The psychology of being supported by the society you work for is completely missed as a reason for why this is the case. It’s this simple, people are more willing to work in a society they feel like cares for them. Why the fuck should I work if I feel like a higher quality of life is being arbitrarily gatekept by the previous generation? Fuck Republicans, they want to sell America to Putin. Being an American should be valuable.
Love all the “liberal” comments. It didn’t work cause of this, it didn’t work cause of that…" blah, blah…the fact is, government dependency never results in successful outcomes. Giving people money (like welfare) and telling them “good luck!” only makes them more dependent and less enthusiastic to work. There’s generations of people in California who have depended on welfare and food stamps for their entire lives…because it’s so easy to get, and if you can keep getting it, why work?
Would you stop working if the government gave you $500 a month? I sure as hell wouldn’t. At no point in my life have I ever had so much money that I thought “yeah this is enough” and stopped trying to earn more.
So many people get held down by the system that they feel they can never do any better and settle with a shitty, meager living. Those people on welfare are not living ‘easy’ lives, far from it. If these people had a $500 payment every month it would lessen their financial burden and overall stress level where some of these people might have more mental capacity to think about doing something else with their life. When you live in constant fear of your finances and potentially losing the place you live, your mind tends to shift in another direction of “how can I survive” becuade of how absolutely exhausting that kind of life is. If I were in this situation, knowing I had an extra guaranteed $500 that I can rely on every month might actually ease some of my stress and chill me out enough where I feel like I can devote more time and energy to digging myself out of the hole rather than feeling nothing but despair and falling deeper in.
Often huge barriers to employment are owning a phone with a consistent number, and appearance/hygiene. For someone with nothing these two things can massively help.
I mean, this is probably because having extra money to take care of yourself makes it easier to have the confidence to find work. But 500 a month is like giving someone a dollar in 2024 and saying “pay your rent, bills, utilities, also buy food, and gas for your car, and also pay your car insurance” and thinking you did something
A Seattle-area guaranteed basic income pilot gave low-income residents $500 a month
102 participants
Employment in the group nearly doubled
So in a city with over 75,000 unemployed people, you saw at most 51 people get new jobs (didn’t see how many were unemployed) and not a lot of data about a control group and how they randomly fared over the same interval. Also, to the extent the 102 participants enjoyed advantaged situation, did that come at the opportunity cost for some others outside the group?
To really try UBI, you need it pervasive and long term, like the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, but that’s a relatively low amount.
The right only pretend to care about economics, whilst refusing to listen to its actual statements and outcomes. This is why Modern Monetary Theory is generally ignored.
Conservatism is about conserving the current social order. Individuals can move between classes occasionally, but for the most part the rich stay powerful (even when they are broke) and everyone else stays weak (even if they gain enough money to become comfortable).
So if there’s an economic theory that would change that if adopted, it will be ignored until it gains popularity, at which point it will be demonized (like communism, socialism, regulation).
UBI saves capitalism from itself. Do we really want to save this shit system that empowers the worst of us?
Do you honestly believe capitalists will allow a liveable UBI to remain untouched? Look at the minimum wage if you’d like to see the future of UBI. $7.25 an hour fucking shameful.
While I agree with your sentiment, I do feel like it is a step in the right direction and will help a great many people in poverty.
Going straight from one economic system to another is likely to be an extremely violent process. I’m hoping that this would act as a stepping stone towards socialism rather than a life preserver for capitalism.
This program isn’t UBI, and should not be compared to it, or used to argue for/against UBI. Universal Basic Income goes to everyone, not just certain people. That’s what makes it UBI, and not a welfare program, which is what this is.
A Seattle-area guaranteed basic income pilot gave low-income residents $500 a month
102 participants
Employment in the group nearly doubled
Note that per a quick search Seattle has about 750k people, 102 specifically low income persons given money for some finite trial period is very very far from a test of universal basic income.
Bud, extreme change causes extreme strife. Having a system that allows us to transition from an old system that worked, to a new system that works better is the preffered method if you dont want to cause massive amounts of damage to peoples lives. The fact that UBI allows us to change towards a better way of functioning WITHOUT completely breaking the old system is a SELLING point. First we get people away from having to work merely to live, and THEN we can take further steps towards whichever utopic ideal we believe in
First we get people away from having to work merely to live, and THEN we can take further steps towards whichever utopic ideal we believe in
I mean it’s not even really a first, if, then, kind of deal, because they’re both mutually inclusive goals to be working towards, rather than being mutually exclusive.
I mean no not really, I was just kinda advocating for dual power because people always like to make a big fuss about how it’s their way ideologically or the highway, without stopping for five seconds about how a lot of people’s ideal goals are actually mutually inclusive or mutually beneficial.
Thats exactly why I phrased my statement the way I did though, just focussing on how UBI is a good transitioning block away from our current capitalist society, without specifically getting into whatever flavour of utopic society each user might have. I guess if your ideal society has shitloads of unhoused people being crushed by late stage capitalism, UBI would work against that outcome
Basic income pilots nationwide have seen noteworthy success, despite conservative opposition.
I’ve learned that conservatives especially, certainly not exclusively, prefer if it people constantly had to worry about their livelihoods. Thus ensuring a steady supply of cheap labor to be exploited.
And the side benefit for those who sell God as a dog-eat-dog free market Capitalist is more people going to their houses of worship where they get reminded to endure because the afterlife will be great. Total win-win for money and the moneyed class who all the while eat really well.
It’s amazing how they’ve convinced people to vote conservative, to vote against themselves.
Look we designed the entire system so that peoples lives could rapidly spiral out of control if they lost their job and this undermines so much of the hard work of billions in corporate lobbying.
What do you consider low income and what do you think the cut off should be? Most people aren’t exactly in favor of giving rich people money so the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Lol right? Sure IDGAF if Jeff Bezos gets $500 with everyone else as long as he pays his millions upon millions of taxes. $500 is a drop in the bucket of what he should be paying. Also Amazon the company should undoubtedly be paying way more taxes than it does (if it even does).
Of course taxes would rise to cover it, so the average person would be absolutely no better off than they are now.
In return the really poor get some breathing room, and we can kill all the “money grabbing dolescum” discourse around claiming benefits. People with low outgoings who just want a break from the treadmill can take it.
Of course taxes would rise to cover it, so the average person would be absolutely no better off than they are now.
That’s actually incredibly optimistic, imo.
$500 a month is $6000 a year.
If we gave that amount of UBI to all working age Americans (rounded down for easy math, numbers 200 million), that’s a price tag of $1.2 trillion, every year.
That’s slightly more than the amount the US spends on welfare programs annually. The entire federal budget is about $6.2 trillion, so this would mean an increase of almost 20%. Where could we possibly get that much more tax revenue?
You’re getting half that back every year. You forgot that part. So it only cost 600 million a year. In fact that means we could kick it to a thousand a month and still be close to our current welfare budget. Find the number that matches exactly, (something like 928) and we can match our current spending while giving poor Americans ~$11,000 a year.
And the government smaller thing actually works here too. You’d think the conservatives would love this! Unless, it’s actually about hurting people isn’t it? Was smaller government just code for hurting people?
Depends on implementation but just paying it out to everyone is the easiest option. You can even make a progressive tax system that’s nothing but UBI + flat tax, ridiculously easy to administer. If the UBI was, say, 1k and the tax rate 50% (just to have easy numbers) if you earn 100 bucks a month you end up with 1050, if you earn 2000 you end up with 2k, and if you earn 1m you end up with 501000: Under 2k income the effective tax rate is negative, at 2k it’s exactly zero, at just over 2k it’s very low, over that it approaches 50% in the limit. Much cheaper and easier to just give it to everyone than means-test a gazillion low-income people just to spite Gates.
because money for poor people is a waste, when we could funnel it all to the handful of giga-billionaires who need to add all money in circulation to their draconic horde, obviously.
Even dragons don’t hoard that much. 500,000 oz of gold is only around 1.04-1.1 billion dollars, and only the richest of ancient red wyrms roll that high. Most of those 10,000 year old dragons have less, cause that figure is rolling perfectly on the treasure table
I love the idea of UBI, but I worry about capitalists slurping up all the money if this is indeed done with the “U” (Universal) in mind.
I think it needs to be paired with a pretty steep tax on the top end, so yes - maybe Mr. Monopoly suddenly raises rent rates as much as the UBI on his tenants, but he’s being taxed heavily on that, and the money is being funneled back down to the bottom which will raise UBI. It needs to be a losing proposition for Mr. Monopoly.
We just went through an inflation cycle where most every business decided en masse to raise prices to increase profits and no other particular reason. We need to be taxing corporations as well, so that actual eating & breathing “people” can live.
As a right winger, I support this approach. Investing into people for a certain amount of time (so they can start working, thus paying taxes and contributing to the economy) will eventually pay off.
It pays off immediately. The return on investment can literally be seen almost instantly. The problem with UBI in an unregulated market is that “inflation/price gouging/collusion” will begin immediately. It’s just like student loan forgiveness, the benefits are immediate but if you don’t fix the underlying cause, your actual return it’s massively minimized due to the very bullshit that necessitated the fix.
> If your kid is starving because they keep getting beaten up for their lunch money, you can’t solve the problem by giving them more lunch money – the bullies will take that money too.
Credit @pluralistic
@theotherverion@rimu I'll be sure to tell my 90-year-old mom (who's probably got at least 8 years left), to hurry up and get off her ass.
The knot in the right-wing angle is the belief that the church, the family, or other philanthropy will meet the perpetual need. The harsh reality is that there are and always will be people who don't and won't ever have what it takes to provide "enough value," as defined by people with money, to a free market.
@theotherverion My mom wouldn't have a pension. She was effectively a clergyman's wife full time, who has and is still spending spent quite a bit of time caring for my disabled brother, who hasn't ever been properly "gainfully employed" despite desperate efforts that have now come out in the wash as traumatic, not just to my brother.
The model works for babies, too. The question is: who pays (etc.) the care workers?
@theotherverion Right, but despite decades of failed and emotionally traumatic attempts at getting him employed, and my mother never having been employed outside the home, now that they're both past retirement age, who's responsible to absorb the cost of their utilities, rent, food, and medical care? Or do we let them rot out in a grassy field somewhere?
I'm not proposing a solution, I'm indicating that employment is frequently not one.
I have it in my country, too. And many right wing countries have it, too. See, the fact I am a right winger does not mean I am against all social stuff. Just firstly you need to have an economy to pay for it.
Right wingers like you supporting UBI is how I know it will just be used as a bait and switch to slash social welfare programs because “now we have UBI!” but UBI won’t be anywhere enough to actually support people and it will get purposefully jammed by the rich in a position of not providing enough money and not rising with inflation.
Right wing people getting excited about UBI honestly tells you everything you need to know, it is a “solution” to the class war going on that doesn’t require recognizing ANY of the actual politics involved in the class war nor how the rich won’t voluntarily give us anything unless we organize to the point that we scare the shit out of them.
UBI in the current political reality is a facade of a solution that doesn’t require an honest conversation about the problem, which explains exactly why conservatives like it.
Don’t you just love how a post-scarcety society is held up as the ultimate unreachable utopia but when it gets down to it, the vast majority of scarcity is either completely artificial or exacerbated to maximize profits? Profits that in turn only mean that much due to artificial scarcity.
Robber baron capitalism truly is as stupid as it’s cruel.
Basic income pilots nationwide have seen noteworthy success, despite conservative opposition.
Well, conservatives have bad ideas on just about everything so that’s not surprising. If all the conservatives just went away we could have a much nicer world like overnight.
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