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I Think People Should be Paid not to Work, if That's What They Want: Switzerland to vote


The Anti-Targ

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Having a guaranteed annual income was in the election platform of the third party here in Canada (a party that actually led the polls for the first half of the campaign).

Let's say, for example, that everyone was guaranteed an annual amount of $20,000.  That would eliminate a whole variety of social support programs, like welfare and unemployment and student loans.  The people who think they can survive on $20,000 wouldn't work, but the expectation is that most people want a better life than what $20,000 would provide.  They would have the $20k as a basic security amount and work to improve themselves.  As they made more money, the $20k would be gradually taxed back.  I think by the time you earned $60k all of it would be gone.

I think it is a workable idea.  I believe at least one country in Europe has a guaranteed annual income, one of the Scandinavian countries, perhaps.

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[drunk post]  Topics like this are fucking hilarious because they come from Middle Class People who clearly have no idea what it is like to be Poor, Working Poor, or Wealthy.

Here's the thing:  People are People.  Rich, Poor, or Middle Class, they are all people.  My observation both from life and from TV is that people who have no purpose tend to create drama just to make their lives more interesting because they are fucking bored.

I have respect for those who try their hardest to support themselves and still come up short.  I have no respect for whiners.  We cannot create a bureaucratic system which can tell the difference.

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How does this system sustain itself ? Genuine query

Tree money. Tree money for everyone!!!  Has to be because income tax receipts are sure to plummet meaning this will become hard to afford.

Also, inflation!!!  Doesnt that happen when free money is given out? Or even stagflation, i think its called. Unemployment rises (whos going to do a shitty job when you get money for nothing) and cost of everything rises (value of currency decreases cause people have more). 

My economics is relatively poor so i would be interested to hear an actual economists perspective.

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[drunk post]  Topics like this are fucking hilarious because they come from Middle Class People who clearly have no idea what it is like to be Poor, Working Poor, or Wealthy.

Here's the thing:  People are People.  Rich, Poor, or Middle Class, they are all people.  My observation both from life and from TV is that people who have no purpose tend to create drama just to make their lives more interesting because they are fucking bored.

I have respect for those who try their hardest to support themselves and still come up short.  I have no respect for whiners.  We cannot create a bureaucratic system which can tell the difference.

You have no idea of my socioeconomic background. I do come from a working poor background on one side of my family and I have relationships with poor people and unemployed people. My family runs the whole spectrum of long term unemployed to living in a castle in the South of France. So don't presume to know people's experience.

I don't know who people are hanging around with but the vast majority of people I know do a lot of work for which they are not paid. The garden, they make things, they volunteer. A lot of the time they work harder at the things for which they don't get paid than the things for which they do get paid. If the assumption is that people are basically lazy and selfish at heart then such a system would collapse under the weight of too many people receiving an income and not enough people generation wealth. But if the assumption is that people are basically social and wish to be active and useful, then the system will work because few people will elect not to do income generating work for long periods of time. The experience people have of lazy, whining welfare sponges is symptomatic of a socioeconomic system which people find depressing and oppressive. In society which has a far more positive emotional influence on people the number of people who are genuinely indolent in nature will be so few that their total lifelong dependancy on a tax payer funded life will not be an economic drag on society. And in the end they are still part of the money-go-round.

I think human nature is is to be useful productive and to positively contribute to society. What we see currently is a distortion of that nature which makes people think human nature is the opposite of these things in most people apart from themselves.

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How does this system sustain itself ? Genuine query

It would be a replacement of all of the current government aid programs and tax subsidies. Keep in mind that in the US, more than 50 million people already get means-tested aid (see the census report in the link) and another 59 million get Social Security. In addition, there is a long list of tax breaks which are mathematically equivalent to government aid for the wealthy (though not everybody agrees that they are morally the same). In addition, taxes on those who are better off would need to be increased.

Universal basic income does imply some redistribution of wealth, but that is not its main purpose or merit. The point is to move past the idea that there is something wrong with a human being who is not employed. Right now, there are a few acceptable reasons for not having a job (e.g. one is too old or too ill), but except for these, people who are not employed are considered either lazy or worthless or both. This attitude is not going to be helpful going forward -- there just won't be enough jobs. The labor force participation rate is not going to go back up -- if anything, the current decrease will only accelerate together with automation picking up speed.

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I believe this is a policy of the UK Green Party, and was in their election manifesto. People more knowledgeable than I about economics said it was unworkable.

I think the Greens themselves admitted it was unworkable when somebody had the gall to ask, "So how you going to pay for that?" and the Greens said, "Well we aren't going to get elected so we don't need to think about that Er, it's a long term aspiration."

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Scot,

 

such proposals usually set the Basic Income around the existential minimum. You'd still have incentive to work if you want to be able to afford anything beyond your base necessities. We do know nowadays how to calculate the existential minimum, so we should be able to set a Basic Income that still motivates to work if one wants to finance any hobbies, own their own home or save up for a new car. 

 

The main problem with the proposal in Switzerland was that it was restricted to Swiss citizens. In a country with about 20% residents without citizenship, that would have immediately created a large underclass that doesn't benefit. Migration, residency status and citizenship are the problems that I consider the most pressing for the proposal; in itself it almost certainly has merit.

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TAT,

What if your assumptions are wrong and Basic is set at a level where people lose the incentive to work?

believe the world would be a better place if people did not have an incentive to work.

Most jobs are already pretty pointless. It's mostly producing stuff nobody really needs, convincing people that they need stuff that they don't need, getting the raw materials for stuff nobody really needs . On the side we damage our environment, harm other lifeforms and fellow people by doing that. Jobs which do things like turning money into more money are also pretty pointless but at least if it's only computer based stuff it does not really cause a lot of harm.

But right now it looks like in the future machines will do these pointless tasks, just more efficient.  

It will be fun to watch the 1% and their robots servants destroy the planet, meanwhile we will just be poor as dirt... wait no I would rather have decent basic income. :P

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Ser Scot A Ellison, have you checked lately how much of the "wealth" generated in todays economy goes to the actual people raising food?

 

Here is an interesting, though flawed bit from the guardian on how "AI" will change and automation has changed economy.

“The poster child for automation is agriculture,” says Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI and the novel Pandora’s Brain. “In 1900, 40% of the US labour force worked in agriculture. By 1960, the figure was a few per cent. And yet people had jobs; the nature of the jobs had changed.

“But then again, there were 21 million horses in the US in 1900. By 1960, there were just three million. The difference was that humans have cognitive skills – we could learn to do new things. But that might not always be the case as machines get smarter and smarter.”

What if we’re the horses to AI’s humans? To those who don’t watch the industry closely, it’s hard to see how quickly the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence is advancing.

< Stupid examples of smart machines (as if horses woul crash into trees all the time). >

The longer you look, the more you find computers displacing simple work. And the harder it becomes to find jobs for everyone.

So how much impact will robotics and AI have on jobs, and on society? Carl Benedikt Frey, who with Michael Osborne in 2013 published the seminal paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? – on which the BoA report draws heavily – says that he doesn’t like to be labelled a “doomsday predictor”.

He points out that even while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focus more on services and interaction with and between people. “The fastest-growing occupations in the past five years are all related to services,” he tells the Observer. “The two biggest are Zumba instructor and personal trainer.”

Frey observes that technology is leading to a rarification of leading-edge employment, where fewer and fewer people have the necessary skills to work in the frontline of its advances. “In the 1980s, 8.2% of the US workforce were employed in new technologies introduced in that decade,” he notes. “By the 1990s, it was 4.2%. For the 2000s, our estimate is that it’s just 0.5%. That tells me that, on the one hand, the potential for automation is expanding – but also that technology doesn’t create that many new jobs now compared to the past.”

This worries Chace. “There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else,” he says. “Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us.

“I think our best hope going forward is figuring out how to live in an economy of radical abundance, where machines do all the work, and we basically play.”

Arguably, we might be part of the way there already; is a dance fitness programme like Zumba anything more than adult play? But, as Chace says, a workless lifestyle also means “you have to think about a universal income” – a basic, unconditional level of state support.

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In some sense we have the makings of this system in place now.  It is not called out as a straight payment but many states are getting to the point where people are getting 45k to 50k in assistance.  Not exactly easy street but its good enough to get by.

I think it would be an interesting experiment. I suspect the divide between the skilled workers (valuable) and unskilled workers (low wage) would widen even more. Other interesting things might happen as well. I could see the black market economy growing a lot in that type of economy. If you are getting paid 40k a year to not work and earn another 30k or 40k by working under the table or side jobs then all of a sudden you are making a pretty good living versus a job at a restaurant.

 

What states are giving out that much in assistance, because I want to move there! When I was laid off, I got the MAX in unemployment benefits and that was $410 a week for 6 months.  When the unemployment ran out, and we got SNAP, it was about $350 a month

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At the most basic level are you saying that people who raise food owe the food they raise to those who didn't work to help raise it or offer compensation to those who did work for their effort?

This is an old argument which I suspect you've already heard multiple times, but the answer to your question is yes. This would not be true if the people who raise food could create it from nothing, but as things currently stand, to raise food they need land. They did not create the land, they monopolize its use and the amount of arable land is finite. Thus, it is not unjust that they owe some compensation to the people whom they deny use of the land. Obviously, the people who do not work should not get as much as the people who do, but they should get something.

Of course, in reality, machines took over agriculture many years ago. There are still some humans involved, but only a few of them. Automation is not something that is happening in the distant future. To a considerable extent, it has already happened and the other shoe is currently on its way down today.

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