance might be quite different, I still notice that those positions are often infused with their own kind of moralism, that also doesn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective.

That's the thing about UBI that's really good. It takes all the moralism out of it. It just makes sure everyone has enough to meet their basic needs.

 Just Tony wrote:
I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

The whole point of the Finland experiment was the 'no strings attached' portion. You get the money whether you try to find work or you don't. You get the money even if you get a job. It's a basic income you get no matter what else is going on in your life. This means it can't abused or defrauded, no-one would be getting it while someone else missed out. But that would only be if it was rolled out to everyone across the country. It's why the very limited experiment idea was so weird.

Ouze wrote:The extensions were relaxed during the worst part of the recession, but the most extreme elements were all phased out in 2012. You can get extensions now but they are nowhere near for years, and they have all sorts of restrictions. The first level is like an additional 14 weeks, and after that it's like,6% unemployment is required. Pretty much only Alaska.

So far as "each iteration", I'm pretty sure most states require at least some work before you can get benefits again. You can't just get unemployment for the max, get an extension, burn it, and then apply over again and start anew. You need to have worked at least x quarters to be eligible again for a year and then have lost that job through no fault of your own.

I've never gotten unemployment so I could be mistaken, but I don't think people coasting for years on unemployment is really possible any more.

You may be right, it could have changed since last I had to deal with it. The last time I applied for unemployment was during a layoff that lasted 29 days. In my "orientation" to that layoff session, the 26 weeks was outlined, as well as the extension process.

And yes, you have to work for X amount of time to qualify in the first place. 3-4 months at a temp job gets you that qualification. Seriously, if I didn't see this sort of stuff in person, I wouldn't rail about it. I think the resource is absolutely necessary, and goes a long way to helping people who are indeed in need, but at the same time I also am aware of the welfare crowd that goes out of their way to abuse that. It's the same group of people who leave the plasma donation clinic and buy a carton of smokes from the smoke shop in the same shopping center. The issue there isn't the resource, it's the people.

Peregrine wrote:Rather than simply being outraged that people stay on unemployment (and welfare in general) for "too long" we could ask why this is happening. Why are people willing to settle for low income while creating a resume gap that makes it even more difficult to find work in the future? Are they just hopelessly lazy, or could there be another reason? Could it have something to do with the alternative being working a job for wages, wages that are subsidized by taxpayers to keep corporate profit margins healthy, with little or no hope of advancement and a long-term outlook of being made permanently obsolete by a machine? Perhaps people look at these jobs, recognize that these "jobs" are soul-crushing destruction of humanity that adds nothing to society besides fueling our collective masturbation over the idea of "hard work" and "bootstraps", and don't want to participate? Nope, must be laziness.

Fix the broken capitalist system, stop allowing companies to pay poverty-level wages and leave taxpayers with the bill for welfare services to make up the difference, and maybe people will be less interested in staying on welfare. At least until guaranteed unemployment starts to become a significant percentage of the population, and the choice becomes universal basic income vs. the execution of the wealthy (and the politicians on their bribe lists) followed by universal basic income.

I have to give you credit, you definitely stick to your Marxist guns. Could it be possible that people can find work ABOVE minimum wage while attempting to find better employment? Half the minimum wage jobs in the US are jobs meant for high school and college students who are just starting out and need both small supplemental income as well as some work experience to demonstrate work ethic and schedule discipline for their resume, however you still have adults that work their entire life as a Sandwich Artist at Subway because of some distaste of manufacturing work (met 7 that think like this, so far). The other half are either low profit industry in the first place or are the catch all for people who make themselves unemployable elsewhere. Security guard comes to mind almost immediately there. The rest of the occupations are above that mark, and if Indiana is any sort of barometer, still looking for employees to fill vacancies.

Also, as far as the whole automation thing:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/16/elon-musk-humans-robots-slow-down-tesla-model-3-production

May not want to pin your hopes and dreams on automation replacing most jobs just yet.

sebster wrote:I remember on the bus one time my wife and I saw a lady reading a book the cover of which was something like 'getting every dollar you can out of welfare'. Looking over her shoulder we could read the blurb on the back, which argued that every person is entitled to using any trick they can to get everything possible out of welfare. It pissed me and my wife right off.

A day or two later we were telling friends about it, full of righteous anger, and a bell went off in my head, and I wondered how that the attitude in that book caused me to be outraged on a moral level, but the exact same attitude applied to tax avoidance didn't. Both were just people working with the rules they were given to try and get the most they could out of the system. But I accepted tax avoidance as just something people did, I even worked in a tax office that was pretty aggressive in creating tax avoidance set ups. And the reality is tax avoidance costs government far more than welfare manipulation ever could, so my different level of outrage wasn't based on the scale of each problem.

I actually still don't know the exact answer to this. The best I've been able to come up with was normalisation, everyone I knew paid taxes and wanted personally to pay less, but I knew barely anyone who'd ever been on welfare, not even on part welfare. So perhaps people who are familiar with life on welfare, because they're on welfare and/or grew up around people on welfare, perhaps to them it's just a normal thing to talk about working welfare to get a little more, and they are outraged that middle class people invent mechanisms to reduce their taxes?

Whatever it is, I think it showed to me I had some very moralistic ideas that actually didn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective. And while someone else's exact stance might be quite different, I still notice that those positions are often infused with their own kind of moralism, that also doesn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective.

That's the thing about UBI that's really good. It takes all the moralism out of it. It just makes sure everyone has enough to meet their basic needs.

As far as the morality question, I think that for the most part you have a stigma attached to being on welfare which elicits that visceral impulse reaction you mentioned. My family growing up had my mom's wire factory shut down and lay her off while the trucking company my dad drove for went out of business and the market was really bleak. We were forced to be on welfare and government assistance at the time, including the government food pantry hand outs at the time. Oh, the joys of going to the distribution center to pick up the oatmeal, cheese, peanut butter, puffed wheat, and other essentials. The distribution center, mind you, that was situated in the section of town near the doctors' office, smack in the middle of the most affluent houses with the most affluent families. It was literally a walk of shame. THAT sort of stigma is attached to welfare, and it affected me on a personal level growing up with it. I will shovel gak out of hog barns as a side job rather than take that sort of assistance again. As well as my company is doing now, I don't have to really worry about it. But just noting it now, if ever a time comes that I can't support every aspect of my family with my job, military service, and the benefits attached to them, then I will take on another 40 hour week job on top of what I do rather than take a hand out. Because "bootstraps", apparently.

sebster wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
I think the issue with the program in Finland was the "no strings attached" portion of it.

The whole point of the Finland experiment was the 'no strings attached' portion. You get the money whether you try to find work or you don't. You get the money even if you get a job. It's a basic income you get no matter what else is going on in your life. This means it can't abused or defrauded, no-one would be getting it while someone else missed out. But that would only be if it was rolled out to everyone across the country. It's why the very limited experiment idea was so weird.

I questioned the limited scope of the "experiment", I questioned the source of the income for the experiment, but then I looked up tax rates in Finland and I got my answer. I also realize that part of the experiment was an attempt to see if losing benefits was the driving force for keeping people out of the job market, at least that's how I was understanding it. It may be, I don't know. I also don't live in Finland, so I don't have a finger on the pulse of the job market to say whether the work is simply not there in the first place. My thoughts are that they are reported in that article as replacing the experimental Universal Wage with something incentive based. I'm wondering if it's either far too few people actively looking for real work while on the program which might paint things in a poor light, or more that steering towards more taxable income to help pay for said benefit.

 Just Tony wrote:
Half the minimum wage jobs in the US are jobs meant for high school and college students who are just starting out and need both small supplemental income

There's no 'meant' involved in this. Jobs are created because a business has a task that needs doing, and the pay is set not at what it's 'meant' to be, but simply at the pay rate that gives the company enough labour of a sufficient skill level. It's an interesting thing that so many strong free marketeers presume an intent and meaning behind so much of the market's operations.

As far as the morality question, I think that for the most part you have a stigma attached to being on welfare which elicits that visceral impulse reaction you mentioned.

No, I have no issue with someone being on welfare, and I don't think any less of someone who needed help. That's life, it happens. That's why I found my reaction interesting - I have no issue with someone being on welfare, but I had a strong reaction against someone reading a book on how to work the system for the maximum gain.

My family growing up had my mom's wire factory shut down and lay her off while the trucking company my dad drove for went out of business and the market was really bleak. We were forced to be on welfare and government assistance at the time, including the government food pantry hand outs at the time. Oh, the joys of going to the distribution center to pick up the oatmeal, cheese, peanut butter, puffed wheat, and other essentials. The distribution center, mind you, that was situated in the section of town near the doctors' office, smack in the middle of the most affluent houses with the most affluent families. It was literally a walk of shame. THAT sort of stigma is attached to welfare, and it affected me on a personal level growing up with it. I will shovel gak out of hog barns as a side job rather than take that sort of assistance again. As well as my company is doing now, I don't have to really worry about it. But just noting it now, if ever a time comes that I can't support every aspect of my family with my job, military service, and the benefits attached to them, then I will take on another 40 hour week job on top of what I do rather than take a hand out. Because "bootstraps", apparently.

Interesting story, thanks for telling it. I've got a foot in both camps on the stigma of welfare. On the one hand people shouldn't be stigmatised for being in need, that's just not cool. On the other hand, I'm really not comfortable with the kind of mentality where everyone looks to government and policy as a way of getting paid as much as possible without regard for actual need.

There needs to be a stigma on people taking when they don't need to, and the same stigma for people who avoid paying what they ought to, without stigmatising people who have genuine reasons to draw on the system. Not an easy thing to achieve.

I questioned the limited scope of the "experiment", I questioned the source of the income for the experiment, but then I looked up tax rates in Finland and I got my answer.

It wasn't that much money. When you look at what gets paid in benefits, low income tax rebates, private/public pensions, rental assistance, and so on, the amount given was probably on the small end for what a UBI could pay.

[I also realize that part of the experiment was an attempt to see if losing benefits was the driving force for keeping people out of the job market, at least that's how I was understanding it.

That's a key part of UBI, yeah, the idea that having a government conditional on not working encourages some people to stay out of work. The other part, which they never got to, is that there might be a significant economic loss from people who are unable to take risks to try and start a new business or go back to school or whatever, because they have to keep their current job just to keep their heads above water. By paying UBI to literally everyone, it means people would be free to leave work for a short time to try a business or whatever.

I'm wondering if it's either far too few people actively looking for real work while on the program which might paint things in a poor light, or more that steering towards more taxable income to help pay for said benefit.

The people who ran the experiment were upset it was closed down, so I doubt that was it. It's more likely that the idea is probably a least a decade ahead of being seriously viable on either a cultural or economic level, and run as a limited experiment was weird and just kind of unfair. As such, this got shut down as soon as the political winds shifted even slightly.

 Just Tony wrote:
[And yes, you have to work for X amount of time to qualify in the first place. 3-4 months at a temp job gets you that qualification. Seriously, if I didn't see this sort of stuff in person, I wouldn't rail about it. I think the resource is absolutely necessary, and goes a long way to helping people who are indeed in need, but at the same time I also am aware of the welfare crowd that goes out of their way to abuse that. .

Pretty confident you can't qualify for unemployment for another 26 week cycle with a single quarter of work; and again, you need to lose that job through no fault of you own. These details matter because it's the difference between identifying an issue and inventing a narrative.

Also, why lump in unemployment with welfare? It's like attaching a stigma to workers comp; it's insurance that was paid into and earned.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Sorry, you misunderstand, perhaps because of my wording. It's extra money in the context of them keeping it if they get a job. But that extra money isn't going to pull long term unemployed people out of unemployment because those people are almost never unemployed because they wouldn't get enough money. These people are unemployed for reasons (skill set, age, job market demand) that go far beyond some extra numbers on a paycheck is what I'm saying, hence 'extra' money isn't going to help.

Your example is a great... example of the reasons beyond extra money. There are structural issues in the current day job market that need fixing before schemes like the extra money one would actually have some effect. Extra money won't magically create viable jobs for people who have already been unemployed for years.

Some of them might be unable but how many will turn down jobs because it's not PROFITABLE for them? Look at my example. I would have had to PAY to do money. With this sytem however I would have had no reason to not take the job.

This is not pouring new extra money for unemployed but give them incentive to take a job, ANY job. There's low pay/part-time jobs but as it is it's often not sensible to take. That's what this system would fight rather than just throwing more money(hell money they pay would be pretty much same anyway).

It's not about creating new jobs but making people take jobs already out there.

tneva82 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

Sorry, you misunderstand, perhaps because of my wording. It's extra money in the context of them keeping it if they get a job. But that extra money isn't going to pull long term unemployed people out of unemployment because those people are almost never unemployed because they wouldn't get enough money. These people are unemployed for reasons (skill set, age, job market demand) that go far beyond some extra numbers on a paycheck is what I'm saying, hence 'extra' money isn't going to help.

Your example is a great... example of the reasons beyond extra money. There are structural issues in the current day job market that need fixing before schemes like the extra money one would actually have some effect. Extra money won't magically create viable jobs for people who have already been unemployed for years.

Some of them might be unable but how many will turn down jobs because it's not PROFITABLE for them? Look at my example. I would have had to PAY to do money. With this sytem however I would have had no reason to not take the job.

This is not pouring new extra money for unemployed but give them incentive to take a job, ANY job. There's low pay/part-time jobs but as it is it's often not sensible to take. That's what this system would fight rather than just throwing more money(hell money they pay would be pretty much same anyway).

It's not about creating new jobs but making people take jobs already out there.

You are a bad example for this UBI trial because you weren't LONG term unemployed, which is they key part in this consideration. I have no doubt that people without any significant gaps in their CV might more easily find work for which this UBI plan could help, but those people weren't the target in the first place.

And again, why would it incentivize you to take any job? Some jobs pay such trash wages for the work involved and the hit your personal life takes its not worth the effort. If the work needs doing, why not pay a wage for which people want to do it in the first place? That would be an ass backward way of approaching this, as the government would be basically subsidizing companies who don't deem it necesarry to offer a job a person could live on. By all means employ UBI, but don't do it to help exploitative business practices. If you can't find people to do your job, maybe consider why people don't take it first, instead of expecting the government to subsidize your workers.

 Just Tony wrote:
Assuming, of course, that everyone on long term unemployment is on it because of those reasons, and not to collect benefits. I think it's the nature of any entitlement that there will always be people to abuse it.

Even if people (which I doubt happens a lot, but there will always be some) initially 'go' into longterm unemployment just to get the benefits, if they stay there long enough, chances are they will lose the skills needed to be a good employee even if they had them before. Their knowledge becomes outdated, many of them become socially isolated which generally does not improve your people skills, they may lose the discipline to get up early enough for work every morning.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

You are a bad example for this UBI trial because you weren't LONG term unemployed, which is they key part in this consideration. I have no doubt that people without any significant gaps in their CV might more easily find work for which this UBI plan could help, but those people weren't the target in the first place.

And again, why would it incentivize you to take any job? Some jobs pay such trash wages for the work involved and the hit your personal life takes its not worth the effort. If the work needs doing, why not pay a wage for which people want to do it in the first place? That would be an ass backward way of approaching this, as the government would be basically subsidizing companies who don't deem it necesarry to offer a job a person could live on. By all means employ UBI, but don't do it to help exploitative business practices. If you can't find people to do your job, maybe consider why people don't take it first, instead of expecting the government to subsidize your workers.

At that point I had zero entries in my CV besides summer jobs so...Not sure how you figure I was not long term unemployed. And I would have had to literally turn the job task down(or at least do it unofficially for free as a favour for the company). With this system I wouldn't have had to. And the "work costing money" isn't that unusual situation...

And why? Maybe because I figure 4 hours a week wouldn't be that bad for extra cash wouldn't be bad idea...Simple matter of life there's plenty of jobs out there but they aren't 40h/week type of gigs with certain work hours. At times you might get decent hours, then another month barely anything. If you take that you risk losing enough benefits that you lose money. With this it's simple case of do you want more money or not.

Whenever you need to actively calculate whether you can AFFORD to take a job you know there's situation where people don't have incentive to take a job financially. Job could be fun, might be quite reasonable hourly wage with reasonable work hours but because amount of hours per month isn't going to be beyond treshold X or even set(so having another job at the same time would be tricky) but you would have to REALLY want something to CV to literally pay to do the job.

tneva82 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

You are a bad example for this UBI trial because you weren't LONG term unemployed, which is they key part in this consideration. I have no doubt that people without any significant gaps in their CV might more easily find work for which this UBI plan could help, but those people weren't the target in the first place.

And again, why would it incentivize you to take any job? Some jobs pay such trash wages for the work involved and the hit your personal life takes its not worth the effort. If the work needs doing, why not pay a wage for which people want to do it in the first place? That would be an ass backward way of approaching this, as the government would be basically subsidizing companies who don't deem it necesarry to offer a job a person could live on. By all means employ UBI, but don't do it to help exploitative business practices. If you can't find people to do your job, maybe consider why people don't take it first, instead of expecting the government to subsidize your workers.

At that point I had zero entries in my CV besides summer jobs so...Not sure how you figure I was not long term unemployed.

And why? Maybe because I figure 4 hours a week wouldn't be that bad for extra cash wouldn't be bad idea...Simple matter of life there's plenty of jobs out there but they aren't 40h/week type of gigs with certain work hours. At times you might get decent hours, then another month barely anything. If you take that you risk losing enough benefits that you lose money. With this it's simple case of do you want more money or not.

Whenever you need to actively calculate whether you can AFFORD to take a job you know there's situation where people don't have incentive to take a job financially. Job could be fun, might be quite reasonable hourly wage with reasonable work hours but because amount of hours per month isn't going to be beyond treshold X or even set(so having another job at the same time would be tricky) but you would have to REALLY want something to CV to literally pay to do the job.

How can you be long term unemployed if you hadn't even had your first full job? From summer jobs I assume you're young, maybe in your late teens at the time? We don't consider children who haven't had a job unemployed. You better be joking, because else you just made yourself an even worse example for this UBI trial as you would be as far off the mark for it as possible.

You had a little job to make some money on the side, this isn't about money on the side. This is about adults that need a job to survive because else they have no income. When a job isn't worth taking financially that is a company problem, not a government problem!

What you're advocating is basically government subsidies for for profit companies. I will be damned before I give my taxes to a UBI scheme that is nothing more than a glorified method of saving profit driven companies a bunch of money by providing cheap labor.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I did the 'part' time work. Let me give you this example. Everyone that worked for the company had part time contracts, because the part time minimum wage is lower. Yet almost everyone consistently made around 50 hours a week. If you complained or wanted a day off you would be looking at perhaps 10 hours next month while other worked more to cover for you, "because that will show you with your time off!" At minimum wage the boss kept complaining that the company couldn't attract better employees and that everybody left as soon as possible. This while the company made a profit of millions and the year in which I left and had a record expansion. That is the kind of gakky business that would benefit from attracting staff by your supplemental UBI plan, while they should be attracting staff by improving conditions.

I'm not against UBI as a concept, I'm against UBI that just enables bad business practices.

I have a major issue with the way unemployment benefits sometimes work in the UK.

A few years ago my now-wife was unemployed and on Jobseeker's Allowance here. She was actively dissuaded from taking part-time or short-term jobs by the staff in the Job Centre because taking them would stop/reduce her benefit. Obviously she ignored them, and one of the jobs lead onto a full-time proper job, paying a proper wage way above the benefits she was receiving. I just don't think the Job Centre is set up properly to get people off of benefits and into proper full-time employment.

I do however think UBI would work - but it would need a whole load of changes across multiple areas of government and society in general. The first of Ed Milibands 'Reasons to be Cheerful' podcast was on the subject - it was very interesting: https://cheerful.libsyn.com/episode-1-free-money-for-all-the-universal-basic-income

 Just Tony wrote:
Half the minimum wage jobs in the US are jobs meant for high school and college students who are just starting out and need both small supplemental income as well as some work experience to demonstrate work ethic and schedule discipline for their resume, however you still have adults that work their entire life as a Sandwich Artist at Subway because of some distaste of manufacturing work (met 7 that think like this, so far).

This is utter nonsense. These jobs are not "meant" for students because places like Subway are open during the hours that students are in class or asleep. The majority of fast food jobs are going to adults using them as normal jobs, and it's absurd to suggest otherwise.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/16/elon-musk-humans-robots-slow-down-tesla-model-3-production

May not want to pin your hopes and dreams on automation replacing most jobs just yet.

As seems to be the theme in these discussions, you're missing the point. Automation is not taking over all jobs right now. But automation is only going to get better, and as it gets better it will continue to replace human jobs with machines. We already have problems with this, and it's only going to get worse. And well short of near-total elimination of human labor we will have the social conflicts that will make socialism inevitable. If 25% of the population is literally unemployable in any meaningful capacity do you think they're going to passively accept their fate and starve to death? Of course not. If the state doesn't voluntarily step in to fix the problem then they're going to exercise their second amendment rights and start lining the wealthy up against the wall until the survivors accept that socialism is the next step.

Ouze wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
[And yes, you have to work for X amount of time to qualify in the first place. 3-4 months at a temp job gets you that qualification. Seriously, if I didn't see this sort of stuff in person, I wouldn't rail about it. I think the resource is absolutely necessary, and goes a long way to helping people who are indeed in need, but at the same time I also am aware of the welfare crowd that goes out of their way to abuse that. .

Pretty confident you can't qualify for unemployment for another 26 week cycle with a single quarter of work; and again, you need to lose that job through no fault of you own. These details matter because it's the difference between identifying an issue and inventing a narrative.

Also, why lump in unemployment with welfare? It's like attaching a stigma to workers comp; it's insurance that was paid into and earned.

Malachon wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
Assuming, of course, that everyone on long term unemployment is on it because of those reasons, and not to collect benefits. I think it's the nature of any entitlement that there will always be people to abuse it.

Even if people (which I doubt happens a lot, but there will always be some) initially 'go' into longterm unemployment just to get the benefits, if they stay there long enough, chances are they will lose the skills needed to be a good employee even if they had them before. Their knowledge becomes outdated, many of them become socially isolated which generally does not improve your people skills, they may lose the discipline to get up early enough for work every morning.

First, it was not my intent to lump all unemployment benefit claimants with all welfare claimants. I saw what I posted, and it was indeed far clunkier than what I wanted to convey. This, once again, comes from my own personal experiences seeing people out to abuse the system to get as much of a free ride as possible, as I will be addressing in Seb's post briefly. And I was trying to reference THAT group, and wound up with fairly poor wording. I blame the forced speed of messaging while at work along with general fatigue.

Now the part that both of you address here in a roundabout sort of way. Some people are forced to go on unemployment for reasons beyond their control, totally acknowledged. Some of what I've seen, which is brought up at the end of Malachon's post, is where someone becomes... accustomed to the lack of schedule that being on unemployment provides. Granted, this is not the kind of income that will keep a nice house afloat or anything of the sort. We had a gamer at one of our stores, we'll call him Stinky Bob. Now, Stinky Bob bounced from place to place, staying wherever he could, and bounced from job to job, doing routine stints on unemployment. He lost his job at Chuck E Cheese's and wound up living in the back of one of the local gaming stores for a brief period in time. He managed to get a job at a cab company as his benefits were expiring. This guy would come into the game shop with his Magic cards and his phone provided by the cab company so he could respond to fares. During a rather lengthy run of M:TG gaming, we watched this dude ignore at least 5 calls on the phone so he could game instead of attempting to work. There was no drive as he'd simply fall back on his safety net in his mind. His termination from the cab company was such that he couldn't draw unemployment afterwards, and seeing him ditch the calls led the store owner to refuse him a place to stay at the store from then on out. I honestly have no idea what happened to the guy now.

My point is that I've seen more than one Stinky Bob in my lifetime. The fact that I saw even one was bad enough, and illustrates the lengths some people will go to if given the chance.

sebster wrote:

As far as the morality question, I think that for the most part you have a stigma attached to being on welfare which elicits that visceral impulse reaction you mentioned.

No, I have no issue with someone being on welfare, and I don't think any less of someone who needed help. That's life, it happens. That's why I found my reaction interesting - I have no issue with someone being on welfare, but I had a strong reaction against someone reading a book on how to work the system for the maximum gain.

sebster wrote:Interesting story, thanks for telling it. I've got a foot in both camps on the stigma of welfare. On the one hand people shouldn't be stigmatised for being in need, that's just not cool. On the other hand, I'm really not comfortable with the kind of mentality where everyone looks to government and policy as a way of getting paid as much as possible without regard for actual need.

There needs to be a stigma on people taking when they don't need to, and the same stigma for people who avoid paying what they ought to, without stigmatising people who have genuine reasons to draw on the system. Not an easy thing to achieve.

It's incredibly rare for us to agree on something politically, but here we are. I'm fully in support of government assistance programs such as these, but I'm realistic enough to realize they get abused. If there was a way to make it happen less, I'd be all ears.

sebster wrote:

[I also realize that part of the experiment was an attempt to see if losing benefits was the driving force for keeping people out of the job market, at least that's how I was understanding it.

That's a key part of UBI, yeah, the idea that having a government conditional on not working encourages some people to stay out of work. The other part, which they never got to, is that there might be a significant economic loss from people who are unable to take risks to try and start a new business or go back to school or whatever, because they have to keep their current job just to keep their heads above water. By paying UBI to literally everyone, it means people would be free to leave work for a short time to try a business or whatever.

I'm off at this point. The government already has programs to pay for your college, at least here stateside. I have no reason to think otherwise for the rest of the Western world. It's the part where the government is expected to pay someone's light bills on TOP of paying for their college that I find flaws in. Work nights and go to school in the day, or vice versa. It's what I did. Actually, it's the thought that since my taxes will be funding said government program, it will be ME expected to pay someone's light bill while they go back to school.

sebster wrote:

I'm wondering if it's either far too few people actively looking for real work while on the program which might paint things in a poor light, or more that steering towards more taxable income to help pay for said benefit.

The people who ran the experiment were upset it was closed down, so I doubt that was it. It's more likely that the idea is probably a least a decade ahead of being seriously viable on either a cultural or economic level, and run as a limited experiment was weird and just kind of unfair. As such, this got shut down as soon as the political winds shifted even slightly.

Will there ever be a perfect storm of events to make the time "right"? It's my understanding that any change like this will not be smooth.

 Just Tony wrote:
I'm fully in support of government assistance programs such as these, but I'm realistic enough to realize they get abused. If there was a way to make it happen less, I'd be all ears.

There are ways to make it happen less, have more investigators looking into people in the program and such. But you reach a point of diminishing returns, eventually you end up spending more money on preventing something from happening than the cost of it actually happening. The often discussed Florida mandatory drug test comes to mind, it costs far more than it catches in abuse.

At a certain point we just have to accept it happens on a certain scale, but its less expensive to have it occur on that scale than to combat it further.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

How can you be long term unemployed if you hadn't even had your first full job? From summer jobs I assume you're young, maybe in your late teens at the time? We don't consider children who haven't had a job unemployed. You better be joking, because else you just made yourself an even worse example for this UBI trial as you would be as far off the mark for it as possible.

Dunno. Do you call mid 20's children?

You make awful lot of assumptions and pulling ideas out of your head of people you don't know at all. Howabout stop that? Assuming you don't want to appear fool of course.

You had a little job to make some money on the side, this isn't about money on the side. This is about adults that need a job to survive because else they have no income. When a job isn't worth taking financially that is a company problem, not a government problem!

I had money what that job gave me BUT if I had taken that extra stint I would have lost money.

It's goverment problem because goverment is the one doing unemployment supports that don't reward taking job and indeed give you incentive to NOT take job. Creating more work doesn't help if the workers would be hurting themselves financially to take it.

I would have been better off saying to company "no sorry, finland's system doesn't allow me to do the job".

Not every job requires 40h/week guys. But yeah bad companies for not wanting to hire people even for periods when the workers would have to sit idle not doing anything.

I know personally people who have a) been unemployed b) have found job where hourly rate is decent enough(not that different from mine actually) but due to weekly hours being rather low realized they are better off simply saying "no". They would have got the job so holes in CV etc were irrelevant. But they would have paid for goverment for taking job...No surprise they refused those...

...Now how many Finnish unemployed people YOU know and what are their reasons for unemployment? Not hearsays, not theories, not rumours. Actual direct knowledge. I presume more than 0 since you seem to claim to know how this works or doesn't work but out of curiosity how many?

tneva82 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

How can you be long term unemployed if you hadn't even had your first full job? From summer jobs I assume you're young, maybe in your late teens at the time? We don't consider children who haven't had a job unemployed. You better be joking, because else you just made yourself an even worse example for this UBI trial as you would be as far off the mark for it as possible.

Dunno. Do you call mid 20's children?

You make awful lot of assumptions and pulling ideas out of your head of people you don't know at all. Howabout stop that? Assuming you don't want to appear fool of course.

You said you only had summer jobs on your CV. The assumption is that you're young in that case, at least a full time student or living at home? Idk how else you could afford to have only worked summer jobs? I'm sorry if that assumption offends you, but when you put it like that its easily made. Saying you only had summer jobs creates that impression. And I didn't mean you were a child, I'm saying that we also don't include children under long term unemployed even if they never had a job, because its not an accurate representation until you fully enter the job market.

Nevertheless, that still isn't long term unemployment in the way you describe it. Because you only work summers, that sounds like a choice. Have you been actively looking and failing for years to acquire a full time job?

tneva82 wrote:

You had a little job to make some money on the side, this isn't about money on the side. This is about adults that need a job to survive because else they have no income. When a job isn't worth taking financially that is a company problem, not a government problem!

I had money what that job gave me BUT if I had taken that extra stint I would have lost money.

It's goverment problem because goverment is the one doing unemployment supports that don't reward taking job and indeed give you incentive to NOT take job. Creating more work doesn't help if the workers would be hurting themselves financially to take it.

I would have been better off saying to company "no sorry, finland's system doesn't allow me to do the job".

Not every job requires 40h/week guys. But yeah bad companies for not wanting to hire people even for periods when the workers would have to sit idle not doing anything.

I know personally people who have a) been unemployed b) have found job where hourly rate is decent enough(not that different from mine actually) but due to weekly hours being rather low realized they are better off simply saying "no". They would have got the job so holes in CV etc were irrelevant. But they would have paid for goverment for taking job...No surprise they refused those...

...Now how many Finnish unemployed people YOU know and what are their reasons for unemployment? Not hearsays, not theories, not rumours. Actual direct knowledge. I presume more than 0 since you seem to claim to know how this works or doesn't work but out of curiosity how many?

That job would have cost you money only because the employer didn't want to pay you a salary that actually gave you money. Why is it the responsibility of the government to make sure you get enough money, when your employer has a job to be done but doesn't want to pay you adequate compensation?

You're still advocating bad business. If those companies can't find people to fill their positions its up to the company to create more incentive by offering higher wages. Its not on the government to fill up the incentive gap! You're just rewarding companies that don't offer proper employment terms.

I never said that companies should hire people 40 hours a week. I'm saying its not up to the government to subsidize these companies in finding workers if they can't find any, its basic market supply and demand principles. If these companies don't attract employees there is a problem in what the company offers.

When it comes to B how is that the fault of unemployment benefits? If the company really needs someone to do that job than its up to the company to fix that. Its not up to the government to subsidize a worker just so the company can have someone part time. Don't you see how open to abuse that is? You're forcing the government to make up for a shortfall that is to the benefit of for profit companies.

I don't know anyone in Finland. But this UBI trial and unemployment isn't just a Finnish occurence. Believe it or not, but in the Netherlands we also have UBI trials, unemployed people and almost the same benefits system.

Regarding the common "minimum wage is meant for students" argument, let's just go back to the statements when minimum wage was first proposed and passed:

"By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level -I mean the wages of a decent living." FDR, 1933

Around my area, I think of the jobs that were traditionally for Teens; babysitting, dog care, and lawn mowing.

Unfortunately, kids in my community can't compete for those jobs anymore because adults have moved in on their territory with fancy LLCs and expensive equipment. Places like Day Care Centers, Landscapers, and Pet Care specialists have removed any chance for teens to make money.

Therefore, if all these adults are moving into this territory, imagine how terrible minimum wage must be to make these pre-employment jobs worth taking over from the kids!

 Easy E wrote:
Around my area, I think of the jobs that were traditionally for Teens; babysitting, dog care, and lawn mowing.

Unfortunately, kids in my community can't compete for those jobs anymore because adults have moved in on their territory with fancy LLCs and expensive equipment. Places like Day Care Centers, Landscapers, and Pet Care specialists have removed any chance for teens to make money.

Therefore, if all these adults are moving into this territory, imagine how terrible minimum wage must be to make these pre-employment jobs worth taking over from the kids!

Its curious how American based those teenage jobs are. Here its mainly supermarket jobs and newspaper/flyer delivery.

As for minimum wage, from personal experience even in the Netherlands its pretty terrible. The unofficial motto is basically "never forget you're replacable." I can't imagine you would survive your whole life in such a work enviroment, but not everyone manages to get out. Minimun wage as an adult is almost a trap, enough money till the end of the month, no money left for self improvement.

 sebster wrote:
I remember on the bus one time my wife and I saw a lady reading a book the cover of which was something like 'getting every dollar you can out of welfare'. Looking over her shoulder we could read the blurb on the back, which argued that every person is entitled to using any trick they can to get everything possible out of welfare. It pissed me and my wife right off.

A day or two later we were telling friends about it, full of righteous anger, and a bell went off in my head, and I wondered how that the attitude in that book caused me to be outraged on a moral level, but the exact same attitude applied to tax avoidance didn't. Both were just people working with the rules they were given to try and get the most they could out of the system. But I accepted tax avoidance as just something people did, I even worked in a tax office that was pretty aggressive in creating tax avoidance set ups. And the reality is tax avoidance costs government far more than welfare manipulation ever could, so my different level of outrage wasn't based on the scale of each problem.

I actually still don't know the exact answer to this. The best I've been able to come up with was normalisation, everyone I knew paid taxes and wanted personally to pay less, but I knew barely anyone who'd ever been on welfare, not even on part welfare. So perhaps people who are familiar with life on welfare, because they're on welfare and/or grew up around people on welfare, perhaps to them it's just a normal thing to talk about working welfare to get a little more, and they are outraged that middle class people invent mechanisms to reduce their taxes?

Whatever it is, I think it showed to me I had some very moralistic ideas that actually didn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective. And while someone else's exact stance might be quite different, I still notice that those positions are often infused with their own kind of moralism, that also doesn't make a lot of sense when given some perspective.

You've just stumbled on the great cleave in worldview around welfare in general.

People get way more mad when they think someone else gets something we didn't, especially if was "free", regardless of the circumstances around it, and especially if it goes to someone seen as a social inferior (for any of the multitude of reasons that may be). That is basically the fundamental emotional driver that drives much of the conversation.

From a rational perspective, we *should* be wanting people on welfare to get every bit out of it they can, to be putting the resources devoted to that purpose to good and proper use, maximizing that investment by society for the greatest good.

But instead we overfocus on free riding, to an obsessive degree, because of that inherent lizard brain status-conscious instinct.

People can be shown that a system to catch welfare cheats costs more than simply accepting a level of abuse, but will still complain about "cheats getting MY money" and vote accordingly. It's madness.

 Just Tony wrote:
It's incredibly rare for us to agree on something politically, but here we are.

Not for long, I suspect

I'm fully in support of government assistance programs such as these, but I'm realistic enough to realize they get abused. If there was a way to make it happen less, I'd be all ears.

I agree, but think the abuse of welfare is often overstated, and dwarfed by abuse in other areas, such tax avoidance.

We seem to have drifted from the point about stigma...

I'm off at this point. The government already has programs to pay for your college, at least here stateside. I have no reason to think otherwise for the rest of the Western world. It's the part where the government is expected to pay someone's light bills on TOP of paying for their college that I find flaws in. Work nights and go to school in the day, or vice versa. It's what I did. Actually, it's the thought that since my taxes will be funding said government program, it will be ME expected to pay someone's light bill while they go back to school.

We come at this from very different POV. You look first and foremost at what government should do, vs what they shouldn't have to do for someone. In contrast, I don't really care what someone should do, I just care about what works. If a person is grinding away 60 hours a week working a couple of minimum wage jobs just to survive, then a UBI allows them to stop working and go and complete a degree and start up a flourishing IT company that employs a dozen people, then I don't care about who should be paying for who, I just care that a change in the system allowed society to become more prosperous overall. Note I'm not saying UBI will make that happen (in fact I'm fairly skeptical of that part), but if it did work that way I'd certainly have no moral problem with it.

This isn't to say your POV or mine is right or wrong, they're just very different, which makes how we look at UBI very different. And its worth noting that your POV is way more common than mine, which is a huge obstacle that people who argue for UBI haven't really addressed.

Will there ever be a perfect storm of events to make the time "right"? It's my understanding that any change like this will not be smooth.

The way I can see it happening is if we reach a point where we really are looking at unemployment well in to the double digits, and not just a recessionary dip that is recovered. I mean 12 or 15% because there is just that many people who simply aren't needed in the economy any more. It would be if we simply don't see new jobs in new economic sectors. Thing is, people talk about the jobs lost to AI and the like, but that's only a small bit of the story. We're always making jobs redundant, that's just a natural part of technological improvement and progress. The problem will come if we stop creating new economic sectors to replace the lost jobs. And that isn't certain, but it possible. Resource extraction has its limits, we are reaching the point where the marginal costs of extraction are getting pretty steep. Without more resources to pour in to the economy, then making human labour more efficient won't allow more creation, it will just drive a reduction in the level of human labour used. Potentially that would mean we adjust and work less hours for the same overall pay, but maybe not. If people keep working 40 hours, that means a slow pressure pushing people out of the economy.

In that context, I can see UBI not only being possible, but essential to social stability. But I wouldn't even want to guess how likely that is. Somewhere between 5% and 50%.


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 Vaktathi wrote:
You've just stumbled on the great cleave in worldview around welfare in general.

People get way more mad when they think someone else gets something we didn't, especially if was "free", regardless of the circumstances around it, and especially if it goes to someone seen as a social inferior (for any of the multitude of reasons that may be). That is basically the fundamental emotional driver that drives much of the conversation.

I think the part 'especially if it goes to a social inferior' is a huge part of the issue. We write a very different set of rules for people beneath us than we do for people above is. It's an issue that goes way beyond tax avoidance vs welfare manipulation. Getting slightly off-topic but there was a case recently of a candidate found guilty of using fake signatures to secure his place on a ballot for a judicial election. It was contrasted against a woman in the same district who voted while on parole. He was the former judge in the district, a wealthy man, and got probation. She was a former convict, and got five years.

And that's far from an isolated incident. People often think rich people get lighter sentences because they have better lawyers, but there's also a strong element of people just seeing people with more wealth and status in a more favourable light than we see people with neither.

And I'm not saying for one second this is a problem other people fall for. It was definitely a big part of why I saw welfare manipulation so differently to tax manipulation. It's in the brain, we're hierarchical creatures.


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 feeder wrote:
People can be shown that a system to catch welfare cheats costs more than simply accepting a level of abuse, but will still complain about "cheats getting MY money" and vote accordingly. It's madness.

Sort of, thing is despite people talking about the cost of welfare they don't actually know or care what it costs. Seriously, ask anyone complaining about welfare what it costs and either they won't answer or they'll give you a wildly inaccurate guess. If it was really about a concern for the affordability of the program, they would at least know the actual cost and the burden it places on the government coffers.

Instead it's about an idea of fairness. It's the idea that if they have to put up with crap for eight hours a day, five days a week, then no-one else should get to bludge either.

There was an experiment done with some monkey a while back. The monkeys were taught they had to do some awkward and time consuming tasks to get a treat. They had to work for a reward. It was fine and the monkeys did it often. Then they put some other monkeys in with them, and gave those monkeys treats without making them do the task. The first set of monkeys got pissed and stopped doing the work entirely. They still had the same personal work to reward ratio, but they no longer wanted to work when other monkeys got the reward for free.

 sebster wrote:

 feeder wrote:
People can be shown that a system to catch welfare cheats costs more than simply accepting a level of abuse, but will still complain about "cheats getting MY money" and vote accordingly. It's madness.

Sort of, thing is despite people talking about the cost of welfare they don't actually know or care what it costs. Seriously, ask anyone complaining about welfare what it costs and either they won't answer or they'll give you a wildly inaccurate guess. If it was really about a concern for the affordability of the program, they would at least know the actual cost and the burden it places on the government coffers.

I think you wildy underestimate people's ability to care very strongly about something they know very little about.

Instead it's about an idea of fairness. It's the idea that if they have to put up with crap for eight hours a day, five days a week, then no-one else should get to bludge either.

I guess. That's a pretty awful way to live your life though, constantly comparing your life to strangers.

It's not like welfare is any life though. Even during my minimum wage days, I was making significantly more than welfare rates. I think welfare was around $550 a month for a single person, and my dish washing take home pay was around $900.

There was an experiment done with some monkey a while back. The monkeys were taught they had to do some awkward and time consuming tasks to get a treat. They had to work for a reward. It was fine and the monkeys did it often. Then they put some other monkeys in with them, and gave those monkeys treats without making them do the task. The first set of monkeys got pissed and stopped doing the work entirely. They still had the same personal work to reward ratio, but they no longer wanted to work when other monkeys got the reward for free.

Interesting. I like to think we are smarter than monkeys, though.

Why should those monkeys work for something that others receive without question?

 feeder wrote:
I guess. That's a pretty awful way to live your life though, constantly comparing your life to strangers.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Why should those monkeys work for something that others receive without question?

Because those apes haven't been born with a silver spoon in their mouth

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Why should those monkeys work for something that others receive without question?

I ask that question sometimes when I look down from my ivory tower.

sebster wrote:There was an experiment done with some monkey a while back. The monkeys were taught they had to do some awkward and time consuming tasks to get a treat. They had to work for a reward. It was fine and the monkeys did it often. Then they put some other monkeys in with them, and gave those monkeys treats without making them do the task. The first set of monkeys got pissed and stopped doing the work entirely. They still had the same personal work to reward ratio, but they no longer wanted to work when other monkeys got the reward for free.

You know, that may be one of those experiments where you could kind of guess how it was going to end before you even started it.

feeder wrote:Interesting. I like to think we are smarter than monkeys, though.

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

 feeder wrote:
I think you wildy underestimate people's ability to care very strongly about something they know very little about.

True, but you'll find the reason they actually care is not related to the reason that happens to be coming out of their mouths. People will say they're worried about the deficit, but if the actual concerned was the deficit and welfare was just a downstream concern, then they would know their country's basic financial figures. And welfare concern would decline in periods of strong government results. That doesn't happen, because the impact on the deficit is a justification for opposing welfare, it is not the actual cause.

I guess. That's a pretty awful way to live your life though, constantly comparing your life to strangers.

I think you wildly underestimate people's ability to make themselves utterly miserable by constantly comparing their lives to strangers.

Interesting. I like to think we are smarter than monkeys, though.

I think you wildly underestimate... okay I think you know where this is going


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 Future War Cultist wrote:
Why should those monkeys work for something that others receive without question?

Because the monkey wants the treat, and was previously happy to do that amount of work to get the treat. If the monkey was rational, then other monkeys getting the treat for no work wouldn't change its own choice. But of course the monkey isn't rational and nor are most humans. So instead monkeys and many humans will stop engaging in the activity they were previously happy to do for the reward.

It is weird, and frankly fairly stupid. But it is how we are hardwired.


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 Just Tony wrote:
You know, that may be one of those experiments where you could kind of guess how it was going to end before you even started it.

Not really. I mean we all know that if you start taking half of a farmer's crop because now Lenin is in charge, the farmer is going to work a lot less hard. But that's easy to explain with marginal utility, because the farmer is now losing his own produce, so he's less inclined to work to produce more.

But this is something different. In this example, the original monkey gets just as much from the same activity, his own reward from doing the task is unchanged. But it still impacts the monkey's decision making.

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

It's way more complex than that. Thing is, in communism people didn't all get the same. The doctor was paid more than the teacher. Communists were at least that practical. And sure, the pay differential wasn't anywhere near as extreme, it was 50% more rather than 500%, but that didn't produce an undersupply of doctors, in fact medical care in communist countries was okay for the most part. Remember a lot of the reward in a job is in status and in actually enjoying the work, not just the money.

No, the problem with communism is more long term. What they didn't have was business investment. No-one was able to start a business, and use earnings to re-invest. There was no business innovation. There was n private sector R&D. That's why Soviet Russia was able to fast track from agricultural to heavy industry inside of 20 years, but then hit a wall and went nowhere. As long as government can point to an ore deposit and order a mine built, communism works great, but developing and improving consumer goods - oh man did they suck.

 sebster wrote:
Because the monkey wants the treat, and was previously happy to do that amount of work to get the treat. If the monkey was rational, then other monkeys getting the treat for no work wouldn't change its own choice. But of course the monkey isn't rational and nor are most humans. So instead monkeys and many humans will stop engaging in the activity they were previously happy to do for the reward.

Ah, but like feeder said, the only reason they were working for the treat was the assumption that it was the only way to receive said treat. The basic principles of compensation for any work done. People generally only work for the incentive of pay, not the joy of it. Only a lucky few enjoy their work. So if they then see that others are receiving the same reward for doing no work at all then of course they're going to question why the hell should they give up their time for nothing.

I had this conversation so many times whilst working as a garbage man. We were in work Monday to Friday for 7:30 am. And whilst doing the routes we could see this whole scenario in play, especially during the summer. Half the homes would be deserted as the people inside were out working, but the other half, the homes of the "scroungers", would be a hive of activity. As it was summer they'd be out in force in their gardens getting drunk before noon and chain smoking (20 packs of cigarettes are over £8 now in the UK). They are living in the exact same houses as the workers, they have cars in their driveway (bought and paid for by the government under the DLA scheme) and they have the money to get drunk and smoke. And we'd always wonder why we bothered working when we could just claim 'depression' and get paid to sit around and get drunk day in and day out.

I think the only reason they still went out every day was because they got slightly more than them in wages. That seemed to be the only thing keeping them going. It certainly wasn't for the love of the job if the complaining was anything to go by. Tellingly, what really irked them was the idea that they were having to 'serve' the scroungers. Because despite not working they never ever had their bins out on time and were constantly coming after the lorry, stopping it and making it come back to their house etc. among other things. As one of my colleagues summed it up, they would have you wiping their asses if they could.

 d-usa wrote:
Regarding the common "minimum wage is meant for students" argument, let's just go back to the statements when minimum wage was first proposed and passed:

"By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level -I mean the wages of a decent living." FDR, 1933

Woah woah woah, are you questioning the corporate overlords here? Because you know what the free market says about these things! Something something corporations are people too.

Did I do that right?

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 sebster wrote:
Because the monkey wants the treat, and was previously happy to do that amount of work to get the treat. If the monkey was rational, then other monkeys getting the treat for no work wouldn't change its own choice. But of course the monkey isn't rational and nor are most humans. So instead monkeys and many humans will stop engaging in the activity they were previously happy to do for the reward.

Ah, but like feeder said, the only reason they were working for the treat was the assumption that it was the only way to receive said treat. The basic principles of compensation for any work done. People generally only work for the incentive of pay, not the joy of it. Only a lucky few enjoy their work. So if they then see that others are receiving the same reward for doing no work at all then of course they're going to question why the hell should they give up their time for nothing.

But we think we're the same or smarter than the monkeys, but we're not. If the reward is money then the test is the same, some humans in live just get the reward handed to them by virtue of being born in a wealthier family. We work not because we're incentivized, we work because we have to. A paycheck isn't a reward, its the most basic necessity required to survive. You might enjoy the work you do, but that is irrelevant, even if you love your job you would still need a paycheck, because it isn't a reward, its necessity. A paycheck is only a reward to those rich enough to do without it.

Plenty of people are already getting the same 'reward' for absolutely no work, yet most of us still slog through life having to work hard and even electing people that implement policies benefitting the rich, those that get the 'reward' for free. Yet most of those people only get up in arms when it comes to welfare and unemployment benefits. We're worse than the monkeys, we look at some who receive the 'reward' for free and admire them, while we vilify others.

To continue the monkey example, a rich monkey did the work to get the reward. But now all subsequent children of said monkey just waltz in and get the reward for free. Meanwhile the children of other working monkeys just have to keep working, because they weren't lucky enough to be born in the rich monkey's family.

@Sebster&monkeys: in this particular example monkey behavior becomes clear if you account for a quite simple fact: before culture emerged all living organism, including early apes were simple "differential engines" aware only of their immidiate surroundings and recent history of their lives, and even most inteligent species were capable of only two levels of reasoning regarding their situation - absolute inner (am I hungry, am I cold etc...) and relative outer (do I fare better or worse than others of my kind). This is because pre-cultural species have no means to see larger picture, the thing you call "reason" behind systems they are put into.

Now remember, that we have only about 10k years of cultural history behind us and c.a. 20 times that of biological evolution of our species alone and we still have some traits that connect us to our amphibian evolutionary ancestors (those annoying hiccups). Trying to understand human psychology and sociology on "rational agents" levels only is one of the main faults of all left leaning "tabula rasa" concepts and ideologies. People do not work because they feel fundamental need of being occupied by socially productive tasks, they work because our current age of social organisation requires us to work in order to survive. Take away this necessity and completely another social structure will inevitably emmerge. This lears me to my main issue with this concept as it is discussed here - what Finland did was NOT UBI, it was just an unconditional and simplified welfare program. "True" UBI is more of a civilisation advancement and one of the possible answers to problems caused by globalisation, production automatisation and work as we know it becoming obsolete or economically unproductive (there are already whole unproductive sectors of economy that are grossly subsidised only because it allows to perpetuate current work-based social structure).

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

Nicely leaving out that capitalism has a gun too - it's called 'work or starve to death'. And just like in the mass of hyperbole above it's garlanded with nice phrases about bootstraps and how the people living hand to mouth working two jobs "deserve" it for being "lazy".

The only difference is capitalists get to crow about their system being better because they use economic violence rather than physical. And as we move into another gilded age we're going to start seeing even more of it than we have already.

 ScarletRose wrote:

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

Nicely leaving out that capitalism has a gun too - it's called 'work or starve to death'.

Not even close to the same. Under a capitalist economic system you are more than capable of simply "going off the grid" and living a life where you provide all your own sustenance. It's still "work or starve to death" but that "gun" as you so eloquently put it was placed there by nature, not by capitalism. But yeah, go ahead and bang the propaganda drum instead of dealing in facts. Communism as it exists today blows up without either changing doctrine (such as the Soviet Union replacing "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to " from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution") to compensate for the inherent shortcomings of the economic model, force people through physical violence to produce (What we see most commonly in communist economies), or to essentially brainwash the working class into working for the enjoyment of work and the betterment of society, which is what Marx explicitly pushed in his writings as having to be necessary for the model to work.

 ScarletRose wrote:
And just like in the mass of hyperbole above it's garlanded with nice phrases about bootstraps and how the people living hand to mouth working two jobs "deserve" it for being "lazy".

Wow, I figured it would be Peregrine who'd kneejerk throw down the anti-capitalism tropes.

Working two jobs to make ends meet isn't lazy, in fact that's the exact OPPOSITE of lazy. I worked three when my wife was recovering from childbirth, if you count being in the National Guard as a job, which you should.. Now, working two minimum wage jobs when there are ample opportunities to make better income, that's stupid. Not lazy. Figuring that you could make enough to scrape by on government assistance without putting forth ANY work, or doing a menial part time job just so you can draw said benefits without having to work more, then THAT would qualify as lazy. The issue is that the onus for self improvement is on the self, not on the government subsidized by everyone currently already working to better themselves. The funny thing about that is that the taxes taken to subsidize programs like that get taken from the lower class as well as the middle and upper class. Anyone who is marginally above the minimum effort plus assistance class gets drug down to that group's level by that group's sycophancy. Are there people that legitimately need those programs? Absolutely. Are there people who don't NEED them but chase after them solely to work less? Absolutely.

 ScarletRose wrote:
The only difference is capitalists get to crow about their system being better because they use economic violence rather than physical.

No, the differences between capitalism and communism is opportunity and choice.

 ScarletRose wrote:
And as we move into another gilded age we're going to start seeing even more of it than we have already.

Gilded Age? Adorable. I'd love an explanation where any non-capitalist economy wasn't "glittery on the outside, but corrupt underneath" as fits the description of Gilded Age.

 Just Tony wrote:

 ScarletRose wrote:

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

Nicely leaving out that capitalism has a gun too - it's called 'work or starve to death'.

Not even close to the same. Under a capitalist economic system you are more than capable of simply "going off the grid" and living a life where you provide all your own sustenance. It's still "work or starve to death" but that "gun" as you so eloquently put it was placed there by nature, not by capitalism. But yeah, go ahead and bang the propaganda drum instead of dealing in facts. Communism as it exists today blows up without either changing doctrine (such as the Soviet Union replacing "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to " from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution") to compensate for the inherent shortcomings of the economic model, force people through physical violence to produce (What we see most commonly in communist economies), or to essentially brainwash the working class into working for the enjoyment of work and the betterment of society, which is what Marx explicitly pushed in his writings as having to be necessary for the model to work.

This is hilarious, go off the grid? Seriously? So as a person living in one of the most densly populated countries with no real nature to speak of how would that go? As a person with no skill in surviving off the grid how would that go? Why isn't going off the grid possible for communism then, going off the grid means they can't find you so they can't force you to work either.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

 ScarletRose wrote:

Interesting. I'd like to think that the "smarter" thing to do would be to realize that organisms work for reward, whether it be pleasure or profit. That's universal. It's the entire reason that the only long term communist economies are enforced by totalitarian governments strong arming people into being incentivized to work. The ideal behind the "greater good" and the emotional attachment some have to charity beyond sustainability doesn't overcome the instinctual drive to gain profit or pleasure. And before it's thrown in, feeding yourself or your young goes under profit. Do you farm because it looks pretty? No, you farm to gain the fruits of your labor. People don't get on the tractor out of a sense of social nobility, they get on the tractor because someone will pay them for the work, their family will be fed from their work, OR in the case of a communist country, having armed personnel there telling you "I'm going to pop a hole in your bean if you don't get on that fething tractor". I think the monkeys are smarter than some of the human population solely because they can figure that part out.

Nicely leaving out that capitalism has a gun too - it's called 'work or starve to death'.

Not even close to the same. Under a capitalist economic system you are more than capable of simply "going off the grid" and living a life where you provide all your own sustenance. It's still "work or starve to death" but that "gun" as you so eloquently put it was placed there by nature, not by capitalism. But yeah, go ahead and bang the propaganda drum instead of dealing in facts. Communism as it exists today blows up without either changing doctrine (such as the Soviet Union replacing "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" to " from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution") to compensate for the inherent shortcomings of the economic model, force people through physical violence to produce (What we see most commonly in communist economies), or to essentially brainwash the working class into working for the enjoyment of work and the betterment of society, which is what Marx explicitly pushed in his writings as having to be necessary for the model to work.

This is hilarious, go off the grid? Seriously? So as a person living in one of the most densly populated countries with no real nature to speak of how would that go? As a person with no skill in surviving off the grid how would that go? Why isn't going off the grid possible for communism then, going off the grid means they can't find you so they can't force you to work either.[/quote

]

If communism is so great, how come it is always imposed by violence? It has wrecked every country it has come to. Its nothing more than compulsion and terror.

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's what's NEEDED to live vs. what I WANT to do? Plus, where does it stop? Don't answer, I already know.

They aren't penalized, the pay according to their means. The idea that its a penalty is laughable, because else all taxation above the bare minimum is a penalty.

But say for example you get paralyzed from an accident and can't work anymore, should you be penalized for being in that accident? When you can't get work anymore because of outside effects not in your control, should you be left to starve? Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government. It isn't in the interest of the rich to let society fall apart, because they tend to end up as the scapegoats. That isn't meant as a threat, its just how it is historically. In a future where the rich desperatly cling to every dollar in an increasingly poor society its going to resemble an authoritarian state pretty quickly. We have examples of that less then a few decades ago in Central America.

And really, when you have 50 billion and you make 1 billion a year, does it matter that much if your taxes are either a 100 million or lets say 400 mil? At what point does such an obscene amount become meaningless numbers?

 Just Tony wrote:
So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't?

They're not penalised. If the machine operator is paid $50,000 and loses $10k in tax, and his boss is paid $100,000 and pays $30k in tax, then you might like to say the boss is penalised because he pays so much more in tax, but at the end of the day the boss has $70k and the worker has $40k, the boss is still in the better position by a long way.

The mistake you're making is looking at tax seperate to the rest of society. But it is all one system. The property and contract rules, police and the courts that enforce those rules, and the infrastructure and education system that allows modern businesses to function - these were all written by the same government that writes the tax code. It's nonsense to pick one part of the system in isolation and claim that's the unfair bit, while everything else should be left as some kind of taken for granted natural order.

Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live?

Making decisions like that is what democratic society is.

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Of course the US gets things backwards. The federal tax rate on the middle class is higher than that for the rich. Any additional dollar that a worker earns the federal government gets at least 25 cents. The rich investor has his income taxed at a max of 20%.

https://taxfoundation.org/2018-tax-brackets/

Gee, the lower income brackets pay a lower percentage. Almost like the poorer people pay less in taxes already. Gee...

The tax brackets alone might say so, but in practice the rich can usually (quite legally) utilize a whole lot of different tax deductions and loopholes that make it so they pay less in the end. Putting the wealth into shell companies and so on also helps, ofc. ÏIRC one of the candidates in the last US presidential race (a moderately succesful businessman) had to rearrange some of his charities so that he'd pay more than the lowest rate that still pays something. And Trump got enough deductions from one of his business blunders that he could have gone years without paying tax at all - and yet he was never poor! Not to mention big corporations which often manage to get away with paying maybe 20% of what the tax rate is through all sorts of creative (and legal) manuevers...

Thing is, the more you have the easier it is to hide part of it. The tax office knows exactly what I own and how much I make and have the power to tax me in full. The bank tycoon with companies in five different countries is harder to keep track of, and while he (probably) pays more than me in cold hard cash he is very likely to get away with a lower percentage.

It's almost as if Tony didn't read what I wrote and is arguibg against something else.

Capital gains is taxed at a max of 20%. (And no FICA taxes) The lowest tax bracket is 10% plus a 15% FICA tax on top of that.

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Second off deals with the marginal utility of money. The amount of happiness provided by adding another dollar of income is less than the previous dollar. Taxing a rich person has quite a lesser effect on their happiness as opposed to the same tax rate on a poor person.

I imagine anyone getting charged more for something than the next person would make someone unhappy, regardless of income. I'm relatively well off, should my water bill for instance be higher than my neighbor who makes less than me solely because I make more money? Apply the principle broadly, and stop focusing on the specifics of "rob from the rich to give to the poor", and you'll see the flaw in the thinking, and why I call it unfair.

Alright, let's play the other side of this game. A C-Section birth costs 30,000 or so in America. Your average wealthy person Harumphs, adjusts their monocle, and moves on. A family making minimum wage pulls in 15 grand a year. They of course, don't pay and it wrecks their credit even further. What they do pay sets them back considerably. a middle class family agrees to a payment plan, and spends years paying off this debt.

The wealthy child is of course all set for college when the time comes.

The poor child is not, unless they manage to scrape together enough scholarships.

The middle class child is unlikely to, unless their family invests in a plan early, or they manage to secure many scholarships.

Nothing about the start of these three children's lives has any difference but the amount of wealth their family happened to have. Logically speaking, if the wealthy child ends up paying more taxes it is perfectly fair- not only did he have higher earning potential from birth, but he has obviously realized that potential if he remains wealthy. If he does not, then he is not taxed as a wealthy individual.

Society is not a commodity. It is an obligation anyone who lives in it must support.

 Just Tony wrote:
So work for reward is slavery, but forced by a totalitarian regime to work whatever the state tells you to work and accept whatever scraps they dictate you need is NOT? I don't have the words.

In a socialist/communist state you may be told to work, but you are not inherently limited to mere scraps. In fact, the goal is to improve the standard of living for everyone.

In a pure capitalist state you work, but the "reward" is poverty. Unlike in the socialist/communist state the people in power in a capitalist state have a personal incentive to keep your standard of living as low as possible so that more of society's wealth can go to them instead. This is why you get people working jobs for poverty-level wages and struggling to afford basic needs. And this is in a state where capitalism is moderated by socialism, in a pure capitalist system anyone who can not be a profitable employee is left to starve to death.

Funny, there are several tribes of people who don't live in any sort of modernized area, who live off the land and not only survive but thrive. Well,, until civilized people bulldoze down their forests and force them to integrate. Hell, we have Amish communities in the States where people live without government assistance, interference, or advancement. The difference between doing that in a capitalist nation and a communist nation is that the capitalists don't need to quell any people refusing to contribute as an example to the populace in order to keep people contributing.

Those groups are a tiny, tiny minority and even the Amish aren't going to refuse the benefits of things like modern medicine. They still interact with the outside world and benefit from society. Removing yourself entirely from society, via living isolated in the remote wilderness, is just a painful way of committing suicide. It doesn't matter how people who wish to die that way are treated under capitalism vs. communism because either way it's still painful suicide.

What makes capitalism NOT blow up is the fact that skateboards don't build themselves. Without workers, the corporate heads make NO MONEY whatsoever.

No, skateboards don't build themselves, but robots build skateboards very efficiently with minimal human involvement. And, in the absence of socialism to moderate capitalism's abuses, the company making those skateboards is free to use the Chinese approach of paying barely enough to avoid death from starvation because there is always someone desperate enough to take the job at that level of pay. The point where capitalism explodes is where too high a percentage of the population becomes literally unemployable as a result of improvements in automation and most of the minority that can get jobs at all are paid next to nothing for their labor.

If you work at McD's for minimum wage, and get $1,000 on top of your wage, you just got more comfortable. You didn't get an excuse to suddenly get your law degree so you could better society. "For the greater good" is an empty purse, and you'll starve an entire nation on that concept. ESPECIALLY when you can't fund that entitlement and the whole thing becomes unsustainable.

Nonsense. You're still working a fast food job, AKA living in hell. That is perhaps better than working two fast food jobs to avoid starving to death, but it's hardly a life of comfort and luxury. There is still a lot of incentive to use the fact that you are no longer working 80+ hours a week just to survive and get training of some sort that qualifies you for a better job. It might not instantly give you a law degree, but it sure gives you a much greater opportunity to get one.

But that's really the plan behind socialism, isn't it? Here's your UBI. Oh, you can't afford health insurance because of the taxes we took out to pay for the UTI? Well, we'll give you health care. Not health treatment, health care. By the way, more taxes coming out. Oh, can't afford gas or insurance for your vehicle anymore? Don't worry, we'll subsidize the public transportation system and expand it to compensate for the massive influx of passengers, with more taxes from you, naturally. Oh, now you can't pay rent/house payments? Oh, do we have you covered. Here's government subsidized housing, at a lower standard of living that you had before. Need to build up instead of out, you know, just have to take more of your check. Oh no, you say not much left for food and the like? Say no more, we'll take the rest of your check, and here's your EBT card. Slow burn Communism. Niftily enough, the taxes will have to be increased on businesses who will be forced into destitution only for the state to acquire them and take control of production. For the greater good, you know. Especially since government heads are known for paying themselves at the same rate as their constituents.

Yep, you get it. The inevitable trend is for state control of more and more of the infrastructure of society and the collective operation of everything for universal benefit. That's what happens when only a minority of people are capable of being meaningfully employed.

Why? Because they can. Read my earlier bit about my 16 year old. Now look at the last two to three generations. They'll pirate whatever they want with impunity, they'll milk any handout they can, and do whatever it takes to put off becoming self reliant as long as possible.

Are you ing serious? Are you honestly trying to present the stupidity of a 16 year old with no life experience as something worth listening to? Your 16 year old might think they can live on $1000/month, but just wait until they hit the real world and realize that things like cars/vacations/hobbies/etc aren't paid for by mom and dad and there's not a whole lot left after paying necessary expenses out of that $1000. They might have grand plans for cheap living from the safety of being 16 years old and stupid, but they'll very quickly realize the benefits of a good job once they try living that life.

While we're at it, what is so wrong with ambition? That seems to be the main difference between capitalism and non-capitalism. If it wasn't for ambition, you wouldn't have the device you are currently viewing this on. If it wasn't for ambition, there wouldn't have been a boat for my great grandparents to have come from Lithuania to the US. If it wasn't for ambition, we would never have set foot on the moon, or had satellites in orbit to manage all sorts of data applications. If it wasn't for ambition, there'd be a different dominant species on this planet.

Nothing is wrong with ambition. The problem is that we are heading towards a point where, for a growing number of people, no amount of ambition will be enough because there simply aren't enough jobs available for everyone. At that point "just have ambition" ceases to be a viable response to the need for a communist/socialist system, and the only question is when and how fast this transition happens.

I think Peregrine has outlined a lot of good points. Capitalism must evolve as more of the population becomes unnecessary from a production standpoint. The jobs which will still be created will be in much less quantities than those lost and require higher education levels.

He also has an excerpt of the lyrics of one of my favourite Maiden songs in his signature.

 Gitzbitah wrote:

Alright, let's play the other side of this game. A C-Section birth costs 30,000 or so in America. Your average wealthy person Harumphs, adjusts their monocle, and moves on. A family making minimum wage pulls in 15 grand a year. They of course, don't pay and it wrecks their credit even further. What they do pay sets them back considerably. a middle class family agrees to a payment plan, and spends years paying off this debt.

The wealthy child is of course all set for college when the time comes.

The poor child is not, unless they manage to scrape together enough scholarships.

The middle class child is unlikely to, unless their family invests in a plan early, or they manage to secure many scholarships.

Nothing about the start of these three children's lives has any difference but the amount of wealth their family happened to have. Logically speaking, if the wealthy child ends up paying more taxes it is perfectly fair- not only did he have higher earning potential from birth, but he has obviously realized that potential if he remains wealthy. If he does not, then he is not taxed as a wealthy individual.

Society is not a commodity. It is an obligation anyone who lives in it must support.

And with every generation, that divide runs deeper and deeper.

Well it was hard work for those babies to get out of that vagina and receive all that money, who are we to penalize them

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
Well it was hard work for those babies to get out of that vagina and receive all that money, who are we to penalize them

Well, actually moms did all the work. The babies are just lazy freeloader who needs to get to work and earn their living. Don't they have any ambition at all?

I've been reading some of this thread the past few days and then I saw this article today.

Basically, they are saying that automation could cost ten million jobs in Britain within the next fifteen years. This is due to at risk jobs, ie order pickers, losing out to automation as well as delivery of those orders being done by drone vehicles.

I'm certainly not informed enough on the issues to offer much of an opinion in this debate, but often there are people saying, "I earned my money, it's mine" and I think to myself, but where did that money come from? What is the ultimate origin of this wealth, which the government uses to create currency which you are given in exchange for your time and skills? I also get the impression that people think that, for instance, if someone in receipt of a government benefit spends that money, it is effectively wasted, they got the money for "free" and they waste it on things they like/want/need without contributing. But the money really exists in a closed loop. If someone get's £100 from the government, and spends it all on alcohol they pay 20% VAT on that alcohol, the worker that served them pays income tax and the business pays its rates et cetera. Some of the worker's pay will be from that benefit money, which they will spend, pay tax and so on. Eventually, the money ends up back at the treasury having passed through many hands and ends up back in the doley's pocket. Unless you've got money under the mattress or remitted abroad then, the money doesn't really go anywhere, just around and around and around.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's what's NEEDED to live vs. what I WANT to do? Plus, where does it stop? Don't answer, I already know.

They aren't penalized, the pay according to their means. The idea that its a penalty is laughable, because else all taxation above the bare minimum is a penalty.

But say for example you get paralyzed from an accident and can't work anymore, should you be penalized for being in that accident? When you can't get work anymore because of outside effects not in your control, should you be left to starve? Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government. It isn't in the interest of the rich to let society fall apart, because they tend to end up as the scapegoats. That isn't meant as a threat, its just how it is historically. In a future where the rich desperatly cling to every dollar in an increasingly poor society its going to resemble an authoritarian state pretty quickly. We have examples of that less then a few decades ago in Central America.

And really, when you have 50 billion and you make 1 billion a year, does it matter that much if your taxes are either a 100 million or lets say 400 mil? At what point does such an obscene amount become meaningless numbers?

Whether meaningless or not, its their money. This sounds more like a simple justification to pillage someone else's wealth.

Sadly, automation is also coming to places like the service industry, so, brace for no jobs at all in the future.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
I think Peregrine has outlined a lot of good points. Capitalism must evolve as more of the population becomes unnecessary from a production standpoint. The jobs which will still be created will be in much less quantities than those lost and require higher education levels.

It's worth noting capitalism has evolved. We no longer work 6 days a week, 10 or more hours a day. We don't start work at 13 or 14, and retire within a year or two of death hoping our kids earn enough to take care of us. We start work in our late teens or early 20s, we work 5 days, average less than 8 hours a day, and we retire often with 20 or more years of life expected to be left.

And yeah, each of those things were fought for by unions and other movements.

What's interesting to note is that many on the left assume that such gains can't happen anymore, that we can't improve lives through constant, small, incremental gains but instead we have to overthrow the whole system of capitalism. At the same time, the right will claim any new small gain is an unacceptable infringement on the market, but none of them would ever think we should go back to 60 hour working weeks. The extremes of both sides maintain arguments that directly contradict history.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gogsnik wrote:
I'm certainly not informed enough on the issues to offer much of an opinion in this debate, but often there are people saying, "I earned my money, it's mine" and I think to myself, but where did that money come from? What is the ultimate origin of this wealth, which the government uses to create currency which you are given in exchange for your time and skills? I also get the impression that people think that, for instance, if someone in receipt of a government benefit spends that money, it is effectively wasted, they got the money for "free" and they waste it on things they like/want/need without contributing. But the money really exists in a closed loop.

This is the core of the issue exactly. All the people who claim it is their money that they created, ask any of them if they were dropped on a desert island, could they mine the resources and then craft their own Audi and build their own townhouse? They can't, because while their place in society might give them the wealth to buy those things, it isn't because their inherent talents, it is because of how they fit in to society.

As such, it makes no sense to ignore all the rules of society, the property rules, the contract rules etc, and look only at the tax laws and say those rules alone are an intrusion on their lives.

 thekingofkings wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's what's NEEDED to live vs. what I WANT to do? Plus, where does it stop? Don't answer, I already know.

They aren't penalized, the pay according to their means. The idea that its a penalty is laughable, because else all taxation above the bare minimum is a penalty.

But say for example you get paralyzed from an accident and can't work anymore, should you be penalized for being in that accident? When you can't get work anymore because of outside effects not in your control, should you be left to starve? Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government. It isn't in the interest of the rich to let society fall apart, because they tend to end up as the scapegoats. That isn't meant as a threat, its just how it is historically. In a future where the rich desperatly cling to every dollar in an increasingly poor society its going to resemble an authoritarian state pretty quickly. We have examples of that less then a few decades ago in Central America.

And really, when you have 50 billion and you make 1 billion a year, does it matter that much if your taxes are either a 100 million or lets say 400 mil? At what point does such an obscene amount become meaningless numbers?

Whether meaningless or not, its their money. This sounds more like a simple justification to pillage someone else's wealth.

It is their money, made possible by society. Try being that rich in Somalia. Its not pillaging their wealth, its increasing their contribution to the wellbeing of society and themselves. There is no point in being rich if you're so desperatly clinging to every dollar that society collapses and all that money becomes meaningless. They have plenty of money and could you point out how it meaningfully hurts their own well being if they make 600 mil instead of 900 mil a year? That's assuming they even pay their fair share and not get into offshore constructions and bank accounts like plenty do.

Far too much to respond to and keep it organized while juggling work, so this will wind up being multiple posts.

Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's what's NEEDED to live vs. what I WANT to do? Plus, where does it stop? Don't answer, I already know.

They aren't penalized, the pay according to their means. The idea that its a penalty is laughable, because else all taxation above the bare minimum is a penalty.

Once again, if you establish what the tax rate is, and they meet that percentage, anything over isn't yours to take. If you take money from a bank, or from government coffers, it's robbery. If you take it from a rich person, it's social justice. I simply don't have the words...

Disciple of Fate wrote:But say for example you get paralyzed from an accident and can't work anymore, should you be penalized for being in that accident? When you can't get work anymore because of outside effects not in your control, should you be left to starve?

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh, this one's in my wheelhouse.

You apply for disability benefits, including Medicaid, EBT, and every other benefit that the government offers you already.

How about personal perspective? Glad you asked.

In 2007, I injured my back during my deployment to Iraq. I'm rated at 10% disabled and draw a monthly check as compensation. I'm fortunate as my job at Cat isn't so physically demanding as to stress that part of my body or exacerbate it, just as my MOS change in the National Guard also works around that. I know that one day in the future, it WILL get worse. Just as I know one day in the far too near future, I won't be able to lift my own daughter. When that time comes, I will file for a reevaluation of my disability rating and go from there. I already have my military pension in place, so I am good there as well. You see, the US already has programs to accommodate people who can't physically or mentally be productive and earn a living. The difference between this and a UBI is qualifiers. I know what 100% disability is going to look like, and I know damn well it wouldn't support my household. At that point, I also know what assistance programs will be available once it gets to that point. By then I will also be getting my pension and probably have my 401K to hit off of. Regardless, I don't expect the government to cut me a $50,000 a year salary on the taxpayers' dime. That's asinine and selfish to expect that.

Disciple of Fate wrote:Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government.

So extortion? Fascinating. Also, rich people already have something like that in place, it's called wages. Well, the rich people who run businesses, which is almost all of them.

Disciple of Fate wrote:It isn't in the interest of the rich to let society fall apart, because they tend to end up as the scapegoats. That isn't meant as a threat, its just how it is historically. In a future where the rich desperatly cling to every dollar in an increasingly poor society its going to resemble an authoritarian state pretty quickly. We have examples of that less then a few decades ago in Central America.

This is why the whole concept of all employment going away is pants on head stupid. With nobody to buy their products, how will the rich make money? There won't be a stock exchange to play, so it all falls apart fast. Regardless of how you think things are going down, only a completely inept upper social class would allow that to happen unless their end goal was to purposefully sabotage wealth creation.

Disciple of Fate wrote:And really, when you have 50 billion and you make 1 billion a year, does it matter that much if your taxes are either a 100 million or lets say 400 mil? At what point does such an obscene amount become meaningless numbers?

I don't know why I have to keep repeating this. It's about principle. It's about setting a precedent. When you can arbitrarily take away someone's wealth through the government, you set things up to where you can take away ALL WEALTH through the government. I realize for some that is the end goal, but once again, you will eventually deplete that wealth in that case. Far sooner than you'd be willing to admit. Unless, of course, the machine guns come out to "incentivize".

sebster wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:
So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't?

They're not penalised. If the machine operator is paid $50,000 and loses $10k in tax, and his boss is paid $100,000 and pays $30k in tax, then you might like to say the boss is penalised because he pays so much more in tax, but at the end of the day the boss has $70k and the worker has $40k, the boss is still in the better position by a long way.

Okay, them paying at the current income tax bracket rate is not penalizing them. If the wealthy were paying 80% of the nation's taxes, I wouldn't have an issue as their income is exponentially higher than the lower to middle class. The issue isn't that they are being called to pay 80% of the nation's tax needs, the issue is from them being expected to pay 80% of their income.

sebster wrote:The mistake you're making is looking at tax seperate to the rest of society. But it is all one system. The property and contract rules, police and the courts that enforce those rules, and the infrastructure and education system that allows modern businesses to function - these were all written by the same government that writes the tax code. It's nonsense to pick one part of the system in isolation and claim that's the unfair bit, while everything else should be left as some kind of taken for granted natural order.

No, I'm making no mistake. I'm looking solely at how you pay for said services.

sebster wrote:

Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live?

Making decisions like that is what democratic society is.

A democratic society gave us some of the most destructive leaders to ever disgrace history, and some of the worst economic decisions ever made.

Spetulhu wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Of course the US gets things backwards. The federal tax rate on the middle class is higher than that for the rich. Any additional dollar that a worker earns the federal government gets at least 25 cents. The rich investor has his income taxed at a max of 20%.

https://taxfoundation.org/2018-tax-brackets/

Gee, the lower income brackets pay a lower percentage. Almost like the poorer people pay less in taxes already. Gee...

The tax brackets alone might say so, but in practice the rich can usually (quite legally) utilize a whole lot of different tax deductions and loopholes that make it so they pay less in the end. Putting the wealth into shell companies and so on also helps, ofc. ÏIRC one of the candidates in the last US presidential race (a moderately succesful businessman) had to rearrange some of his charities so that he'd pay more than the lowest rate that still pays something. And Trump got enough deductions from one of his business blunders that he could have gone years without paying tax at all - and yet he was never poor! Not to mention big corporations which often manage to get away with paying maybe 20% of what the tax rate is through all sorts of creative (and legal) manuevers...

Thing is, the more you have the easier it is to hide part of it. The tax office knows exactly what I own and how much I make and have the power to tax me in full. The bank tycoon with companies in five different countries is harder to keep track of, and while he (probably) pays more than me in cold hard cash he is very likely to get away with a lower percentage.

The quickest fix is to eliminate any tax deductions completely. That, and raise the tax rate on individual companies, which would ding the rich multiple times for trying the shell company shenanigans. There are other ideas too, but those would solve that problem.

STILL, the original post was that income tax for the rich was a lower rate, and that was patently false. Loopholes may affect what they can pull as far as seeking deductions, but the rate itself is most assuredly higher on the rich than the middle and lower classes. The loopholes need closed, for sure, but that doesn't change the percentage value as written.

skyth wrote:It's almost as if Tony didn't read what I wrote and is arguibg against something else.

Capital gains is taxed at a max of 20%. (And no FICA taxes) The lowest tax bracket is 10% plus a 15% FICA tax on top of that.

It's almost as if I read exactly what you said and responded directly to it.

skyth wrote:Of course the US gets things backwards. The federal tax rate on the middle class is higher than that for the rich. Any additional dollar that a worker earns the federal government gets at least 25 cents. The rich investor has his income[i][u] taxed at a max of 20%.

So when you say income, you mean actual income for the lower class, but mean capital gains for the rich. Never mind what their actual income is, or that there is a separate set of tax rules for the corporation/company from the start, OR that income and investment earnings are two entirely different things. You didn't just move the goal post, you switched to a different sport in a different state.

For the record, though, I'm all for investment earnings being treated as income for tax purposes, and should be taxed at the same rate. It's one of several tax fix ideas I have.

Gitzbitah wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Second off deals with the marginal utility of money. The amount of happiness provided by adding another dollar of income is less than the previous dollar. Taxing a rich person has quite a lesser effect on their happiness as opposed to the same tax rate on a poor person.

I imagine anyone getting charged more for something than the next person would make someone unhappy, regardless of income. I'm relatively well off, should my water bill for instance be higher than my neighbor who makes less than me solely because I make more money? Apply the principle broadly, and stop focusing on the specifics of "rob from the rich to give to the poor", and you'll see the flaw in the thinking, and why I call it unfair.

Alright, let's play the other side of this game. A C-Section birth costs 30,000 or so in America. Your average wealthy person Harumphs, adjusts their monocle, and moves on. A family making minimum wage pulls in 15 grand a year. They of course, don't pay and it wrecks their credit even further. What they do pay sets them back considerably. a middle class family agrees to a payment plan, and spends years paying off this debt..

Let's play that out how it would ACTUALLY go, shall we?

the rich person does some terribly stereotypical thing involving a monocle (because class warfare tropes, I suppose) and simply pays what isn't covered by his/her insurance.

Since I believe I qualify as middle class, I'll field this one from experience. My daughter Charlotte was born C-Section (Lucky me, my son Aidan, who is due at the end of this month, is breach and will more than likely necessitate ANOTHER C-Section) and I submitted the bill to my insurance. I had some copay to pay off.

So there's the real way it would go down. Omitting a major step to foster to political rhetoric is NOT arguing in good faith.

The family pulling in minimum wage submits the cost to government assistance healthcare (My son qualifies for Medicaid because of his Down Syndrome, so this clears up whatever copays left from Tricare we may have. Not sure what government provided health insurance would apply to welfare assistance families). There may be overhead to deal with.

Gitzbitah wrote:The wealthy child is of course all set for college when the time comes.

The poor child is not, unless they manage to scrape together enough scholarships.

The middle class child is unlikely to, unless their family invests in a plan early, or they manage to secure many scholarships.

Once again, borrowing from my own personal experiences, I dispute this.

There are many grants through the government for students to take care of. Speaking as a person who grew up WELL below middle class, I was able to go to college with nothing but a few grants and my GI Bill. I could have gotten more out of military college benefits, but I wasn't signed up for some in my contract. That avenue is easily available for ANYONE, regardless of upbringing.

If I were to walk out my door at my house and look past the gas station that looms over me from the other side of the street, I can see the tops of the buildings of Purdue University. The attendees at this school come from all walks of life, even from poor upbringings.

That's not even taking into consideration vocational schools or jobs with OJT.

Gitzbitah wrote:Nothing about the start of these three children's lives has any difference but the amount of wealth their family happened to have. Logically speaking, if the wealthy child ends up paying more taxes it is perfectly fair- not only did he have higher earning potential from birth, but he has obviously realized that potential if he remains wealthy. If he does not, then he is not taxed as a wealthy individual.

So, yet again, punish success. Which, of course, incentivizes people to be less successful. Say what you will, but the monkeys who realize they are working harder or more for the same treats that other monkeys will get for free will indeed stop working for them. It's also why you have rich parents kicking their kids off the trust funds to fend for themselves when they get complacent/entitled.

Gitzbitah wrote:Society is not a commodity. It is an obligation anyone who lives in it must support.

Absolutely, and the structures and administrative apertures of society, I totally agree with you. You are obligated to support and finance. What you are NOT obligated to finance, however, is someone else's expenditures simply based on your success. If you scored a perfect score on your freshman level chem class, and someone else didn't pass because either they didn't understand the material or didn't do enough work to pass, is it your obligation to take a C in that class and donate your hard work in there to bump that person up to a C to be right next to you? That is a question I would hope is rhetorical, but somewhere someone thinks that is how it SHOULD happen. Like I've said a dozen times in threads like this: take the principle behind the law/procedure/whatever and apply it to something else that demonstrates the failed logic behind it, you need to stop getting hung up on specifics, especially when you attach too much emotion to those specifics.

 Just Tony wrote:
Once again, if you establish what the tax rate is, and they meet that percentage, anything over isn't yours to take. If you take money from a bank, or from government coffers, it's robbery. If you take it from a rich person, it's social justice. I simply don't have the words...

I don't see what your point is here. Nobody is arguing for theft, the rich will be taxed by establishing the tax rate in law and then collecting taxes the same way that everyone else's taxes are collected. Are you trying to suggest that the tax rate has been established forever at X% and can never be changed?

You apply for disability benefits, including Medicaid, EBT, and every other benefit that the government offers you already.

That sounds an awful lot like socialism...

So extortion? Fascinating. Also, rich people already have something like that in place, it's called wages. Well, the rich people who run businesses, which is almost all of them.

Call it what you want, it's the inevitable choice: socialism or violent revolution followed by socialism. And wages don't count when the majority of the population is unemployable and unable to obtain wages.

There are many grants through the government for students to take care of. Speaking as a person who grew up WELL below middle class, I was able to go to college with nothing but a few grants and my GI Bill. I could have gotten more out of military college benefits, but I wasn't signed up for some in my contract. That avenue is easily available for ANYONE, regardless of upbringing.

There are benefits, but there are still two major obstacles:

1) You have to qualify for college in the first place. If you're poor you probably went to a lower-tier school and have weaker academic credentials. You don't have access to test prep classes, the ability to send in piles of college applications at $100 each, and all the various other expenses of getting into college.

2) Grants don't pay for everything. Your tuition may be covered but what about housing? Transportation? Your expenses for breaks when the college is closed? At best you're taking on lots of loan debt just trying to keep your bills paid, at worst you find that there's a gap between what you can afford and the assistance you can get and you don't get to go to college. And you'd better hope you don't have a family that needs support, or you'll have to get a job and start making money instead of investing in the future.

 Just Tony wrote:
Far too much to respond to and keep it organized while juggling work, so this will wind up being multiple posts.

Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's what's NEEDED to live vs. what I WANT to do? Plus, where does it stop? Don't answer, I already know.

They aren't penalized, the pay according to their means. The idea that its a penalty is laughable, because else all taxation above the bare minimum is a penalty.

Once again, if you establish what the tax rate is, and they meet that percentage, anything over isn't yours to take. If you take money from a bank, or from government coffers, it's robbery. If you take it from a rich person, it's social justice. I simply don't have the words...

And why can't the tax rate be adjusted. I'm certainly not advocating robbery, just the adjustment as required. You seem to have enough words to put some in my mouth...

 Just Tony wrote:

Disciple of Fate wrote:But say for example you get paralyzed from an accident and can't work anymore, should you be penalized for being in that accident? When you can't get work anymore because of outside effects not in your control, should you be left to starve?

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh, this one's in my wheelhouse.

You apply for disability benefits, including Medicaid, EBT, and every other benefit that the government offers you already.

How about personal perspective? Glad you asked.

In 2007, I injured my back during my deployment to Iraq. I'm rated at 10% disabled and draw a monthly check as compensation. I'm fortunate as my job at Cat isn't so physically demanding as to stress that part of my body or exacerbate it, just as my MOS change in the National Guard also works around that. I know that one day in the future, it WILL get worse. Just as I know one day in the far too near future, I won't be able to lift my own daughter. When that time comes, I will file for a reevaluation of my disability rating and go from there. I already have my military pension in place, so I am good there as well. You see, the US already has programs to accommodate people who can't physically or mentally be productive and earn a living. The difference between this and a UBI is qualifiers. I know what 100% disability is going to look like, and I know damn well it wouldn't support my household. At that point, I also know what assistance programs will be available once it gets to that point. By then I will also be getting my pension and probably have my 401K to hit off of. Regardless, I don't expect the government to cut me a $50,000 a year salary on the taxpayers' dime. That's asinine and selfish to expect that.

I'm glad you seem to understand the basics. Now imagine a future where through no fault of your own its no longer possible to find employment. The government already struggles to provide for those things now at the current taxrate. Imagine if we put 5 times more people on that system. Without adjustment of tax rate it would collapse. I'm glad you agree the government should not let those people get penalized. If 50-60% has that problem, there is no way that current programs will suffice to cover the problem, this is when UBI comes in.

 Just Tony wrote:

Disciple of Fate wrote:Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government.

So extortion? Fascinating. Also, rich people already have something like that in place, it's called wages. Well, the rich people who run businesses, which is almost all of them.

If you call a tax increase extortion then sure! Wages for robots? I don't think you understand what the future might bring for human employment.

 Just Tony wrote:

Disciple of Fate wrote:It isn't in the interest of the rich to let society fall apart, because they tend to end up as the scapegoats. That isn't meant as a threat, its just how it is historically. In a future where the rich desperatly cling to every dollar in an increasingly poor society its going to resemble an authoritarian state pretty quickly. We have examples of that less then a few decades ago in Central America.

This is why the whole concept of all employment going away is pants on head stupid. With nobody to buy their products, how will the rich make money? There won't be a stock exchange to play, so it all falls apart fast. Regardless of how you think things are going down, only a completely inept upper social class would allow that to happen unless their end goal was to purposefully sabotage wealth creation.

Automatisation and robotics are already making a lot of jobs obsolete. UBI could provide a way to safeguard a market when you no longer need a workforce but still save money in the end. In the end business has a choice, either you keep employing humans in the face of better alternatives like robots or you implement UBI to salvage the market.

 Just Tony wrote:

Disciple of Fate wrote:And really, when you have 50 billion and you make 1 billion a year, does it matter that much if your taxes are either a 100 million or lets say 400 mil? At what point does such an obscene amount become meaningless numbers?

I don't know why I have to keep repeating this. It's about principle. It's about setting a precedent. When you can arbitrarily take away someone's wealth through the government, you set things up to where you can take away ALL WEALTH through the government. I realize for some that is the end goal, but once again, you will eventually deplete that wealth in that case. Far sooner than you'd be willing to admit. Unless, of course, the machine guns come out to "incentivize".

You have a strange way of characterizing tax increases as "extortion" or "arbitrary", believe me in the context we're discussing there is nothing arbitrary about a tax increase, its in the long term interest of the rich. I never said take all their money, but I'm also not a firm believer in the requirment to make billions a year. Its funny in a sad way how you think there is no middle ground between the current tax rate and just seizing all their money, but it sure makes the discussion sound dramatic for no reason.

If you call a tax increase extortion then sure! Wages for robots? I don't think you understand what the future might bring for human employment .


You have a strange way of characterizing tax increases as "extortion"

Your statement previously boiled down to "The rich will pay more taxes or else they'll be killed". That's quite literally extortion. I'm not really getting into this discussion since I'm not that great at economic values in society, but I can see why he's calling it extortion when you put it as bluntly as that.

Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

If you call a tax increase extortion then sure! Wages for robots? I don't think you understand what the future might bring for human employment .


You have a strange way of characterizing tax increases as "extortion"

Your statement previously boiled down to "The rich will pay more taxes or else they'll be killed". That's quite literally extortion! I'm not really getting into this discussion since I'm not that great at economic values in society, but I can see why he's calling it extortion when you put it as bluntly as that.

Actually if you read what I said it either ends up with the rich dead or an authoritarian state like in Central America. How is that extortion, I'm just looking at history. But I guess history is extortion?

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government.

You should have included the part where I said it wasn't a threat, just observing history. Desperate starving poor people don't tend to be the most friendly of neighbours. Again, take it up with the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution etc etc. When people have nothing to lose they tend to take matters into their own hands and guess who is going to take the blame? Maybe we should ask Marie Antoinette if she would have taken that extra million a year over her head.

Disciple's example is no more extortion than property rights: "Don't step on this piece of land or the police will shoot you". The benefit of the State's monopoly of violence is far greater for those with wealth being safeguarded by it than those without; thus, we expect the people who gain more from the system to pay more into the system.

There's a lot of complaining about the "entitlement" of the poor, but the biggest exemplars of entitlement are the people at the top of the heap that think society owes them anything, rather than the other way around. Buffet, Gates et al. have enough humility to realise that their success wasn't primarily made possible because of their own inherent greatness (although their skill obviously played a part) but through society. For an example of someone who isn't and doesn't, just look at Trump and his small million-dollar loan.

In a scenario when most jobs become obsolete, current tax rates won't cut it at the end of the day. Now most new taxes could easily fall on business that cut costs in labor. When you fund UBI with that then society and the economy as a whole can keep running for the most part. Saying its unfair to tax the wealthy more will make society drift more into a police state, because the wealthy are some of the few who can afford taxes and in exchange the government has to protect them against an ever more desperate and poor society. We have seen this examples in history quite a few times. The rich and business want no political change because they won't benefit, but they have to use force to keep social movements who want change down. Central America up until the 90's had US sponsored death squads running around beheading and executing union leaders and student news paper staff. We can directly observe what happens when the elite resist social change at all cost because "its unfair", well it sure isn't pretty either.

 Just Tony wrote:
Far too much to respond to and keep it organized while juggling work, so this will wind up being multiple posts.

Disciple of Fate wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Taxing the rich more is not unfair. First off, everyone needs a set amount to live on. The portion that is needed to live on is a lot less for someone who is rich. Thus it is unfair to tax the poor person the same rate as a rich person.

So because someone is successful, they should be penalized and subsidize everyone who isn't? Also, who dictates what is "needed" to live? Do we then move to identical housing? One model of vehicle for everyone? Do I have to eat a certain way if that's

Just Tony 755324 wrote:

skyth wrote:It's almost as if Tony didn't read what I wrote and is arguibg against something else.

Capital gains is taxed at a max of 20%. (And no FICA taxes) The lowest tax bracket is 10% plus a 15% FICA tax on top of that.

It's almost as if I read exactly what you said and responded directly to it.

skyth wrote:Of course the US gets things backwards. The federal tax rate on the middle class is higher than that for the rich. Any additional dollar that a worker earns the federal government gets at least 25 cents. The rich investor has his income[i][u] taxed at a max of 20%.

So when you say income, you mean actual income for the lower class, but mean capital gains for the rich. Never mind what their actual income is, or that there is a separate set of tax rules for the corporation/company from the start, OR that income and investment earnings are two entirely different things. You didn't just move the goal post, you switched to a different sport in a different state.

When the majority of the rich peoples' income comes from capital gains, it is one and the same. No moving goalposts or anything. But please continue to use dishonest argunents.

Gitzbitah wrote:

 Just Tony wrote:

skyth wrote:Second off deals with the marginal utility of money. The amount of happiness provided by adding another dollar of income is less than the previous dollar. Taxing a rich person has quite a lesser effect on their happiness as opposed to the same tax rate on a poor person.

I imagine anyone getting charged more for something than the next person would make someone unhappy, regardless of income. I'm relatively well off, should my water bill for instance be higher than my neighbor who makes less than me solely because I make more money? Apply the principle broadly, and stop focusing on the specifics of "rob from the rich to give to the poor", and you'll see the flaw in the thinking, and why I call it unfair.

Alright, let's play the other side of this game. A C-Section birth costs 30,000 or so in America. Your average wealthy person Harumphs, adjusts their monocle, and moves on. A family making minimum wage pulls in 15 grand a year. They of course, don't pay and it wrecks their credit even further. What they do pay sets them back considerably. a middle class family agrees to a payment plan, and spends years paying off this debt..

Let's play that out how it would ACTUALLY go, shall we?

the rich person does some terribly stereotypical thing involving a monocle (because class warfare tropes, I suppose) and simply pays what isn't covered by his/her insurance.

Since I believe I qualify as middle class, I'll field this one from experience. My daughter Charlotte was born C-Section (Lucky me, my son Aidan, who is due at the end of this month, is breach and will more than likely necessitate ANOTHER C-Section) and I submitted the bill to my insurance. I had some copay to pay off.

So there's the real way it would go down. Omitting a major step to foster to political rhetoric is NOT arguing in good faith.

The family pulling in minimum wage submits the cost to government assistance healthcare (My son qualifies for Medicaid because of his Down Syndrome, so this clears up whatever copays left from Tricare we may have. Not sure what government provided health insurance would apply to welfare assistance families). There may be overhead to deal with.

Gitzbitah wrote:The wealthy child is of course all set for college when the time comes.

The poor child is not, unless they manage to scrape together enough scholarships.

The middle class child is unlikely to, unless their family invests in a plan early, or they manage to secure many scholarships.

Once again, borrowing from my own personal experiences, I dispute this.

There are many grants through the government for students to take care of. Speaking as a person who grew up WELL below middle class, I was able to go to college with nothing but a few grants and my GI Bill. I could have gotten more out of military college benefits, but I wasn't signed up for some in my contract. That avenue is easily available for ANYONE, regardless of upbringing.

If I were to walk out my door at my house and look past the gas station that looms over me from the other side of the street, I can see the tops of the buildings of Purdue University. The attendees at this school come from all walks of life, even from poor upbringings.

That's not even taking into consideration vocational schools or jobs with OJT.

Gitzbitah wrote:Nothing about the start of these three children's lives has any difference but the amount of wealth their family happened to have. Logically speaking, if the wealthy child ends up paying more taxes it is perfectly fair- not only did he have higher earning potential from birth, but he has obviously realized that potential if he remains wealthy. If he does not, then he is not taxed as a wealthy individual.

So, yet again, punish success. Which, of course, incentivizes people to be less successful. Say what you will, but the monkeys who realize they are working harder or more for the same treats that other monkeys will get for free will indeed stop working for them. It's also why you have rich parents kicking their kids off the trust funds to fend for themselves when they get complacent/entitled.

Gitzbitah wrote:Society is not a commodity. It is an obligation anyone who lives in it must support.

Absolutely, and the structures and administrative apertures of society, I totally agree with you. You are obligated to support and finance. What you are NOT obligated to finance, however, is someone else's expenditures simply based on your success. If you scored a perfect score on your freshman level chem class, and someone else didn't pass because either they didn't understand the material or didn't do enough work to pass, is it your obligation to take a C in that class and donate your hard work in there to bump that person up to a C to be right next to you? That is a question I would hope is rhetorical, but somewhere someone thinks that is how it SHOULD happen. Like I've said a dozen times in threads like this: take the principle behind the law/procedure/whatever and apply it to something else that demonstrates the failed logic behind it, you need to stop getting hung up on specifics, especially when you attach too much emotion to those specifics.

Reply by: Co'tor Shas - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 15:25:21

Post by: Co'tor Shas

Those who benefit most from a society deserve to pay the most into it. And the richest amount us are those who have benefited the most.

Reply by: daedalus - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 16:48:01

Post by: daedalus

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

If you call a tax increase extortion then sure! Wages for robots? I don't think you understand what the future might bring for human employment .


You have a strange way of characterizing tax increases as "extortion"

Your statement previously boiled down to "The rich will pay more taxes or else they'll be killed". That's quite literally extortion. I'm not really getting into this discussion since I'm not that great at economic values in society, but I can see why he's calling it extortion when you put it as bluntly as that.

Rich people still get to be rich, but in exchange for society not ripping them to shreds by having a functional and protective government they can help by making sure to pay an adequate amount of tax to the government.

I believe it's basically the corollary to a Hobbsian viewpoint. For practical purposes, it's not wrong. Classic "strongman keeps humanity from killing and eating each other, state of nature offers only overlapping and absolute property rights for everyone on everything" kind of thing.

Only thing I can see in it that some might find disagreeable is the implications that people might need to pay an appropriate amount into the system representative to what they have to protect.

But you pay more for insurance if you're a health risk. You pay more into insurance if your car is worth more. You pay more into insurance if you have a bigger home full of more stuff. All of that is fine, right? So why not pay more into government/society if you get more out of it too?

Reply by: skyth - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 16:57:08

Post by: skyth

Combine with the fact that the biggest reason that the ultra-rich are rich is due to luck.

Plus there needs to be a basic recognition of humanity. The 'work' a rich executive is no where near 5,000 times as valuable or as hard as the workers in the company.

Reply by: d-usa - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 17:07:14

Post by: d-usa

 skyth wrote:
Combine with the fact that the biggest reason that the ultra-rich are rich is due to luck.

With the promise of capitalism, there are a lot of people who are voting against entitlement programs that would benefit them now or in the future. I always feel that many of the poor people in the US don't see themselves as poor or disadvantaged, they just see themselves as future small business owners who haven't bootstrapped hard enough yet.

Reply by: daedalus - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 17:10:49

Post by: daedalus

 skyth wrote:
Combine with the fact that the biggest reason that the ultra-rich are rich is due to luck.

Plus there needs to be a basic recognition of humanity. The 'work' a rich executive is no where near 5,000 times as valuable or as hard as the workers in the company.

I'm unwilling to make value based judgments at this point. However, when a person in a company can receive a bonus larger than another employee's salary even when they get fired for performance reasons, it's not hard to see things are going wrong, particularly when the second employee gets fired for taking the wrong path back from the restroom.

Reply by: Disciple of Fate - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 17:14:25

Post by: Disciple of Fate

Well this being the first of May, it might be a good moment why this was chosen as international workers day: the US.

In 1886 there were large and violent protests in the US for an 8 hour work day (I know I know... lazy commie scum with their 8 hours). About a dozen people died in the crackdown and four labor leaders were hanged in what is considered a miscarriage of justice. Private business security actually killed protestors.

Why is it so hard to imagine that there might be a return to those kinds of scenes in an economically uncertain future? Those damn socialists enabled an 8 hour working day in the US, those poor rich people suffered such injustice!

Reply by: d-usa - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 17:19:29

Post by: d-usa

Well, some US companies basically maintained private armies to keep labor unions and workers in check. Those are in addition to the many times local, state, and national governments send in police and military forces to help resolve labor disputes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States

Reply by: Disciple of Fate - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 17:29:21

Post by: Disciple of Fate

I know, US labor history is fascinating. But it also shows how the less privileged in society fought against the rich and business to improve their lives. So I'm wondering where all the people arguing against higher taxes for the rich and business drew a line in the sand, what year was perfection achieved so as not to be meanies against the wealthy? Were those protesters being unfair too in their opinion? After all, episodes like that cost the wealthy more money. It also shows the amount of social strife that is possible, but apparently saying it might be in the interest of the rich to pay slightly more is a threat and extortion

Reply by: BaronIveagh - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/01 23:52:16

Post by: BaronIveagh

 Disciple of Fate wrote:
I know, US labor history is fascinating. But it also shows how the less privileged in society fought against the rich and business to improve their lives. So I'm wondering where all the people arguing against higher taxes for the rich and business drew a line in the sand, what year was perfection achieved so as not to be meanies against the wealthy? Were those protesters being unfair too in their opinion? After all, episodes like that cost the wealthy more money. It also shows the amount of social strife that is possible, but apparently saying it might be in the interest of the rich to pay slightly more is a threat and extortion

Mind you, the tax rates on income over a million dollars a year were previously somewhat steep, sometimes almost 90%, in the US. It should be pointed out that this in no way hindered their ability to produce jobs, as the 1940's, 50's and 60's demonstrated.

Reply by: Just Tony - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/02 02:44:30

Post by: Just Tony

You know what, you guys win. I have responses to every single one of you, but you've simply exhausted me trying to keep up. Nothing I say will change opinions, nor will mine change, so this is a waste of resources. Good day.

Reply by: Ouze - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/02 06:13:28

Post by: Ouze

 Just Tony wrote:
You know, that may be one of those experiments where you could kind of guess how it was going to end before you even started it.

Ironic.

Reply by: sebster - click to view full reply 

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Finnish Basic Income to end this year @ 2018/05/03 07:59:45

Post by: sebster

 Just Tony wrote:
You know what, you guys win. I have responses to every single one of you, but you've simply exhausted me trying to keep up. Nothing I say will change opinions, nor will mine change, so this is a waste of resources. Good day.

That's solely on you.