Topic: Should UBI Replace all Welfare Systems? - page 3. (Read 1349 times)

I'm waiting for you to announce the annual competition where all these people you feel don't have the right to exist in your utopia, can compete for enough food to scrape by.
I wonder would you even say "May the odds be ever in your favor"

So of these 500 million gods who is going to be performing manual labor roles, fixing roads, or clearing the sewers? Not the gods surely!!! Oh wait you'll have a hardy group that have survived their death sentance to bestow a "lifetime of servitude upon". Sounds great  

In case you only look forward and do not consider history as an indication of human behavior, this generally leads to the "peasant" or "undesirables" giving their lives the same value you do while hoards of them give that life to drag the "gods" into the streets and ......

Wow, I wonder where my check is... must be a huge amount of backpay, here checky, checky, checky.

Or they do what they can in a system they do not feel they can advance in, while still wanting to provide for themselves or their family. Would you rather they quit and seek welfare? Some of those people do find a drive or see an opportunity and find a way to be happy working a 9-5 or some variation. I was about to say these are not the individuals we are here to discuss, but imagine what a UBI could do for them, pretty much( insert all benefits previously stated)

I have worked around these robots, they are great because usually you need to employ 2 people for each of them to be able to provide mechanical repairs or technical troubleshooting.

I am totally with you on this. I'm not sure if standards of living would be the right way to put it. I think it's just a culture of of needless consumerism. I remember really an article of a family of 4 that comfortable lives on $25,000 per year (though they make more) compared with a family of 4 where the father is a doctor and the mother is a dentist. I think the latter family was making over $350,000/year. Of course the latter family was also that it just wasn't enough to finish building their million dollar home and pay for their kid's private schools and nannies etc. It's just ridiculous how people don't even think twice to spend more than they earn.

I had another idea that I think may apply well to all this. What if there was just a limit placed on how much you could work to, say 20 hours/week? There would immediately be twice as many jobs available. We could raise wages and focus on increasing productivity. We already produce much more than we need and waste so much.

"Universal" actually.


It already pretty much works that way. The majority of world's population live in shit (and refuse to die contrary to your expectations) compared to the top 500 million so that doesn't solve anything.

You know what the U stands for in UBI?

Unconditional


Anyway if i was the world leader i would just remove welfare completely and sent all the shitters to mexico, africa or some other shit 3rd world country where they die after a while.

Population is too big anyway.

Better let 500 million people live as gods then 7 billion people like beggars.

That western 6 year old mentality of everyone deserves love, peace and money is retarded.


 


Edit: Whoever doesnt agree is 100% on welfare

Edit2: @theymos Only stupid people have soul-sucking 9-5  jobs which doesnt earn them enough.
Its no wonder anyway because half of the population has an iq less then 90.

Good paid manual labor is mostly done by robot nowadays.

Thanks for mentioning. Even more relevant to the topic is the most social security program is practically a Ponzi scheme. Straight out off Paul Samuelson's mouth...

“The beauty about social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in. . . . Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population. More important, with real incomes growing at some 3 per cent per year, the taxable base upon which benefits rest in any period are much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired. . . . A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived.”

Right, that's why while I think that it's a good idea in principle, it'll probably never be done, and almost certainly never be done in a way which is a net positive. The point is to reduce the size of government (in number of regulations, government employees, etc.) and encourage some amount of personal responsibility (at least the responsibility to ask private charities for money if necessary), but instead you're going to end up with a huge mess of limitations and exceptions which would rival the US tax code in size.

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I'd be theoretically OK IMO to progressively phase out UBI at very high income levels, but I wouldn't particularly support that because it requires the government to know your income, and I strongly favor eliminating the income tax. Taxation is theft and should be totally eliminated, but income tax is the worst type; it'd be better to replace income tax with sales tax and/or property tax. (If there is an income tax, then you can do negative income tax, a similar system to UBI supported by Milton Friedman.)

The amount should not depend on marital status. If two or more people are able to have a better standard of living by living together, then that's fine. Charles Murray suggests that his proposed $13k/year is not usually enough to live alone, and would require either marriage or rooming.

The amount should not depend on location. If costs are too high where you live, then you should move. If costs are low where you live, then that's fine. People without much money should go to low-cost areas; it's like supply & demand.

Minimum wage is basically universally agreed amongst economists to be counter-productive to everyone. The only thing that it can possibly do is prevent two people from making a deal which they otherwise would've considered worthwhile. It decreases employment and has very little effect on wages. With UBI, even the (totally false) justification for minimum wage that it's necessary for people to get enough money to live would be removed.


This is something that also bothers me. People always frame prosperity/welfare as needing to find a well-paying 9-to-5 job, but is it really necessary for people to work so much? 100 years ago it was common for a single person to support two adults and several children on his own, but now it's common for two parents to work full-time and still feel squeezed. Standards of living have increased, of course, and materialism also plays a big factor, but the whole culture seems wrong. It's probably also due in large part to the government uselessly consuming so much of the economy.

Especially with increasing automation, people are going to have to spend more time on free-form, entrepreneurial sorts of things, and that's good. There's no need to force people into soul-sucking 9-to-5 jobs. Already, I suspect that if you're earning less than $30k/year in the US, then you could probably make more money by becoming an independent contractor of some sort, even if you're completely unskilled.

I fear that governments will create near-pointless 9-to-5 jobs as a form of welfare (like eg. the New Deal CCC) in order to guarantee a "living wage", which would be just unbelievably stupid. Just send people a check and the vast majority of them will on their own do much more useful and fulfilling work.