Weird how every one of these tests shows most people use the money to better themselves instead of wasting it all like right wing media would say.
Super weird.
It’s projection. “I’d blow it all on coke and hookers, so obviously everyone else will too!”
Right wing media has the same formula for everything and it somehow keeps working with their brainwashed base. Phrase good things for society to sound bad and repeat it over and over. Don’t use facts, use fear and emotions to achieve this. Anytime an issue is caused by a power center the right supports, blame the individual. Find examples of the issue negatively affecting a person that the base will dislike or not identify with (typically a minority) to prop up blaming the individual. Project any negative attacks from other ideological parties back onto that party brazenly and repeat it over and over. Play the victim if anyone tries to question your motives or actually push back. Make showy gestures of support for traditional value social issues to make your base feel you are one of them (as long as they don’t affect the true agenda of advancing the goals of businesses and the rich). It’s the same playbook for 40+ years and it’s still working.
Oh look UBI experiment number 1578 says the same thing.
And people will still ignore it and pretend UBI is unproven.
But people won’t want to slave away for my megacorp for starvation wages if we pay them not to work!
Experiments like these only proves “BI”. Still waiting for someone to explain how the “U” is supposed to work.
There are multiple ideas, all of which have merits and drawbacks because this is reality.
Piss easy to find them yourself and not pretend like you actually know what you’re on about.
Sorry, I assumed you were being sincere and looking for a discussion.
Simply put you give everyone X amount. We’ll use 100 because it’s easy. Then you tax it back on a sliding scale. At the low end they keep the entire 100 dollars. At the high end it is all paid back. In the middle you’d get 100 dollars and owe 50 back in taxes.
This actually removes a lot of the administrative overhead and allows UBI to circulate a lot more money than you’re actually paying into it.
Less simply, I’ll let this guy explain it.
I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don’t reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.
Oh this is an awesome comment. I love talking about this part of UBI
I studied Economics in school and dived deep into UBI. Some interesting facts/research for you:
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(Fun fact) The US already has UBI, just a super watered down version. It’s called EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). It’s a Nixon brainchild and was thought they could use UBI to reduce the inefficiencies of such a big government. I.e. get one nice UBI check that covers healthcare, retirement, insurance, education, food, housing, etc. blah blah blah, and you can shut down a bunch of federal government agencies that are pretty inefficient.
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The car dealership thing happened because of a variable that we often discount: information (or knowledge). The car dealership knew exactly how much money was coming out and who got it (mostly), and they knew it was a one-off not an ongoing thing. A lot of UBI macro research guesses that we’d see some small inflationary pressure at the beginning when it’s new, but then return to normal as it becomes part of every day life. And even if it does, the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits and the Fed has other tools to reign in inflation to balance the affect out.
Caveat, this knowledge is 20+ years old. I may be way off base.
Just a heads-up, you accidentally wrote “the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits” instead of (presumably) “the benefits strongly outweigh the drawbacks.”
That’s just how strong the benefits are. It’s cyclic!
benefits all the way down
trickle down benifinomics
Sweet! I sure hope the inflation wouldn’t completely invalidate the extra income, but I still have very little faith in American capitalism allowing for there to be money not immediately being funneled into the bank accounts of the 1%.
IIRC, that was one of the ways Nixon sold it. If the plebes have more money, they spend it on more consumerism bullshit . . .which is money that ends up in the hands of the 1%.
Again, this is a 20 year old college course, so my memory could be way off (and aspirational b.c. I personally like UBI).
This second point is going to be impossible to avoid when everyone knows ubi is a thing.
In my mind I see a huge displacement coming for a large number of workers who get ousted by AI. There will still be jobs, but far fewer in each discipline. Think office workers and coders etc. Once ai matures and integrates, we are going to have millions of people without jobs as companies cut 80 to 90% in each department. UBI will be necessary and everyone who sells shit will know that it exists and we are back to square one because they increase prices. It seems hard to avoid.
To be clear, I’m all for UBI. It seems like its pretty much unavoidable as productivity per worker continues to sky rocket and wages remain the same.
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There have been UBI trials before and they found that it didn’t lead to price increases to any great degree.
Yes but not widespread UBI, I think it would be slightly different like the reference to the stimulus checks where nearly everyone obtained it and it was widely circulated information.
Exactly. If a small group of people are given UBI, then they just have more money, and stores want to profit from everyone, including the people who aren’t getting more money. But if everyone gets UBI, then the stores are sure that their customers can afford higher prices, and our current government has shown that it doesn’t care if prices are arbitrarily inflated. I’d love UBI, but it can’t function alone without accompanying laws to prevent price hiking.
And the discussion about immigrants receiving UBI is going to be very problematic.
It will, yeah, but I think people will be a lot less worried about others succeeding when they themselves are succeeding as well. But maybe I’m underestimating the country’s racism. I hope I’m not.
Exactly. If a small group of people are given UBI, then they just have more money, and stores want to profit from everyone, including the people who aren’t getting more money. But if everyone gets UBI, then the stores are sure that their customers can afford higher prices
But if everyone was getting it, wouldn’t people at different income levels spend it on different things?
Even at the grocery store…middle class people might start buying nicer stuff and nice to haves that they didn’t buy before. Lower class people might start buying more well-rounded batches, but still the “cheaper” brands and stuff.
If I was buying Ritz crackers for $4 before, maybe now they’re $5. I’m making more money, and it’s just $1, so I might not even be paying enough attention to notice, but if everything goes up by a similar amount, then I’m spending significantly more on the same items than I was before, and might end up dropping $100 of my new UBI money on groceries without even making a change in my shopping habits.
Now, a lower income person might be buying store brand crackers that only cost $2, but now they’re $3, so the same situation occurs.
These are hypothetical numbers of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a situation like that occurred, given that every company would know exactly how much more money is now in everyone’s pockets. Every product goes up just a bit, just to take a bit of that UBI pie.
My point is that people with more money would have more “fun” money, and people with less money would have more room for essentials.
You’d think the bigger market would be to pull at the people with “fun” money, rather than the people who can now afford a well-rounded diet.
Yeah, things will go up in price. It’s like when minimum wage goes up. But in all the studies I’ve seen on minimum wage going up, the minimum wage earners generally win out over rising prices (being better off after the increase).
I’m sure some store has done the math that it’s better to sell 2 boxes of cookies to the poor guy than to raise the price to get the maximum profit off of an individual box. And then there are places with competition…and some staples are already generally competitive (such as bread) to the point of being loss leaders in grocery stores.
I certainly hope you’re right. All I picture is the dollar stores suddenly becoming $2 stores as everything just shifts to be more expensive with very few people improving their financial situation at all.
That is not how a competitive market works, at all. If there is enough competition, someone will always undercut the scalpers.
You’re right, it’s not… Too bad most places have realized they can just raise prices together and share in the extra profits, rather than compete with one another. There’s a reason why price fixing is illegal, and there’s a reason why the government rarely enforces it.
Sure buddy, if you say so.
The issue being we’ve never seen an actual trial of UBI. It’s always some sample of the population for a known limited time. UBI as a concept doesn’t lend itself to “trials”, we won’t really know until at least a number of entire cities are indefinitely implementing UBI, and probably would be 3 or 4 years before people start actually acting like it is indefinite.
Same thing happened to college financial aid. The more aid given the more colleges raised the prices.
This is a big problem with getting rid of taxes on the working class, or citizens, which as someone trying to NOT exist in society as much as possible. I’m all for, you’re telling me i dont have to think about property tax anymore? sign me the fuck up!
But, unless you fix that shit, it literally will not give you more spending money. Corpos will pay you less, things will cost more, entertainment will cost more. etc…
The entire concept of a scientific study to determine whether people spend this money wisely is bunk, because it’s nobody else’s business how a person’s money gets spent and whether it’s categorized as “wise”.
If we assume that there is an objective, ie scientifically valid, definition of “wise spending”, then we should just go centrally planned communism because the whole point of free markets is allowing people to enact their own value structure in their spending.
The whole idea of basic income, as opposed to all these other services, is based on the same idea: that people’s money is their own.
This study seems nice, but it frames this whole question the wrong way. The whole concept of money is that people have a right to make their own economic choices, regardless of what some centralized authority thinks is “wise”.
Word.
The entire concept of a scientific study to determine whether people spend this money wisely is bunk
For anything like this to actually happen people will have to vote for it.
1st you are incorrect because this wont happen if the people arnt educated on what happens when this system is introduced.
2nd Your correct because you can do all the studies in the world and gen pop would still be too easily manipulated to ever try something out of the box like this.
i actually think in the concept of distributing tax money as UBI, that this is actually a very valid point.
It doesn’t matter how it’s spent, you can spend it on a fucking 5 thousand dollar bottle of wine, or you could spend it on food because you are broke as fuck. It makes no difference to either party, that money is still spent and utilized in the economy.
Where that money goes after however? Now that’s a different story, go ask bezos.
Unsure I agree with this. I agree it’s not black and white but for example if someone spent it on drinking binges or gambling is that really just their business? The money could have gone to something else.
Personally I have never considered that there would be a risk of the UBI recipients to spend the money unwisely.
People needing UBI have a very long standing experience of not getting what they need to minimise their losses on a daily basis, so of course they will invest in that first. They all probably have a ranked, itemised list of all that would help. And I’m willing to bet that said list, on average, would be at least 80% correct (the 20% being influenced by personal sensitivities and beliefs, like a vegan person spending more on plastic based clothing, that wears out faster).
People not needing UBI already have more money than they can find intelligent uses for, and so they already are spending money unwisely.
Nah, the part that concerns me is that as soon as we all get UBI, and I do mean the very next day, rents are gonna rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, the cost of food will rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, and the cost of all the rest combined will rise by 34% of the amount of the UBI. It will be back to square one, and all we will have achieved will be funnelling our taxes straight into the pockets of for profit, private megacorporations.
We need to “fix” that megacorporation problem first.
You mean rents will go up by 100% of the UBI, food will go up by 100% of the UBI, and healthcare will go up by 10,000% because it’s a day ending in the letter Y.
Start a competing business that doesn’t make any profit.
How can you be so thick? If the problem was with profits, we’d have solved it essentially on day one of capitalism.
No, profits are good, it means you can live from your work.
The problem here is greed. And you know what? Unlike with finding out that you’re too stupid to get this, finding out where profits stop and greed start is a hard problem. Not individually, because that is about when a business owner starts paying their workforce less and starts buying stupid useless crap to show their status or grow their comfort much beyond the average… No, systematically. Because differences in management style mean that sometimes it makes sense to shrink everyone’s income (including the CEO’s) to be able to address challenges. But you can’t easily tell that apart from greed and dodging taxes.
You can live from your work without profit. Wages are a cost, not the result of profit. I would argue it’s very easy to see when greed begins - it’s when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work. Obviously there is an argument that senior managers get paid disproportionately, but a part of that will always be stock for which they will continue to earn money without doing anything at all. At least their wage is paid for doing something.
The other commenter misses a key point that under the current system to truly compete with megacorps you need investors to build scale. Independent companies can certainly reinvest their earnings rather than claiming them as profits, which is far better than having them siphoned off, but won’t get you anywhere near the kind of cash that you need. And as soon as you have investors, they expect their cut.
You can live from your work without profit. Wages are a cost, not the result of profit.
This only works when you have enough capital to back it up. Can’t switch to a salary-based remuneration model without having enough assets to make sure you don’t default every other month. But yes indeed, you can do that, once you have made enough profits to have an appropriate capital for this use case.
I would argue it’s very easy to see when greed begins - it’s when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work.
Yes, that is correct. However the appreciation of “work” is actually the hard part. If it wasn’t, micromanagement wouldn’t be a thing. So I guess we’re saying the same thing, from different angles.
Obviously there is an argument that senior managers get paid disproportionately, but a part of that will always be stock for which they will continue to earn money without doing anything at all. At least their wage is paid for doing something.
Yeah, so, already, this is going into “hard to gauge” territory. Is the senior manager one of the founding members, that grew a business from nothing, eating pasta and sweating blood for years; is the senior manager one of the founding members, that just was a dick from day one, backed by inherited money or VC money; or is the senior manager someone who just joined along the way, and is now profiting off of the work of others?
See, in these 3 eventualities alone, only the first one actually has any kind of legitimacy for being paid and not doing much. Because then, it is a return on investment, and a pretty damn hard investment at that. However, even in that case, it is extremely easy to overdo it and end up paying yourself more than you would actually deserve, even with the all hard work, the initial risk and stress, and the dedication combined.
The other commenter misses a key point that under the current system to truly compete with megacorps you need investors to build scale.
I believe you don’t necessarily need investors, but then, you need skill, wits, balls, and a whole lot of sheer luck. Oh, and a “sure thing” product/service too. Can’t take any chances.
Independent companies can certainly reinvest their earnings rather than claiming them as profits, which is far better than having them siphoned off, but won’t get you anywhere near the kind of cash that you need.
I mean, if you are truly starting a honest business, without much starting capital, and without much preexisting means (e.g. no privileged professional network, access to means of production at extremely low, or no cost, free raw materials/energy, etc), you can’t really do it any other way. You gotta reinvest as much as possible, pay yourself the minimum viable amount (pasta/rice only, and necessities. No travel, no leisure, no comfort), to grow the business into something that can ultimately support your life in a more “normal” way.
And as soon as you have investors, they expect their cut.
The main problem with investors isn’t even that. Them wanting their cuts is definitely a challenge. But the pressure they can exert on the management, the changes they can enact, the decisions they can force, that is the actual problem with investors. They aren’t doing it just for the money. It is a domination kink.
You’re being greedy by demanding lower prices. How can you be so hypocritical? If you don’t like the businesses that are out their get off your armchair and start competing with a better model. Slackers all of you.
I had to read word by word to make sense of your drivel. At first, it seemed to be sarcasm, but reading “out their” convinced me otherwise. Lrn2English bruh.
For other readers that will find this comment: I’d have written a logical rebuttal explaining why the concentration of wealth, IP laws, predatory financial institutions, etc. make this flat out impossible; and how fair, true capitalism died under Nixon, but it would here be like casting pearls before swine.
So you can’t compete because you have no actual abilities. Got it.
a competiting UBI business?
“People spend money on basic needs”
Here in the US, our society is in practice neutral towards human life. We (usually) don’t actively kill each other, but we’re completely comfortable letting our fellow citizens die under a freeway of exposure for the crime of not producing capital value for our owner class.
Instituting something like UBI would be a significant step towards finding congruence with our currently false, empty rhetoric of valuing human life.
Untl then, we as a people can and will continue to pretend that we do, but again in practice, it means the same as saying we value the candy bar wrapper we just threw in the trash.
the amount given should be based on some cost of living index just like the minimum wage should be
The crazy thing is that this kind of thing is way closer to actual socialism than any historical society has gotten, but the tankies hate it because it doesn’t have enough violent fan service.
Don’t give away money to the poor! They’ll just waste it spending $36 billion on a poorly thought out and woefully executed meta-universe! Only corporations can be trusted to make efficient decisions!
