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I don't know if it's made an impression, but I've had a few people at a loss as to how to respond to the assertion that Basic.Income would just be more.of what we're already doing. We already use tax revenue to fund environmental protection for everyone. We already use tax revenue to fund police protection for everyone. This would just be using tax revenue to supplement income for everyone. It's just another public policy which research suggests would be immensely beneficial to society.
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Jan 6, 2016 04:23
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GunnerJ posted:I figured it was code, sure. I can also see how someone might not like this kind of thing going to people who are already living on "free income" from private sources but I don't know how many such people there really are that this would be an actual systemic/fiscal problem. In those cases, I think it would be better to apply the minimum income as a tax break; this could (and maybe should) also be applied to working peoples' taxes. Code? The " minimum income will specially help creatives and help people live at leisure without working " was something actually mentioned pages back. That's what I was talking about in my post, I'm sorry for reading the thread I guess. Yes, figuring out who gets minimum income and who doesn't is not the easiest thing to do. But I think that raising the floor equally won't bring equality. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 05:28
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wiregrind posted:Code? The " minimum income will specially help creatives and help leisure " was something actually mentioned pages back. So, sorry for reading the thread I guess. GunnerJ posted:What the hell does "creatives who don't want to work" even mean? If they don't want to create, in what sense are they "creatives?" wiregrind posted:Yes, figuring out who gets minimum income and who doesn't is not the easiest thing to do. No, it's really very simple: "everyone does." That is the what the entire concept is.
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Jan 6, 2016 05:31
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GunnerJ posted:No, it's really very simple: "everyone does." That is the what the entire concept is. I referenced creatives just because it was set as an example before in here. It could be anyone who, at present without minimum income, already has a choice between working or not. Or even who has a choice of what kind of work they will do. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 05:37
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wiregrind posted:Code? The " minimum income will specially help creatives and help people live at leisure without working " was something actually mentioned pages back. That's what I was talking about in my post, I'm sorry for reading the thread I guess. As with progressive taxation, the marginal utility of the dollar is the reason that providing an income to all will increase equality of standard of living. The rich will hardly notice the increase while the poor will be hugely benefited. Edit: And it sidesteps the issue of a perverse incentive against low-wage work due to no one wanting to work unless the resulting income significantly exceeds the minimum income. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 05:43
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Jazerus posted:As with progressive taxation, the marginal utility of the dollar is the reason that providing an income to all will increase equality of standard of living. The rich will hardly notice the increase while the poor will be hugely benefited. wiregrind fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 05:49
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wiregrind posted:I think it will just bring up the people who are already surviving, and those resources would be better utilized somewhere else on people who really need help.That's my criticism to this concept. If people are already surviving they will have more discretionary income, and can spend more and thus contribute more tax. In the UK, about 20% of any handout will immediately be returned to the treasury in the form of VAT on purchased goods. Extra money creates extra opportunities to part people from their money and thus extra jobs, and that money will eventually again be recouped in tax somewhere down the line, as most monetary motion incurs tax at some point. But as said, 10k a year is far more useful to someone on 15k a year, than it is to someone on 150k a year. And there are far more people on 15k than 150k. wiregrind posted:I had not seen it this way. This makes sense as long as the min income increaseses according to the costs of living. Since it could get balanced off if prices go up. If necessary you could combine it with price caps. And besides, there is that wonderful free market competition thing that will supposedly keep prices down as companies compete against each other for a share of the new income. You can honestly sell mincome pretty easily as a business subsidy that businesses have to work for. You're creating customers by giving people the ability to spend. It's up to business to figure out how to get them to spend. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 05:51
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wiregrind posted:I think it will just bring up the people who are already surviving, and those resources would be better utilized somewhere else on people who really need help.That's my criticism to this concept. Yes, that's what I mean. What you're saying here is an objection to the concept itself, while what you were saying before, that "it'll be hard to figure out who gets it," is a misunderstanding of the concept. Figuring out who gets a basic or minimum income is not even a thing you have to do by definition. What you would prefer is something other than basic income. That said: the presupposition here seems to be that we can't afford, due to scarcity of resources whose allocation needs to be prioritized, to give everyone a basic income. If that is the case, the varied merits of basic income vs. means-tested welfare are irrelevant because only one of them is feasible. I guess though that you could also be saying that even if we could afford to pay everyone a basic income it would be better to not do so because it would be unethical for some reason to allocate resources in that way (rather than needing to make a choice due to scarcity), but your reasons for this don't make sense to me. I am not concerned about this program benefiting those who "are already surviving" because ensuring survival is not the only worthy goal of the program. If we can allow those who aren't surviving to survive and also help those who are surviving, then we should, because "survival" in the labor market is precarious. quote:I referenced creatives just because it was set as an example before. It could be anyone who, without minimum income even present already has a choice between working or not. Or even who has a choice of what kind of work they will do. OK. It was just kind of weird that you would specifically say that "the right way to spend such welfare would be in anything except on creatives who don't want to work," because that made it sound like you've got some special animus against professional artists, writers, musicians, etc. who don't seem to enjoy their profession. What you're saying here is also seems kind of weird though. Unless I am missing something, you're now talking about "people who don't want to work, but for some reason don't have any need to anyway." Like I said before, I can see how it would seem like a waste to be cutting checks to such people, but I am unconvinced that there are enough of them for it to be a fiscal issue justifying the extra administrative overhead to figure out who these people are and exclude them. That pragmatic consideration is the only reason I would care. It would probably be easier to just implement it as a income tax credit (if an unusually large one) with the stipulation that if it erases an individual's tax burden entirely, then any remainder of the credit just gets sent as a check. In essence people who have no other income would have the whole of the credit paid to them, people with low-to-middling incomes up to a certain amount (i.e., whatever income requires them to pay taxes less than the basic income amount) would have pay no income taxes and then get a bonus "rebate" on top of it, and people with very high incomes would see it as a deductible. At the point where there would seem to be so little benefit in terms of social welfare to subsidize someone due to how rich they are that doing so strikes you as perverse, the amount of the basic income would basically be irrelevant to their finances anyway and would not have an appreciable impact on their tax burden so there's no real pragmatic case for caring about it. (ETA: this is already sort of how it works, but the "basic deduction" is nowhere near enough to qualify as a basic income in the sense of being something people can live on, even if it's very spartan living, and you do have to have some kind of taxable income to benefit from it.) (ETA2: Thinking it over I am not sure why I thought this would be a needed course of action because if the basic income is untaxed income then cutting everyone a check is mathematically the same drat thing.) GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 06:13
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Isn't a negative income tax better than a simple mincome?
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Jan 6, 2016 07:57
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Mincome would be interesting for my friends the poor folks of the dirty south. There are already dozens of communities within an hr drive that would completely fall apart without Disability payments, the EITC, and Social security. The median household income for my neighborhood is well under 10K (20K if you're white, 6K if you're black). A mincome would be a complete game changer. It could go a couple of ways. People would buy a lot more drugs and booze at first. A lot of people would finally have the means to up and leave for somewhere with more opportunities. We would probably see a lot more small-time entrepreneurship. The jobs that are available here are pretty lovely. I think most people would opt out of work all together as you can get by on 10k here. We'd see a lot less kids growing up in dilapidated old houses who rarely got a chance to eat at home. I think we'll see something more akin to an increase in EITC rather than a mincome, however. It's a lot more politically feasible, and we already have the infrastructure and bureaucracy in place.
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Jan 6, 2016 08:23
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Isn't a negative income tax better than a simple mincome? how do you calculate this when you don't have an income?
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Jan 6, 2016 12:30
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Isn't a negative income tax better than a simple mincome? No, that just encourages employers to pay their employees less and less money. Minimum income needs to go to everyone for it to be worth anything.
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Jan 6, 2016 15:25
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ChairMaster posted:No, that just encourages employers to pay their employees less and less money. Minimum income needs to go to everyone for it to be worth anything. Even better if a Mincome could push everyone (even those who get nothing without benefits) into a minimal tax bracket, allowing for official bodies to more easily spot people who avoid/evade paying taxes through whatever methods.
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Jan 6, 2016 15:37
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^^^ You could still do some work under the table though, I don't see how reporting your mincome would affect that. There was a (sort-of) mincome experiment in Canada years ago and there are some articles about it: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html Unfortunately I don't have the time to research it too deeply now. Some of the claims in the articles are that it eliminated poverty (duh) and didn't remove the incentive to work. One thing that's not particular clear is the cost of that program, which is kind of a big deal.
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Jan 6, 2016 16:19
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ChairMaster posted:No, that just encourages employers to pay their employees less and less money. Minimum income needs to go to everyone for it to be worth anything. They're slightly different implementations of the same thing. Below a certain income you're a net receiver, while above that income you're a net payer. Min income still has the same crossover point somewhere. And by the way, that crossover is probably middle middle class at the highest. Which is why when we talk about political consequences they're significant. Middle class people are going to be paying for this.
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Jan 6, 2016 17:53
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:Why not have mincome be paid out to everyone regardless of income? Make it so the system benefits you while benefiting everyone else as well so there is no distinction or income caps to segregate recipients from non-recipients. This also would eliminate the need for means-testing or verification which serve to shame the poor who have to continuously prove that they are, in fact, poor and hurts those who would otherwise make just above the income limit that, in practice, keeps people stuck in a poverty trap as happens with SSDI. If the mincome is the same for everyone, and there is no tax cap, obviously the rich will perceive themselves as being at a major disadvantage. SS works because there's a cap. Good luck getting the necessary tax for a mincome through a capped tax.
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Jan 6, 2016 19:02
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Radbot posted:If the mincome is the same for everyone, and there is no tax cap, obviously the rich will perceive themselves as being at a major disadvantage. The rich always percieve themselves as being at a major disadvantage, that's why you don't listen to them.
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Jan 6, 2016 19:05
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Radbot posted:If the mincome is the same for everyone, and there is no tax cap, obviously the rich will perceive themselves as being at a major disadvantage. Right, SS is conceptually entirely different. Min income is a wealth transfer from rich to poor. It has to be paid for by the rich to functional at all. SS is a retirement plan with benefits theoretically tied to past contributions. It doesn't really move wealth across class.
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Jan 6, 2016 19:48
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When SS was initially created, it was a huge transfer to poor people. It was also not the universal program we see today, and excluded several (mostly black) occupations. That is to say, we can create a more moderate version of the program and as long as it is done correctly, make changes over the program's life to make it more universal.
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Jan 6, 2016 20:20
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Paper With Lines posted:The point about work being a key part of Americanism is good but I think the bigger hurdle is that a minimum income would be be instantly characterized as welfare unless careful steps were taken to prevent such a characterization. It is a subtle distinction, but an important one. When Nixon proposed a version of the minimum income in 1969, the main obstacle to its passage was when conservatives started framing it as welfare. Once a program is viewed as welfare, the politics change drastically. The closest thing the US has to a minimum income now, the Earned Income Tax Credit, has pretty deep bipartisan support but after President Clinton's 1993 made big increases to the credit as part of his welfare reform agenda, conservatives started going after it with the same strategies they used to blackify cash assistance and degrade public support for that. Okay, so label it the 'Freedom Stipend' then. It would quite literally free you to do whatever you want!  Opening up a universal mincome would also be great for helping spouses escape financially abusive relationships that one or the other spouse use to manipulate the other and keep them trapped in an abusive relationship. It would have certainly helped my underskilled/undereducated mother escape from my abusive dad, at the least. 
Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 23:47
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:Okay, so label it the 'Freedom Stipend' then. It would quite literally free you to do whatever you want! I'm really sorry about your family situation, man. I actually think the mincome could help stop abuse in other ways as well - I remember reading how domestic violence dropped in the Canadian area where mincome was tested, and while I'd bet part of that was due to people being able to escape like you said, I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of it came from the reduction in stress all around. Sometimes people are abusive assholes due to simply being assholes, but I do think a lot of the time it's lashing out due to feelings of stress and powerlessness, especially in the workplace.
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Jan 7, 2016 03:54
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asdf32 posted:They're slightly different implementations of the same thing. That's part of why it's useful to use it to phase out other programs and have less bureaucracy about income. Edit- It'd be intriguing to see how mincome would affect population.
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Jan 7, 2016 05:24
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In the "everybody gets Mincome" plan, would kids get Mincome? Maybe some kind of trust situation? (gold fringed flags optional)
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Jan 7, 2016 06:12
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:In the "everybody gets Mincome" plan, would kids get Mincome? Maybe some kind of trust situation? (gold fringed flags optional) IIRC this was Thomas Paine's plan, but in reality it's more likely that they won't. You'd have to me an adult to qualify as prior to that you're an economic dependent on a parent or guardian. It's "universal" in the same sense that suffrage is, although maybe there's a case to be made that Paine had the right of it.
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Jan 7, 2016 06:16
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Isn't a negative income tax better than a simple mincome? If your goal is to transfer more of the nation's income to the lower working classes, then yes. If your goal is to create an expensive entitlement system that allows perfectly able bodied people to work less at the expense of others, not so much. ChairMaster posted:No, that just encourages employers to pay their employees less and less money. Minimum income needs to go to everyone for it to be worth anything. And don't forget to cut your nose to spite your face! Yes, a portion of a negative income tax might be captured by employers. Maybe. There's no conclusive evidence that that would happen to a significant degree. But so what? They're the ones paying for it in taxes, and they still won't get all of it, or even most of it. Compensation is a matter of bargaining power, not whether or not the government is subsidizing low wages. Typical Pubbie fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 08:37
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There are so many more people who need jobs than there are jobs to be filled that it is outright ridiculous to think that employers would not lower their wages to as much of a degree as possible in a negative income tax situation. There will ALWAYS be more people to replace some dick who thinks he's entitled to a living wage. Always. In a minimum income situation an employer would be forced to pay a wage that makes the job actually worth doing, because nobody would be living in the constant fear of homelessness and starvation that they live with now. The only people who prefer negative income tax seem to be under the farcical impression that there is some kind of inherent value in "work" and that people's value only comes from how much of their lives they can waste by standing around doing whatever some moneyed dickhead tells them to do. gently caress that forever.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:01
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ChairMaster posted:There are so many more people who need jobs than there are jobs to be filled This is a problem to be solved by collective bargaining. ChairMaster posted:In a minimum income situation an employer would be forced to pay a wage that makes the job actually worth doing, because nobody would be living in the constant fear of homelessness and starvation that they live with now. What's to stop employers from saying that since everyone is receiving mincome they should be allowed to pay people sub-minimum wage? After all, the workers are already getting their "living wage" from the government. Cutting wages because of the negative income tax would be a dicey prospect for employers because not everyone would receive a NIT or the same benefit of NIT. Market forces still apply and we are back to the same problem and solution as before: the need for collective bargaining. ChairMaster posted:The only people who prefer negative income tax seem to be under the farcical impression that there is some kind of inherent value in "work" and that people's value only comes from how much of their lives they can waste by standing around doing whatever some moneyed dickhead tells them to do. gently caress that forever. It is extremely important for the health and long term viability of any entitlement program that people continue working to the extent necessary to foster the system both economically and socially. Typical Pubbie fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 09:11
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:In the "everybody gets Mincome" plan, would kids get Mincome? Maybe some kind of trust situation? (gold fringed flags optional)
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Jan 7, 2016 09:12
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Typical Pubbie posted:This is a problem to be solved by collective bargaining. That's not a real thing and hasn't been for almost three decades and you know it. Typical Pubbie posted:What's to stop employers from saying that since everyone is receiving mincome they should be allowed to pay people sub-minimum wage? The fact that nobody would be forced to work those jobs anymore. You don't seem to understand the inherent coercion that's keeping the entirely of the working class in line. With literally no safety net whatsoever there is nothing to stop you from being discarded as homeless trash and left to die on the streets if you don't have a job for long enough. This is not the case in a scenario where everyone is able to pay for housing and food by virtue of being a human being with citizenship in a country that doesn't suck rear end. Typical Pubbie posted:It is extremely important for the health and long term viability of any entitlement program that people continue to work as much as possible (within reason). Aside from the obvious facts that work has no inherent value, and is no longer worth nearly as much as it was in the past due to modern technology, minimum income is not meant to pay for a luxurious lifestyle, it's meant to keep people alive. You are literally arguing in favor of letting people die for the heinous crime of not working.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:17
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Work has value, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it. The problem is the absence of any bargaining power at the low end of the wage scale, combined with the work just not being very valuable to begin with. We already have a workable solution: Expand the EITC.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:22
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Work itself has no value, and the middle class only exists as a sort of grandfathered-in system in which their owners await the day they retire so they can be replaced by machines that do the same job for a tenth of the price. People pay for work because it allows them to make more money for themselves. Nothing more, nothing less. Filling the pockets of the people in charge of our society is not a goal which i find noble or valuable in any way, and expanding the EITC is nothing but a band-aid at best, which does nothing but give the rich an easier time exploiting the working class, who will remain to live in existential terror of homelessness and starvation until the day the day the whole thing falls apart. The way you use the word "entitlement" frankly disgusts me, and I think it is reprehensible that you disagree with the notion that that other people, your fellow countrymen even, are not inherently entitled to food and shelter.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:33
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Typical Pubbie posted:Work has value, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it. The problem is the absence of any bargaining power at the low end of the wage scale, combined with the work just not being very valuable to begin with. We already have a workable solution: Expand the EITC. Work doesn't really have any inherent value. And people only pay for work because they are required or forced to, because things like slavery, indentured, and other forced labor activities aren't quite as easy to explicitly get away with. Sometimes. But you are right there is a tremendous power unbalances in play but collective bargaining isn't a catch-all solution. Also, "OMG ENTITLEMENTS" Those nasty, nasty think-their-people poors. How dare they. Government only exists to solve the problems and concerns of the upper class and rich, not ~yoooou~ things. Eww.
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Jan 7, 2016 09:43
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ChairMaster posted:There are so many more people who need jobs than there are jobs to be filled that it is outright ridiculous to think that employers would not lower their wages to as much of a degree as possible in a negative income tax situation. There will ALWAYS be more people to replace some dick who thinks he's entitled to a living wage. Always. In a minimum income situation an employer would be forced to pay a wage that makes the job actually worth doing, because nobody would be living in the constant fear of homelessness and starvation that they live with now. Why do you think negative income tax is different than minimum income? Second, whether any plan impacts wages depends on how it impacts the desire to work. If less people want to work wages will go up in response to lower supply. But if everyone still wants to work, it will have little impact.
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Jan 7, 2016 13:57
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Typical Pubbie posted:What's to stop employers from saying that since everyone is receiving mincome they should be allowed to pay people sub-minimum wage? After all, the workers are already getting their "living wage" from the government. Cutting wages because of the negative income tax would be a dicey prospect for employers because not everyone would receive a NIT or the same benefit of NIT. Market forces still apply and we are back to the same problem and solution as before: the need for collective bargaining. asdf32 posted:Why do you think negative income tax is different than minimum income?
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Jan 7, 2016 14:30
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Not under most definitions that I'm aware of. quote:In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a progressive income tax system where people earning below a certain amount receive supplemental pay from the government instead of paying taxes to the government. Such a system has been discussed by economists but never fully implemented. It was developed by British politician Juliet Rhys-Williams in the 1940s[1] and later by United States economist Milton Friedman.[2][3][4]
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Jan 7, 2016 15:10
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Nowadays we generally call that tax credits as implemented in the UK.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:11
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Typical Pubbie posted:If your goal is to transfer more of the nation's income to the lower working classes, then yes. If your goal is to create an expensive entitlement system that allows perfectly able bodied people to work less at the expense of others, not so much. Can you come up with some figures that would convince someone pragmatically minded about this to give a poo poo? Because I don't give a poo poo about your moralistic fist-shaking at parasitic entitled bums leeching off the virtuous hardworkers. It strikes me as just inherently unlikely that people are going to stop working en masse. People are going to want things that the minimum cannot provide and businesses are going to want to sell things to people, like always. As long as this holds, people will work for better things in life. Just not to survive. Actual in-the-real-world experiments with basic income and other similar programs do not support the idea that it results in mass dropouts from the workforce. When people did stop working in these experiments it tended to be so they could focus on school or caretaking responsibilities for family, or because they were straight up child laborers. These are unambiguously good things. Whatever other problems there could be with this concept, this does not look like one of them.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:18
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If you are using a negative income tax to implement a universal basic income then there was no reason to distinguish between the two in a post.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:18
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Berk Berkly posted:Work doesn't really have any inherent value. You're right. It has value because people pay for it. Berk Berkly posted:Also, "OMG ENTITLEMENTS" Yes, I'm poor shaming by advocating means tested welfare and EITC which specifically targets the poor with income transfers paid for by taxes on people who can afford them the most. A lot of people in this thread that are extremely passionate about sucking the labor of the middle class to pay for a blanket entitlement program with no real advantage over means tested welfare. Inferior Third Season posted:With a mincome sufficient to cover basic necessities, what is the incentive for people to accept sub-minimum wage jobs in numbers large enough that the wages could be suppressed to below where they are now? Take away the employers' ability to pose an existential threat to their employees, and I think you'll find that the actual market rate for lovely jobs will be much higher than current minimum wage. Sounds like a drat good excuse to hire transient workers and non-citizens who don't get paid mincome. And realistically mincome is unlikely to cover the bare essentials for everyone. There will still be desperate people out there willing to work for the bare minimum to pay off their debts/child support/drug addiction/what have you. I do agree that mincome probably would support some rise in wages but not to the extent that its proponents are hoping for. Typical Pubbie fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 15:45
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Do you or do you not think that human beings have an intrinsic right to food and shelter.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:47
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