Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on.
What happened?
What happened?
the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute
so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster
I don't buy this argument. Businesses that do this would be leaving money on the table: namely the poor people that were outside of their total addressable market. Whereas before those folks would never have been able to provide revenue, with more cash in their pockets, they are now potential consumers. Increasing prices just maintains the same TAM for no real reason — you can make more revenue by serving the newly minted consumers.
The only good/service for which this breaks down is housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform (like Japan).
While advertisers like to claim that they are merely improving distribution of information (bringing us closer to that mythical "perfect information" assumption about competitive markets), in practice they mostly do the opposite.
That is, taking advantage of cognitive biases to sell people things they don't need, increasing net market participant irrationality.
Not nearly as much as it needs to be. Indiana imports 90% of its calories. What does it take to get vegetables grown near Indianapolis?
> our food supply is highly distributed.
I meant this in the sense of diversity if firms, not geographically. We've certainly seen consolidation with some of the bigger agri-conglomerates, and the trends are worrying, but we are nowhere near monopolization of the industry as a whole.
From Wikipedia:
> The 2012 US Census of Agriculture indicates that 5.06 percent of US farms are corporate farms. These include family corporations (4.51 percent) and non-family corporations (0.55 percent). Of the family farm corporations, 98 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Of the non-family farm corporations, 90 percent are small corporations, with 10 or fewer stockholders. Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area. Family farms (including family corporate farms) account for 96.7 percent of US farms and 89 percent of US farmland area;[17] a USDA study estimated that family farms accounted for 85 percent of US gross farm income in 2011.
There are plenty of issues with our food supply system. But I don't think we need to worry about monopolies raising prices unilaterally. The OP thought we needed price controls to keep food costs low. I don't think this in the case. The problems are instead on the poverty side of the equation. Who has the money to pay for our (generally pretty cheap) food? The are too many that are food insecure, not because groceries are expensive, but because they are in poverty.
US government injected about 3 trillion worth of liquidity into the country since the start of the coronavirus, similar to how UBI of $1000/month to every single adult would cost. And did you see any price rise?
Giving everyone their own money for, say healthcare costs, and having them navigate markets alone... achieves exactly the kind of divide-and-conquer that price-gouging pharmaceutical companies and hospitals have wet dreams about.
The only good UBI supplements, but does not replace, most existing social welfare programs.
Replacing existing programs just creates an open season for vultures.
For example, you go into the hospital for abdominal pain, but it turns out that you need a massive orthopedic surgery to fix a congenital issue that only 2 surgeons in your area can perform (true story). Or you are a severe diabetes or lupus sufferer who has routine hospitalizations for a variety of infections you get at random due to their underlying condition. Need a tooth filling replaced? Of course, shop around. Need emergency dental surgery because you had traumatic facial impact playing soccer? Not so much. Emergency treatments to sick geriatric patients to extend their lives by weeks and months: also very expensive.
Routine doctor's office visits to remove a wart from your foot, or diagnose a sore throat, which you can shop around for, are not where the high costs comes from.
Yet those do have insanely high costs as well, as compared to the rest of the economy. We live in an economy where medicine tends to get more expensive, rather than less, i.e: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/diabetes/u-s-insulin-costs-pa....
Doesn't it make sense to figure out why the basics are getting more expensive, before suggesting we engage in a national price-fixing experiment?
But that doesn't really solve the needs that may not be optimal for a 100% market approach - probably the big two being health and education.
It's a basic good, but its price is still very much driven by supply and demand.
Compounded by nearly 2-3 decades of astonishing population decline, and a 'freeter' type lifestyle for all but the most 'privileged' youth that also helps in reducing access to desirable housing, too. Personally speaking had Fukushima not occurred, I think I would be owner and chef of a Kaiseki kitchen at an Onsen Ryoukan in the Country-side by now given how affordable and plentiful those abandoned compounds are all over Japan.
NIMBY is real and gets the nouveau riche up in arms and drives them out to the polls and releases purse strings for lobbyists like nothing else, but to be entirely honest as a multi-generational Californian: they can keep the Valley.
Its atrociously managed, its old, over-crowded, needlessly expensive and stricken with horrible politically ambitious and greed driven shortsightedness, the homeless problem is a glaring symptom that has clearly proven that neither money nor legislation can solve its core problem.
My family up there divested from their businesses and sold their homes in the area in mid 2000s to move to the South, and while its not perfect it shows that there are is no better way to show your opposition to a system then to just leave.
If many former office jobs and school classes (K-12 as well as University) can be optimized to be done remotely, then I will reluctantly accept that the COVID situation was worth it. Having a population density like seen in New York is not just undesirable (for many reasons) but also a biological hazard. Disruption had to come the housing situation, and I think this could be just as good as anything else in trying to alleviate the damage caused from having remained in an archaic system created to benefit the Land-owning class for doing nothing but being born at a time when housing prices as well as overall Economic health and sound wages were accessible to most in the US.
These land owners don't create wealth, they just consume it off the backs of people far more risk-prone than themselves that still have Utility in the Labor force, and we're thinking they'll ever allow for implementing something that is against there interests? That's a deluded panacea that won't ever be achieved using orthodox methods, like voting for fairer zoning laws.
But in this case, I remember a coworker of mine who a while back created an advocacy org for UBI. He's a socialist. I specifically remember him reaching out to work with libertarians and getting them in leadership roles. (Not sure if this org still exists.)
So, in practice, I imagine there would be lots of offices and agencies, services and interdependent liaison offices and agencies along with the requisite inspector general offices and agencies and the necessary committees, subcommittees, and working groups that would have to be created.
In the land of government bureaucracy, the rapidly increasing fixed-pie of current and (hopefully) future taxpayer revenue gets divided up into more and more slices every day.
However - I've always been puzzled by how each person in the US doesn't have a public, singularly identifying number assigned. Doesn't that make even an 'universal' basic income hard to define? How do you guarantee that every person gets one, and only one, BI check every month? How do you find out who is dead and should stop getting one...?
From what I know, SSN are used for stuff like that, but there's all this weird stuff about it (althoug I admit my knowledge of it comes from a half forgotten CGP Grey video, and that the impression that stuck)
https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-...
Also this paragraph from the linked article suggests that the 0.7% figure does not include means testing:
Indeed, universal participation and the absence of means-testing make Social Security very efficient to administer. Administrative costs amount to only 0.7 percent of annual benefits, far below the percentages for private retirement annuities. Means-testing Social Security would impose significant reporting and processing burdens on both recipients and administrators, undercutting many of those advantages while yielding little savings.
Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. That's what happened. There simply isn't enough tax revenue, even if you seized 100% of the wealth and future earnings of the wealthy, to provide a basic income sufficient for most people to live off of.
Also a lot of proposals would have ended up giving the poor and elderly less than they get under current programs. And the claims of reduced overhead wouldn't have made much of a dent in things either, IIRC admin costs for Social Security are less than 1% of what the actual payouts are
I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical.
That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.
Something more like a "guaranteed minimum income" where you can't have less money than what is required to have a good standard of living is a cheaper and more effective idea that accomplishes the same goals of ending poverty.
But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.
I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.
However, a higher velocity of capital without commensurate economic value being created ~= massive inflation.
This is a potential risk for UBI, and one that small-scale studies do not cover. Ideally, the additional economic value would be greater than the face value of the capital transferred every year, but there is no guarantee that is correct (nor is there any reason they should even be on the same order of magnitude).
Implementing UBI on a national scale would be a grand experiment. Most grand experiments tend to fail with massive upheaval. I think for UBI to be adopted, you would need a plausible incremental strategy with a lot of safety checks.
The perspective of MMT is that government can and should tax out money at a rate that keeps the economy from inflating beyond the scope of our control, and inject it at a rate that sustains the velocity of capital. Making this perspective the dominant one in discourse, however, would require a lot more public trust in government before people got comfortable with the idea of governments taxing us for our benefit.
The NPV of that dilution would be enormous, unless the economic value being created is very close to $1000/mo (or higher).
I'm perplexed by how often people assume that spending will only increase with the introduction of UBI, when there are many existing pathways for capital to travel that will become obsolete when UBI is enacted, and can be diverted to funding UBI instead.
This is a good point. Money maps to stuff and services. But there is ample surplus production (and unused capacity) in our economy.
Every year 40bn+ pounds of food is wasted at the retail level (on top of all the waste that happens before retail in production), while ~11% of the American population is food insecure.
Nearly every clothing company — H&M, Nike, Burberry, Eddie Bauer, and so on — destroys billions of dollars of unsold clothing every year in order to preserve their brand.
We have material abundance thanks to highly optimised mechanisation and more recently automation in agriculture and manufacturing. UBI can allow the poorest parts of society access the surplus that we would otherwise destroy.
Having an income (via UBI or some other mechanism) would help the poor, that is true (minus the caveat above about economic upheaval). Assuming that said income will reduce economic waste is not at all evident.
This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work is a very American concept with corollaries in only a couple other countries. This is not the norm and certainly not a healthy way to look at labor and the economy.
Money is a recent invention, and economies have flourished without it. Money facilitates trade, increases liquidity, and reduces friction in transactions.
> This fetishism with "work" as a proxy for the value of the human life which performs the work
It is not a proxy for the value of a human life. It is a representation of the value of the labor of that human.
Americans are very generous in voluntarily giving to charities.
By withholding economic power until someone provides "labor" as defined by the state, and leaving them embedded in an economy which requires money to survive, you are directly tying the value of the human life to the value of their labor.
> giving to charities
Interesting, probably has a lot to do with the low taxes and high amount of disposable income.
A young lady I used to know was the kindest person I ever met. She didn't have much, but would donate a few dollars to every charity that called. They had her number, and called her all the time.
She was the real deal, not one of those people who are only generous with someone else's money.
> you are directly tying the value of the human life to the value of their labor.
Oh baloney. Plenty of people will voluntarily give food to a hungry person.
Not enough, with the amount of hunger that's present in the richest country in the world.
signed, a surfer
Certainly UBI isn't going to do it, either.
The country of Finland has done the same, with a plan to reach absolute zero (nobody staying temporarily with friends or relatives) by 2022. Right now, over there, with 5.5 million people, 500 people don't have permanent housing of their own.
Does that count?
I.e. it's inadequate.
If you think that 500 people out of 5.5 million -- who aren't sleeping on the street, but have access to shelter and only lack their own permanent housing, with a plan to house them in the next two years -- is "inadequate," that's a you problem, not a "no social problem has adequately been resolved by any organization" problem.
Try surfing, man. It might relax you.
I hope you see where I'm going with this.
We are paid what can demand and not a penny more irrespective of our labor's actual value.
Value is what people are willing to freely pay for it. Any other definition of it is subjective and fairly useless.
We can use the system that we already have, that is, income tax. It has worked fine for quite a while.
Not saying these issues can't be addressed, just pushing back against the notion that UBI is simple to implement.
It would be no different than e.g. the existing payroll tax, or income tax withholding. You'd just notice it as a reduction in your paycheck. And if your income is high enough, the UBI can simply be a tax credit.
I think the desired effect is simply a refundable tax credit, and then you can adjust the existing progressive tax rates as needed.
In the model proposed by Milton Friedman, you start with an exemption amount, and a specific proportion of any unused exemption is refundable.
The first dollars you earn reduce your exemption, but at least they aren't taxed, until earnings equals the exemption amount, at which point you are getting no subsidy and your next earned dollar starts being taxed at the lowest rate.
The effective tax rate on those early dollars would be equal to the subsidy rate. For example, an exemption amount of $20k and a subsidy rate of 40% would mean earning nothing would grant you a $8k credit ($20k * 40%). Earn $10k and you would get a $4k credit ((20 - 10) * 40%). Earn $20k and you would get no credit and pay no taxes. But effectively your tax rate on the first $20k earned is 40% -- because you earned $20k and only netted $12k in additional income.
If instead you just give everyone $X, and just have the first dollar earned get taxed at whatever the lowest rate is, you don't have the same problem with regressive rates.
It is not the case that you can reasonably just give large groups of people with histories of poor financial literacy cash as a replacement for food, shelter, or other necessities. Many people will make bad choices if just given money. That's why many of these programs were built this way: to ensure people can't spend all their cash and be unable to afford baby formula or rent.
I don't think anyone doubts that often people will spend additional money they are given productively.
I'm not trying to be unreasonably judgemental, and I don't mean things like bond rates or yield curves. Things like making sure you have enough dollars at the end of the month to make a rent payment. Making sure the check gets written so it actually happens. Keeping track of automated withdrawals and ensuring the number stays above zero with the timing of all of them.
This is not trivial at all for a huge chunk of the population that is served by social welfare programs. You can't just expect it to work out giving them cash instead.
The vast majority of poor people do just fine with money when given to them. The 1-2% who are addicted to substances or mentally ill will always need additional services, but why throw out the huge efficiency gains in just direct cash transfers to all because of the worry that 1-2% might waste it? The efficiency gains of a UBI vs. most means-tested programs is likely more on the order of 20-50%.
A similar argument is “would we give a UBI to billionaires too?! What a waste!” Yes, what a waste of 0.0000003% of the UBI!
One shortcoming of the UBI studies I've heard about is that (naturally) they focus on settings that I don't have much confidence would necessarily translate to other settings like the current US. I can easily imagine the efficiency of UBI changing over time, let alone across locations, due to a plethora of factors. This isn't really a criticism of the studies (they're probably doing the best they can, and achieving good results on those is obviously a prerequisite), but rather of how much we can extrapolate from them and how much weight we can put in positive results currently. No matter how perfect their results, I'd totally expect people to be reasonably skeptical of their extrapolability (if that's a word) in the beginning.
Not really. There are UBI models that are more or less zero cost - taxes are increased by roughly the UBI amount for employed workers, and for the unemployed the UBI would be similar to the unemployment benefits they would lose.
A guaranteed minimum income would need to phase out by income, so as to not discourage people from working if they want to.
This is simply false. Please provide sources for this claim.
Most implementations of UBI are comparable to the existing taxation.
"Universal" means not means-tested. That hasn't changed.
What happened is that those who promoted UBI in order to achieve their objective of dismantling the social safety net and reducing overall taxation and government expenditure lost interest in it for many reasons.
First, and most important, the UBI supporting right largely returned to the standard economic platform of the right, since the political changes in 2016 resulted in many of their goals being achieved, including the attacks on Obamacare and food stamp programs, and the massive tax cuts for the very wealthy.
Second, they couldn't really explain UBI to others in the mainstream right. Simply cutting the safety net to punish "lazy" people who leech off the system is, and has always been, an easier line to sell politically vs "we consolidate all the existing safety net expenditures, cut them by x% by dismantling the bureaucracy, and distribute the cash as UBI, for a net reduction in total expenditure". UBI is economics nerd stuff on the right, a clever scheme and experiment whose costs would be ultimately paid by others who were less fortunate - in the form of reduced overall benefits.
Those who were left supporting UBI (no pun intended) were those who see it as one tool among many needed to reduce inequality, not as a way to further reduce government assistance to struggling people. They believe the cost should be payed by greater taxation on the wealthy, and their support is rooted in their beliefs about what a more just society would look like. Their perspective was further bolstered by Andrew Yang's advocacy, and the measures being taken now due to covid19. Therefore their perspectives on UBI have become the dominantly heard perspectives on UBI.
"Many Americans used part of their coronavirus stimulus check to trade stocks"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-...
Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.
Somebody did the math.
Edit:
With the corona virus "stimulus" people are getting a taste of modern monetary theory. They are starting to realize how little the nation debt matters and that what really matters is the result of the spending and the actions it invokes.
Some people are wondering why the stimulus checks are so small. I believe that if they were any bigger people might get used to the idea of living decent lives without economic anxiety thus the cats out the bag for the corporate big wigs, corporate democrats and republicans.
It might lead to a domino effect of a new standard of living and a new collection of cultural assumptions regarding money
Also, generally Andrew Yangs version of UBI would cut social spending and is not founded on modern monetary theory axioms.
Edit again,
I should mention Stephanie Kelton does not support UBI perse', she supports a federal jobs program but the economic assumptions still hold true.