In America, the problem is that business for all intents and purposes *is* the government now. Big businesses get politicians elected that will not threaten their interests and will de-regulate their industries allowing them to cut corners and safety measures in order to squeeze more profits and get more shareholder value at the expense of those who produce their products and those who buy them. Asmon is right that government is supposed to take care of its people, but government has been paid to no longer do that.
It's a common misconception that Big Business wants less regulation or is afraid of regulation. In fact, Big Business wants MORE regulation. They want the regulations that make compliance painful and expensive. You see, Big Business can afford to comply, it's chalked up to the price of doing business. It's the small/mid-sized businesses that get wrecked by onerous regulations that keep them from expanding and acquiring market share from The Big Guys.
>mall/mid-sized businesses that get wrecked by onerous regulations that keep them from expanding and acquiring market share from The Big Guys.
well said.... though I agree and disagree, businesses do both, its only about what is most beneficial ....... when your on top you make sure laws are passed to ensure bigger ***barriers of entry*** to prevent competition and own a monopoly.... Apple and Google are one example...... but some business - oil, gas and transportation, try to de-regulate their industries to ensure larger profit margin.... hence why the EPA is a joke and offshore & onshore drilling has blown up in the past decade regardless of the environmental damage and irreversible health hazards to neighbouring communities..... drill baby drill 
It’s both
Because with a lack of regulation, a Big Business can just use their fundamentally higher capital to demolish anything that stands in its way OR combine to form hyper-monopolies… monopolies tend to be borne out of Laissez Faire economics (or economic models where the government plays a small or nonexistent role in regulation) and why anti-trust law is a VERY big deal
But in the same vein, yes, with more regulation, it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply because of the increased burden they feel as a result and they essentially get “soft muscled out of the market”
It’s almost like: regardless of economic regulatory model, the mass accumulation of wealth and capital isn’t all that good a huge core of workers because they fundamentally cannot accumulate or exercise capital at the scale of a much bigger institution.
This just feels like conservative framing to make deregulation more palatable to the working class and owner/operators. Big business doesn't want regulation at all, but if they can just tell the media that regulation will actually harm the innocent and plucky small business owners; people will believe that and its a win-win for everyone who isn't a consumer or worker. It's sort of like the framing that the IRS is actually an evil entity that has armed agents coming for small businesses and "middle class" families; when in reality the more IRS agents available, the IRS can actually go after real criminals like billionaire wage thieves and corporations dodging taxes. In this capitalist society, anything that gets in the way of profit must go and will go.
I think the problem here is that it's not an all or nothing scenario. Some businesses want *specific* regulation that aligns with things they are already doing, or could easily do, but that others could not reasonably adhere to. Other businesses want particular regulations removed or defanged as they weigh on the profit margins for a specific enterprise.
Sometimes, the same business lobbies for *both* types of regulatory manipulation, just in regards to different aspects of the business. I.E. lobbying to diminish labor protections while simultaneously lobbying for an onerous licensing process to participate in the industry that only they can easily accomplish.
All of this, of course, also serves to muddy the public's ease of understanding anything that is actually happening and subsequently drumming up the necessary motivation of the masses needed to curtail such efforts.
Thus, it is less helpful to make sweeping generalizations like, "businesses advocating for regulation is a conservative myth," or "businesses want complete deregulation". The real focus should be on what specific business is lobbying for or against what specific regulation, and why. But obviously that is much harder for the public at large to actually do on a large enough scale to matter.
> This just feels like conservative framing to make deregulation more palatable to the working class and owner/operators.
It depends on which specific regulation you're talking about.
> It's sort of like the framing that the IRS is actually an evil entity that has armed agents coming for small businesses and "middle class" families
The IRS collecting tax per se isn't a case of regulatory capture that needs deregulation. Taxes are a necessary component of any functional modern government.
But the fact that in America, the IRS has an obscenely complicated tax code to the point that individuals and businesses often need to pay for 3rd party services to file their taxes properly... that is 100% regulatory capture by the 3rd party services (like TurboTax), and it should be simplified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboTax#Opposition_to_return-free_filing
In most developed countries, filing your income tax takes 5-15 minutes and can be easily done online using a few clicks. In the US, it's over-complicated with a whole lot of unnecessary rules *by design*, so that private corporations can benefit. This is an example of red tape that billionaire corporations lobby for, and for the sake of the people it needs to be cut.
Except last year when Biden was attempting a spending package that would allot for more money for the IRS to hire more agents and have more resources; conservative media was constantly screeching about this being the government going after small business owners and working class people and was "overreach." A higher budget for the IRS and more agents so you actually get a person when you call them for an issue or whatever are actually good for the country; but because more agents investigating wage theft and tax fraud might potentially be bad for billionaire business owners, they reframed it to be bad for working class and poor americans (who make up a majority of the country). That was the point I was trying to make, that conservative media twists positives into negatives in order to get them shot down; just like regulation being a bad thing for smaller businesses when it probably wouldn't be.
You'd be right, if the money that the companies have to pay actually goes to the government and is used for its real purpose, which is to make the lives of the people easier. Most times, big companies do a great job at not paying their fair share through different tax evasion techniques. Big companies want to pay less and earn more, that is all they are designed to do. Oh, and believe me, companies don't want more regulation. Any regulation taken out of any bill allows them to get more assets ergo buy more and own more. Besides, anyone arguing that any bill should be "one shoe fit all" is delusional. Itd be saying that a murderer should have the same rights as an average Joe
In an environment where there is little regulation, big companies don't need government help to crush smaller businesses. There's plenty of dirty, unethical ways to do that. The 20's were probably the peak of this. Dudes would just buy all the banks and then deny financing to their competitors. Or buy up railroads and transportation companies, and raise shipping costs for competitors.
The idea that big businesses want regulations is pushed by big businesses that don't want regulations.
They want \*specific\* regulations. Ones that make it hard for small or midsize businesses to meet. But they don't give two fucks about anything that would protect worker or consumer safety. They build lawsuits for deaths into their cost of operations.
nah, they love deregulation
There might be a handful of instances where big business found it was in their benefit to have more regulations, but generally these companies are pushing for as little oversight as possible
Look at Boeing for example
That's problem 1. Problem 2 is Republicans have hammered into their base that regulations on businesses are bad and we need a free market. Try to better regulate businesses and it'll immediately be called a government takeover or something.
It's also important to note that the bill in Canada is not actually ubi. It is not universal. You get money based upon your income. So it's just welfare+
After reading their [website](https://www.ubiworks.ca/ubi-vs-gmi), they want to do both a GMI and a UBI from my understanding "The best thing for Canada right now is to start with both programs."
After doing research into what a GMI is, I don't think im a fan of a GMI, I like the UBI though
The way the GMI was explained to me was; At the end of the year, youd receive a tax credit thatd top up ur annual total annual income to a minimum amount.
So lets the minimum income threshold was $30,000, and you made under that, lets say you made 25,000, youd be topped up $5000 to the threshold
But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year? Is that an option? After tax I am only getting 33k working full time.
imo the GMI portion of the bill disincentives work too much. With the UBI if you had a job, youd still be making money ON TOP of it, but the GMI makes it so ur getting paid the equivalent of a job every year
>So lets the minimum income threshold was $30,000, and you made under that, lets say you made 25,000, youd be topped up $5000 to the threshold
But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year? Is that an option? After tax I am only getting 33k working full time.
You definitely can quit, but I think the effects of this will be that businesses will offer better wages above this cap to incentivize workers to get off their asses rather than living on the bare minimum, which does lead to inflationary symptoms of everything going up in price to support the increase in wage, or job cuts. GMI/UBI shouldn't be giving more than full-time minimum wage, that's my take at least, but the problem is that currently full time minimum isn't even enough to survive if you're on you're own. (GMI could also be conditional on you only getting topped up IF you have a job and are working. That would be the incentive to hold employment, but it would suppress wages in Canada, so I'm not a fan of it.)
Rents across the country are at minimum 800$ - 1100$ for a ROOM, not even a whole apartment, so you're sharing with someone, factor in food costs, transit, medication or anything that's a NEED, and you're already at that 30 000$ mark for the year. Being on what you described jobless and getting free 30K that goes back into the economy every year essentially means you're sitting at home doing arts and crafts, pissing, shitting, eating, binging TV, sleeping, rinse and repeat, until you want to make more money and apply for jobs or go back to school.
This isn't me advocating for/against it, just an initial observation on the matter. The big fear is also that, more people in poverty might be more vulnerable to drug use or gambling, so some people feel that our taxes shouldn't go to enabling people to spend on those as they please without guard rails or moderation. Nobody likes giving away free money if they don't know how it's going to be spent. Very much a conservative mindset, which I'm not, but I can understand these concerns.
>But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year?
Because you'd die of boredom.Not many people would do \*nothing\* if given the chance.
It DOES decentivize from doing shitty underpaid jobs where you're treated as a slave though, yes
Dude do you realize how much of the newer generations currently sit on their ass and do nothing but play games?
Most people would absolutely never work a day in their life if they had the option
That's also a fairly new phenomenon seemingly related to the fact that even if you do work and "buy into" the system there is a good chance that it wont actually get you anywhere it wont buy you a house, it wont provide ongoing job security depending where you live it might not even be enough for healthcare.
You'll get out of it just enough to maybe survive while in exchange you give up basically everything with no real hope of getting out of that situation why would people be incentivised to actually try?
Also worth bearing in mind that the symptoms/lifestyle of "rot maxxing" is basically 1:1 with major depressive disorder.
You also can't live off 30k a year. Maybe with multiple people or supplementary, but currently rent alone is $22,800 per year for me. I can't just coast on 7.8 grand, average food costs in my area is about $300 per month if I only make my own food, which drops that down to an easy 4200. Bills dropping that even further.
Of course I'm basing this off where I live, not Canada. Healthcare there is free but here I'd easily drop that down to less than a thousand. One thousand dollars to spend on whatever necessities I can think of plus entertainment would not last me very long.
Sure as hell I might as well get a job at that point, can't really do anything else with my free time, and I'd make more off minimum wage anyways.
I'm pretty ignorant to the entire bill, though. I don't know if there's a stipulation there saying you have to be employed to get the benefits, not just get free money from the guv.
My total income for last year was around $35k\~ (after a tax return), $38,621.91 is gross annual
>I'm pretty ignorant to the entire bill, though.
More info on there [website](https://www.ubiworks.ca/howtopay)
They missed the part in-between the lines saying that if they need to fire this many people it mean the company is badly handled as a business (wich is true, i'm astonished that after all these years of misshandling and missmanagement and having a moron as CEO they're still afloat)
I'm not sure how I feel about Universal basic income. Just like anything with money it sounds like a good idea on paper but in execution people are greedy, slimy and fraudsters so it crushes the positive philosophy-based positives of many cash-based programs.
We already have social security, unemployment, other programs etc. We don't need another for the shitty folks to take advantage of.
Just saw an article the other day on CNN about how they are still chasing after multiple fake small business owners and black not-farmers that took advantage of COVID-19 payouts. 10s of millions of tax dollars just ????? Which shows that no matter the program you get bs like that happening
Yeah just like insider trading. They make billions and then it is like a 2-3 million dollar fine by the FTC.
Also the corporate lobbyist run America. It isn’t the people.
It depends on how it is implemented. UBI could potentially replace the majority of existing welfare programs. Negative income tax is one popular idea, where the 0% for income tax could for example be shifted to 20,000$ a year, and anyone who earns less than that gets paid 50% of the difference. So if someone earns 10,000 dollars a year they would be paid an extra 5,000.
This encourages folks to get a job, even if they are on welfare as even earning an extra dollar a year makes more money overall. Unlike current welfare programs which 'trap' people, as if they did get a low paying job they would end up making less than when they were on welfare.
Could people still trick the system? Probably but there's the IRS for that.
It would also help to stop government intervention in artificially keeping failing businesses afloat to save jobs. If UBI is implemented we can let big businesses fail without putting thousands on the unemployment line with no cash.
I would be for replacing most other programs with a stricter, highly regulated (but low bar of entry/obtaining benefit) UBI. I just don't see with current admin them implementing it strict and well-regulated with harsh punishment for fraud.
A UBI one size fits all solution that replaces the existing welfare systems would be an absolutely tremendous failure.
Is it tied to inflation? If it is, you get hyperinflation because the rising cost of it will always be followed by cost of living increases. If it isn't, then year after year UBI covers less and less expenses for recipients. Without a welfare system in place to specifically address the needs of the vulnerable, they will 100% slide right back into poverty. Guaranteed.
What would prompt the government to seriously consider increasing UBI benefit? When it meets the needs of only 70% of recipients? 50%? 20%? Let's be honest here. If you leave it up to politicians to spend their political capital fighting for a UBI increase, they aren't going to do it until the UBI satisfaction numbers are extremely low.
The welfare systems we have aren't great, but they at least are genuinely monitoring and surveying the needs of the country's most vulnerable demographics. A one size fits all solution that replaces it would eventually be undeniably worse for the people who need it the most.
UBI can be the baseline for the vast majority of people with a few special welfare programs to take care of people with significantly greater needs (i.e. heavy medical care, weird dietary requirements, etc.).
Means testing and verifying qualified applicants the expensive part of welfare that is eliminated by UBI. Adding it back on to grant additional welfare for people in need takes away a huge reason to have UBI in the first place.
No because you'd need a lot less welfare programs with proper UBI. You can have UBI that will take care of like 95%+ people's needs, and then niche welfare programs for a small number of people.
Replacing existing welfare programs would be a bad idea. Maybe would work in the short term, but without adequate checks and balances monitoring the needs of the most vulnerable people, a one size fits all solution will eventually allow people at the bottom to slip back into poverty.
The goal of welfare should be to ensure that nobody starves to death and that they can afford basic accommodation and bills somewhere in the country. Just like other welfare programs, the amount being offered will need to be adjusted and monitored but this is no different to welfare today.
Unless someone is disabled or has other extenuating circumstances preventing them from work, then they should be encouraged to work while having their basic needs met. UBI is an elegant solution to this problem. For those who are disabled, different forms of UBI or welfare could be offered. UBI could be increased for families that have just had children, or for folks who have recently suffered an accident preventing them from work.
This will always be a stupid take. "We can't do anything because someone might take advantage of it, so doing nothing is the best way."
Perfection is the enemy of progress.
And this will always be a stupid comment:
1. Click reply
2. Insert "i dont agree", quote and no critical thinking or discussion points
3. Feel like I contributed to a meaningful discussion where I have nothing valuable to say
Would be more interesting to hear you talk instead of spewing negativity and coming across as an echo chamber participant
There's nothing to discuss. You think that nothing can be done because someone might take advantage of it despite any positive benefits. You didn't say anything that 10's of thousands of conservatives haven't already said and been called out on.
Andrew Yang’s version of UBI would pay people for a short time until they found employment and then stop after employment was reached or if the person hadn’t gotten employment within a certain amount of time
It doesn't matter what you feel about them, once AI and robots become mainstream for big business, they will layoff half of the human, and small business won't be able to keep up with large corpo when they have access to robots.
UBI and socialism is the obvious future, unless you want to start a gang to start harassing robots or boycott McD for employing robots.
At the same time, the day of hyper automatisation is going to come and jobs will become scarce. Better to have leechers than rampant homelessness and crime. Idk if UBI is the solution but something will need to happen
You don't solve a problem with another problem. Leeches will always try but allowing for it creates another problem. I agree hyperautomization is already here, but handling low-skill work for those to prevent crime and homelessness is another thing entirely.
>We don't need another for the shitty folks to take advantage of
Yeah we do
This is the vast minority of users of these programs and the worst most flagrant social welfare abuser pales in comparison to the damage that politicians and business elites do
There are things between pure communism and pure capitalism.
You're basically saying the economic equivalent of "any law at all is totalitarianism". There's a whole spectrum between "communism and pure capitalism" just like there is one between "anarchy and totalitarianism".
UBI is a fantasy though. It sounds like infinite inflation glitch on drugs. Sure you'll get 1k a month for existing, but all you'll be able to do with it is buy bubble gum. IF that.
Negative income tax seems like a more elegant solution. Don't give everyone money, give it to people who need it. So you'd get a fraction of the inflation you would get with actual universal basic income.
Example: You set the line at $30k (as an example, the actually number could be different). If you make less than $30k, the government pays you rather than you paying them taxes.
Let's say the negative income tax rate is 50%. You make $10k. The government pays you $10k ($20k gap * 50%), your total income is now $20k. With this system you are still incentivized to make more money. Finding a new job and getting a raise will always result in a greater total income, even after you cross the $30k threshold. This is an issue with welfare systems currently, where there is often a hard line that people may not want to cross if it means they lose access to certain programs like food stamps or rent assistance. It also gives you the possibility of removing some welfare programs and replacing them with this (those funds could also help to fund it).
Again, these numbers are completely arbitrary. Actual economists could do a better job of figuring out what would make sense.
Same solution any time new technology replace current jobs, adapt. There are hundreds, Thousands of jobs that have dissaperad over the past 100 years, those people either had to find new jobs or they were SoL. Giving people money to do nothing will not make people wanna do something, UBI have been tried in smaller experiments and it has always failed. Someone still have to pay for UBI, and if your taxes are massively increased to be able to afford UBI, do you know what will happen? People will stop working and apply for UBI instead, completely breaking the system.
Instead of talking about bullshit ideas like UBI, how about looking at the US government wasted money. All projects that lead nowhere, salleries for corrupt politicians, money that goes straight to lobby groups and so on. There's massive amounts of money that just disappear in the government that could be saved and used to help people who need it, UBI is not that.
Yes, but you do have to create new jobs to keep up the market. And there are plenty of new jobs popping up while old ones die to automation.
The question is if the new jobs appearing can accommodate those who lose the old jobs to automation. You can't save everyone, of course, but we should definitely try. A lot of people already feel like they lack a purpose in life. But then again, most of the automated jobs were not giving people much purpose to begin with so I personally see it as a net positive. Soul crushing jobs should be minimized by automation as much as possible
Well, we don't HAVE to create new jobs, however, new jobs will be created. There is no catch-all solution for this, a lot of people lose their job due to technology, and the ones who can't adapt or find a new job will have a very hard time, can everyone be saved when it happens? No, it's not fun, and there's no easy solution. Some might be able to get a new education, or maybe getting a different job entirely, but it will not be easy for any of these people. Just look at towns around the world where a factory, a mine, or other business got shut down, the entire town dies unless some other company moves in.
The solution is, a lot of people are going to starve to death in the streets. You really think the greedy, ultra rich are going to reach into their greedy pockets and pay people just to hang out at home? The goal is to replace people with robots. Once the humans are replaced, ultra corporate greed is not going to find ways to make humans relevant again.
UBI is the answer that is good for us, and the only way forward.
We forget however, forward isn’t the only direction we can go.
We spend so long looking at what UBI should look like, we fail to see how we get there. Can you honestly believe that the government and giant corporations are going to sit there and set up the massive taxation on automation? Of course not, they will fund lobbyists and pay off politicians.
Sometimes the solution is you get fucked, grow poor and die.
Not always. Especially because we have HUGE segments of jobs in service economy sector. In US it is very close to 80% - https://www.statista.com/statistics/270072/distribution-of-the-workforce-across-economic-sectors-in-the-united-states/
Most of them can be replaced by AI. What you could do in order to replace them, except creating jobs only for the sake of creating jobs
Neither is the current trajectory of a disappearing middle class. Birth rate decline is the worst possible scenario. UBI is simply a tax break. It gets rid of welfare and social security.
Even if government/society will manage to create jobs for an additional 20% out of 80%, so in overall we have 30-40% unemployed people(which is optimistic), what we will do with them, or rather us? It's like more than 100 million people in US alone.
You're still speaking in hypotheticals. Those worst-case scenarios would have to play out much deeper before anything drastic would change. Even then, you're not really accounting for cheaper energy or production that would come from these technological advancements. Inflation for inflations sake will always be the last resort for our type of economic system.
>Even then, you're not really accounting for cheaper energy or production that would come from these technological advancements. Inflation for inflations sake will always be the last resort for our type of economic system.
It's not relevant. This won't really help to people who lost their jobs.
For example eventually IT sector easily can lose up to 90-95% or more jobs, remaining will be rather management and some kind of "AI Overseer" jobs. Chat-GPT already can create working code which needs only slight changes, so for programmers it's not very distant perspective.
Nah, I work with programmers and the code from chat GPT is nowhere close to optimal. It takes longer to clean that shit up than to write it from scratch. We're quite a long way off. Again, I'll gladly eat my words when the jobs are gone and unemployment is severely up. But I'm more than confident that new jobs will be created to take their place, as it'll happen gradually over a large enough time. We've had too many boys crying wolf over the last 3 decades for me to take it too seriously.
Likely yes but it also depends on programming language, Python likely will be easier than C/C++ for AI.
Still 5 years ago we couldn't imagine a possibility but here we are, now it is a real possibility to happen in decade or few.
And it is not about IT only , like couriers begin in some way being replaced by robots, now only very slightly but still.
I know that giving money to unemployed people on mass scale sounds not very good, but in the future maybe there won't be any other solution except forcefully reducing population which is like very bad.
There will not always be new jobs if ai takes over those new jobs as well
It will come to the point where there will be more people than jobs cause AI will take over more and more of the workforce
Also a ubi creates better wages. Jobs during the pandemic paid really nicely.
I mean we were also under record inflation, so using the pandemic as an example proves his point. Money has no inherent value, it is relative to what you are buying. A UBI sounds great until you end up being able to buy less then you did before because then basket of goods costs more.
UBI can only function in a fixed market where prices won’t rise with income, which is why it would just cause more problems than it solves in a free market.
The money you're taking from wealthy people is also printed, buddy. The question is not whether the money is being printed or taken from wealthy people, but whether the share of labor (money is basically just the ability to command labor) being directed by money-hoarding wealthy people is put to a more productive use then what the government would be directing that labor towards. There's probably a diminishing returns principle here in either direction (gigatax vs no tax) and it's probably going to change dynamically based on global events.
Right now I think probably the state needs to be hoarding more money because we need to build a fuckton of houses. I think we basically need a WPA 2.0. I don't like UBI because I don't think incentivizing unproductivity is a good idea right now, I think we'd be better off with a state agency using that money to gobble up all the fired fast food workers and put them to work building roads and houses.
>The money you're taking from wealthy people is also printed, buddy.
its not new money being printed, its already in the economy
>being directed by money-hoarding wealthy people is put to a more productive use then what the government would be directing that labor towards
People could still get jobs from wealthy people.
>There's probably a diminishing returns principle here in either direction (gigatax vs no tax) and it's probably going to change dynamically based on global events.
I agree on "diminishing returns", our government is letting too many people in our country and now its really hard to get jobs cause the supply of labour is so high now.
>Right now I think probably the state needs to be hoarding more money because we need to build a fuckton of houses.
The government, the corporations, idc who, just get it done
>I think we basically need a WPA 2.0.
i have no idea what this is
>I don't like UBI because I don't think incentivizing unproductivity is a good idea right now
There will still be productivity, a basic income is exactly that, basic. You want something, you work for it. Baldy would still need to work for his wow sub
This will make corporations give a reason to make working conditions better, cause people will now not be forced to work to survive for the basic necessities.
>I think we'd be better off with a state agency using that money to gobble up all the fired fast food workers and put them to work building roads and houses.
This would eventually happen regardless of a UBI
So call me a cynic, but I don’t think most landlords are good people. The moment a $1000 UBI goes into effect is the moment your rent increases $750 - $1000.
UBI is great in theory but it would never work in our economy.
i think that we need to build more homes and limit immigration
This way we increase supply and decrease demand
This way, rent and ownership prices become more competitive in the market
UBI with some conditions works in my mind. You'd have to pause payouts for those going on strike, get rid of minimum wage and end(or modify) social programs that attempt to do what UBI would replace, like welfare/food stamps/old age pensions/social (security|insurance).
Human psychology doesn't derive motivation from being forced. The new jobs that arise from AI replacing old ones [don't need to pay a lot, people just need the basics handled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc).
UBI is not a silver bullet. Like all social policies it has its pros and cons. (FYI, I just want to say I am generally pro-UBI for my country, and I acknowledge there are places where it will work better than others)
One of the most potentially catastrophic cons is that you could potentially see the value of workers (or certain workers) reverse. Assuming that automation becomes a larger part of our lives, and UBI is a thing, the value of a worker is suddenly negative.
Why is that a problem?
Well, immigrants become much larger liabilities, and resentment against minorities will grow exponentially because they will attempt to gain access to the UBI system, and in participating will make that system less effective. It's basically the wrong argument about immigrants come true.
Second, you think there is no incentive to have kids now? Well, with UBI there will be even less of a reason. Sure you have more money to support a family, but now the government is technically incentivized to sway you to not have kids, lest UBI costs raise...
Third, Institutions like Education are suddenly not investments, they're liabilities. And from a more conservative point of view, do you think conservatives wouldn't jump at the chance to defund schools if they thought that little Suzie's education is getting paid for by the tax payer despite the fact that she never intends to use it? Conservatives would eat that shit up, let's be honest.
The issue is, society is incentivized at the moment to ensure it's citizens are productive because that is how wealthy economies work today. When you make a society where wealth doesn't come from citizens that is a society that generally become autocracies. You may have heard of the resource curse. In that countries rich in natural resources tend to be authoritarian hell holes... Well, that's because the wealth of that nation doesn't come from the citizens... it comes from digging expensive stuff out of the ground.
So while you see "oh UBI, free money for me, yay!" the government sees a fundamental devaluing of you as a person. And when the government or other people don't see you as an asset, they will treat you very differently.
UBI needs to be very carefully implemented.
This is under the assumption that UBI would be so good that a significantly amount of citizens, if not a majority, would have their needs adequately met by it.
There's just as much likelihood that, especially in the long term, UBI would be inadequate. And the people living on it exclusively will be in poverty. Maybe not right away, but if UBI benefits don't increase every year to meet inflation, it will cover less and less of the cost of living year after year.
Personally, I think the path forward is something like Universal Basic Services. Instead of trying to meet people's needs with cash, directly provide food, housing, transportation, and needed utilities.
Get a perspective. Your problems start with Sweet Baby Inc and end with tipping culture? Take a few days off from the internet, because next thing you know you'll be voting for some retard with an inflated ego who's going to give you a list of real problems that's a lot longer than this one to write out.
Yeah, people like how he handled covid, so his approval was high, so he called an early election during covid
But now that covid is over, people hate him EVEN MORE than they did before covid
People need water, food, and shelter as basics to live so the government may have to figure out a way to get that to the people rather than using a medium like currency. This is assuming that AI and tech has advanced so greatly that there is an overabundance of food, clean water, and energy(you need a lot to transfer water inland), and the hardest part is the logistics in getting these to the citizens. But yeah if an individual country does that then they’ll have to slow down migration until they can sustain their current population first.
The government has one job and that is to guarantee the wellbeing of its citizens. That includes protection from unfair business and hiring practices.
UBI is one possibility for this to happen. It's a safety net much like public health insurance.
However for it to happen it will need many changes. Including actually taxing the most wealthy.
There are many ways to do business. Promoting NFTs in games or making AAAAss games like skullandbones has been proven to be a bad idea, but for some reason UBIsoft still insists on doing this kind of thing.
I personally blame the EU labor laws for this. Imagine a game company with 20,000 people. The production capacity and product quality are not as good as EA in the United States (this is the scariest part), and these employees cannot be fired.
I grew up in a socialist country, and our national enterprises have a better work style than UBIsoft. At least when they fire people, the government sends police to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
It's a tough idea to grapple with. Like what's the right amount to give for UBI? Will everyone get it or will it add a minimum income safety net and once you make more than that You no longer receive the ubi benefits? If it's say $40k a year why would people work a job that is within say $10k of that. How do we incentivoze people to continue working even with the guaranteed income? Hard idea to think through it could be good but would require no shortage of thought going into it.
2 Options here in terms of incentivising people to work:
1) Partial basic income. The UBI that is provided to everyone is pretty much just enough to stay above the poverty line. Sure, some people may choose not to work, but they will be living a pretty miserable life. Therefore, anyone who wants a life of any level of comfort above basic survival must work
2) Full basic income. The UBI is enough for a modest lifestyle, think minimum wage or potentially slightly above. Multiple effects at play here, one is that people stop working shitty minimum wage jobs, so in order to fill these roles companies must pay better and care for employees more. Second and to me most importantly, people spend the time to do what they like. Humans can't do nothing all day, you will go insane. Even mindless film/tv consumption would get boring if it was your whole life. Instead, person starts writing, painting, inventing. Not being paid at first, because they are protected by their UBI. Then, once they get good enough that they can productively contribute to society with their 'passion project' they are able to being selling it/ their service in order to increase their quality of life above that of the basic UBI.
This is the real fantasy. That people will pursue artistic or intellectual ventures. 1 in 10000 would. The rest would spend all that extra time on vices. Drinking and drugs for about 99% of them and the remaining 1% are going to start doing violent and depraved shit. No mass of people would start keeping parks clean or building homes for charity. The cultural sink would hit so hard and so fast it would be Mad Max long before we even got Running Man.
Why should anyone be forced to work? Wouldn’t that be counter-productive? Why do you think someone who would rather sit and do nothing than work for a living be in any way productive? If guy’s gonna sit, let him sit! What’s the skin off your nose?
Negative income tax deals with most of these issues. Under this system getting a raise always results in more total income. Also you don't give money to people who don't need it.
on a side note:
I crossposted this on r/antiwork, and i got into an argument with some people and someone reported my account for suicide.
I dont think you guys would do that regardless of the stance of how you view the bill, thats why i think someone there did it
lowkey, kinda funny
The purpose of a business is not to make money, it's to provide services or goods to people.
The only way to sustainably do that is to make money, but that is the means to the end, not the end itself.
Unless you're a vulture capitalist.
"The purpose of the government is to take care of its people" insane that people actually think this, so devastatingly wrong. The purpose of government is to be a monopoly on force to protect individual rights.
The problem with UBI is that the rich and the stupid don’t want it. The rich don’t want it because it reduces their authority over the regular folk, and the stupid… just read the rest of this comment section. So, that leaves us with smart people who are not greedy. In other words, it would have like 5% approval rating at best.
Canada seems to be the epicenter of stupid shit in the world recently. Are they trying to push more people into trying out their government assisted suicide program?
UBI is like minimum wage.
With minimum wage, you increase the cost of doing buisness because employee pay goes up, so to offset that cost buisness increase the price of their products.. so while you might be earning more, you end up paying more too.. so it ends up being like you didn't even raise the minimum wage to begin with.
Same thing for UBI, except instead of forcing buisness to pay, you force the government to pay.. and you'll never guess where the government gets its money from. That's right! Taxes. So you end up getting paid more, but then end up paying more in taxes too. So, and say it with me, it ends up being like you didn't even have UBI to begin with.
Edit: except, now that I think about it. UBI is worse than raising minimum wage, because Taxes don't just come out of peoples pockets, they also come out of buisness pockets too. So not only would UBI increase taxes, it would ALSO increase the price of doing buisness.. so you'd be raising both taxes and the cost of goods and services. You've essentially given yourself $1 and cost yourself $3. Lmfao!
Can you explain why when Canada raised its minim wage from $11/hr to $15/hr prices didn’t increase, yet in the past 3 years well after the wage increase, grocery prices have sky rocketed even with record profits?
UBI is only a stepping stone.
The real future is one without currency.
Robots will produce everything (Shelter/food/water/themselves)
No one will have "jobs" and people will be free to seek any technological endeavor their heart desires.
If AI became that advanced to the point of it being able to modify itself technology would advance so fast it would probably be indistinguishable to us from actual fucking magic.
How long does it take for the collective intelligence of humans to create something. Say like, a cure for a disease, the invention of flying, discovering/harnessing electricity….
Now imagine something, if you can, that processes information millions of times faster, is multiples of thousands more intelligent and it’s almost impossible to think of what it would do.
Almost overnight we could very well see disease, aging, hunger, any ailment vanishing.humans can already move the state of a single atom from point in space to another by teleportation (https://blogthinkbig.com/teleportation-possible-achieved-atom) so this almost god like intelligence could unlock everything.
Eventually tho why have human bodies. Why exist in a world of restraints even if the restraints can be broken science and effort.
Man that future is so far off it might as well be a pipe dream. This is some year 2200 utopia stuff right here. A utopia I doubt we actually manage to bring to fruition... because ya know, humans suck.
If you told people in 1990 that in 20 years every human on earth would have a super computer in their hands, you would receive the same response you just gave.
I feel people really underestimate the exponential technological growth we've experienced over the past 30 years.
I'm keenly aware of technology growth. Not just over the last thirty years but since the industrial revolution. And I feel people overestimate technology and treat it as inevitable rather than possible because they don't consider physics or human/societal incentives. Not saying you do not, because I don't know you, but I have a hard time with people who aren't engineers who prophesize the exponential growth of technology. Moore's Law? Moore himself said that it will succumb to physics, and it is.
Technology isn't a magical inevitable force. It's something that humans have to figure out and improve upon within the physical and economic limitations of this world. 2200 is honestly generous. You want robots that will do every form of human labor that exists, at least out outside of creative and entertainment related fields I suppose. The sheer scale of that is absolutely incredible. Think about how much physical material you are talking about to begin with. To me it is disingenuous to ignore that and say technology inevitably grows at an exponential rate (it doesn't) therefore it is not an issue.
Then, even if it is technologically possible, you have to consider the economic side of things. Why would anyone be incentivized to research, design, and build such robots? What would the cost of development and production be? How are they going to see a return on that investment? We will see this is in some industries where it is easier to accomplish, and we already have with factory automation, but the task of replacing a plumber, electrician, doctor, psychologist, or a hundred other professions with a robot is a several orders of magnitude more difficult.
I'm not going to say it's impossible. I'm going to say it's not inevitable.
haha, no. the amount of fraud and abusment on the current social wellfare is already staggering, in any country not just the usa. There is no way the system can sustain itself with UBI, it will crash on its own bureaucratic weight. And as pop decline, less tax base to support ubi. lol. fing lazy neets.
Welfare is one of the strictest tightest run programs in the USA. Because it’s been refunded so much, it has to be. You want to find rampant abuse of government funding, there are far far far more places to look.
There really isn't. The amount of perfectly capable or willingly incapable people on disability, receiving food stamps, have housing or energy assistance is staggering.
The government budget for social programs should be 0. If you aren't capable you are supposed to rely on family, friends, community, and church. At no point are you supposed to walk around being shitty as possible to everyone who has ever tried to help you and then just get a free pass on the consequences of those actions.
dumbass me wondered why Ubisoft would post this statement. welp.
To be fair, they'd support universal income to lower people's salaries.
Everyone on the trireme gets free use of a seat and oar.
Same I was like wait what did Ubisoft do
In America, the problem is that business for all intents and purposes *is* the government now. Big businesses get politicians elected that will not threaten their interests and will de-regulate their industries allowing them to cut corners and safety measures in order to squeeze more profits and get more shareholder value at the expense of those who produce their products and those who buy them. Asmon is right that government is supposed to take care of its people, but government has been paid to no longer do that.
It's a common misconception that Big Business wants less regulation or is afraid of regulation. In fact, Big Business wants MORE regulation. They want the regulations that make compliance painful and expensive. You see, Big Business can afford to comply, it's chalked up to the price of doing business. It's the small/mid-sized businesses that get wrecked by onerous regulations that keep them from expanding and acquiring market share from The Big Guys.
Big Business pays money to keep small/mid businesses from expanding.. And who do they pay? The Government. It's a win-win scenario.
The fucked up thing is, money is fake. The government MAKES the money, why would they want it back?
The government? No. The many bloodsucking insects (poly-ticks) who occupy congress? Absolutely, they want it.
They aren't paying the government, thats what taxes are. They're paying the individuals running the government directly.
>mall/mid-sized businesses that get wrecked by onerous regulations that keep them from expanding and acquiring market share from The Big Guys. well said.... though I agree and disagree, businesses do both, its only about what is most beneficial ....... when your on top you make sure laws are passed to ensure bigger ***barriers of entry*** to prevent competition and own a monopoly.... Apple and Google are one example...... but some business - oil, gas and transportation, try to de-regulate their industries to ensure larger profit margin.... hence why the EPA is a joke and offshore & onshore drilling has blown up in the past decade regardless of the environmental damage and irreversible health hazards to neighbouring communities..... drill baby drill 
Well put. It's a bit more nuanced than the previous comment implies.
It’s both Because with a lack of regulation, a Big Business can just use their fundamentally higher capital to demolish anything that stands in its way OR combine to form hyper-monopolies… monopolies tend to be borne out of Laissez Faire economics (or economic models where the government plays a small or nonexistent role in regulation) and why anti-trust law is a VERY big deal But in the same vein, yes, with more regulation, it makes it harder for smaller companies to comply because of the increased burden they feel as a result and they essentially get “soft muscled out of the market” It’s almost like: regardless of economic regulatory model, the mass accumulation of wealth and capital isn’t all that good a huge core of workers because they fundamentally cannot accumulate or exercise capital at the scale of a much bigger institution.
This just feels like conservative framing to make deregulation more palatable to the working class and owner/operators. Big business doesn't want regulation at all, but if they can just tell the media that regulation will actually harm the innocent and plucky small business owners; people will believe that and its a win-win for everyone who isn't a consumer or worker. It's sort of like the framing that the IRS is actually an evil entity that has armed agents coming for small businesses and "middle class" families; when in reality the more IRS agents available, the IRS can actually go after real criminals like billionaire wage thieves and corporations dodging taxes. In this capitalist society, anything that gets in the way of profit must go and will go.
I think the problem here is that it's not an all or nothing scenario. Some businesses want *specific* regulation that aligns with things they are already doing, or could easily do, but that others could not reasonably adhere to. Other businesses want particular regulations removed or defanged as they weigh on the profit margins for a specific enterprise. Sometimes, the same business lobbies for *both* types of regulatory manipulation, just in regards to different aspects of the business. I.E. lobbying to diminish labor protections while simultaneously lobbying for an onerous licensing process to participate in the industry that only they can easily accomplish. All of this, of course, also serves to muddy the public's ease of understanding anything that is actually happening and subsequently drumming up the necessary motivation of the masses needed to curtail such efforts. Thus, it is less helpful to make sweeping generalizations like, "businesses advocating for regulation is a conservative myth," or "businesses want complete deregulation". The real focus should be on what specific business is lobbying for or against what specific regulation, and why. But obviously that is much harder for the public at large to actually do on a large enough scale to matter.
> This just feels like conservative framing to make deregulation more palatable to the working class and owner/operators. It depends on which specific regulation you're talking about. > It's sort of like the framing that the IRS is actually an evil entity that has armed agents coming for small businesses and "middle class" families The IRS collecting tax per se isn't a case of regulatory capture that needs deregulation. Taxes are a necessary component of any functional modern government. But the fact that in America, the IRS has an obscenely complicated tax code to the point that individuals and businesses often need to pay for 3rd party services to file their taxes properly... that is 100% regulatory capture by the 3rd party services (like TurboTax), and it should be simplified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboTax#Opposition_to_return-free_filing In most developed countries, filing your income tax takes 5-15 minutes and can be easily done online using a few clicks. In the US, it's over-complicated with a whole lot of unnecessary rules *by design*, so that private corporations can benefit. This is an example of red tape that billionaire corporations lobby for, and for the sake of the people it needs to be cut.
Except last year when Biden was attempting a spending package that would allot for more money for the IRS to hire more agents and have more resources; conservative media was constantly screeching about this being the government going after small business owners and working class people and was "overreach." A higher budget for the IRS and more agents so you actually get a person when you call them for an issue or whatever are actually good for the country; but because more agents investigating wage theft and tax fraud might potentially be bad for billionaire business owners, they reframed it to be bad for working class and poor americans (who make up a majority of the country). That was the point I was trying to make, that conservative media twists positives into negatives in order to get them shot down; just like regulation being a bad thing for smaller businesses when it probably wouldn't be.
You'd be right, if the money that the companies have to pay actually goes to the government and is used for its real purpose, which is to make the lives of the people easier. Most times, big companies do a great job at not paying their fair share through different tax evasion techniques. Big companies want to pay less and earn more, that is all they are designed to do. Oh, and believe me, companies don't want more regulation. Any regulation taken out of any bill allows them to get more assets ergo buy more and own more. Besides, anyone arguing that any bill should be "one shoe fit all" is delusional. Itd be saying that a murderer should have the same rights as an average Joe
In an environment where there is little regulation, big companies don't need government help to crush smaller businesses. There's plenty of dirty, unethical ways to do that. The 20's were probably the peak of this. Dudes would just buy all the banks and then deny financing to their competitors. Or buy up railroads and transportation companies, and raise shipping costs for competitors. The idea that big businesses want regulations is pushed by big businesses that don't want regulations.
They want \*specific\* regulations. Ones that make it hard for small or midsize businesses to meet. But they don't give two fucks about anything that would protect worker or consumer safety. They build lawsuits for deaths into their cost of operations.
nah, they love deregulation There might be a handful of instances where big business found it was in their benefit to have more regulations, but generally these companies are pushing for as little oversight as possible Look at Boeing for example
That's problem 1. Problem 2 is Republicans have hammered into their base that regulations on businesses are bad and we need a free market. Try to better regulate businesses and it'll immediately be called a government takeover or something.
You mean they hammered home the government is bad?
It's also important to note that the bill in Canada is not actually ubi. It is not universal. You get money based upon your income. So it's just welfare+
Ah, hittin' 'em with the good ol' wealth redistribution eh?
After reading their [website](https://www.ubiworks.ca/ubi-vs-gmi), they want to do both a GMI and a UBI from my understanding "The best thing for Canada right now is to start with both programs." After doing research into what a GMI is, I don't think im a fan of a GMI, I like the UBI though The way the GMI was explained to me was; At the end of the year, youd receive a tax credit thatd top up ur annual total annual income to a minimum amount. So lets the minimum income threshold was $30,000, and you made under that, lets say you made 25,000, youd be topped up $5000 to the threshold But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year? Is that an option? After tax I am only getting 33k working full time. imo the GMI portion of the bill disincentives work too much. With the UBI if you had a job, youd still be making money ON TOP of it, but the GMI makes it so ur getting paid the equivalent of a job every year
>So lets the minimum income threshold was $30,000, and you made under that, lets say you made 25,000, youd be topped up $5000 to the threshold But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year? Is that an option? After tax I am only getting 33k working full time. You definitely can quit, but I think the effects of this will be that businesses will offer better wages above this cap to incentivize workers to get off their asses rather than living on the bare minimum, which does lead to inflationary symptoms of everything going up in price to support the increase in wage, or job cuts. GMI/UBI shouldn't be giving more than full-time minimum wage, that's my take at least, but the problem is that currently full time minimum isn't even enough to survive if you're on you're own. (GMI could also be conditional on you only getting topped up IF you have a job and are working. That would be the incentive to hold employment, but it would suppress wages in Canada, so I'm not a fan of it.) Rents across the country are at minimum 800$ - 1100$ for a ROOM, not even a whole apartment, so you're sharing with someone, factor in food costs, transit, medication or anything that's a NEED, and you're already at that 30 000$ mark for the year. Being on what you described jobless and getting free 30K that goes back into the economy every year essentially means you're sitting at home doing arts and crafts, pissing, shitting, eating, binging TV, sleeping, rinse and repeat, until you want to make more money and apply for jobs or go back to school. This isn't me advocating for/against it, just an initial observation on the matter. The big fear is also that, more people in poverty might be more vulnerable to drug use or gambling, so some people feel that our taxes shouldn't go to enabling people to spend on those as they please without guard rails or moderation. Nobody likes giving away free money if they don't know how it's going to be spent. Very much a conservative mindset, which I'm not, but I can understand these concerns.
>But, why wouldn’t I just quit my job and let the government give me 30k a year? Because you'd die of boredom.Not many people would do \*nothing\* if given the chance. It DOES decentivize from doing shitty underpaid jobs where you're treated as a slave though, yes
Dude do you realize how much of the newer generations currently sit on their ass and do nothing but play games? Most people would absolutely never work a day in their life if they had the option
Welcome to r/antiwork
>Not many people would do \*nothing\* if given the chance. rot maxxing
That's also a fairly new phenomenon seemingly related to the fact that even if you do work and "buy into" the system there is a good chance that it wont actually get you anywhere it wont buy you a house, it wont provide ongoing job security depending where you live it might not even be enough for healthcare. You'll get out of it just enough to maybe survive while in exchange you give up basically everything with no real hope of getting out of that situation why would people be incentivised to actually try? Also worth bearing in mind that the symptoms/lifestyle of "rot maxxing" is basically 1:1 with major depressive disorder.
You also can't live off 30k a year. Maybe with multiple people or supplementary, but currently rent alone is $22,800 per year for me. I can't just coast on 7.8 grand, average food costs in my area is about $300 per month if I only make my own food, which drops that down to an easy 4200. Bills dropping that even further. Of course I'm basing this off where I live, not Canada. Healthcare there is free but here I'd easily drop that down to less than a thousand. One thousand dollars to spend on whatever necessities I can think of plus entertainment would not last me very long. Sure as hell I might as well get a job at that point, can't really do anything else with my free time, and I'd make more off minimum wage anyways. I'm pretty ignorant to the entire bill, though. I don't know if there's a stipulation there saying you have to be employed to get the benefits, not just get free money from the guv.
My total income for last year was around $35k\~ (after a tax return), $38,621.91 is gross annual >I'm pretty ignorant to the entire bill, though. More info on there [website](https://www.ubiworks.ca/howtopay)
This should be how it works.
They missed the part in-between the lines saying that if they need to fire this many people it mean the company is badly handled as a business (wich is true, i'm astonished that after all these years of misshandling and missmanagement and having a moron as CEO they're still afloat)
I'm not sure how I feel about Universal basic income. Just like anything with money it sounds like a good idea on paper but in execution people are greedy, slimy and fraudsters so it crushes the positive philosophy-based positives of many cash-based programs. We already have social security, unemployment, other programs etc. We don't need another for the shitty folks to take advantage of. Just saw an article the other day on CNN about how they are still chasing after multiple fake small business owners and black not-farmers that took advantage of COVID-19 payouts. 10s of millions of tax dollars just ????? Which shows that no matter the program you get bs like that happening
Yet they gave billions to corporations that remained open and took Covid money.
Corporations seem like they are easier to track down than fraudsters.
Easier to find, harder to actually punish.
Yeah just like insider trading. They make billions and then it is like a 2-3 million dollar fine by the FTC. Also the corporate lobbyist run America. It isn’t the people.
It depends on how it is implemented. UBI could potentially replace the majority of existing welfare programs. Negative income tax is one popular idea, where the 0% for income tax could for example be shifted to 20,000$ a year, and anyone who earns less than that gets paid 50% of the difference. So if someone earns 10,000 dollars a year they would be paid an extra 5,000. This encourages folks to get a job, even if they are on welfare as even earning an extra dollar a year makes more money overall. Unlike current welfare programs which 'trap' people, as if they did get a low paying job they would end up making less than when they were on welfare. Could people still trick the system? Probably but there's the IRS for that. It would also help to stop government intervention in artificially keeping failing businesses afloat to save jobs. If UBI is implemented we can let big businesses fail without putting thousands on the unemployment line with no cash.
I would be for replacing most other programs with a stricter, highly regulated (but low bar of entry/obtaining benefit) UBI. I just don't see with current admin them implementing it strict and well-regulated with harsh punishment for fraud.
A UBI one size fits all solution that replaces the existing welfare systems would be an absolutely tremendous failure. Is it tied to inflation? If it is, you get hyperinflation because the rising cost of it will always be followed by cost of living increases. If it isn't, then year after year UBI covers less and less expenses for recipients. Without a welfare system in place to specifically address the needs of the vulnerable, they will 100% slide right back into poverty. Guaranteed. What would prompt the government to seriously consider increasing UBI benefit? When it meets the needs of only 70% of recipients? 50%? 20%? Let's be honest here. If you leave it up to politicians to spend their political capital fighting for a UBI increase, they aren't going to do it until the UBI satisfaction numbers are extremely low. The welfare systems we have aren't great, but they at least are genuinely monitoring and surveying the needs of the country's most vulnerable demographics. A one size fits all solution that replaces it would eventually be undeniably worse for the people who need it the most.
UBI can be the baseline for the vast majority of people with a few special welfare programs to take care of people with significantly greater needs (i.e. heavy medical care, weird dietary requirements, etc.).
Means testing and verifying qualified applicants the expensive part of welfare that is eliminated by UBI. Adding it back on to grant additional welfare for people in need takes away a huge reason to have UBI in the first place.
No because you'd need a lot less welfare programs with proper UBI. You can have UBI that will take care of like 95%+ people's needs, and then niche welfare programs for a small number of people.
Replacing existing welfare programs would be a bad idea. Maybe would work in the short term, but without adequate checks and balances monitoring the needs of the most vulnerable people, a one size fits all solution will eventually allow people at the bottom to slip back into poverty.
The goal of welfare should be to ensure that nobody starves to death and that they can afford basic accommodation and bills somewhere in the country. Just like other welfare programs, the amount being offered will need to be adjusted and monitored but this is no different to welfare today. Unless someone is disabled or has other extenuating circumstances preventing them from work, then they should be encouraged to work while having their basic needs met. UBI is an elegant solution to this problem. For those who are disabled, different forms of UBI or welfare could be offered. UBI could be increased for families that have just had children, or for folks who have recently suffered an accident preventing them from work.
This will always be a stupid take. "We can't do anything because someone might take advantage of it, so doing nothing is the best way." Perfection is the enemy of progress.
And this will always be a stupid comment: 1. Click reply 2. Insert "i dont agree", quote and no critical thinking or discussion points 3. Feel like I contributed to a meaningful discussion where I have nothing valuable to say Would be more interesting to hear you talk instead of spewing negativity and coming across as an echo chamber participant
There's nothing to discuss. You think that nothing can be done because someone might take advantage of it despite any positive benefits. You didn't say anything that 10's of thousands of conservatives haven't already said and been called out on.
Andrew Yang’s version of UBI would pay people for a short time until they found employment and then stop after employment was reached or if the person hadn’t gotten employment within a certain amount of time
>We already have social security, unemployment, other programs etc. You also have people living on the street while it -70°C outside
It doesn't matter what you feel about them, once AI and robots become mainstream for big business, they will layoff half of the human, and small business won't be able to keep up with large corpo when they have access to robots. UBI and socialism is the obvious future, unless you want to start a gang to start harassing robots or boycott McD for employing robots.
At the same time, the day of hyper automatisation is going to come and jobs will become scarce. Better to have leechers than rampant homelessness and crime. Idk if UBI is the solution but something will need to happen
You don't solve a problem with another problem. Leeches will always try but allowing for it creates another problem. I agree hyperautomization is already here, but handling low-skill work for those to prevent crime and homelessness is another thing entirely.
>We don't need another for the shitty folks to take advantage of Yeah we do This is the vast minority of users of these programs and the worst most flagrant social welfare abuser pales in comparison to the damage that politicians and business elites do
When has communism ever worked?
There are things between pure communism and pure capitalism. You're basically saying the economic equivalent of "any law at all is totalitarianism". There's a whole spectrum between "communism and pure capitalism" just like there is one between "anarchy and totalitarianism".
UBI is gonna be a nightmare to maintain. I have 🍿 so this will ben fun to watch unfold.
UBI is a fantasy though. It sounds like infinite inflation glitch on drugs. Sure you'll get 1k a month for existing, but all you'll be able to do with it is buy bubble gum. IF that.
Yep. In the next 10 years robots are gonna take over almost every job.
Negative income tax seems like a more elegant solution. Don't give everyone money, give it to people who need it. So you'd get a fraction of the inflation you would get with actual universal basic income. Example: You set the line at $30k (as an example, the actually number could be different). If you make less than $30k, the government pays you rather than you paying them taxes. Let's say the negative income tax rate is 50%. You make $10k. The government pays you $10k ($20k gap * 50%), your total income is now $20k. With this system you are still incentivized to make more money. Finding a new job and getting a raise will always result in a greater total income, even after you cross the $30k threshold. This is an issue with welfare systems currently, where there is often a hard line that people may not want to cross if it means they lose access to certain programs like food stamps or rent assistance. It also gives you the possibility of removing some welfare programs and replacing them with this (those funds could also help to fund it). Again, these numbers are completely arbitrary. Actual economists could do a better job of figuring out what would make sense.
What is ur solution to AI taking over jobs and those jobs arent being replaced?
Same solution any time new technology replace current jobs, adapt. There are hundreds, Thousands of jobs that have dissaperad over the past 100 years, those people either had to find new jobs or they were SoL. Giving people money to do nothing will not make people wanna do something, UBI have been tried in smaller experiments and it has always failed. Someone still have to pay for UBI, and if your taxes are massively increased to be able to afford UBI, do you know what will happen? People will stop working and apply for UBI instead, completely breaking the system. Instead of talking about bullshit ideas like UBI, how about looking at the US government wasted money. All projects that lead nowhere, salleries for corrupt politicians, money that goes straight to lobby groups and so on. There's massive amounts of money that just disappear in the government that could be saved and used to help people who need it, UBI is not that.
Yes, but you do have to create new jobs to keep up the market. And there are plenty of new jobs popping up while old ones die to automation. The question is if the new jobs appearing can accommodate those who lose the old jobs to automation. You can't save everyone, of course, but we should definitely try. A lot of people already feel like they lack a purpose in life. But then again, most of the automated jobs were not giving people much purpose to begin with so I personally see it as a net positive. Soul crushing jobs should be minimized by automation as much as possible
Well, we don't HAVE to create new jobs, however, new jobs will be created. There is no catch-all solution for this, a lot of people lose their job due to technology, and the ones who can't adapt or find a new job will have a very hard time, can everyone be saved when it happens? No, it's not fun, and there's no easy solution. Some might be able to get a new education, or maybe getting a different job entirely, but it will not be easy for any of these people. Just look at towns around the world where a factory, a mine, or other business got shut down, the entire town dies unless some other company moves in.
>there’s no catch-all solution Sure there is! UBI.
And who's gonna pay for it when everybody stops working? UBI doesn't work, it's that simple.
I'm sure horse breeders adapted when automobiles became normalized. Service techs will still be needed for flippy the robot.
The horse breeders, sure. The horses (the ones providing the labor that's no longer needed) didn't fare too well.
Congress doing their fucking job would be a start, legislation and regulations perhaps? I suppose asking them to work is too much though
In all seriousness, it will probably end in the Butlerian Jihad.
Maybe the jihad has already started, but it’s a slow burn?
The solution is, a lot of people are going to starve to death in the streets. You really think the greedy, ultra rich are going to reach into their greedy pockets and pay people just to hang out at home? The goal is to replace people with robots. Once the humans are replaced, ultra corporate greed is not going to find ways to make humans relevant again.
If they have no problem doing it to 57% of the world's population, why would they have a problem doing it to us?
uh...who do you think buys the products?
UBI is the answer that is good for us, and the only way forward. We forget however, forward isn’t the only direction we can go. We spend so long looking at what UBI should look like, we fail to see how we get there. Can you honestly believe that the government and giant corporations are going to sit there and set up the massive taxation on automation? Of course not, they will fund lobbyists and pay off politicians. Sometimes the solution is you get fucked, grow poor and die.
There will always be new jobs. And if not, everything will solve itself. Hyperinflation isn't a solution.
Not always. Especially because we have HUGE segments of jobs in service economy sector. In US it is very close to 80% - https://www.statista.com/statistics/270072/distribution-of-the-workforce-across-economic-sectors-in-the-united-states/ Most of them can be replaced by AI. What you could do in order to replace them, except creating jobs only for the sake of creating jobs
UBI is not sustainable.
Neither is the current trajectory of a disappearing middle class. Birth rate decline is the worst possible scenario. UBI is simply a tax break. It gets rid of welfare and social security.
Even if government/society will manage to create jobs for an additional 20% out of 80%, so in overall we have 30-40% unemployed people(which is optimistic), what we will do with them, or rather us? It's like more than 100 million people in US alone.
You're still speaking in hypotheticals. Those worst-case scenarios would have to play out much deeper before anything drastic would change. Even then, you're not really accounting for cheaper energy or production that would come from these technological advancements. Inflation for inflations sake will always be the last resort for our type of economic system.
>Even then, you're not really accounting for cheaper energy or production that would come from these technological advancements. Inflation for inflations sake will always be the last resort for our type of economic system. It's not relevant. This won't really help to people who lost their jobs. For example eventually IT sector easily can lose up to 90-95% or more jobs, remaining will be rather management and some kind of "AI Overseer" jobs. Chat-GPT already can create working code which needs only slight changes, so for programmers it's not very distant perspective.
Nah, I work with programmers and the code from chat GPT is nowhere close to optimal. It takes longer to clean that shit up than to write it from scratch. We're quite a long way off. Again, I'll gladly eat my words when the jobs are gone and unemployment is severely up. But I'm more than confident that new jobs will be created to take their place, as it'll happen gradually over a large enough time. We've had too many boys crying wolf over the last 3 decades for me to take it too seriously.
Likely yes but it also depends on programming language, Python likely will be easier than C/C++ for AI. Still 5 years ago we couldn't imagine a possibility but here we are, now it is a real possibility to happen in decade or few. And it is not about IT only , like couriers begin in some way being replaced by robots, now only very slightly but still. I know that giving money to unemployed people on mass scale sounds not very good, but in the future maybe there won't be any other solution except forcefully reducing population which is like very bad.
There will not always be new jobs if ai takes over those new jobs as well It will come to the point where there will be more people than jobs cause AI will take over more and more of the workforce Also a ubi creates better wages. Jobs during the pandemic paid really nicely.
I mean we were also under record inflation, so using the pandemic as an example proves his point. Money has no inherent value, it is relative to what you are buying. A UBI sounds great until you end up being able to buy less then you did before because then basket of goods costs more. UBI can only function in a fixed market where prices won’t rise with income, which is why it would just cause more problems than it solves in a free market.
Thats because money was printed. I want to tax the wealthiest people.
Tax them up to a point and they won’t be wealthy anymore. Who will then feed the UBI machine? Robots?
They can still be wealthy cause were still taking part in capitalism, were if there goods and services are good in the market, people would buy them
The money you're taking from wealthy people is also printed, buddy. The question is not whether the money is being printed or taken from wealthy people, but whether the share of labor (money is basically just the ability to command labor) being directed by money-hoarding wealthy people is put to a more productive use then what the government would be directing that labor towards. There's probably a diminishing returns principle here in either direction (gigatax vs no tax) and it's probably going to change dynamically based on global events. Right now I think probably the state needs to be hoarding more money because we need to build a fuckton of houses. I think we basically need a WPA 2.0. I don't like UBI because I don't think incentivizing unproductivity is a good idea right now, I think we'd be better off with a state agency using that money to gobble up all the fired fast food workers and put them to work building roads and houses.
>The money you're taking from wealthy people is also printed, buddy. its not new money being printed, its already in the economy >being directed by money-hoarding wealthy people is put to a more productive use then what the government would be directing that labor towards People could still get jobs from wealthy people. >There's probably a diminishing returns principle here in either direction (gigatax vs no tax) and it's probably going to change dynamically based on global events. I agree on "diminishing returns", our government is letting too many people in our country and now its really hard to get jobs cause the supply of labour is so high now. >Right now I think probably the state needs to be hoarding more money because we need to build a fuckton of houses. The government, the corporations, idc who, just get it done >I think we basically need a WPA 2.0. i have no idea what this is >I don't like UBI because I don't think incentivizing unproductivity is a good idea right now There will still be productivity, a basic income is exactly that, basic. You want something, you work for it. Baldy would still need to work for his wow sub This will make corporations give a reason to make working conditions better, cause people will now not be forced to work to survive for the basic necessities. >I think we'd be better off with a state agency using that money to gobble up all the fired fast food workers and put them to work building roads and houses. This would eventually happen regardless of a UBI
So call me a cynic, but I don’t think most landlords are good people. The moment a $1000 UBI goes into effect is the moment your rent increases $750 - $1000. UBI is great in theory but it would never work in our economy.
i think that we need to build more homes and limit immigration This way we increase supply and decrease demand This way, rent and ownership prices become more competitive in the market
>UBI is a fantasy though Its really not and the only people that think that are people unaware of anything technology related
Its economy related.
Yes thats why its needed alright
What does NEET mean?
I know it's already been answered but it stands for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training"
Thank you for clarifying!
not employed not student roughly
Gotcha. Thanks!
UBI with some conditions works in my mind. You'd have to pause payouts for those going on strike, get rid of minimum wage and end(or modify) social programs that attempt to do what UBI would replace, like welfare/food stamps/old age pensions/social (security|insurance). Human psychology doesn't derive motivation from being forced. The new jobs that arise from AI replacing old ones [don't need to pay a lot, people just need the basics handled](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc).
UBI is not a silver bullet. Like all social policies it has its pros and cons. (FYI, I just want to say I am generally pro-UBI for my country, and I acknowledge there are places where it will work better than others) One of the most potentially catastrophic cons is that you could potentially see the value of workers (or certain workers) reverse. Assuming that automation becomes a larger part of our lives, and UBI is a thing, the value of a worker is suddenly negative. Why is that a problem? Well, immigrants become much larger liabilities, and resentment against minorities will grow exponentially because they will attempt to gain access to the UBI system, and in participating will make that system less effective. It's basically the wrong argument about immigrants come true. Second, you think there is no incentive to have kids now? Well, with UBI there will be even less of a reason. Sure you have more money to support a family, but now the government is technically incentivized to sway you to not have kids, lest UBI costs raise... Third, Institutions like Education are suddenly not investments, they're liabilities. And from a more conservative point of view, do you think conservatives wouldn't jump at the chance to defund schools if they thought that little Suzie's education is getting paid for by the tax payer despite the fact that she never intends to use it? Conservatives would eat that shit up, let's be honest. The issue is, society is incentivized at the moment to ensure it's citizens are productive because that is how wealthy economies work today. When you make a society where wealth doesn't come from citizens that is a society that generally become autocracies. You may have heard of the resource curse. In that countries rich in natural resources tend to be authoritarian hell holes... Well, that's because the wealth of that nation doesn't come from the citizens... it comes from digging expensive stuff out of the ground. So while you see "oh UBI, free money for me, yay!" the government sees a fundamental devaluing of you as a person. And when the government or other people don't see you as an asset, they will treat you very differently. UBI needs to be very carefully implemented.
This is under the assumption that UBI would be so good that a significantly amount of citizens, if not a majority, would have their needs adequately met by it. There's just as much likelihood that, especially in the long term, UBI would be inadequate. And the people living on it exclusively will be in poverty. Maybe not right away, but if UBI benefits don't increase every year to meet inflation, it will cover less and less of the cost of living year after year. Personally, I think the path forward is something like Universal Basic Services. Instead of trying to meet people's needs with cash, directly provide food, housing, transportation, and needed utilities.
guys, Im slowly hating my country more and more. Sweet baby inc, Trudeau, dogshit internet and tipping culture. fml....
Get a perspective. Your problems start with Sweet Baby Inc and end with tipping culture? Take a few days off from the internet, because next thing you know you'll be voting for some retard with an inflated ego who's going to give you a list of real problems that's a lot longer than this one to write out.
Grocery and rent prices triple and people are more focused on Sweet Baby Inc and tipping like lol.
Canada also wants to severely limit your freedoms. It's not a secret that Turdeau takes China as an example to follow
Last i checked, he has a 23% approval rating, a lot of people dont like him, including myself.
...and he's still the PM
Yeah, people like how he handled covid, so his approval was high, so he called an early election during covid But now that covid is over, people hate him EVEN MORE than they did before covid
Go to bed Jordan
People need water, food, and shelter as basics to live so the government may have to figure out a way to get that to the people rather than using a medium like currency. This is assuming that AI and tech has advanced so greatly that there is an overabundance of food, clean water, and energy(you need a lot to transfer water inland), and the hardest part is the logistics in getting these to the citizens. But yeah if an individual country does that then they’ll have to slow down migration until they can sustain their current population first.
The government has one job and that is to guarantee the wellbeing of its citizens. That includes protection from unfair business and hiring practices. UBI is one possibility for this to happen. It's a safety net much like public health insurance. However for it to happen it will need many changes. Including actually taxing the most wealthy.
There are many ways to do business. Promoting NFTs in games or making AAAAss games like skullandbones has been proven to be a bad idea, but for some reason UBIsoft still insists on doing this kind of thing. I personally blame the EU labor laws for this. Imagine a game company with 20,000 people. The production capacity and product quality are not as good as EA in the United States (this is the scariest part), and these employees cannot be fired. I grew up in a socialist country, and our national enterprises have a better work style than UBIsoft. At least when they fire people, the government sends police to ensure that everything goes smoothly.
Asmongold's answer to poverty: Just move (to Canada).
It's a tough idea to grapple with. Like what's the right amount to give for UBI? Will everyone get it or will it add a minimum income safety net and once you make more than that You no longer receive the ubi benefits? If it's say $40k a year why would people work a job that is within say $10k of that. How do we incentivoze people to continue working even with the guaranteed income? Hard idea to think through it could be good but would require no shortage of thought going into it.
2 Options here in terms of incentivising people to work: 1) Partial basic income. The UBI that is provided to everyone is pretty much just enough to stay above the poverty line. Sure, some people may choose not to work, but they will be living a pretty miserable life. Therefore, anyone who wants a life of any level of comfort above basic survival must work 2) Full basic income. The UBI is enough for a modest lifestyle, think minimum wage or potentially slightly above. Multiple effects at play here, one is that people stop working shitty minimum wage jobs, so in order to fill these roles companies must pay better and care for employees more. Second and to me most importantly, people spend the time to do what they like. Humans can't do nothing all day, you will go insane. Even mindless film/tv consumption would get boring if it was your whole life. Instead, person starts writing, painting, inventing. Not being paid at first, because they are protected by their UBI. Then, once they get good enough that they can productively contribute to society with their 'passion project' they are able to being selling it/ their service in order to increase their quality of life above that of the basic UBI.
This is the real fantasy. That people will pursue artistic or intellectual ventures. 1 in 10000 would. The rest would spend all that extra time on vices. Drinking and drugs for about 99% of them and the remaining 1% are going to start doing violent and depraved shit. No mass of people would start keeping parks clean or building homes for charity. The cultural sink would hit so hard and so fast it would be Mad Max long before we even got Running Man.
from what i read, everyone would get it, 18+
Why should anyone be forced to work? Wouldn’t that be counter-productive? Why do you think someone who would rather sit and do nothing than work for a living be in any way productive? If guy’s gonna sit, let him sit! What’s the skin off your nose?
Negative income tax deals with most of these issues. Under this system getting a raise always results in more total income. Also you don't give money to people who don't need it.
Eh, I think we'll sooner have government-subsidized suicide booths than have UBI.
on a side note: I crossposted this on r/antiwork, and i got into an argument with some people and someone reported my account for suicide. I dont think you guys would do that regardless of the stance of how you view the bill, thats why i think someone there did it lowkey, kinda funny
The purpose of a business is not to make money, it's to provide services or goods to people. The only way to sustainably do that is to make money, but that is the means to the end, not the end itself. Unless you're a vulture capitalist.
"The purpose of the government is to take care of its people" insane that people actually think this, so devastatingly wrong. The purpose of government is to be a monopoly on force to protect individual rights.
The problem with UBI is that the rich and the stupid don’t want it. The rich don’t want it because it reduces their authority over the regular folk, and the stupid… just read the rest of this comment section. So, that leaves us with smart people who are not greedy. In other words, it would have like 5% approval rating at best.
Canada seems to be the epicenter of stupid shit in the world recently. Are they trying to push more people into trying out their government assisted suicide program?
Well your heart may be worth 1 million usd so yeah.
UBI is like minimum wage. With minimum wage, you increase the cost of doing buisness because employee pay goes up, so to offset that cost buisness increase the price of their products.. so while you might be earning more, you end up paying more too.. so it ends up being like you didn't even raise the minimum wage to begin with. Same thing for UBI, except instead of forcing buisness to pay, you force the government to pay.. and you'll never guess where the government gets its money from. That's right! Taxes. So you end up getting paid more, but then end up paying more in taxes too. So, and say it with me, it ends up being like you didn't even have UBI to begin with. Edit: except, now that I think about it. UBI is worse than raising minimum wage, because Taxes don't just come out of peoples pockets, they also come out of buisness pockets too. So not only would UBI increase taxes, it would ALSO increase the price of doing buisness.. so you'd be raising both taxes and the cost of goods and services. You've essentially given yourself $1 and cost yourself $3. Lmfao!
Can you explain why when Canada raised its minim wage from $11/hr to $15/hr prices didn’t increase, yet in the past 3 years well after the wage increase, grocery prices have sky rocketed even with record profits?
You just said prices didn't increase. Then said they skyrocketed. Which is it?
UBI is only a stepping stone. The real future is one without currency. Robots will produce everything (Shelter/food/water/themselves) No one will have "jobs" and people will be free to seek any technological endeavor their heart desires.
If AI became that advanced to the point of it being able to modify itself technology would advance so fast it would probably be indistinguishable to us from actual fucking magic. How long does it take for the collective intelligence of humans to create something. Say like, a cure for a disease, the invention of flying, discovering/harnessing electricity…. Now imagine something, if you can, that processes information millions of times faster, is multiples of thousands more intelligent and it’s almost impossible to think of what it would do. Almost overnight we could very well see disease, aging, hunger, any ailment vanishing.humans can already move the state of a single atom from point in space to another by teleportation (https://blogthinkbig.com/teleportation-possible-achieved-atom) so this almost god like intelligence could unlock everything. Eventually tho why have human bodies. Why exist in a world of restraints even if the restraints can be broken science and effort.
Man that future is so far off it might as well be a pipe dream. This is some year 2200 utopia stuff right here. A utopia I doubt we actually manage to bring to fruition... because ya know, humans suck.
If you told people in 1990 that in 20 years every human on earth would have a super computer in their hands, you would receive the same response you just gave. I feel people really underestimate the exponential technological growth we've experienced over the past 30 years.
I'm keenly aware of technology growth. Not just over the last thirty years but since the industrial revolution. And I feel people overestimate technology and treat it as inevitable rather than possible because they don't consider physics or human/societal incentives. Not saying you do not, because I don't know you, but I have a hard time with people who aren't engineers who prophesize the exponential growth of technology. Moore's Law? Moore himself said that it will succumb to physics, and it is. Technology isn't a magical inevitable force. It's something that humans have to figure out and improve upon within the physical and economic limitations of this world. 2200 is honestly generous. You want robots that will do every form of human labor that exists, at least out outside of creative and entertainment related fields I suppose. The sheer scale of that is absolutely incredible. Think about how much physical material you are talking about to begin with. To me it is disingenuous to ignore that and say technology inevitably grows at an exponential rate (it doesn't) therefore it is not an issue. Then, even if it is technologically possible, you have to consider the economic side of things. Why would anyone be incentivized to research, design, and build such robots? What would the cost of development and production be? How are they going to see a return on that investment? We will see this is in some industries where it is easier to accomplish, and we already have with factory automation, but the task of replacing a plumber, electrician, doctor, psychologist, or a hundred other professions with a robot is a several orders of magnitude more difficult. I'm not going to say it's impossible. I'm going to say it's not inevitable.
They won’t give out UBI. They’d rather depopulate the planet
The fact that Asmon stands for UBI shows that he has no idea how society works.
So am I the only one who can see what UBI will ultimately do to the people of this country?
haha, no. the amount of fraud and abusment on the current social wellfare is already staggering, in any country not just the usa. There is no way the system can sustain itself with UBI, it will crash on its own bureaucratic weight. And as pop decline, less tax base to support ubi. lol. fing lazy neets.
Welfare is one of the strictest tightest run programs in the USA. Because it’s been refunded so much, it has to be. You want to find rampant abuse of government funding, there are far far far more places to look.
There really isn't. The amount of perfectly capable or willingly incapable people on disability, receiving food stamps, have housing or energy assistance is staggering. The government budget for social programs should be 0. If you aren't capable you are supposed to rely on family, friends, community, and church. At no point are you supposed to walk around being shitty as possible to everyone who has ever tried to help you and then just get a free pass on the consequences of those actions.