Basic Income

Discussion in 'Economics' started by dealmaker, Feb 8, 2019.

  1. dealmaker

    dealmaker

    Basic Income

    The results are out for the first half of Finland's much-watched basic income experiment. It seems the unconditional cash (given to unemployed people in lieu of basic unemployment benefits) didn't result in any meaningful rise in employment. It did, however, make the recipients feel healthier, less stressed, and more positive about their employment prospects. Fortune
     
    fordewind, ET180, Onra and 1 other person like this.
  2. Snuskpelle

    Snuskpelle

    There's maybe a case for saving by cutting bureaucracy here to somewhat offset costs for basic income. At least Sweden employs a large number of people to evaluate who qualifies for various social security benefits. And at least people didn't work less. Certainly agree there's no clear outcome here though without further analysis/experiments.
     
  3. Most western countries already have a convoluded basic income through low income benefits like welfare, child tax, etc
     
  4. JSOP

    JSOP

    Universal Basic Income is the way to go. Eventually everybody will be on UBI once production is completely taken over by robotics. There is only going to be very few people employed, what's the rest of the population going to do without UBI? Since it's the way of the future, we might as well implement it now. Would save us tons of cost in administration and results in better social and individual well-being. I don't see any downside of it. The only people who are against it are the bureaucrats who are the welfare administrators. They are the ones who are going to lose their jobs but then again they will be the first eligible recipients of UBI if it's implemented so I don't really see anything that they need to complain about.
     
  5. JSOP

    JSOP

    Yes but they are still conditional and not really universal. Your income has to be below certain level, you have to have children and etc. UBI won't work unless it's truly unconditional and implemented to everybody everywhere no matter what happens, hence universal!!! Implemented like across the whole universe!
     
  6. UBI is better then the communist non-sense Job guarantee left winged nut jobs want, but ironically UBI will increase inequality, someone making 1 million a year doesn't mind rampant inflation as much as someone making 45k a year, 8 $ for 2 litres of milk is only gonna affect the lower income population... UBI isn't gonna go towards production where output can offset inflation, it will be mostly for consuming, nobody is gonna start a business from helicopter money. After a few years, UBI will become a nightmare due to sharp increase in cost of life
     
  7. If you think universal income will be anything buy starvation and mass death you are ignoring history completely.. robots will not take over everything.. same bull crap they have been saying for generations....
     
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  9. JSOP

    JSOP

    Communist's job-guarantee is NOT the same as UBI because there is inequity + decimation of productivity + reduction of individual and social well-being due to lack of individual choices where is under UBI everybody is equal and paid the same amount, for example as long as you are between 18-64, you are paid $X every month. And productivity is not going to be impacted because the more productive you are, the more you would be making in addition to the UBI and in the case of complete automation by robotics, the productivity is not going to be impacted at all as the robots would still keep on working regardless how much $$ humans are getting paid. And third, just as the trial in Finland has shown, social and individual psychological well-being are higher with UBI because people are still free to choose to do whatever they want and yet with the security of knowing that they will always be covered instead of worrying about where the next paycheque is going to come from.

    And with the productivity issue, the problem is the sample size is not large enough. The UBI experiment was only carried out on a sample of randomly selected 2000 people who are unemployed. Out of that 2000 people, fine there was very little spending of the funds to investment type of activity but that may not be representative of the entire population. Maybe if you implement the UBI on the entire population of the country, you would actually see an increase in productivity you never know. It is not entirely to assess the effects of UBI just based on an experiment carried out on 2000 people. That's why I stated in my previous post that UBI would not work unless it's implemented true to its nature, UNIVERSAL. That means it is given to everybody regardless of what with no strings attached. It's not supposed to be given to just a selected small population satisfying certain criteria; that is no different from the current welfare structure that still requires administration. That is NOT how UBI works. This experiment is really setting UBI up to fail.

    But then again now the world is in a catch-22 situation. One cannot afford to implement UBI on a complete scale without knowing how it would work in a small test environment but in a small test environment, one would never know the true effects of UBI due to the sampling error and no country has the guts to take the plunge to implement UBI over an entire population.
     
  10. UBI is just dumb, you would be furthering inequality with inflation, and bringing even more people closer to government dependency. Job Guarantee is communism, straight retards would push for that... Job Guarantee will only destroy small business, create monopolies who will employ automation in the private sector for survival in thinner profits environment, reducing jobs from the private sector, therefor having to increase SOE who lose money, creating a even bigger socialist environment, and bigger wealth difference... Under Capitalism, there's winners and losers, under socialism everyone loses except government. It's economically retarded and I don't understand this government dependent push that's been happening in the US lately, some people in American politics are trying REALLY hard to destroy there economy and dollar
     
    #10     Feb 8, 2019
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