Nobody has yet to explain the incentive for minimum paid workers to go to work once UBI payments becomes equal to a minimum paid job.
Your comment elides the point that almost everyone who wants UBI views at this mythical source of extra money from nowhere.
The UK already has a welfare state, we have Universal Credit which is basically a consolidated welfare payment to people who need money, and the main complaint (justified if we consider housing costs) is that this isn't enough.
I am not exactly sure how paying everyone money helps people who need it more than a system that just gives money to people who need it (particularly as once you introduce UBI, there is zero chance of it ever being removed until it bankrupts the country).
It is a nice idea but the actual practical mechanics of the situation (i.e. what people who support this really want, how this compares to what we have) are totally ignored. Public policy always goes through these phases: when you don't have something, it seems like the solution to all your problems. It won't be (again, the main reason why inequality hasn't fallen more in the UK over the past ten years is housing costs...it is the number one issue, nothing else matters).
I mean one obvious benefit is the monumental amount of savings in government services caused by getting rid of all of the bureaucracy involved in making sure only people who "need" the payment get it.
You can get rid of all the job centres, all the review boards, all the DWP departments that have to constantly check people's eligibility etc
You also free up time for people that are currently on UC who need to constantly go and confirm that yes, they still can't work. Now they just get the money and can go do whatever without having to justify selling knitting on etsy or whatever
The Tories also had an obsession with "work coaches", these contracts cost an absolute bomb, and had no effect on unemployment going to 3% whatsoever (the issue in the early 2010s was jobs not being there).
But my counter-point would be that part of the problem has been that definition of "need" and the quantum of that "need" has changed. The Tories assumed that everyone was on the take (and to be clear, Labour did this too around 2002-2004, they managed to reduce disability spending by 20% by just removing people from the benefit and telling them they weren't disabled anymore...even Duncan-Smith wasn't this thick) which meant they invested very heavily in pointless things.
It is actually fairly easy to determine whether someone needs money or not...look at their income, look at their savings...it actually isn't hard.
My concern is that the universal benefits brought in by Blair precipitated a situation where we have massive subsidies for the middle class whilst the govt is trying to take money from everyone who actually needs it (how can we spend more, we spend so much on in-work benefits). This is basically what happened in the pandemic.
Maybe the solution to bad admin is good admin (the system that the DWP has with disability is patently ludicrous, they ignore GPs, they hire doctors who can't get work anywhere else, they rely on "examinations" by non-doctors, I had a relative with a chronic neuro issue...she had her benefits removed once, under Labour, by a non-doctor and the re-assessment was done by a physio...tbf, the Tories pulled back once they realised what was happening with early assessments, they never went as far as Labour...but it is an insane system).
This presumably means that some of my taxes went into someone auditing her bank acounts, going "yup that's too much money", then into all the paperwork involved in kicking her out, followed by a few months later all of the paperwork and auditing of her re-applying for UC once her savings ran out.
Obviously we would have saved a bunch of money by someone auditing her case, saying "yup still not got any legs" and moving on, but should we be paying for that in the first place?
I don't like the idea of the government looking into my personal affairs or deciding how I should be spending my time. Obviously they don't at the moment since I have a very nice job but what if I got hit by a car on my way to work?
If some kind of universal income lets us keep the government's nose out of our collective businesses and the cost of that is Amazon has to pay more tax or whatever I don't really see the problem.
Maybe a few wasters just live off the money and play games all day but they were probably going to do that anyway. Most people like having something to do in my experience...
UBI funded with additional high-end tax progressivity avoids the pervese incentives with traditional means-tested welfare where benefits are cut rapidly with additional income (sometimes at a more than 1:1), disincentivizing outside income and tending to trap people in dependency. You can view it as equivalent to means tested welfare where the means test is shifted upward not to the survival level but to the level where the social utility of incentivizing additional income-seeking has gone negative.
It still seems that people choose to work. Of course things could be different in other countries, there are clearly a number of factors at work here....
I'm curious how your UBI actually does compare to someone working a low paid job. For instance, what's the UBI payment per week vs how much would someone working in retail for 40 hours?
If you have been employed lately you will get 62% of your regular salary up to ~70.000 USD, for up to 1 year I think. There's a number of programs if you haven't recently been employed. You can also get free housing. But the sum of all the different programs is that you will end up with roughly the same monthly payment as a low paying job, like retail or something like that. At present probably somewhere around 2000 USD after taxes I would guess. If you consider that a normal salary is probably around 3000 USD after taxes, it's not so bad.
That sounds like means-tested welfare which doesn’t stack with earned income. That’s literally the problem UBI sets out to solve, not effectively the same thing as UBI.
Another problem is the risk of inflation. If everyone in the country has a certain amount of money coming in then shop-keepers are just going to raise their prices. Why wouldn't they? After a few years of this, we are back to square one and the only solution would be to keep raising the UBI.
The situations are not the same. At all.
With the current setup, the options are 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $x.
With UBI, the options would be 1) don't work and receive $x, or 2) work and receive $2x.
Would some people rather not work and get $x than work and get $2x? Certainly. But not all of them would. Not even close.
I'm not necessarily advocating for UBI, but your presentation of the situation is not accurate.
Money _cannot_ have any value if it’s not backed by any goods or labor.
If your baker gets his UBI, why would he want to get up early and bake your bread in the first place when there is no incentive?
Or why would anyone want to sell you anything when the money isn’t actually a „credit“ for any goods or labor.
Money is just a convenient method for exchanging goods and labor. If you just give out money to anyone for free without exchanging it for labor, it eventually doesn’t have any value and people will find another currency or go back to exchange goods and labor directly.
This is why I'm asking. I actually know two bakers, and can guarantee that there's no way they would go to work if they had exactly what they were earning but didn't have to get up and go to work.
Extending this out, no baker would consider working unless their pay was above and beyond UBI. And the only way to pay them more while having the same profits to the bakery owner would be to raise prices. This is a direct example of how UBI would definitely cause inflation.
If you have UBI instead of a minimimum income guarantee, it stacks with income from other sources, so the incentive is doubling your income.
Do you think the fact that no one would want to do these jobs for minimum wage if they aren't being forced to by threat of poverty might suggest that we need to approach those jobs differently?
So you want to pay your cleaning personnel the same wage as a heart surgeon?
Don’t you think that such high wages will eventually just raise prices?
Contrived example.
Say you have some toilets you want cleaning and you decide to offer the job for $5 an hour + tips from toilet goers. The only person that agrees to do it is some homeless dude. You're not very happy about this, but no one else showed up so you go with it.
Then two weeks later the city offers $5/hr UBI and the homeless guy immediately quits.
"But wait, if you were scrubbing the toilets you get $10/hr + tips!" you say to him, and he says "ok cool but I'd rather beg on the street" and walks out
This means that $10/hr is actually significantly too low for cleaning toilets and the only reason this guy agreed to do it for $5/hr is he would have literally died otherwise
You can say "hey, a guy scrubbing toilets should definitely not make more than me, a big important programmer! My job's way harder" but would you scrub toilets for your current salary? I don't think I'd want to. Equally my company could probably give me a 10% pay cut and I'd complain about it but keep doing my job. I like programming.
However, the sad truth is society needs people to clean toilets and sweep the streets significantly more than it needs me to write React code for some website. If every cleaner in the world quit simultaneously, it'd be utter chaos. If every frontend dev in the world quit it'd be annoying but no one would die.
So why do we pay cleaners so little?
I'll counter with an example which might illustrate.
If you were at a desert, and dying of thirst, you would pay absolutely anything for water. You would not pay anything for diamonds at all.
But in normal circumstances, water is cheap, so cheap, that it's almost not metered. Diamonds, however, is still fairly expensive (even artificial ones).
Why do we pay so little for water, when it's so essential? Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny?
Because the government says water has to be cheap? There are quite a lot of places in the world where water is not cheap, but where I live there are laws that govern how much it can be sold for.
There are certain things that people will pay literally anything for, such as water, food, healthcare etc because they'll die otherwise. Usually the government will step in and set a maximum price for these things to try and make sure people don't die because overall that's bad for the economy.
No one's going to die from a dirty toilet though
> Why do we pay so much for diamonds, when it's basically useless cept for being shiny?
I read a really interesting article about the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" advertising campaign but I can't find it now. The summary is "because the people that own the diamond mines say they're worth it and everyone just goes along with the lie because it makes them feel nice"
By the same logic if a heart surgeon for some reason wanted to drive an uber you think they are getting paid $1000+ now? Why would anything about this change?
prices will fluctuate by supply and demand. I could buy 100$ bottles of wine but don't because that's dumb. If I had a million I still wouldn't.