The give simple jobs, like cleaning or painting, to people on the lower bottom of earnings. Most people in that plan are people with low formation, like those who left school in their mid teens.
This seems like a great idea to me! Making it cheaper for businesses to hire people for these jobs would lower prices for everyone, improving accessibility of the services.
How would this help lower prices? The taxes have to be paid for by someone, and that cost should largely end up landing on the consumer.
It seems like we'd be changing who's hands the money moves through, but it still has to be paid for one way or another. If that's the case we'd risk higher prices since taxes have to subsidize prices and cover all the costs of running the program in the first place.
In the end, you use money from the rich to pay for socially beneficial jobs. Exactly the sort of thing government is for: ensuring that social goods are provided.
Taxing the rich can have unintended consequences. First you have to change the tax code so they actually get taxed and can't dodge it, those rules alone would be difficult to write effectively and would likely mean changing other parts of our tax code that impact everyone. If the rich do get taxed enough to cover a good chunk of wages, demand for luxury items would go down so too then would the jobs that make those products and services.
Once subsidized by a UBI, at best workers will continue to work at the same levels they do now. There will be an incentive for them to work less though, potentially driving up the labor costs you are trying to reduce. How do we accurately predict how many workers will reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely? And how do we predict what that would do to prices?
The idea of taxing the rich to bail out everyone else is too often boiled down to a simple lever that, when pulled, magically fixes everything without any risk of unintended side effects.
There's an obvious wealth gap that's increasing and the people up top are getting even less oversight as we speak. As you say in your post, you don't know what the effects will be because it's not simple. But I see no compelling reason to continue with the oligarchy
My point was that we can change taxes to a system that we think will work better today, but we can't claim to know what the actual results will be years from now.
The claim made earlier in the chains was that taxing the rich to subsidize wages would lower labor costs and lower prices. I don't think we can ever know well enough how a broad reaching change will land, and claiming to know prices will go down isn't reasonable.
I had to watch this office space clip again just to be sure. https://youtu.be/Fy3rjQGc6lA ah yes, the meaning of life. ha-ha I love the classics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBdU9v5nLKQ
A much more terrible issue we suffer from already is that without participating we forget how our civilization works. Having a job gives you at least a tiny bit of insight that may partially map to other jobs.
Very similar to how ultra hard core libertarians assume they’ll be the ones at the top of the food chain calling the shots and not be just another peasant.
But it doesn’t really matter because there is no way in hell any of these LLM’s will uproot all of society. I use LLMs all the time, they are amazing, but they aren’t gonna replace many jobs at all. They just aren’t capable of that.
The available work offers the entire spectrum but we have to divide and plan it.
I watch these historical farm documentary tv shows, and they show how everyone in a town had a purpose and worked together, the blacksmith, the tile maker.
And I do often think the limiting factor to a life like this is the “market” so if you could create these communities, and could be an artist/artisan/builder, without strictly having to worry about making enough to live.
I met someone recently who lived in the Galapagos islands, and she seemed to sort of live this community oriented, trading anarchocapitalist lifestyle, and I think most people would be happier if they're small capitalist or socialist community involved direct interaction with people rather than dealing with soulless corpo's all the time.
I can imagine loads of tasks or jobs that would be quite pleasant if it weren't for stressing over efficiency or business admin.
I mean think about it…when was the last time you heard of charity gutter cleaning services? People would much rather enjoy their leisure time on hobbies or with family/friends.
In terms of charity cleaning services, there are people who clean hoarder's houses or landscape unruly yards for free on YouTube... ;)
If the government gives out free money people will pocket it. Should not be controversial.
As for why: for purpose, for praise, for community, for mental health, for trade/contribution, for skill building, etc. Loads of examples of this already. Maybe none of these things are attractive to you but I don't think that's universal.
Like I said, it's just trying to add to the default UBI, not getting everyone volunteering in their community or else.
For free on YouTube in exchange for ad revenue
Also, it’s fascinating that you say “no benefit to the taxpayer” as if the taxpayer not having to work is somehow not a benefit?
A conversation that starts like this is not going to go well.
The vast majority of people's passions are partying, sex, alcohol/drugs, watching sports, gossiping, generally wasting time. Things that mostly
This whole line of thought to me is embarrassingly clueless, naive and basically childish.
It is just mind blowing to me how smart people can't see what a bubble they live in.
I almost suspect, the higher a person's IQ, the more susceptible they are to living in a bubble that basically has nothing to do with the majority of people with an IQ of 100.
I imagine just like with existing benefits, the majority of people wouldn't feel great about being on UBI doing nothing, and they would pursue something that gives them a better social standing, a better sense of purpose, a good challenge, whatever motivates an individual. It's why lots of people do volunteer work, work on important open source software, and so on. Sure, there's outliers that actually proudly slack off, but you don't address specific problems with generic solutions.
But more importantly, having the _option_ to fall back on benefits means people need to take fewer risks to pursue their talents and likely be of more value to society than if they did whatever puts food on the table today. Case in point: People born into a family that can finance them through college are more likely to become engineers than people born into poor households. On the flip side, some people do white collar jobs vs something like being a medic to uphold their standard of living from the higher salary, not out of preference.
I think it would need careful management, but I believe there's every reason to be optimistic.
People work for money. If a job has no pay, you can't expect it to get done.
We need people to actually run hospitals, produce food, construct shelter/infrastructure, provide childcare/education, etc.
It’s a classic economic blunder that dictatorships love to make:
1. Create money & rack up debt.
2. Produce nothing.
3. Create inflationary crisis and exacerbate wealth inequality.
4. Highlight your good intentions and relish your new position as champion of the people.
And why do you need money at all in that scenario, at least for the basic items the UBI intends to make affordable to all? Why not just make them free and available to everyone?
No UBI proposal I'm aware of proposes UBI replaces salaries or is high enough to satisfy everyone. The "B" is for basic. Most people are not satisfied with earning a basic salary.
I know a few people with small businesses in various manufacturing industries. They all had a really hard time finding enough people to work while stimulus checks were going out.
People wouldn't make quite as much, but they were happy to stay home and have the basics for "free" rather than have a job.
Historically, jobs or professions always existed around the intrinsic motivation of the person working and around the needs of the society around that person.
So you could become a poet, but if you do not write poems that people like you would starve. Or you could become a farmer and provide the best apples in your city and you will earn a more than deserve income.
That's why free economies have developed historically so much better than any centrally planned economy.