Coal companies folding is hardly economic pain, just opportunity for solar and wind.
If we had a functional Congress, that's the sort of thing we would be doing.
It’s also partially why calls for UBI and other alternative solutions are gaining traction nowadays (although, atm only one person is running on that platform for President in the states)
I'm genuinely curious as to whether it could replace other existing welfare programs, or if it would exacerbate self-destructive behaviors in the absence of opportunities for earned and delayed gratification.
Many of these trials are cut short due to ‘unsustainability’- generally due to the fact that the programs aren’t actually paid for by anything- UBI on its own is unsustainable ! As such, the candidate I mentioned above is running on a platform that looks to consolidate existing welfare programs and implement a VAT to help afford the policy.
Alaska program akin to UBI : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
Finland UBI trial results : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/the-results-finlands-...
(Political page) 35 UBI or cash transfer experiments: https://www.yang2020.com/35-ubi-programs-cash-transfer-exper...
The government paid out some amount, to all residents, regardless of income, to be used unconditionally. Pretty much the defn of UBI.
To your point about standard deduction - it on the other hand does not pay out anything if you don’t make anything. The petro fund is an actual dividend, very much not a deduction.
1) It is sufficient to provide a "basic" level of income 2) It is more efficient than targeted welfare programs (medicare, medicaid, food stamps, etc) 3) Community outcomes are improved by way of economic (retraining / small business starting), health (less stress / more treatment) and poverty (less stress = smarter financial choices)
So far, I haven't seen any experiment actually test any of those things. I don't know of any where participation has been contingent upon giving up other programs (so we don't know if it's better than targeted welfare), and none have lasted long enough to know if any behavior changes were influenced by the knowledge that the cash was going to be cut off in the future.
As such, I haven't seen much "success" in the way of UBI experiments.
To quote:
BIEN lists the following five defining characteristics of basic income:
Periodic: Distributed in regular payments, Cash payment: Distributed as funds rather than, for example, vouchers for goods or services. Individual: Each citizen (or adult citizen) receives the payment, rather than each household. Universal: All citizens receive the payment. Unconditional: Recipients are not required to demonstrate need or willingness to work.
Your points 1, 2, and 3 are not definitions of UBI.
EDIT: the Finland trial looked at many of the outcomes you described above- linked above. Only half of the results are currently available. As I'd already mentioned, there hasn't been much in the way of negative outcomes in existing UBI and UBI-like trials.
That doesn't mean that any of this is good public policy, that it would be better than current policies, or that it would improve long-term outcomes.
Notably, your Finland link indicated that there was no change to employment rates, which is unfortunate, and I think undermines a lot of the arguments I've heard from proponents of UBI- that people who are less stressed financially will be able to make better use of their time training into new industries, start small businesses, etc.
Moreover, all these positive outcomes you seem to dismiss (and add that in the long term money doesn’t buy happiness- which is neither here nor there) doesn't mean that any of this is NOT good public policy, that it would NOT be better or that it would NOT improve long-term outcomes.
If anything, all the outcomes: lower stress, greater happiness, etc, are all known to lead to healthier individuals, with more fulfilling lives, with plenty of potential benefits for society as a whole.
Moreover, trialing UBI is a red herring. How many welfare programs have been trialed before implementation? How many have been researched thoroughly on their per dollar outcome? The fact is, many of these programs are implemented without any trial and only on the basis of perceived outcomes that would lean positive. Why should UBI be any different?
There are also plenty of examples that show that direct cash is oftentimes more favourable than some other variant; see the charity GiveDirectly’s entire premise.
To argue that no successful trial has been run, that outcomes have not been favourable, or that the general idea of UBI is flawed until we research it to death, is to be overtly skeptical.
It's the "U" part. Taking money from the middle and upper classes just to give it back to them is inherently inefficient and entirely pointless.
Additionally, I disagree that it has been researched to death. People have infinite wants, and we have finite means. I would personally rather see this play out at a smaller level in reality (not a time limited trial that biases the outcome) before we go all in on 300 million people. And if we are not going to be replacing existing programs with it, I would rather not see it happen at all. That's my personal preferences based on what I currently know, at least.
On these points we don’t disagree.
But again, not saying it's not a good thing, just that it doesn't really solve this problem.
If we still had widespread apprenticeship as a way to learn, this would be fine. Classroom training isn't really the greatest way to learn something. But it's the way our society has doubled down on in the last generation or so, to the point that high schools shut down shop class programs and expanded AP, regarding anyone who didn't go to college as a failure.
Again, I don't know if it applies to the case you're discussing, just raising it as a possible explanation.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160321063455/https://www.hilla...
Coal jobs are in that waning category of blue collar jobs that you can have a decent life on. So it’s lamented the same way as when auto plants close, manufacturing plants close, etc.
You’re right it has too much power, but you have to put more effort into understanding why.
This is why we need to price in carbon externalities in energy markets.
Damn fracking pulled the bottom out of electricity prices, screwing over nuclear plants whose O&M is pretty high. They were fine when electricity revenue was normal. But fracking dropped it off.
“The most likely candidates for a coal-to-gas conversion are 50-plus year old units, less than 300 megawatts in capacity and generally early generation sub-critical utility boilers – the least efficient, most costly to operate and with the lowest overall capacity factor in the coal fleet,” he wrote. “Most plants west of the Mississippi River built in the 1960s or later aren’t as attractive as candidates for fuel switching since they are often larger, more efficient and tend to burn Powder River Basin coal, a cost effective fuel with a more favorable emission profile than the bituminous burned by many eastern plants.”
Sidenote: Power River Basin coal is that which is mined by the company this article refers to as having entered bankruptcy.
https://energynews.us/2017/02/24/midwest/conversion-to-natur...
It's awful because real people are losing their jobs and probably don't have the best prospects. It's necessary though. It's one of the reasons a good government has social programs to support those whose jobs become obsolete.
One significant difference: coal employees are concentrated in a relatively small number of communities, which means that those communities are collectively suffering greatly, and the employees have fewer opportunities because there are no more jobs locally.
Farriers and ice deliverers were relatively evenly distributed, lessening the overall community impact and making it much easier to find a new career.
You should go read about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars. Big Coal more or less committed genocide in Appalachia and not only got away with it but had some assistance from the US government. That's how powerful they are. The number of senators these states have is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...
You could for instance encourage solar companies to hire ex coal miners and pay them good wages.
When shifting an experienced miner to the natural gas industry, the problem isn't education, it's replacement pay. They're usually technically, industrially competent people, and are well suited to the oil and natural gas industries as far as ease of skill adaptation goes. It's something our government/s should be pursuing aggressively (except usually the states where the coal industry exists don't want to go against those jobs and actively encourage that shift). If done correctly, you could make the job shift from coal to other energy industries far easier, buffering the labor hit, and drain the coal industry of the labor it needs to operate (accelerating its demise).
There's reasons the whole "just replace coal jobs with solar jobs" thing has never played out. It's not for a lack of trying or because nobody here ever coming up with the idea. It's because the powers that be sure as hell weren't gonna let it fly.
(TVA continues to be the least green utility in the South btw. Promotion of the welfare of the people of the Tennessee Valley my ass.)
Those jobs are often not easy to replace financially for the people working them. It involves uprooting their families, or being away for weeks at a time, working in the natural gas industry or similar, and they still don't make more than they were making in coal. I grew up around coal country Appalachia. Making $50,000 per year in a coal mine in the early 1990s, anywhere in Appalachia, was a financial godsend for those workers. I knew a lot of families that it provided a solid middle class life for, people that otherwise were going to be stuck working low wage jobs in those regions, if there were any jobs at all (and it was a hard, dirty, unhealthy, dangerous job; they all knew that).
A typical Sears worker has plenty of other opportunities at comparable or higher pay. There isn't a shortage of $13-$15 / hour jobs in the US, particularly in the locations where most Sears stores operated historically.
And who would have thought: exactly those regions are, no matter the country, the ones where the right-wing populists easily gained and kept ground. I mean, sure, the people there will wake up once they realize that no amount of kicking out foreigners will bring back their coal jerbs, but for now democracy is stuck with the aftermath of decades of ignorance.