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Orlanth wrote: I know someone who worked at an Amazon distributon cente in the UK.
Very poor working hours, practices and minimum wage. a draconian disciplinary regimen that effected things as diversely as visitor parking with warnings and threats of dismissal, and a hire and fire attitude that offered a toxic working environment and deliberately eshewed any form of work stability on point of principle; to let everyone know they could be replaced anytime and would not be missed.
Warehouse jobs are rapidly being replaced by robots.
John Prins wrote: Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
The claim that the middle class is needed to consume to make the rich rich is a claim I seem made a lot. It doesn't actually work. I mean sure, the current economy is built around businesses providing goods for the middle class, but that's because most of the buying power is still with the middle class.
But economies adapt. If money shifts almost entirely to the very rich, then the goods and services provided will shift almost entirely to the rich. This means the future isn't one of economic collapse, but one where the vast majority of people are almost entirely excluded from the economy. While most of us work for very low pay or collect a tiny universal basic income, to live extremely humble lives, almost all capital and resources are poured in to bespoke supercars and daytrips to Saturn, enjoyed by a scarce few.
It's an interesting concept, kind of like The Hunger Games or Walkaway.
I'm not sure the great mass of people will put up with it, though. Money, after all, only works as long as enough people believe in it.
Or Elysium. Except without the magic spaceships to let Matt Damon get a happy ending.
I mean, it must be unsustainable? Having an increasing population at the same time as deliberately shrinking the supply of jobs?
Neither North America or Europe have increasing populations - this is basically propped up by immigration. Part of the backlash against immigration is because of the lack of jobs, naturally.
What's terrifying is the short sighted-ness of the situation. We need a strong middle class that pays taxes, to support the infrastructure that makes the economy strong. There aren't enough rich to pay for it, not when the rich are spending so much political effort to avoid paying taxes.
Gutting the middle class will cause these economies to collapse and destroy most of the wealth of the rich in the process - because a lot of the rich's wealth is tied up in businesses that will be destroyed. Universal Basic Income is probably the only viable solution, but I doubt there's the political will for it in the USA. Europe and Canada both have strong social systems, so it might work for them, but a collapsing US economy will probably drag a lot of the world along with it.
How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
Think about it in the inverse. Concentrate more and more wealth in the top 1% of society, while taking away jobs from the 99%, condemning them and their families to hopeless misery, and blaming them for their plight. How is that a solution?
UBI is bread and circuses. It is the answer to the problem of the downtrodden masses rising up to guillotine the rich.
Prestor Jon wrote:How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
Companies are already automating as much as they can and as much as is sensible. UBI means you have to tax companies and the rich much higher to support the population (and not just increase income taxes for the general population). The average worker can't benefit directly from automation (if their job gets automated away their boss gets the money). High tax rates worked well until the rich started lobbying for lower taxes and since the 70s or so everybody in the developed world has been lowering taxes for dubious reasons: "Companies are just going to relocate in countries with lower taxes if we don't lower them", taxes got lowered and companies still shifted taxes around. And here we are now, countries don't get enough money to finance their social services and safety nets. And with UBI you wouldn't need social security anymore, neither would you need to save money for retirement (or pensions) as you would get UBI. In the same way that the USA already has some sort of socialised healthcare for certain groups there's also already an UBI for certain groups. One just needs to expand those groups until you cover the whole population. And to pay for that we need to increase taxes on the groups that are already wealthy and don't need to work anymore.
If more and more stuff gets automated and there are no "replacement jobs" or new industries don't get created for people to shift into and work there then we'll need some sort of UBI as a simple form of wealth redistribution because the alternative for the rich are guillotines or similar solutions if things get worse (and they probably like their heads right where they are). John Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week but instead we just got what we have now. The whole tech sector (everything from improved efficiency for manufacturing to AI, and everything that got enabled or made possible via the internet) reduced the need for people to work and the service sector can't keep absorbing those workers. Maybe somebody invents a new service or thing that needs a few employees but things will need to change.
We are not living in a Star Trek economy but we'll need to get used to the idea that maybe work doesn't have to be such a big focus of our lives. We can make more food than we need (we just throw it away so the poor don't get it "for free", or we donate it to poor countries where our donations destroy the local agricultural economy), we have more housing than need (but it's left unoccupied because there're no incentives to let people live there for free), we can, more or less, manufacture "everything" at a tiny cost. We probably won't need that many people to keep this going. Why not make it possible for people to actually do what they want instead of forcing them to sell slices of their life for an tiny allowance just so they don't end up homeless and without food? What's the problem with giving people enough money to live their lives? They'll still need to spend that money on something, they won't just burn it. Yes you don't extract work from them but we area already moving in a direction where we need to do that with fewer people to keep things going. Why force people into that hamster-wheel?
At the time feudalism worked "well enough" (for certain people), later we had an industrial revolution and that enabled new ways of living (and improved the lives of a lot of people despite its problems), in the last half century or so we have the tech revolution that against allowed us to live differently than before (against improving the standard of living). Maybe it's time to regulate capitalism a bit more (instead of liberating it) before it allows a few people to leverage automation and tech to accumulate too much power (and we regress in some way as a society instead of improving). We are not living in the 18th or 19th, not even in the 20th century anymore. The situation has changed and we should also change our perspective and how we view the systems (cultural and governmental) we built.
The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
It can but that would mean much higher taxes but for some people that idea's just anathema and not to be mentioned under any circumstance.
I have a feeling that could lead to some political repercussions. This "representaive liberal democracy" stuff was a fun experiment while it lasted!
Exactly. If things continue as they are, it doesn't end in collapse. It ends with more and more people slowly being excluded from the economic system, and with that excluded from the political system.
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Kilkrazy wrote: It's an interesting concept, kind of like The Hunger Games or Walkaway.
I'm not sure the great mass of people will put up with it, though. Money, after all, only works as long as enough people believe in it.
I agree that the masses likely won't put up with it. I think change is almost inevitable. I didn't mean to sound fatalistic about this. But change will have to happen, it won't just stop without some kind of action.
Really, I just wanted to say that if this is left untouched, the future won't be economic collapse, but economic adjustment towards those still able to command a large income.
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Prestor Jon wrote: How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
The economy doesn't care if your $1,000 comes from working or from a UBI. $1,000 in income is $1,000 in demand which will drive $1,000 in production.
You seem to be caught up on an assumption that a UBI can't be as high as a middle class income, but in the long term that's false. Because installing those new robots has freed up the companies from paying a lot of people middle class wages, which means their profits by definition have increased by the loss in middle class incomes. Which means if you tax those companies an extra amount equal to the increase, that's money you now have to pay UBI equal to the old middle class jobs.
There are issues around ensuring any UBI scheme maintains a sufficient incentive to work to the extent that workers are still needed, but in terms of government payments replacing wages there's no issue.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2017/11/01 02:23:39
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
Kilkrazy wrote: Think about it in the inverse. Concentrate more and more wealth in the top 1% of society, while taking away jobs from the 99%, condemning them and their families to hopeless misery, and blaming them for their plight. How is that a solution?
UBI is bread and circuses. It is the answer to the problem of the downtrodden masses rising up to guillotine the rich.
Bread and circuses are for people that you convince to support your in your position of authority. The 1% don't need to convince the 99% to vote for them to keep them wealthy and powerful, the 1% already has all the wealth and power they need and the 99% can't take it away from them. The 1% could try to placate the envious, resentful, angry 99% with payoffs akin to danegeld but do they really need to do that? If in the future there's no worthwhile work for the 99%, or at least the majority of the labor force, to do then why would the 1% spend the money and effort to keep them around at a subsistence level just because? In the near future the 1% can build luxurious fortified resorts in remote places, like Wyoming or Alaska, or tropical islands and stay there with their AI, advanced robotics, cutting edge technology and whatever resources they need that they purchased with their immense wealth, protect themselves with PMCs, weaponized drones, etc. and let the 99% fend for themselves. What are the 99% going to do? Spend the money they don't have because they don't have an income because they don't have a job to cover the travel costs to go to remote places just to try to kick down the door of the 1%'s fortified manor house and take their stuff? What are the 99% going to eat when they don't have any money to buy food and the automated trucks stop delivering product to the automated stores because there's no sales to be made to people with no money to buy products? If the 1% hole up and let the 99% feth off, that 99% is quickly going to die off to a much smaller number that will pose even less of a threat to the 1%.
techsoldaten wrote: Call centers used to be that way, low pay, high stress, high turnover. That turned around and the industry is expanding.
Has it actually turned around? Over here (UK) they've always paid slightly above minimum (to try and aid retention), but are still high stress & high turnover
In some cases, yes. I can't speak for the industry as a whole, but I do know people who work for call centers who are doing well for themselves here in the US. They work in insurance claims, technical support, cable TV and other areas.
The job is not really just to take calls, but to facilitate hand-offs to the right departments and services and do some first-level triage when there's a problem. I'm sure the level of responsibility varies.
When my company used to have layoffs, they'd give severance packages that were halfway decent.
Today I learned that they changed the wording in the policy somewhat. This must have happened a while ago. Now, when they lay people off, they can offer them a position as a subcontractor working for another company for our company. If they do that, they do not need to offer a severance package. Once that has happens, and if the employee accepts, they can then discontinue employment with the individual whenever they desire. If the employee refuses, then they can just shrug and say that they offered a "reasonable alternative".
In doing this, they can skirt any sort of laws that prevent companies who offered severance packages in previous, but similar, situations from withholding them in the future.
Prestor Jon wrote:How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
Companies are already automating as much as they can and as much as is sensible. UBI means you have to tax companies and the rich much higher to support the population (and not just increase income taxes for the general population). The average worker can't benefit directly from automation (if their job gets automated away their boss gets the money). High tax rates worked well until the rich started lobbying for lower taxes and since the 70s or so everybody in the developed world has been lowering taxes for dubious reasons: "Companies are just going to relocate in countries with lower taxes if we don't lower them", taxes got lowered and companies still shifted taxes around. And here we are now, countries don't get enough money to finance their social services and safety nets. And with UBI you wouldn't need social security anymore, neither would you need to save money for retirement (or pensions) as you would get UBI. In the same way that the USA already has some sort of socialised healthcare for certain groups there's also already an UBI for certain groups. One just needs to expand those groups until you cover the whole population. And to pay for that we need to increase taxes on the groups that are already wealthy and don't need to work anymore.
If more and more stuff gets automated and there are no "replacement jobs" or new industries don't get created for people to shift into and work there then we'll need some sort of UBI as a simple form of wealth redistribution because the alternative for the rich are guillotines or similar solutions if things get worse (and they probably like their heads right where they are). John Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week but instead we just got what we have now. The whole tech sector (everything from improved efficiency for manufacturing to AI, and everything that got enabled or made possible via the internet) reduced the need for people to work and the service sector can't keep absorbing those workers. Maybe somebody invents a new service or thing that needs a few employees but things will need to change.
We are not living in a Star Trek economy but we'll need to get used to the idea that maybe work doesn't have to be such a big focus of our lives. We can make more food than we need (we just throw it away so the poor don't get it "for free", or we donate it to poor countries where our donations destroy the local agricultural economy), we have more housing than need (but it's left unoccupied because there're no incentives to let people live there for free), we can, more or less, manufacture "everything" at a tiny cost. We probably won't need that many people to keep this going. Why not make it possible for people to actually do what they want instead of forcing them to sell slices of their life for an tiny allowance just so they don't end up homeless and without food? What's the problem with giving people enough money to live their lives? They'll still need to spend that money on something, they won't just burn it. Yes you don't extract work from them but we area already moving in a direction where we need to do that with fewer people to keep things going. Why force people into that hamster-wheel?
At the time feudalism worked "well enough" (for certain people), later we had an industrial revolution and that enabled new ways of living (and improved the lives of a lot of people despite its problems), in the last half century or so we have the tech revolution that against allowed us to live differently than before (against improving the standard of living). Maybe it's time to regulate capitalism a bit more (instead of liberating it) before it allows a few people to leverage automation and tech to accumulate too much power (and we regress in some way as a society instead of improving). We are not living in the 18th or 19th, not even in the 20th century anymore. The situation has changed and we should also change our perspective and how we view the systems (cultural and governmental) we built.
The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
It can but that would mean much higher taxes but for some people that idea's just anathema and not to be mentioned under any circumstance.
That means 37% of the labor force isn't working, which is 59,624,020 people.
If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: Do you really think that is what will happen?
I don't think people like Jeff Bezos are going to keep running companies like Amazon just to send the majority of their earning to the govt as taxes for redistribution to unemployed people so they can buy products from Amazon. What would be the point of that? At some point the money needed to keep people consuming products is going to become too much to get via taxation. Printing it isn't the answer and we already borrow hundreds of millions of dollars per week so funding it with debt isn't the answer either. There's no way to keep the economy going without jobs and human labor is needed less each year. Sooner or later the 1% is just going to bail, because they can and there's nothing for them to gain by sticking around.
The economy doesn't care if your $1,000 comes from working or from a UBI. $1,000 in income is $1,000 in demand which will drive $1,000 in production.
You seem to be caught up on an assumption that a UBI can't be as high as a middle class income, but in the long term that's false. Because installing those new robots has freed up the companies from paying a lot of people middle class wages, which means their profits by definition have increased by the loss in middle class incomes. Which means if you tax those companies an extra amount equal to the increase, that's money you now have to pay UBI equal to the old middle class jobs.
There are issues around ensuring any UBI scheme maintains a sufficient incentive to work to the extent that workers are still needed, but in terms of government payments replacing wages there's no issue.
Of course it matters. Where does the money come from that the govt is spending on UBI payments? It has to either come from taxation, debt or the printing press, there are no other options. There are limitations on how much the govt can tax, borrow and print so there is a limit as to how much the govt can spend on UBI. Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
If less people have jobs then less people have an income. If less people have an income then less people buy goods and services. If less people buy goods and services then companies make less money so there is less money to tax.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
There is a SuperTarget store near where I work. It's a basically a SuperWalMart. There are about 20 cash registers for checking out but rarely are more than 6 open and staffed with cashiers. However, at either end of the line of registers there are a half dozen self check out registers, each group of 6 self check out registers has 1 Target employee supervising and helping. Target now gets to use 1 employee to replace the work of 6 employees with the added bonus of getting consumers to do the work of a cashier for free. Do you think Target pays that 1 employee covering 6 self checkout registers 6x as much as the cashiers working a single register? Consumers aren't getting any price breaks to offset the labor they provide by being their own cashier. Target just uses fewer employees and increases profits via reduced labor costs. How much do you think Target pays employees? $10-15/hr probably. Even when you add in benefits, if those workers are full time which many aren't, thereby allowing Target to not provide benefits, Target is only increasing profits by whatever they would have spent paying cashiers. Even if you tax all of that extra profit from Target its not enough to be able to redistribute it as middle class level UBI because the employees Target eliminated to increase profits weren't making middle class wages.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2017/11/01 18:18:16
Kilkrazy wrote: Think about it in the inverse. Concentrate more and more wealth in the top 1% of society, while taking away jobs from the 99%, condemning them and their families to hopeless misery, and blaming them for their plight. How is that a solution?
UBI is bread and circuses. It is the answer to the problem of the downtrodden masses rising up to guillotine the rich.
Bread and circuses are for people that you convince to support your in your position of authority. The 1% don't need to convince the 99% to vote for them to keep them wealthy and powerful, the 1% already has all the wealth and power they need and the 99% can't take it away from them. The 1% could try to placate the envious, resentful, angry 99% with payoffs akin to danegeld but do they really need to do that? If in the future there's no worthwhile work for the 99%, or at least the majority of the labor force, to do then why would the 1% spend the money and effort to keep them around at a subsistence level just because? In the near future the 1% can build luxurious fortified resorts in remote places, like Wyoming or Alaska, or tropical islands and stay there with their AI, advanced robotics, cutting edge technology and whatever resources they need that they purchased with their immense wealth, protect themselves with PMCs, weaponized drones, etc. and let the 99% fend for themselves. What are the 99% going to do? Spend the money they don't have because they don't have an income because they don't have a job to cover the travel costs to go to remote places just to try to kick down the door of the 1%'s fortified manor house and take their stuff? What are the 99% going to eat when they don't have any money to buy food and the automated trucks stop delivering product to the automated stores because there's no sales to be made to people with no money to buy products? If the 1% hole up and let the 99% feth off, that 99% is quickly going to die off to a much smaller number that will pose even less of a threat to the 1%.
Nihilism IS the New Economy!
This thread and the 2067 thread are really depressing. No wonder some people want political chaos and "burn it all down" politics across the West if this is everyone's vision of the future. Dystopia, Dystopia for everyone!
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Prestor Jon wrote: Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
Technically speaking yes.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
No one is talking about a literal tit-for-tat "pay for the jobs you cut out of the economy" scheme. No one expects target to pay for the whole thing by itself. There's a huge economy out there, and more than enough money to grant a bare minimum standard to prevent poverty from being a death sentence in itself. This idea that $17.3 trillion dollar economy that continues to follow a general line of upward growth can't find the money is ludicrous. The issue isn't whether the money exists but how to collect and distribute and manage it. The issue has never been of mathematics. It's pure politics.
Do you think Target pays that 1 employee covering 6 self checkout registers 6x as much as the cashiers working a single register? Consumers aren't getting any price breaks to offset the labor they provide by being their own cashier. Target just uses fewer employees and increases profits via reduced labor costs.
That's Sebster's point. Now add in that Target receives large amounts of tax money in the form of benefits and welfare (WIC, unemployment benefits, etc etc) from a population demographic that includes its own employees. Why should Target be able to cut jobs out of the economy, pay those that remain so little they have to use government welfare programs, and then reap the benefits of it all while still complaining about taxes being too high? Which is kind of the absurdist reality here. Corporations and the rich play a big role in the slow slide that the middle class has experienced They bitch about taxes being too high and entitlements for "lazy people" but many of them benefit directly from those entitlements, , and somehow their still touted as the real victims of any proposal to reduce the need for entitles (by mandating higher wages) and yet generate the need for those entitlements in the first place (by lobbying against higher wages).
How much do you think Target pays employees? $10-15/hr probably.
No. Target pays more often than not the absolute minimum. Shockingly Wal-Mart pays its employees more as the company set its "minimum wage" higher than actual minimum wage and shockingly at about 25% above minimum it's still too little to get most Wal-Mart employees off government benefits for being poor as dirt.
Kilkrazy wrote: Think about it in the inverse. Concentrate more and more wealth in the top 1% of society, while taking away jobs from the 99%, condemning them and their families to hopeless misery, and blaming them for their plight. How is that a solution?
UBI is bread and circuses. It is the answer to the problem of the downtrodden masses rising up to guillotine the rich.
Bread and circuses are for people that you convince to support your in your position of authority. The 1% don't need to convince the 99% to vote for them to keep them wealthy and powerful, the 1% already has all the wealth and power they need and the 99% can't take it away from them. The 1% could try to placate the envious, resentful, angry 99% with payoffs akin to danegeld but do they really need to do that? If in the future there's no worthwhile work for the 99%, or at least the majority of the labor force, to do then why would the 1% spend the money and effort to keep them around at a subsistence level just because? In the near future the 1% can build luxurious fortified resorts in remote places, like Wyoming or Alaska, or tropical islands and stay there with their AI, advanced robotics, cutting edge technology and whatever resources they need that they purchased with their immense wealth, protect themselves with PMCs, weaponized drones, etc. and let the 99% fend for themselves. What are the 99% going to do? Spend the money they don't have because they don't have an income because they don't have a job to cover the travel costs to go to remote places just to try to kick down the door of the 1%'s fortified manor house and take their stuff? What are the 99% going to eat when they don't have any money to buy food and the automated trucks stop delivering product to the automated stores because there's no sales to be made to people with no money to buy products? If the 1% hole up and let the 99% feth off, that 99% is quickly going to die off to a much smaller number that will pose even less of a threat to the 1%.
Nihilism IS the New Economy!
This thread and the 2067 thread are really depressing. No wonder some people want political chaos and "burn it all down" politics across the West if this is everyone's vision of the future. Dystopia, Dystopia for everyone!
I think it's actually worth commenting how absolutely asinine that whole scenario is. I mean let's completely ignore everything we know about economics, like hyper-inflation, and the basic mechanics of fiat currency, to present a dystopia fit for an edgy teen action adventure film.
If the 99% have reached the point that they literally have nothing they'll either all be dead in which case great job on instigating mass genocide simply to protect your riches rich folks, or they'll just turn all that anger and free time they have towards stealing everything and cutting the rich out of the "new society", which results in them all being dead or having some degree of success that enables them to survive. None of outcomes are desired, and they all make the rich seem like heartless monsters (which kind of just begs the question of why any of the rest of us should care to protect their wealth), but the whole presentation is tailor made to protect the rich from having any of their riches siphoned off to prevent a dystopic outcome from occuring. This scenario is never going to happen because it ignores economics, but invoking it as an argument against economic reform carries a certain irony. Kind of goes to show how absurd debate about economic reform has become.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2017/11/01 20:36:50
Prestor Jon wrote:How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
Companies are already automating as much as they can and as much as is sensible. UBI means you have to tax companies and the rich much higher to support the population (and not just increase income taxes for the general population). The average worker can't benefit directly from automation (if their job gets automated away their boss gets the money). High tax rates worked well until the rich started lobbying for lower taxes and since the 70s or so everybody in the developed world has been lowering taxes for dubious reasons: "Companies are just going to relocate in countries with lower taxes if we don't lower them", taxes got lowered and companies still shifted taxes around. And here we are now, countries don't get enough money to finance their social services and safety nets. And with UBI you wouldn't need social security anymore, neither would you need to save money for retirement (or pensions) as you would get UBI. In the same way that the USA already has some sort of socialised healthcare for certain groups there's also already an UBI for certain groups. One just needs to expand those groups until you cover the whole population. And to pay for that we need to increase taxes on the groups that are already wealthy and don't need to work anymore.
If more and more stuff gets automated and there are no "replacement jobs" or new industries don't get created for people to shift into and work there then we'll need some sort of UBI as a simple form of wealth redistribution because the alternative for the rich are guillotines or similar solutions if things get worse (and they probably like their heads right where they are). John Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week but instead we just got what we have now. The whole tech sector (everything from improved efficiency for manufacturing to AI, and everything that got enabled or made possible via the internet) reduced the need for people to work and the service sector can't keep absorbing those workers. Maybe somebody invents a new service or thing that needs a few employees but things will need to change.
We are not living in a Star Trek economy but we'll need to get used to the idea that maybe work doesn't have to be such a big focus of our lives. We can make more food than we need (we just throw it away so the poor don't get it "for free", or we donate it to poor countries where our donations destroy the local agricultural economy), we have more housing than need (but it's left unoccupied because there're no incentives to let people live there for free), we can, more or less, manufacture "everything" at a tiny cost. We probably won't need that many people to keep this going. Why not make it possible for people to actually do what they want instead of forcing them to sell slices of their life for an tiny allowance just so they don't end up homeless and without food? What's the problem with giving people enough money to live their lives? They'll still need to spend that money on something, they won't just burn it. Yes you don't extract work from them but we area already moving in a direction where we need to do that with fewer people to keep things going. Why force people into that hamster-wheel?
At the time feudalism worked "well enough" (for certain people), later we had an industrial revolution and that enabled new ways of living (and improved the lives of a lot of people despite its problems), in the last half century or so we have the tech revolution that against allowed us to live differently than before (against improving the standard of living). Maybe it's time to regulate capitalism a bit more (instead of liberating it) before it allows a few people to leverage automation and tech to accumulate too much power (and we regress in some way as a society instead of improving). We are not living in the 18th or 19th, not even in the 20th century anymore. The situation has changed and we should also change our perspective and how we view the systems (cultural and governmental) we built.
The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
It can but that would mean much higher taxes but for some people that idea's just anathema and not to be mentioned under any circumstance.
That means 37% of the labor force isn't working, which is 59,624,020 people.
If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: Do you really think that is what will happen?
I don't think people like Jeff Bezos are going to keep running companies like Amazon just to send the majority of their earning to the govt as taxes for redistribution to unemployed people so they can buy products from Amazon. What would be the point of that? At some point the money needed to keep people consuming products is going to become too much to get via taxation. Printing it isn't the answer and we already borrow hundreds of millions of dollars per week so funding it with debt isn't the answer either. There's no way to keep the economy going without jobs and human labor is needed less each year. Sooner or later the 1% is just going to bail, because they can and there's nothing for them to gain by sticking around.
The economy doesn't care if your $1,000 comes from working or from a UBI. $1,000 in income is $1,000 in demand which will drive $1,000 in production.
You seem to be caught up on an assumption that a UBI can't be as high as a middle class income, but in the long term that's false. Because installing those new robots has freed up the companies from paying a lot of people middle class wages, which means their profits by definition have increased by the loss in middle class incomes. Which means if you tax those companies an extra amount equal to the increase, that's money you now have to pay UBI equal to the old middle class jobs.
There are issues around ensuring any UBI scheme maintains a sufficient incentive to work to the extent that workers are still needed, but in terms of government payments replacing wages there's no issue.
Of course it matters. Where does the money come from that the govt is spending on UBI payments? It has to either come from taxation, debt or the printing press, there are no other options. There are limitations on how much the govt can tax, borrow and print so there is a limit as to how much the govt can spend on UBI. Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
If less people have jobs then less people have an income. If less people have an income then less people buy goods and services. If less people buy goods and services then companies make less money so there is less money to tax.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
There is a SuperTarget store near where I work. It's a basically a SuperWalMart. There are about 20 cash registers for checking out but rarely are more than 6 open and staffed with cashiers. However, at either end of the line of registers there are a half dozen self check out registers, each group of 6 self check out registers has 1 Target employee supervising and helping. Target now gets to use 1 employee to replace the work of 6 employees with the added bonus of getting consumers to do the work of a cashier for free. Do you think Target pays that 1 employee covering 6 self checkout registers 6x as much as the cashiers working a single register? Consumers aren't getting any price breaks to offset the labor they provide by being their own cashier. Target just uses fewer employees and increases profits via reduced labor costs. How much do you think Target pays employees? $10-15/hr probably. Even when you add in benefits, if those workers are full time which many aren't, thereby allowing Target to not provide benefits, Target is only increasing profits by whatever they would have spent paying cashiers. Even if you tax all of that extra profit from Target its not enough to be able to redistribute it as middle class level UBI because the employees Target eliminated to increase profits weren't making middle class wages.
What about people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
Prestor Jon wrote:How is Universal Basic Income the solution? With UBI you'll have companies eliminating jobs via automation only to have the govt tax those companies to get money to give to jobless people so they can purchase the goods and services produced by robots. No jobs means no income tax and UBI means everyone is getting a payment from the govt every month so that money has to come from somewhere. Companies that are eliminating jobs by automating will have to pay more taxes so that jobless people can have more money to purchase enough goods and services to make the automated companies profitable to run. UBI will just run into the same kind of funding issues as Social Security. Eventually there won't be enough automated companies earning enough profit to pay the taxes needed to fund UBI payments to allow people to make enough purchases to fuel a consumption driven economy. If people can't afford to buy stuff from Amazon then it doesn't matter how efficient their automated distribution centers are.
Walmart is the largest private sector employer in almost half the states in the US. How many jobs at WalMart pay a "middle class" salary for an individual or family? Add in the fact that WalMart is already eliminating jobs with automation and that trend is going to continue and what happens to all the WalMart employees that will be jobless in the near future? Consumerism requires consumption and consumption requires income and income requires jobs. The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
Companies are already automating as much as they can and as much as is sensible. UBI means you have to tax companies and the rich much higher to support the population (and not just increase income taxes for the general population). The average worker can't benefit directly from automation (if their job gets automated away their boss gets the money). High tax rates worked well until the rich started lobbying for lower taxes and since the 70s or so everybody in the developed world has been lowering taxes for dubious reasons: "Companies are just going to relocate in countries with lower taxes if we don't lower them", taxes got lowered and companies still shifted taxes around. And here we are now, countries don't get enough money to finance their social services and safety nets. And with UBI you wouldn't need social security anymore, neither would you need to save money for retirement (or pensions) as you would get UBI. In the same way that the USA already has some sort of socialised healthcare for certain groups there's also already an UBI for certain groups. One just needs to expand those groups until you cover the whole population. And to pay for that we need to increase taxes on the groups that are already wealthy and don't need to work anymore.
If more and more stuff gets automated and there are no "replacement jobs" or new industries don't get created for people to shift into and work there then we'll need some sort of UBI as a simple form of wealth redistribution because the alternative for the rich are guillotines or similar solutions if things get worse (and they probably like their heads right where they are). John Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week but instead we just got what we have now. The whole tech sector (everything from improved efficiency for manufacturing to AI, and everything that got enabled or made possible via the internet) reduced the need for people to work and the service sector can't keep absorbing those workers. Maybe somebody invents a new service or thing that needs a few employees but things will need to change.
We are not living in a Star Trek economy but we'll need to get used to the idea that maybe work doesn't have to be such a big focus of our lives. We can make more food than we need (we just throw it away so the poor don't get it "for free", or we donate it to poor countries where our donations destroy the local agricultural economy), we have more housing than need (but it's left unoccupied because there're no incentives to let people live there for free), we can, more or less, manufacture "everything" at a tiny cost. We probably won't need that many people to keep this going. Why not make it possible for people to actually do what they want instead of forcing them to sell slices of their life for an tiny allowance just so they don't end up homeless and without food? What's the problem with giving people enough money to live their lives? They'll still need to spend that money on something, they won't just burn it. Yes you don't extract work from them but we area already moving in a direction where we need to do that with fewer people to keep things going. Why force people into that hamster-wheel?
At the time feudalism worked "well enough" (for certain people), later we had an industrial revolution and that enabled new ways of living (and improved the lives of a lot of people despite its problems), in the last half century or so we have the tech revolution that against allowed us to live differently than before (against improving the standard of living). Maybe it's time to regulate capitalism a bit more (instead of liberating it) before it allows a few people to leverage automation and tech to accumulate too much power (and we regress in some way as a society instead of improving). We are not living in the 18th or 19th, not even in the 20th century anymore. The situation has changed and we should also change our perspective and how we view the systems (cultural and governmental) we built.
The govt can't get enough money to just send everyone UBI payments that are equivalent to "middle class" paychecks.
It can but that would mean much higher taxes but for some people that idea's just anathema and not to be mentioned under any circumstance.
That means 37% of the labor force isn't working, which is 59,624,020 people.
If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: Do you really think that is what will happen?
I don't think people like Jeff Bezos are going to keep running companies like Amazon just to send the majority of their earning to the govt as taxes for redistribution to unemployed people so they can buy products from Amazon. What would be the point of that? At some point the money needed to keep people consuming products is going to become too much to get via taxation. Printing it isn't the answer and we already borrow hundreds of millions of dollars per week so funding it with debt isn't the answer either. There's no way to keep the economy going without jobs and human labor is needed less each year. Sooner or later the 1% is just going to bail, because they can and there's nothing for them to gain by sticking around.
The economy doesn't care if your $1,000 comes from working or from a UBI. $1,000 in income is $1,000 in demand which will drive $1,000 in production.
You seem to be caught up on an assumption that a UBI can't be as high as a middle class income, but in the long term that's false. Because installing those new robots has freed up the companies from paying a lot of people middle class wages, which means their profits by definition have increased by the loss in middle class incomes. Which means if you tax those companies an extra amount equal to the increase, that's money you now have to pay UBI equal to the old middle class jobs.
There are issues around ensuring any UBI scheme maintains a sufficient incentive to work to the extent that workers are still needed, but in terms of government payments replacing wages there's no issue.
Of course it matters. Where does the money come from that the govt is spending on UBI payments? It has to either come from taxation, debt or the printing press, there are no other options. There are limitations on how much the govt can tax, borrow and print so there is a limit as to how much the govt can spend on UBI. Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
If less people have jobs then less people have an income. If less people have an income then less people buy goods and services. If less people buy goods and services then companies make less money so there is less money to tax.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
There is a SuperTarget store near where I work. It's a basically a SuperWalMart. There are about 20 cash registers for checking out but rarely are more than 6 open and staffed with cashiers. However, at either end of the line of registers there are a half dozen self check out registers, each group of 6 self check out registers has 1 Target employee supervising and helping. Target now gets to use 1 employee to replace the work of 6 employees with the added bonus of getting consumers to do the work of a cashier for free. Do you think Target pays that 1 employee covering 6 self checkout registers 6x as much as the cashiers working a single register? Consumers aren't getting any price breaks to offset the labor they provide by being their own cashier. Target just uses fewer employees and increases profits via reduced labor costs. How much do you think Target pays employees? $10-15/hr probably. Even when you add in benefits, if those workers are full time which many aren't, thereby allowing Target to not provide benefits, Target is only increasing profits by whatever they would have spent paying cashiers. Even if you tax all of that extra profit from Target its not enough to be able to redistribute it as middle class level UBI because the employees Target eliminated to increase profits weren't making middle class wages.
What about people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
What about them? The 1% isn’t made up of only bad people but neither Gates nor Buffet can fund middle class earnings level UBI payments for the growing number of displaced workers in the labor force.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2017/11/01 22:27:39
That means 37% of the labor force isn't working, which is 59,624,020 people.
If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
You dropped some zeros in that final figure (3.5 trillion, not 3.5 billion).
Ultimately, though, don't forget that either the people are paying taxes on their UBI, or if they are not, they don't need nearly as much UBI (30-40% less, probably). Also, you won't displace ALL THE JOBS with automation, so you've still got a working class of people to draw taxes from. And people on UBI will probably supplement the UBI with taxable income from ad-hoc work. And a highly automated economy makes a decent standard of living possible for far less money, enabling the necessary levels of consumption. As long as the economy is consumption based, you need consumption to happen, and you need people to consume. The rich DO NOT consume enough of anything to support a consumption based economy - they can only eat so much food, wear so much clothing, drive so many cars.
That means 37% of the labor force isn't working, which is 59,624,020 people.
If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
You dropped some zeros in that final figure (3.5 trillion, not 3.5 billion).
Ultimately, though, don't forget that either the people are paying taxes on their UBI, or if they are not, they don't need nearly as much UBI (30-40% less, probably). Also, you won't displace ALL THE JOBS with automation, so you've still got a working class of people to draw taxes from. And people on UBI will probably supplement the UBI with taxable income from ad-hoc work. And a highly automated economy makes a decent standard of living possible for far less money, enabling the necessary levels of consumption. As long as the economy is consumption based, you need consumption to happen, and you need people to consume. The rich DO NOT consume enough of anything to support a consumption based economy - they can only eat so much food, wear so much clothing, drive so many cars.
UBI has the same problem as SSI, a shrinking number of workers trying to support a growing number of nonworkers. Automation won’t eliminate all jobs but it will eliminate a lot of them. Now the labor participation rate is 63% but it will drop lower, how low will it go? If it drops to 50% that’s 80 million people if we lower non taxed UBI payments to $40,000 that’s still $3.2 trillion dollars a year which is pretty much doubling the entire federal budget just by adding UBI. Where does the federal govt get another 3 trillion plus dollars from? And that’s not even counting additional expenses like healthcare for the tens of millions of nonworkers.
Prestor Jon wrote: If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
Where in the feth did you get the idea that UBI had to paid at the current median income? Seriously, why did you just make that up? I mean sure, if you set UBI to a stupidly big number then it becomes impossible to afford. But if you look 20 years forward and assume that we see similar growth levels and that growth concentrates in the top 1% as it has in the last few decades, and you set a UBI that's provides enough to live on but isn't stupidly high, then it works okay.
Of course it matters. Where does the money come from that the govt is spending on UBI payments? It has to either come from taxation, debt or the printing press, there are no other options. There are limitations on how much the govt can tax, borrow and print so there is a limit as to how much the govt can spend on UBI. Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
If less people have jobs then less people have an income. If less people have an income then less people buy goods and services. If less people buy goods and services then companies make less money so there is less money to tax.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
Yes, I just went through the maths of this. Imagine blockbuster earns $100. It pays $50 to staff and suppliers, and is left with $50 profit. The netflix comes along and completely takes over the blockbuster business. It earns the $100 that used to go to blockbuster. But netflix has only 1 IT and no other costs, for $10. Oh oh, that's $40 that's no longer in the economy... except netflix profit is $90. The money is still there. You tax netflix that $40, use that to fund UBI for the displaced workers and everyone is back where they started.
It is a basic issue of maths - if a person is no longer employed, they no longer draw a salary but they are also no longer an expense to their company - the money hasn't disappeared its just been reallocated from staff to shareholders. So taxing the company and using that to cover a UBI for former worker is just a process of doing a +/- to offset the +/- previously done by the company.
There are of course lots of complicating factors. There's no point pretending this will be an easy process even without political resistance, and there will be winners and losers. But you seem to disputing the basic maths of the process, and on that level there's really no argument to be had.
“We may observe that the government in a civilized country is much more expensive than in a barbarous one; and when we say that one government is more expensive than another, it is the same as if we said that that one country is farther advanced in improvement than another. To say that the government is expensive and the people not oppressed is to say that the people are rich.”
Adam Smith, who must have been some kind of leftie or something.
Prestor Jon wrote: If we pay each of those people $59,000 that would cost $3,517,820,000
The govt could tax 100% of the earnings of the top 5% and not be able to pay the median income to all the current nonworking workers.
Where in the feth did you get the idea that UBI had to paid at the current median income? Seriously, why did you just make that up? I mean sure, if you set UBI to a stupidly big number then it becomes impossible to afford. But if you look 20 years forward and assume that we see similar growth levels and that growth concentrates in the top 1% as it has in the last few decades, and you set a UBI that's provides enough to live on but isn't stupidly high, then it works okay.
Of course it matters. Where does the money come from that the govt is spending on UBI payments? It has to either come from taxation, debt or the printing press, there are no other options. There are limitations on how much the govt can tax, borrow and print so there is a limit as to how much the govt can spend on UBI. Is that limit enough to match the loss of income from jobs disappearing as human labor becomes less necessary?
If less people have jobs then less people have an income. If less people have an income then less people buy goods and services. If less people buy goods and services then companies make less money so there is less money to tax.
Can you collect enough taxes from Netflix to pay a middle class wage to all of the people that lost their jobs when BlockBuster video went out of business?
Yes, I just went through the maths of this. Imagine blockbuster earns $100. It pays $50 to staff and suppliers, and is left with $50 profit. The netflix comes along and completely takes over the blockbuster business. It earns the $100 that used to go to blockbuster. But netflix has only 1 IT and no other costs, for $10. Oh oh, that's $40 that's no longer in the economy... except netflix profit is $90. The money is still there. You tax netflix that $40, use that to fund UBI for the displaced workers and everyone is back where they started.
It is a basic issue of maths - if a person is no longer employed, they no longer draw a salary but they are also no longer an expense to their company - the money hasn't disappeared its just been reallocated from staff to shareholders. So taxing the company and using that to cover a UBI for former worker is just a process of doing a +/- to offset the +/- previously done by the company.
There are of course lots of complicating factors. There's no point pretending this will be an easy process even without political resistance, and there will be winners and losers. But you seem to disputing the basic maths of the process, and on that level there's really no argument to be had.
What amount do you want the UBI to be? You're the one that said that UBI payments needed to replace "old middle class jobs."
sebster wrote: Which means if you tax those companies an extra amount equal to the increase, that's money you now have to pay UBI equal to the old middle class jobs.
What current annual UBI payment would be the equivalent of an old middle class salary? I used the current median income because it's literally the middle income, you have yet to put forth any alternative figure.
What would be a decent middle class UBI payment? How about $8/hour nontaxed income? That would work out to be $16,000 a year (40hrs/wk x 50 weeks). Let's pay for that by taking $8 from every Netflix subscriber's monthly fee, $8/month x 12 months is $96/year. $16000/96 is 167 Netflix subscribers for each former Blockbuster Video employer getting $16k UBI annually, which is 58,500 x 167 = 9,769,500 Netflix subscribers needed to cover the $936 million in UBI for former Blockbuster employees.
There are 52,770,000 Netflix subscribers so they could collectively fund 316,000 people receiving $16k in annual UBI payments. There are over 161 million people in the labor force with over 59 million nonworking people in the labor force. Taxing over 67% of Netflix subscription fees will cover $16k UBI payments for 315,000 people. If you wanted to make UBI really Universal and paid to every member of the work force, using the same $16k amount it would cost $2,576,000,000,000 which is over 60% of the entire Federal budget for 2017 which incurred a deficit of over $600 billion. In 2015 the total income reported to the IRS by individuals was $10 trillion so a UBI of $16k/yr to the entire labor force would equal to 25% of all individual income.
Where does all of that money come from? You can't take it all out of companies like Netflix.
As of October 2017, Netflix had 109.25 million subscribers worldwide, including 52.77 million in the United States.[7] Their efforts to produce new content, secure the rights for additional content, and diversify through 190 countries has resulted in the company racking up billions in debt: $21.9 billion as of September, 2017, up from $16.8 billion from the same time the previous year.[14]
If you tax hundreds of millions of dollars from Netflix they're going to have to change the way their business operates. The changes they make will influence the content and services they can offer which will impact the number of subscribers they can get. If fewer people subscribe to Netflix because it can't afford to offer the same content and services then Netflix has less money to tax for redistribution as UBI payments. If UBI payments are reduced to the extent that the taxes to fund them can be easily absorbed by the companies against which the taxes are levied then the impact of the UBI on the lives of the people who receive is decreased.
Easy E wrote: If it is not UBI, can someone give me an idea of the alternative?
I think it's tins of dog food until the rest of the population catches on and demand drives that unattainably expensive.
You must mean bags of dry dog food, there's no way we can afford to feed everyone cans of wet dog food. And "dog food" is just code for soylent green, right?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/11/03 15:21:10
Automatically Appended Next Post: One thing that you are forgetting is that UBI replaces social security(retirement and disability), unemployment, and welfare as well. Plus there would be savings in administrative costs as you don't have to worry about keeping the 'wrong' people off of it.
Plus with UBI you could get rid of the minimum wage.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/11/03 15:44:52
Automatically Appended Next Post: One thing that you are forgetting is that UBI replaces social security(retirement and disability), unemployment, and welfare as well. Plus there would be savings in administrative costs as you don't have to worry about keeping the 'wrong' people off of it.
Plus with UBI you could get rid of the minimum wage.
A Negative Income Tax, essentially UBI, was proposed back in the 1960s and it failed to garner support. Instead we got the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit in the 1970s and in theory those would have replaced welfare and social security too but instead Congress kept all of it and just added on the EITC and CTC. I'm sure this time the politicians in DC will have no problem working together and convincing the American people to understand that it isn't that Congress is taking away their SSI and Disability and Unemployment and the EITC and the CTC and Welfare programs it's that they're gaining UBI. Maybe if we all wish real hard, this time will be different.
Oh, I do not dispute that UBI isn't politically viable at this point. Mostly because certain people constantly drum beat against it(or similar things) for idealogical reasons.
However, your big argument is that the math doesn't add up, which is wrong. Of course you used faulty math to back up your argumemt like saying 53M is less than 10M.
skyth wrote: Oh, I do not dispute that UBI isn't politically viable at this point. Mostly because certain people constantly drum beat against it(or similar things) for idealogical reasons.
However, your big argument is that the math doesn't add up, which is wrong. Of course you used faulty math to back up your argumemt like saying 53M is less than 10M.
No I didn't. I used real numbers, did the math and actually proved that my assumption was wrong. You CAN (in theory) get enough money from Netflix subscriptions to pay a decent (maybe? nobody seems to want to decide how much UBI should be) UBI to all the former Blockbuster employees. Unfortunately, the total number of Netflix subscribers is nowhere near large enough to make any significant dent in paying for the UBI for all workers or all out of work workers.
We still have to figure out where to get the trillions of dollars a year we need to fund UBI. We would need to terminate multiple assistance programs (something we seem to be incapable of doing even when its ostensibly meant to be done to make way for better programs) and increase taxes massively on companies without negatively impacting their ability to produce the profits we need to get the taxes from (another very difficult thing to get right).
Technology increases efficiency and productivity which eliminates jobs. Businesses will increase profitability through increasing efficiency and productivity but there's no guarantee that those increased profits can be large enough to help fund UBI payments. Technology lets you sell widgets from home without needing to pay rent and utilities for a brick and mortar store and pay wages and benefits to employees to staff the store. However, selling widgets from home on Ebay is not guaranteed to generate enough profit to pay the UBI tax.
Kilkrazy wrote: Why do you think that Netflix is the only company in the world?
Why do you have the impression that I do?
It's a company that is a clear example of how advancing technology changed an industry and allowed a new company to drive old companies out of business and eliminate jobs. It's easy to get pertinent information like number of subscribers and cost of subscriptions to get an idea of how much money they make and extrapolate from that how much could be taxed from them in an effort to fund something like UBI.
How much money do you want to give to people in UBI payments?
skyth wrote: Plus Distribution centers are high stress (Both physically and mentally) jobs that pay close to minimum wage. Paying that badly doesn't give you a middle class. Plus they can just toss the workers out once they use them up and grab a new batch...
You mean like mills and factories did before the workers organized? Guess we gotta IWW it up in the Amazon warehouses. Just gotta watch out for them Pinkertons.
That won't work, Amazon is already heavily investing in more robots and automation. The can get cheap loans (if they really needed those) to eliminate more jobs in the long term. They bought Kiva Robotics many years ago and since then have eliminated more and more jobs while developing warehouses from the ground up that need even fewer people.
Indeed, I just watched a documentary a week or two ago that looked into robots and automation at distribution centers. The robots not only kept the warehouses neat and orderly, but also increased efficiency by over 30%.
So corporation tax from that warehouse alone would pay for the UBI of the former employees and the company would still be better off.
That's where the money comes from - not from income tax on the shrinking labour force. If the companies want the benefits that come from being based in a country (customers, mainly, as well as the transport infrastructure, education of those employees theydo need, a legal system, and at the root of it all, a society that recognises corporate structures and money), then they should pay for it. If they don't want to pay for that, then they can move to Somalia and not have to worry about that sort of thing.
The resources are there to house, clothe and feed everybody. All we're arguing over is how to share them out.
Assuming we decide to retain a money based economy, then UBI would be funded from taxation.
The amount given would need to be set at a level that offers individuals a modest but dignified life, so that everyone whose job has been eliminated by robots and AI would not have to simply die or start a revolution. This would also allow people to enhance their income through activities such as one of the remaining jobs, or by creating art, or other such things, thus rewarding people who use their skills for the public good.
There have already been studies done to establish basic living wages and so on. Those would be a good place to start.
I don't know if there should be an income for children. Clearly they need to be paid for somehow, however you don't want to encourage baby farming.
1. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant, and funnels massive quantities of wealth into the pockets of those who own the robots. The rich refuse to surrender this wealth, and an enormous permanently unemployed, impoverished underclass is created. Late stage capitalism is in fully effect.
2. Automation leads to all but the most intelligent and skilled people being made redundant. The state passes effective legislation to equally distribute the capital created by robots amongst the populace, and general standard of living goes up. Capitalism is slowly phased out due to abundance of machine-created wealth.
Peregrine - If you like the army buy it, and don't worry about what one random person on the internet thinks.
1500pt
2500pt 
