The concept of "universal basic income" is gaining currency right now in Silicon Valley, where thinkers from Tesla's Elon Musk to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are considering the idea of blunting the impact of automation by driving each person—working or not—with a minimum income for life. AsFortunereports this month, venture investor Sam Altman and his startup incubator firm, Y Combinator, are currently testing the idea with a pilot project involving up to 100 families in Oakland, Calif. But the idea is hardly new: In fact, it has resurfaced repeatedly over the centuries at times of economic transformation, winning allies across the ideological spectrum. Here are some of the thinkers and policymakers who have backed it over the years. http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/universal-basic-income-history/
What are the repercussions of something like this in practice? Do prices shoot up because people now have higher disposable income assuming nothing else changes? Sure once automation is huge a lot of jobs will be eliminated, just curious what the impact would be if say this started today and everybody's income now jumps up $15k and how would taxes have to be changed to pay for this?
It is only accepted by conservatives if it is a blanket no questions asked payment in lieu of all other payments and not just another benefit which can never be budgeted. It is not accepted by liberals because they fear people won't spend it right.
Single payer healthcare and income for life. It's all good until opm runs out, we all know that. Lefty ideas make sense when the future holds the possibilities of decades of deficit spending and borrowing, problem is, these people are stuck in the 1930's, those decades are behind us, not ahead...
Lefty ideas make sense as long as they can rely on righties to grow the economy. Notice how they never have any ideas for that. They start all their ideas after the righties created an economy. They just can't accept the simple truth all mankind must buy low and sell high. There is no other way. So they wait until we make it and then come up with new old ideas how to split it all up now that someone else made what they think is too much. I do however like UBI if it could ever be administered by angels. I have to laugh though when 15k/yr is considered a victory and next election UBI needs to be raised to a living salary/pension because nobody can live a middle class lifestyle on 15k. That's what I mean by angels. The party of need never has enough and never will.
June 30, 2017 Good morning, One of the ironies of today’s economy is that while unemployment is near historic lows, anxiety about technology eliminating jobs seems to be near record highs. That’s because for years we were told the future belongs to “knowledge workers”—and now AI is threatening to displace knowledge work, too. “There’s a huge need to increase productivity around the world, the U.S. included, simply because of aging. Half of our economic growth has come from more people working: women in the workforce, growing population. That source is about to disappear. So we badly need to increase the economic output. One way to do that is to have the robots, the AI, do the work. It has the potential to increase our productivity.” —Michael Chui, partner, McKinsey Global Institute “Most of us don’t have the reflective time that allows us to be innovative and creative. So we’ve actually destroyed our capacity to go beyond computers. But computers are always going to be more efficient than us. For us to be better than technology, we have to find our inner human.”—Lynda Gratton, professor, London Business School News below. Spend some quality time with your inner human this weekend. I’ll be back Wednesday morning, after the July 4th holiday. Alan Murray @alansmurray alan.murray@timeinc.com
The politicians that forward all these ideas have a motto: "let's all share the wealth and gimmee some"
You do know that most lottery winners take only a few years to bankrupt themselves? I've seen the level playing field and how most people are useless with money. Those of us here probably have more smarts than the average prole. We are here to optimise our capital, not dream about fee money. I'd be happy for everyone to get the same wage, so long as there is NO safety net.
Universal Basic Income? How about universal basic tax Everyone pays the same To make it "fair" and just.
Except the tax would have to be more than the UBI. Let's see, a dollar a day times 350 million, where would that get us? How far can we go on $350,000,000 per day?