Just in my personal opinion, things like a UBI move us towards that world. It wound allow people flexibility.
I mean, it should be less guilt-y of course (I'm not in marketing) and somehow capture it's _society_ finally paying for the things generated by free/underpaid labor, not individual citizens, and not imply that people have been selfish etc.
I like the spin on seeing this from a new marketing angle, new framing.
That’s the entire federal tax revenue consumed by UBI. So you need to double everyone’s income tax to get back to even.
Of course there is evidence giving people free stuff improves their lives. The problem is that’s an insane amount of money that has to come from somewhere.
To put that in context, the top 1% have an aggregate wealth in the US of about 34 trillion. So we could take all of the net worth from doctors, lawyers, business owners, CEOs, FAANG employees, etc and pay for this for about 10 years. Then we’re left with consuming the middle class and then we’ll just be out of wealth period.
There is just no reasonable explanation for how this will be paid for. Even wealthy countries favorable to socialist policies (e.g. Norway) have nothing like UBI.
Let me turn the question to you. What makes you think UBI is sustainable? You have to have some pretty damn good evidence when you’re betting the entire federal government budget on it.
“Redistribute from workers” is a cutesy way to make it sound like it’s just coming from some excess cache reserve. No such reserve exists. For the numbers to work out, this needs to come from the middle class’s income as well as the rich. There isn’t enough wealth, let alone income, at the 1% level to even scratch the surface on these proposals.
No, actually I mentioned it because I thought you skipped out on the fact that money isn't a static amount which we drain out with UBI in this quote:
>To put that in context, the top 1% have an aggregate wealth in the US of about 34 trillion. So we could take all of the net worth from doctors, lawyers, business owners, CEOs, FAANG employees, etc and pay for this for about 10 years.
So I wanted to have a different measurement which took how much we produce into account.
But thanks for assuming I'm arguing in bad faith, lol.
You can’t print your way to GDP. If you’re suggesting the government just issue the extra money without funding it, you’re just diluting everyone’s existing money because you haven’t increased the production of the economy. Constant issuance of amounts this big needs to be funded or the massive amount of demand for the same fixed amount of goods and services will just cause hyper inflation.
And if you’re arguing that giving people UBI will make them work more and not less (enough to account for the GDP loss), that’s a pretty extraordinary claim that hasn’t been backed up by any ongoing UBI experiments.
> But thanks for assuming I'm arguing in bad faith, lol.
I’m not. I’m pointing out the incredible road block for UBI and you’re refusing to address it. It would fundamentally alter the economy to become the highest taxed of any first world countries and we would have the largest monetary entitlements per capita ever. Nothing like this has ever worked, none of the communist/socialist states (even at their peaks) gave out this much in income.
People who are against UBI are concerned with that. It has nothing to do with lack of empathy.
The problem with UBI is that it’s not solving a particular problem so there are no efficiencies to be gained. Like if we wanted to solve housing, we could have the Army go out and build houses at scale and the per house costs could be quite low. No such economies of scale come into play with UBI.
You’ll find more support for federal government built housing and federal government provide food than you will for UBI when the reality sinks in of what you’re asking the middle class to sacrifice.
BTW, people in the 1% don’t hoard money, that’s a... financially stupid thing to do. They buy shares in companies and other assets. So there is a lot less money supply trapped up in wealthy peoples’ banks than you would think.
UBI would likely replace most welfare programs, so that'd just be moving budget around. I'm finding a bunch of numbers for US welfare spending, some of them not really consistent with others, but welfare spending is easily over $1T per year.
I would absolutely be in favor of adding more (higher) marginal tax brackets to help with any further shortfall. That 1%er $34T cash hoard you mention is built through income, which can be taxed more. I'd also be in favor of a wealth tax. Top 1% is probably too wide for something like that, but a sub-5% wealth tax (perhaps taxed progressively, as with income) even on the top 0.1% or 0.01% would likely net a big chunk of change that could be put to useful work, vs. sitting around in some management fund for someone's great-great-great-great-great grandchildren to spend, assuming we haven't collapsed our financial system by then.
Rather than phased out the idea is usually that everyone gets exactly the same UBI (thus removing overhead and friction associated with existing welfare schemes) but it is cancelled out for the wealthy by an additional/increased regressive income tax.
Frankly, this view is the major divide between conservative and liberal. And, it'll directly affect all practical implementations such as giving everyone free money. It's also profoundly philosophical in questioning the essence of the soul, so most people like to get unphilosophically political (which is like trying to make software without knowing a language).
The difference then is in motivations. Are you motivated to make UBI work or aren't you? Those that are believe that fundamentally, our society must be able to bear it. We know we have the total wealth generated to support it, sot he rest is an implementation detail. If you prioritize it as a key aspect of a successful human-orientated society, it is achievable.
The people that are against UBI are not psychopaths. But they ultimately do not believe in the idea and use costs and other such concerns to justify not moving towards that direction. The reasons why they don't support it can be diverse, but mostly it comes down to a lack of empathy for others. They truly feel that others do not deserve help or support, and base the rest of their beliefs around it.
I think if you reread your post closely, you would see the circular reasoning. You've assumed that UBI is a policy with positive outcomes, as part of your argument for why folks should support UBI. That's "begging the question" (the classical meaning of it).
I have a lot of empathy for others. Enough so that I'm unwilling to back polocies that I expect will cause more overall suffering in the long term.
Framing it as “finally paying for something you’ve been getting for free” is an amazing way to kill it because you’re paying to support drunks, spouse abusers, racists, etc. That will immediately lead to discussions about criteria to receive it and it will no longer be UBI.
It makes no sense that, with all the excess industrial supply that we have today, that we refuse to provide a basic minimum standard of living for all human beings.
Healthcare is still very expensive. There are diseases (including cancer) we could easily spend millions per patient on. Pulling out all the stops you could spend 10s of millions. But we really don't have that kind of societal overabundance, not yet.
So how much do you spend per patient? Are there certain diseases that you don't spend any public money on because the interventions are so expensive compared to success rates? It's really not a simple set of decisions to make, and those decisions do need to be made (or more to the point: agreed upon).
What an improvement.
Plenty of countries have both a public and private insurance options.
61% couldn't shell out $1000 if their life depended on it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/just-39percent-of-americans-...
If little johnny needs a 150k operation and the insurance says no he's going to die and they can't all pay into each others go fund me. The economics just don't work out.
Also virtually nobody has suggested outlawing cash payments for services. That idea is much outside of the mainstream as believing that the earth is flat. Pretending that is what socialized medicine is, is a straw man.
They are 2 ways to cost pool neither suggests or requires the elimination of cash payment.
If we perfected artificial hearts, for example, and they cost some nominal amount (less than a typical car, for example), we still wouldn't implant them in 102 year-olds. I'd argue against that implant for my parents, myself, and in the unlikely event I'm around then, for my kids.
I don't live under NHS, but the calculations they do, while often the subject of finger-wagging, seem entirely sensible to me.
In countries like Australia, where drug companies have to negotiate a fair price with a single government agency, the cost of treatment is an order of magnitude lower.
MRI machines are not expensive because of "patents". They are expensive because they are expensive devices that utilize superconducting magnets which need a constant supply of liquid helium.
Various drugs are expensive because (regardless of patents) there aren't enough patients to justify mass-production, so the price stays high. Sometimes even with mass production drugs are hard enough to make that the price still stays high.
Doctors are not cheap to train, so their services will always be expensive until we replace them with robots.
There are a plethora of reasons why medicine and healthcare is expensive beyond "patents" – remove patents from the equation and you can still easily spend millions per patient for various diseases.
Of course, if these treatments are more common at the same price, the social costs might be too high and we'd have to let people live or die depending on their financial situation or ability to fundraise.
There are some drugs that require the doctor to make a case for it - but thats a fairy routine matter. You do hear of people flying overseas for a special treatment (mainly experimental) thats not yet here, that isn't covered.
Edit: an example - I had a checkup last year, got a bunch of tests done - total out of pocket for me was $30 or so, all the blood tests are free. The $30 was for the doctor, if I wanted to shop around there are free doctors that just charge the schedule price. I had to get an MRI about 7 years ago, now I could have waited, or got it in the hospital, but I chose to get it at a clinic, cause I wanted to get out of the hospital (which was free) - out of pocket was $800 for that.
There is a government advisory committee called PBAC which advises the government on whether to pay for certain drugs. There have been cases where PBAC refuses to fund a new drug because it doesn't see the benefit as worth the cost. For example, suppose there is a new cancer drug which costs $100,000 a patient, and on average extends the patient's life by 3 months. PBAC will likely say it isn't worth it for taxpayers to pay $100,000 to extend a person's life only by 3 months.
To give another example, in the public health system, there are a certain number of ECMO machines available. Given the limited number, they can't just leave patients on ECMO indefinitely. Sometimes they will take a patient off because the probability of survival is low and there is another patient needing one with a higher probability of survival. But, if you look at patients with low survival probability, most of them will die even with treatment, but a small minority may have nonetheless survived yet now that you are withdrawing treatment they won't. However, we cannot know who will be in that small minority, and society isn't willing to spend unlimited resources on trying to save people's lives against the odds.
The most expensive drugs are rarely needed by many people. The big one recently is a drug to treat Hep C, at about A$22000 a patient (but possibly saving years of dialysis) and a macular degeneration treatment (what price do you put in vision?).
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-12-01/australias-mos...
From someone on the PBSAC: https://www.nps.org.au/australian-prescriber/articles/the-ch...
It isn't so much the cost, but whether they actually work, or are any better than other treatments.
Prices being high or things being expensive (both subjective terms that are hardly useful in this context) aren't a universal truth. Generally, a nation-organised and at least partially managed medial healthcare system costs less and delivers better results than a free-for-all corporations-decide system.
"Cheaper" =/= "cheap".
The "private prescription price" is the un-subsidised cost that people not covered by Medicare (e.g. foreign residents) pay. The discounted PBS price is what regular residents pay, the concession price is for people on low incomes or pensions.
Even un-subsidised, you're typically looking at a price 80% lower than what people in the US pay. With subsidies, it's closer to 90-95% less. This has nothing to do with manufacturing costs - manufacturing in Australia is more expensive. It's entirely because our government doesn't allow pharmaceutical companies to profiteer from their IP to the obscene extent that the US government does, and we've had a right-leaning government for 19 out of the last 25 years.
My training as an anaesthesiologist has cost the taxpayer roughly 2 million AUD from medical school to specialist qualification. The direct cost to me? About $75,000 AUD.
Some treatments are expensive and futile. We aren’t compelled to offer them. We do have to prioritise treatments and triage patients, resources are not unlimited. By the same token, no-one is denied care on the basis of age or ability.
Many patients suffer from too much medical intervention, and I am extremely grateful that I almost never feel compelled to perform treatments that don’t benefit patients.
So yes you have a point in that especially in the US the dollar amounts attached to treatments aren't necessarily indicative of the effort involved. Treating their argument charitably though, as a species we have finite capacity, and "spend millions per patient" is a linguistic shorthand for "we don't have enough resources to evenly distribute this level of care to everyone."
That argument isn't infallible (e.g., it's pretty easy to get a majority to agree on upper and lower bounds for such an idea, so picking a number in between might still be reasonable), but it's much more interesting to pick apart the thing they're trying to say rather than the exact words they used.
I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make.
My Mum in Australia had a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer, discovered at stage four.
She had almost three years of radiation, chemo, all the associated drugs, scans, treatments and even two different trial drugs.
She never paid a cent, all of it on Australia's standard "heathcare for all".
If Australia and many other countries can manage it, then more countries can too.
Anything less is just an excuse.
The decision is simple for you, because it's your mom. The decision is not a simple one for a society.
We do not yet live in a post-scarcity world. Spending on one thing by necessity means less spending on something else.
Edit: if you don't like it you can always pay for private education - it to is partially government funded.
Your argument is only sound in the hypothetical case.
This is objectively true. There is nothing hypothetical about it.
Even calculations about what is and isn't a reasonable expenditure are inherently polluted with the presumption that the current cost structure is an immutable condition as opposed to being the result of a system designed by the worlds dumbest,greediest,least worthy democracy to ever exist.
To clarify what I'm trying to say is that because of the nature of physics warmth which is to say energy is a scarce quantity and will always be so but in the context of making sure everyone is warm its almost always very simple there actually IS enough to go around despite it being scarce. The same thing is true of food.
We cannot afford infinite degrees of effort per patient but what we can afford is more than what most would consider sufficient.
Why don't we? Because of so many people who point out the unfairness of someone who's not working at all getting housing for free from the government, when so many working people are struggling to house themselves.
So there's perhaps other unfairness at work there that people are unwilling to look at how solve (why is housing so expensive, relative to wages? why do we expect people to work 2-3 jobs and have no leisure time, no time to relax, just to satisfy the basic needs of survival?), and that alone seems to have boxed people into a system where we're jailing people and leaving them out in the elements, even though it costs us all more in the long run.
Where health care is concerned, what bothers me most is how outrageously expensive US care is for its outcomes, compared to every other western nation. That doesn't seem right, and doesn't seem like a good use of our society's money or human effort, expending so much money on systems that could easily be made unnecessary -- like medical billing and the mass of health care insurers.
(And then I had an ex whose father is a doctor, a GP, who lived a very nice life, and insisted that he deserved that...when I asked him what he thought about how doctors in other countries aren't so richly compensated, he only responded, "hey I went to med school, I deserve this," and he too couldn't conceive of a different ordering of things, because...I'm guessing here...his mind went to the couple of new cars in the driveway of his massive house in a tony suburb of an expensive east coast city, and how, had he had less, he might have just one new car instead of two...but that's a speculation on my part. I wasn't inside his head.)
[0] https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2021/03/05/san-francisc...
I'd love to see your math on this.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland
You see the narrative today being that whites don’t deserve what they have. Whites don’t deserve their hard work because it was built on empire building and slavery and privilege. To me, this is being set up to cripple capitalism, pretending that the hard work capitalism encourages is somehow false or fake.
Yes, UBI would solve your problem in the short term. However, I think proponents of UBI are deviously attempting to downplay capitalism’s benefits and entirely hiding UBI’s drawbacks when society is no longer as well off (e.g. during wars)
I challenge you to find one post (with positive score) on HN with such a narrative. And besides, it's incredibly strange how you shoehorn race into this discussion.
> entirely hiding UBI’s drawbacks when society is no longer as well off (e.g. during wars)
So we should not have UBI during good times because if the nation collapses it would not work? I can come up with plenty of things that don't work when society is no longer well off, but it's unclear what bearing that has on whether they are solving problems in the present day...
I don't have any well formed opinions about UBI and I believe myself to be open-minded about it.
I do, however, think that GSE/WSB is going to push it back outside the overton window.
Nobody in power - across the broad political spectrum, from Feinstein to McConnell and everyone in between - is going to sign us up for more of that.
Would it be better than what we have now? Possibly! I’m fairly confident a real social safety net would be better. Or tight regulations around all that liquidity in the market, presumably pulled from elsewhere in the public coffers. At the end of the day it still sounds like wealth redistribution away from properly funded public works.
I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people.
I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time.
It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others.
Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.
But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are met <- conserve energy".
I can imagine a educational system where we prepare our children from childhood for UBI and it will work.
But given how rudimentary most education still is I don't see that happen anytime soon. Maybe in 100 years.
This is exactly the opposite of how people actually work people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Adversity especially insofar as fear of basic needs being met isn't inspiring it's stunting.
Anything else is a basic dysfunction in understanding people fed by survivorship bias. Imagine if you met someone who was sure that plant growth was maximized by periodically holding a lighter to one or another of the leaves because all the surviving plants had gone through that. Your understanding is every bit as ridiculous.
We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
Some people do. Many don't, they'll take that support and rest on it. Plenty of European Countries have UBI for all intents and purposes (free health care, housing, utilities, enough cash money for everything else including entertainment and communication). People don't excel, and plenty don't bother to contribute, because it's not necessary.
> We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
The kind of person who doesn't bother to contribute is probably the kind of person who would be contributing by making fries or checking you out at walmart. These contributions can be replaced by automation and nothing of value will be lost meanwhile some portion of the people will use their time that would have been thrown away at walmart to actually contribute.
If 90% of the team at walmart was replaced by robots and 10% found more meaningful ways to contribute it would be a net gain.
> You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
If you offered most people a poverty wage of 2k monthly and netflix and the opportunity to earn 2k + whatever they could earn in addition doing something with their life 90% would chose the latter given the option especially if free education were available to get from A to B. Most people want to feel their life is meaningful. If you don't understand that then you don't understand people in the slightest.
This is a false pursuit, and in a sense a vacuous statement.
You are never independent of society around you. You are in constant need of others doing that invisible and visible labor - in production and in services - to maintain your way of life.
It's only with Capitalism being the way it is that you need to "work your ass off" to not be financially dependent on your parents, or at the risk of a crisis and collapse upon losing your job etc.
The USA was still a capitalist society when the American dream was alive and well with a thriving middle class. Meanwhile nations with planned economies, abolished land ownership and worker owned means of production were starving and seeing general iniquity.
Now those protections that gave us a thriving middle class and general economic prosperity have been largely gutted and our government generally subverted.
My point is, the ills of a country are likely the cause of governmental failings and destabilization exploited by the ruling class of the system to entrench themselves and expand their interests at the expense of the general public, regardless of what that that system is. It can happen to any system of governance paired with any economic system.
I think we should be cleaning our government up and taking that power back, but that by putting the blame squarely on capitalism you're missing the forest for the trees. The problem is allowing whatever naturally formed ruling class in an economic and or political ecosystem from concentrating too much power, and potentially resources [1], in the first place.
[1] Though I'm skeptical of this but in so much as resources equate to power maybe it's necessary.
"Financial independence" != "independence from the society". No one claims to be independent of the society. One just does not have to earn money anymore.
I agree that money are worthless without places to spend them and someone producing stuff to buy. This does not make financial independence less useful though.
It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that five month stretch where you could be doing worthwhile things – even if you would make enough money in those three months to support yourself, when most of it's going into paying off the debt you got into because you lost your job and had to eat, it's difficult to do so.
Think this is a bit much? Okay, how about this: you're in jail on suspicion of committing some crime or other. This lasts 1½ weeks, before they realise that no, actually, you weren't guilty. But in the meantime, you've lost your job, and without the savings you'd usually gather prior to job-hopping… what then?
You might've worked really, really hard to get where you are. For many, working really, really hard simply isn't enough.
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¹: “Capitalism” here is shorthand for “society being structured under the assumption that capitalism is a fully-general ideal solution for allocating all resources, and there are only a handful of narrow examples where it makes sense to do something else”. There's nothing inherent to capitalism that causes these things, any more than a chainsaw is responsible for felled trees. But this is pedantry, so I kept it out of the first sentence.