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OwlFancier posted:Has it ever been balanced? I'll try to expand. By "balancing the budget" I mean paying attention to the government's ability to finance its debts. I don't think there's any religious importance to achieving zero government debt, but a debt/gdp ratio that is high and growing is a bad thing, to be avoided. Unless it's a temporary measure to fight the low part of the economic cycle-- one that is paired with opposite measures to fight the boom and bust part of the cycle. I don't think the government can finance large budget deficits indefinitely.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:45
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OwlFancier posted:Yes but there's a difference between the budget having to actually be balanced because of some inherent physical law, and the utility of presenting it as stable enough that people don't lose faith in the currency. In the context of continued growth running a deficit is fine. Separately, inflation reduces debt in real terms as well. The combination of these things makes it sustainable within limits.
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Jan 8, 2016 04:46
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asdf32 posted:The bold means that when we people speak in dollars they're really talking about the stuff dollars represent. You may have missed my post asdf32, so ill repost: I don't think this sentence parses? Could you rephrase? e: Maybe your sentence does parse, it just doesn't relate to my argument at all? My argument was: "We have excess medicine, food, and shelter. We just don't allocate it to the poor, thus poverty. Money can't be the barrier to these goods going to the poor, because money is an abstraction over real resources." How does "when speaking of dollars we mean the stuff dollars represent" disagree or disprove that sentence?
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Jan 8, 2016 04:52
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JeffersonClay posted:I'll try to expand. By "balancing the budget" I mean paying attention to the government's ability to finance its debts. I don't think there's any religious importance to achieving zero government debt, but a debt/gdp ratio that is high and growing is a bad thing, to be avoided. Unless it's a temporary measure to fight the low part of the economic cycle-- one that is paired with opposite measures to fight the boom and bust part of the cycle. I don't think the government can finance large budget deficits indefinitely. State debt doesn't work anything like consumer debt.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:57
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Rob Filter posted:You may have missed my post asdf32, so ill repost: You said two things. (1) Money is an abstraction layer over real resources, capital, and labor. (2) It's impossible for America to run out of money Both are true. But only for different senses of 'dollars'. Point #1 means that you're talking about real dollars. Like, "give everyone $30k dollars" = "give enough future-dollars to buy the sort of stuff that you could buy with $30k in 2016." Real dollars = an abstraction over a fixed amount of stuff. Point #2 only works if you're talking about nominal dollars. Like "give everyone papers that say 'thirty-thousand' on the front", regardless of how much inflation has devalued the money. The government can't run out of nominal dollars. We could, if we wanted, print a $1-Trillion note for each person in the US. The government can run out of real dollars. Obviously, the $1 Trillion notes won't mean that everyone could suddenly buy a super-yatch. There just aren't enough super-yatches out there.
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Jan 8, 2016 05:59
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Rob Filter posted:My argument was: "We have excess medicine, food, and shelter. We just don't allocate it to the poor, thus poverty. Money can't be the barrier to these goods going to the poor, because money is an abstraction over real resources." Yeah, that makes sense to me. You can physically measure the number of houses there are, number of cars, food per person, and see that there's more than enough for everyone. asdf32 posted:The problem with the proponents is that they seem to be underestimating the cost (no it probably wont' grow GDP) and overestimating the political feasibility. Oh it's hugely infeasible. But that's more an argument against our political system than it is the merits of mincome. We don't have a massive, revolutionary working class movement for the Democratic party to negotiate with and try to diminish, and they don't seem to want to give us nice stuff otherwise. If by cost you mean overhead, we're coming up on a century of experience with an income transfer program. SocSec is low overhead. If by cost you mean how much is taken out of paychecks, for the majority of people, more will be coming in than leaving, since mean income is greater than median income.
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Jan 8, 2016 06:16
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JeffersonClay posted:I'll try to expand. By "balancing the budget" I mean paying attention to the government's ability to finance its debts. I don't think there's any religious importance to achieving zero government debt, but a debt/gdp ratio that is high and growing is a bad thing, to be avoided. Unless it's a temporary measure to fight the low part of the economic cycle-- one that is paired with opposite measures to fight the boom and bust part of the cycle. I don't think the government can finance large budget deficits indefinitely. The only reason it can't happen in the US is because one of the two main political parties, with state and federal majorities that seem permanent thanks to gerrymandering, is absolutely fanatically focused on bankrupting the government by refusing to raise taxes after they've already been cut significantly, out of some petty spite for imagined welfare queens/<insert racial stereotype>. Yet that seems more like a peculiarity of US politics, rather than an insurmountable problem. More sane countries already seem to be heading in this direction.
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Jan 8, 2016 08:16
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Let's be fair, the Democrats have plenty of people like our thread's resident That Guy, who simply can't conceive of human life having value if it isn't spent laboring for capital. Mincome is currently a no-hoper on both sides of the aisle. But we can talk about it, and we can change minds, and we can build a better world for our great-great grandchildren. Which they'll need, because of the environmental apocalypse and all.
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Jan 8, 2016 08:28
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Let's be fair, the Democrats have plenty of people like our thread's resident That Guy, who simply can't conceive of human life having value if it isn't spent laboring for capital. The thing I found most objectionable about calling Typical Pubbie a "neocon" or whatever is that their shtick is stock-standard centrist Democrat hippie-punching.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:02
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JeffersonClay posted:There would be more labor demanded (because poor people consume more), and less labor supplied (because fewer people would work, or work as many hours). It's really good economic policy, to say nothing of its moral quality. I'm curious how you reconcile this statement. You foresee increasing demand met with contracting supply, and you consider that a good thing? Price inflation will eat away at the value of not only the mincome but the income of all working Americans. That sounds like bad economics and bad politics to me. GunnerJ posted:The thing I found most objectionable about calling Typical Pubbie a "neocon" or whatever is that their shtick is stock-standard centrist Democrat hippie-punching. What points of yours have I not addressed? I'm still amazed that anyone calling for socialized medicine and free education can be accused of being a millennial hating centrist.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:17
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Typical Pubbie posted:I'm curious how you reconcile this statement. You foresee increasing demand met with contracting supply, and you consider that a good thing? Price inflation will eat away at the value of not only the mincome but the income of all working Americans. That sounds like bad economics and bad politics to me. His post described increasing demand (of labor) and decreasing supply (of labor) leading to higher wages. Wages increasing from economic growth causing more labor to be needed is not inflation.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:21
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Typical Pubbie posted:What points of yours have I not addressed? I'm still amazed that anyone calling for socialized medicine and free education can be accused of being a millennial hating centrist. The fact that you're telling me that you're amazed at all the things I haven't said to you makes me think that giving you an executive summary of stuff I have said to you would be a huge waste of my time. eta: To clarify about the "centrist" thing, your "shtick," meaning your whole approach to this discussion and the rhetoric you use, follows that pattern even if your actual opinions are solidly left-of-center. But I am pretty sure I would remember calling you a millennial-hater or whatever. eta2: But then again, the fact that you decided to focus on what's probably the one disparaging thing I've said confirms that you're really not here to have a polite discussion, that it's the poo poo-flinging that interests you. Which is totally fine, but you should get off your high horse about how no one else is being fair to you. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 09:23
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Yeah I also thought calling him a neocon was kind of bullshit, in total honesty I have a lot of sympathy for typical pubbie, but that comes from my marxism - socially necessary labor has to be done, if you can't do it the system fails. The trick is realizing that consumerism already has the (almost beautiful) solution to this - there is no satisfactory state. Hell, what are hippies known for? Going to concerts, eating health food - You think that poo poo's cheap? Hell no! There's always that low fat, low sugar, organic, fair trade, biodegradable, luxurious, decadent and ribbed (for her pleasure) alternative, just out of reach. So you get back on the treadmill, just for one more hit because how could it hurt, then another, and another, and Oh My God did you hear what Madeline said yesterday? She's just, like, this whole situation.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:24
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rudatron posted:\The trick is realizing that consumerism already has the (almost beautiful) solution to this - there is no satisfactory state. Hell, what are hippies known for? Going to concerts, eating health food - You think that poo poo's cheap? Hell no! There's always that low fat, low sugar, organic, fair trade, biodegradable, luxurious, decadent and ribbed (for her pleasure) alternative, just out of reach. So you get back on the treadmill, just for one more hit because how could it hurt, then another, and another Yep. Also, there have been mincome experiments done before, and there was no noticeable increase in unemployment among primary earners (and the secondary and tertiary earners that quit their jobs did so in order to take other productive but unpaid work like child-rearing and schooling), so I am not sure what the foundation is for this concern that mincome will destroy the social order with laziness and shiftless devilish idleness as American workers turn to laudanum, burlesque, postmodern art, and general ruin.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:31
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I am pushing hard for more burlesque and debauchery though, but that's what the flouride & chemtrails are for.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:37
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VitalSigns posted:Yep. The basis is, as the saying goes, pure ideology.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:38
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VitalSigns posted:His post described increasing demand (of labor) and decreasing supply (of labor) leading to higher wages. But in the situation you are describing the higher wages stem in part from contracting supply. This is not the ideal way to achieve wage growth because your new wages are going to get chipped away by higher prices. You only get economic growth if supply increases to meet demand. If supply contracts while demand increases or remains the same then you get stagflation ala 1970s America and the oil crisis.
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Jan 8, 2016 09:43
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What are you talking about? If supply increasing to meet demand is 'growth', then what it is most definitely not is 'wage growth'. That and wages are not just a pure supply/demand negotiation, they also represent a power relationship between employer and employee, hence why wages fall when union participation is down. edit: The assumption that all benefits in wage increases will be eaten by increased prices also assumes it would have the same relative affect on all wages, instead of just the lowest. A large relative increase in the lowest wages versus the highest represents a transfer of wealth from high to low, the increase in prices of all products will be in proportion the sum of the proportions of labor required by each tier of wage earners times the relative change in that tier, meaning that since the relative change of the lowest tier wages are higher, their purchasing power will increase at the expense of high earners. rudatron fucked around with this message at 10:13 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 09:55
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Typical Pubbie posted:But in the situation you are describing the higher wages stem in part from contracting supply. This is not the ideal way to achieve wage growth because your new wages are going to get chipped away by higher prices. You only get economic growth if supply increases to meet demand. If supply contracts while demand increases or remains the same then you get stagflation ala 1970s America and the oil crisis. Contracting supply of labor (because children can stay in school and one spouse can stay home with the kids and people can retire on time and the poor don't need to work three jobs to make ends meet), not contracting supply of goods. Why would supply of goods decrease: we either already have a glut (like in houses and food, of which more is produced than Americans need), or manufacturers will be expanding production to meet the new demand from people with mincome. Even if luxury items can't keep up with new demand, the supply of those items wouldn't contract.
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Jan 8, 2016 10:14
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A big part of the Pure Ideology is the idea that we, as a civilization (for lack of a better word), are a few bums surfing the dole away from scarcity-induced economic collapse, as if industrial production were barely capable of a surplus of goods, as if all work done in the context of market exchange (but only there; only work or the product of work someone is willing to pay for counts regardless of what they're paying for) were basically just above the exact amount needed to keep the train moving. There's just no way to efficiently communicate how false this is. How much useless work there is, what it means that the most of the most lucrative work is not done to produce basic necessities, the sheer amount of waste, the increasing amount of work that automation in various forms displaces... There is too much, if anything: more than can be consumed, more than can be desired, more than the planet's resources can bear. I just can't take seriously this idea that if a policy is implemented that results in fewer people working for a wage or working fewer hours, the economy won't be able to keep running because there just won't be enough stuff being made. There just isn't enough that actually needs to be done.
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Jan 8, 2016 10:27
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As I said before, if early humans could sustain themselves with sharp rocks and sticks, it's a bit strange that modern humans could not sustain themselves with all the benefits of modern technology without constant work. I mean fair enough our lives are a lot more complex to sustain but it's a weird idea that our standard of living has kept pace perfectly with our productive capacity.
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Jan 8, 2016 14:21
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rudatron posted:Yeah I also thought calling him a neocon was kind of bullshit, in total honesty I have a lot of sympathy for typical pubbie, but that comes from my marxism - socially necessary labor has to be done, if you can't do it the system fails. Yeah but you get the implications of this right? The hippies who want a new Prius arn't going to be thrilled about handing over more of their paycheck to min income. In general this the nature of a sliding scale and the left is as guilty as anyone. What's considered the moral minimum of bare necessity by many people isn't rooted in one place and has moved just as fast as GDP. But they seem to lack an awareness of this and expect everyone else to perceive this bare minimum right where they do.
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Jan 8, 2016 17:05
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asdf32 posted:Yeah but you get the implications of this right? The hippies who want a new Prius arn't going to be thrilled about handing over more of their paycheck to min income. No. Letting the hungry starve when there is spare food, the sick die when there is spare medicine, and the homeless freeze when there is spare housing, is wrong. Anyone who disagrees with this is a terrible person. This is not a moving target. This basic, bare minimum morality has been around since the dawn of humanity. Rob Filter fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 17:18
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asdf32 posted:Yeah but you get the implications of this right? The hippies who want a new Prius arn't going to be thrilled about handing over more of their paycheck to min income.
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Jan 8, 2016 17:32
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Rob Filter posted:No. Letting the hungry starve when there is spare food, the sick die when there is spare medicine, and the homeless freeze when there is spare housing, is wrong. Anyone who disagrees with this is a terrible person. Certainly a 20-30k min income is above bare necessity and above the things your taking about. Other areas of the globe literally survive on <<10k. So coming up with a min income number in the 10's of k and pretending you arrived at it based on survival alone is obviously a mistake.
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Jan 8, 2016 17:52
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asdf32 posted:Certainly a 20-30k min income is above bare necessity and above the things your taking about. Yes. quote:Other areas of the globe literally survive on <<10k. Yes, though the value of money is relative to location (in other areas of the globe medicine that costs $1000 in America costs $4, for instance). The official poverty line in America seems to be around 11K. quote:So coming up with a min income number in the 10's of k and pretending you arrived at it based on survival alone is obviously a mistake. Oh, no, I didn't come up with that number, someone pulled it out as impossible and I ran with it; I thought it worthwhile to mention that America could literally support everyone getting 30K a year. 30K a year isn't necessary to destroy poverty though, merely possible. If you were to have minimum income, the poverty line is a place to start. ... I'd personally prefer a guaranteed goods scheme to a minimum income scheme; make the necessities of life free, paid for through taxes by the state. Leave money for luxury goods and services. I'd still personally prefer minimum income to the poverty politics that is in place now, though, if those were the only two choices.
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Jan 8, 2016 18:09
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How are you going to allocate and distribute the goods? Would there be huge warehouses everywhere with free stuff that the government restocks? Food stamp on steroids? For health services it would make sense, I think, but otherwise I don't see how this would be preferable to just giving people the money to decide on their own.
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Jan 8, 2016 19:12
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VitalSigns posted:Yep. edit: also as an aside quote:1975 2014 dollars Cicero fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 19:31
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asdf32 posted:Yeah but you get the implications of this right? The hippies who want a new Prius arn't going to be thrilled about handing over more of their paycheck to min income. Again I feel like you guys don't understand what the wealth distribution in America actually looks like:  People keep wringing their hands about the poor green slice when we don't even need to touch their money. gently caress the black slice. gently caress the red slice. We can lower taxes on the bottom four quintiles, raise it on the people in the top one who have more money than anyone could spend in a hundred lifetimes, and be just fine. The tax burden falling unduly on the middle class is an unnecessary thing borne of greed, just like all our other poverty problems. mobby_6kl posted:How are you going to allocate and distribute the goods? Would there be huge warehouses everywhere with free stuff that the government restocks? Food stamp on steroids? Tiny Brontosaurus fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 19:37
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I'm pretty excited about giving everyone in the country an inflation adjusted no-strings attached income of ~30K per year. I'd probably securitize my and my SO's life-time income streams from the program into a flat upfront payment. Given that it's risk-free (both inflation and counterparty), I think I'd be able to get a couple million up-front from a financial/insurance intermediary. Buy a house or two and rent it out  In fact, I think there'd be a boom in financial products that securitize these income streams into flat up-front payments. It's pretty cool, everyone that's middle class or above gets to wreck the housing market. I can basically pay an additional million or two more for housing I really want. Great news everyone!
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Jan 8, 2016 21:05
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Again I feel like you guys don't understand what the wealth distribution in America actually looks like: This is a good idea, the rich have so much. But, what about Africa, India, and China? They are so poor, even poorer than the poor in the West. We should instead take the money from the rich, from the middle slices, all but the poorest, then send it to the Indians, Blacks, and Han who are poorer.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:25
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:State debt doesn't work anything like consumer debt. What part of my post do you think suggests that it is? rudatron posted:Do you believe that mincome will be impossibly hard to implement because it cannot be paid for? Because that just sounds absurd, it's total system effects aren't that large, it's mostly just accounting for things differently. I only think that how the program gets paid for is an important part of the conversation. Estimates of cost ITT run from one to many trillions of dollars. The federal government only collected 3 trillion in taxes last year. The tax increases required to finance the program would be substantial--means testing starts to look a lot more attractive.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:32
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JeffersonClay posted:What part of my post do you think suggests that it is? The part where you're talking about carrying debt like it's practically a moral failing. JeffersonClay posted:I only think that how the program gets paid for is an important part of the conversation. Estimates of cost ITT run from one to many trillions of dollars. The federal government only collected 3 trillion in taxes last year. The tax increases required to finance the program would be substantial--means testing starts to look a lot more attractive. Again, mincome would replace quite a lot of current government expenditure, like food stamps. The numbers aren't as simple as they look. And really considering how incredibly complicated nation-sized economic theory gets and how much trouble people here have been having with even basic stuff like "money is an abstraction" I really don't think conversations about the budget are worthwhile here. Everyone pro-mincome in this thread has admitted it's currently not feasible. You're beating a dead horse. It's more interesting to speculate about how it would change society, and how we might work towards a society that does see something like mincome as feasible. Tiny Brontosaurus fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 21:39
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JeffersonClay posted:I only think that how the program gets paid for is an important part of the conversation. Estimates of cost ITT run from one to many trillions of dollars. The federal government only collected 3 trillion in taxes last year. The tax increases required to finance the program would be substantial--means testing starts to look a lot more attractive. Even if it were absolutely necessary, you'd be better off treating it as a negative income tax and adjusting the tax code to accommodate that at higher income levels. You'd have the exact same effect (no net gain at higher income levels), but it'd be cheaper overall since you wouldn't need a new bureaucratic apparatus to support it. Means testing is never a good option for anything.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:41
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Shayu posted:This is a good idea, the rich have so much. But, what about Africa, India, and China? They are so poor, even poorer than the poor in the West. We should instead take the money from the rich, from the middle slices, all but the poorest, then send it to the Indians, Blacks, and Han who are poorer. This is an absurd standard that you obviously don't apply to every policy, but you're selectively applying to mincome because you don't like it. A country doesn't have to implement universal health care for the globe before making it work at home. We don't have to bomb every country on earth before we bomb ISIS. We don't have to establish worldwide garbage-collection before we hire garbagemen for our cities. We don't have to put out every fire on the planet before we send s firetruck to your house.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:56
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Cicero posted:If you're talking about Dauphin, I believe it was understood to be an experiment by the people participating (meaning it couldn't be relied on long-term), and also the mincome was pretty low (according to this article and at current exchange rates, about 11,400 USD for an individual per year). I think using it to say, "look, they did a mincome and society didn't suddenly explode" is fine, but you can't extrapolate out that to maintaining economic stability for the very long run. There have been a number of experiments besides that as well as similar policies which effectively act as if they were basic income programs. However, it might not be worth going into any of them because your overall point here seems to indicate that "experimental evidence" of this kind is not convincing. The thing that is weird to me, though, is that saying "well, that's not exactly the same thing, so you can't say for sure what it will really look like" is not really responsive to VitalSign's post, which was not actually about staking a claim that we can know for sure what a real basic income program would look like based on these experiments. It was questioning the basis for arguments against basic income which seem very confident that it will certainly result in (for example) "noticeable increase in unemployment among primary earners." So if experiments with and examples of policies that approximate basic income give us no basis for knowing what the real thing will be like, doesn't this apply to arguments against it as much as those for it? Honestly it seems worse for the opposition. Results like those you're talking about are not conclusive, but they are suggestive, and they make it worth questioning why we should be concerned with these speculated failures when approximates of the real thing don't manifest them. Or is the ideological truthiness of the arguments against make them the default position?
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Jan 8, 2016 23:38
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VitalSigns posted:This is an absurd standard that you obviously don't apply to every policy, but you're selectively applying to mincome because you don't like it. No, just want to be fair. I think Americans so greedy, want to take money and keep it, but instead should be given out to the even poorer peoples.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:40
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VS this is a gimmick poster, don't engage.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:41
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Again I feel like you guys don't understand what the wealth distribution in America actually looks like: No, for a few reasons its wrong to use [saved] wealth in this discussion. Permanent policy needs to be funded by income. The income picture isn't quite the same.   So look at the first picture and pick an income number. Maybe 150k? Now look at the green area above that number. If you taxed income above 150k you'd have that area to spread around. It's not close to what your picture implies (Though PS the cost is the crux of the debate, if anyone has a better source or spreadsheet I'd like to see that)
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Jan 9, 2016 01:07
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asdf32 posted:No, for a few reasons its wrong to use [saved] wealth in this discussion. Permanent policy needs to be funded by income. The income picture isn't quite the same. Not necessarily, because once the stored wealth inequality is addressed, mincome can be repurposed to maintain wealth equality. If you tax the ultra rich so there are no ultra rich any more (and hopefully also no ultra poor either), you can then readjust the taxation so that everyone pays more equally in and gets equally out. Initially mincome should serve to redistribute stored wealth, eventually it should serve to keep wealth equally distributed. Unless you actually have a production deficit whereby you literally can't produce enough to keep everyone in livable conditions, mincome would still work, it would just work differently. More like socialized medicine I suppose in that it's something everyone pays into and everyone uses. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 01:11
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