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I dunno why you're so fixated on civil servants with good salaries and benefits. I'm in favor of basic income for reasons that have nothing to do with putting civil servants out of work so it seems a little weird.
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Dec 29, 2015 04:13
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GORDON posted:It isn't about putting them out of work, it's about helping everyone and making a better system. OK, so if that's the case, why even talk about how hypothetically some bureaucrats would be out of a job? Who cares, unless someone brings it up as a consequence to consider?
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Dec 29, 2015 04:33
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GORDON posted:Because reducing the cost of the bureaucracy of redundant programs directly affects the benefit of the MI program. Well I'd say that I think it might be worth doing some math about money saved, but... quote:You are firmly in the "protectionism of unneeded civil servant jobs is priority." Noted. Let's move on. ...it kinda looks like this is something you're invested in for reasons that have nothing to do with any particular policy you favor. For example: your nonsense belief that anyone questioning your odd preoccupation with  paper shufflers and their lavish $75k salaries is in favor of "protectionism of unneeded civil servant jobs." Yes, it is good for you to move on from this, you sound like a moron trying to talk about it.
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Dec 29, 2015 16:36
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Ardennes posted:It seems to be the basis of support of a minimum income is that are people on the lower end actually getting more with the system than a previous system and is that commensurate with the amount of extra spending being done? I have a hard time seeing getting rid of medicaid/medicare/social security working in that regard. This is my biggest reservation about basic income. It can't come at the cost of things like universal healthcare and public education (up to and including higher ed). If the funding for those things is diverted to basic income, that's not really a benefit because it isn't clear that the payouts from basic income will allow individuals to afford healthcare and education. Social Security, though, I think would basically be replaced by a basic income?
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Dec 29, 2015 17:48
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SedanChair posted:I feel like we've had this discussion many times over the years, and for some reason people act as though basic income could be implemented without the political climate that would also allow for comprehensive housing assistance, universal health care and free college. To think that we'd be stuck in the GOP austerity mindset of "but what programs will we cut to pay for this" seems strange. To clarify, my concern isn't about what's politically viable. It's about what's fiscally possible: is the money actually there to do all this stuff? But I guess it could be that thinking it's not is itself ideologically ingrained. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Dec 30, 2015 |
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Dec 30, 2015 16:18
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SedanChair posted:Do you mean "is there enough money" or "will rich people cough up enough money"? Because there is definitely enough money. Fair enough. If my concern is about any variation of the latter, then it is actually about political viability. But it is also possible that even if the political will to raise enough taxes to support all these things, this is not a sustainable arrangement. Like, I'm not making this argument, this is an argument that fully convinces opponents of basic income, UHC, public education, etc. I'm a proponent of these things, but I also don't think that it's worth dismissing that possibility out of hand. But I also can't show that it actually is unsustainable either so it's just a vague concern.
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Dec 30, 2015 17:32
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The whole idea that we need to tightly monitor and control the spending of people receiving public assistance is classist horseshit based on legends about welfare queens and a sense that welfare is some kind of noblesse oblige burden of THE TAXPAYER that gives "us" the right to make sure "our money is well spent" rather than a resource for public benefit that should be available to any who need it. People who are deprived of necessities are usually pretty capable of satisfying their needs when they are able to. I don't give a poo poo if they buy an X-Box with what's left over.
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Dec 30, 2015 18:14
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Not sure why, if work is such an uplifting part of human satisfaction with life, people will not engage in it outside of employment for wages.
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Dec 31, 2015 03:08
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Tying it to "actual verifiable poverty" is a misguided way of thinking about these kinds of policies in general: they are not charities, they're forms of security that liberate (by degrees) ordinary working people from the power of employers to determine their lives through their inherently unfair edge at the bargaining table. This is not something that only "verifiably poor" workers need and attempting to limit it in that way introduces needless bureaucratic inefficiency and political football over what exactly qualifies as "poverty," opening the door to all sorts of ugly condescending poor-shaming lifestyle policing about what poor folks are and are not allowed to own or purchase as well as making it harder for those who need it to get it. It's junk. The whole point of basic income is subverted by that qualification. eta: 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?" This sounds like echoes of the OP's weird spiteful fixation on paper-pushing bureaucrats. A minimum income would be good for the advancement of the arts and entertainment by allowing creative people more time to work on their creations and giving them more freedom from the whims of publishers (i.e., the analogue to employers). GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 14:56
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Lyapunov Unstable posted:Unemployed trust-fund babies (Bohemian also works). "Starving artist" or "looking for work" is the code for unemployed poor whites, and welfare queen/moocher for unemployed poor blacks. 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.
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Jan 5, 2016 16:05
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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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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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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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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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Typical Pubbie posted: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. Yo, the OP of this thread got probated for this weak poo poo FYI.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:51
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Typical Pubbie posted:Oh for real? How about accusing people of hating the poor because they support a strong social safety net? I'm not doing that so I don't feel the need to answer for anyone who does. But I am in the class of people supposedly "passionate about sucking the labor of the middle class to pay for a blanket entitlement program with no real advantage over means tested welfare" so I will tell you to gently caress off with that poo poo. Just because you see a downside with program that its supporters do not does not make its supporters advocates of that downside. By the way, still interested in hearing why this supposed problem you have with basic income is worth caring about.
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Jan 7, 2016 15:57
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Typical Pubbie posted:Because that is the only practical difference between a basic income and a strong safety net + work subsidies like a NIT or the EITC. The basic income benefits people who are capable of working but choose not to. That is its main distinguishing feature. And it's so expensive that it must be paid for in part by the middle class. This is not actually responsive to my post. Again: the people you are arguing with do not agree with your concern here for various reasons. You cannot be passionate about causing a problem that you do not think exists.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:05
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rudatron posted:You want to know who the big winners of mincome are gonna be? Empolyers of part timers and casual staff, who will get away with paying less and still being able to reasonably demand flexibility in shifts and response when calling. Which honestly seems to be the way a lot of jobs are going, stability in employment is now essentially at a premium. I think in as much as they might be able to reasonably demand things, they might not because those demands can be more easily rebuffed if workers don't need those employers anymore.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:15
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Typical Pubbie posted:But I'm not convinced that artists need to be unemployed to create, so I'm a neocon. In what sense are artists actively producing art "unemployed?"
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Jan 7, 2016 16:23
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Typical Pubbie posted:That's a hobby. Are you of the opinion that productive human activity only counts when it is done in exchange for wages, all else being a "hobby," which is presumably worse for some reason?
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Jan 7, 2016 16:31
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rudatron posted:But the need is still there, you just not threatening literal starvation. Which is kind of a dick move anyway, and really loving stressful to have to suffer through. Stress is a killer itself after all, never mind the mental health issues. Not sure what you mean by "the need is there," but if the idea is that they need the things they demand (flex scheduling for example), then if they need these things more than employees need them I think it will work out in a way that is not disadvantageous to workers so I am tentatively unconcerned about it.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:37
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Typical Pubbie posted:I used to support a basic income until I was shown this problem. To make a basic income into a living income for everyone you would end up paying able bodied adults multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year. But that would be ridiculous, so you would have to include certain requirements be met to receive the full benefit. Now you're back to square one with means testing and most of your savings on bureaucracy (that were pretty negligible to begin with) go out the window. So you pretty much have to accept that you're advocating paying able bodied people not to work. Which may become necessary in the not too far future or during an economic downturn but I don't think it is necessary or good now. Well to be more accurate, you "had to" accept this conclusion in as much as you believed in the premises of this line of argument.
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Jan 7, 2016 16:39
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Rob Filter posted:No resource barriers prevent us making sure everyone has access to medicine, food, and shelter. Medicine is almost completely free to make, 50% of food gets thrown out, and houses stand empty all the time. There is no reason for poverty to exist, except that it benefits the rich. Medicine is cheap to manufacture but necessarily cheap to "make" when you include design of the medicine from blue-sky chemistry research to practical applications development. Of course, this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering, it's just something you have to take into consideration. We'd still need people to know how to devise new medicines.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:08
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Typical Pubbie posted:I don't think simplicity is a virtue if the money goes to people who don't need it. It is a virtue if the waste from this is less than the waste from alternatives. Still waiting for that evidence that mass workforce dropouts would result. This also seems to rely on a very restrictive understanding of "need." Sure, people in well-paid professional jobs don't need the minimum to provide for their economic needs, but they are still subject to the pressures of employer demands and the job market, so a minimum income would benefit them.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:11
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Typical Pubbie posted:Alternatively: That college student might have to work 20+ hours a week where he will be forced to interact with people outside his air-tight social circle which in turn will foster a sense of community and provide him with real world experience which we could channel into his creative work. Assumptions not actually in evidence here (not an exhaustive list, just what I can identify in under a minute): -That "having to work" 20+ hours per week would not negatively impact a student's ability to focus on scholarship (i.e., the whole point of being "a student"). -That all students have "air-tight social circles." -That having an "air-tight social circle" is necessarily a bad thing and necessarily incompatible with having a "sense of community." -That students won't engage in any other non-work activity that might "foster a sense of community." -That work is the only way to have inspiring "real world experience," or that work even provides this at all. The reason you are getting so many derisive responses is because you seem to argue entirely from stereotypes, vague moral abstractions, and a ton of problematic unexamined assumptions. GunnerJ fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jan 7, 2016 |
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Jan 7, 2016 17:18
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Paradoxish posted:Why is it a hobby? Because it's unpaid? There is also nothing inherently wrong with more people having more free time to devote to hobbies even from the standpoint of "social value" rather than mere personal value. Humans are social animals and in the age of the internet and social media, even enthusiasts the more solitary hobbies can and will connect with each other in "communities" (such that they could be said to "have a sense of community") and often will collaborate on things the make the human experience better for everyone, even if this is not the intended goal of their activity.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:25
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Fargo Fukes posted:People can be claim to be working from that premise but they are lying if they do. Alternately, they do not define "value" in terms of marketable economic output.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:28
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Rob Filter posted:I agree. Yes, that is why I said "this is not an argument for pharmaceutical company profiteering." It's still worth considering the cost of researching and developing medicine because if you want to do that in a way that is not beholden to the profit motive, and we should, you need to figure out how to make R&D happen otherwise. The most obvious way is just publicly funded research (much of the basic conceptual research is already funded in this way iirc) but this is a cost to consider in designing and funding the overall social welfare system of which basic income would be a part.
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Jan 7, 2016 17:32
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Typical Pubbie posted:I'm beginning to wonder if people in this thread actually read dissenting viewpoints or if they see what looks like a negative critique of mincome and instantly default to "poor hating neocon puritan who is also probably a racist." I haven't done any of this kind of thing, but you've been strangely reluctant to address my points. So I kind of think you might be full of poo poo with your whining about this. Seems like that's what you're actually looking for.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:11
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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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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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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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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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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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Typical Pubbie remains an unattractive investment opportunity for my time, but I also enjoy wasting my time on stuff like this, so:Typical Pubbie posted:If the supply of labor contracts then the supply of goods is likely to contract as well. Later on you ask about how it is that only "unnecessary labor" would not get done, or how we even know what labor is unnecessary. Well, one thing to keep in mind is that the supply of goods is excessive already. We produce too much and end up wasting much of it. Look up figures on food waste. Or, have you ever heard of businesses destroying unsold product before throwing it away so that scavengers can't get it for free? In these cases, wasted goods represent wasted effort. If a product is thrown away without being used, then all the labor that went into putting it up for sale is wasted and never had to be done. So if the marginal number of people we can expect to be permanent dropouts from the workforce results in less stuff being made, so loving what? (And again, there is no evidence to suggest that we actually have to worry about mass workforce dropouts. This outcome is ideologically "common-sensible" but no experiment in minimum income supports it.) Typical Pubbie posted:Also I see no one has bothered to address a point I made earlier: A mincome would make America a very expensive place to live and do business for anyone not receiving mincome. This extends to exports. However, this logic applies to every single social welfare program you support. They have the same effects if in different or lesser ways. This is a recurring theme which complicates your proposed alternatives. So for example: Typical Pubbie posted:Inheritance above a certain level should be taxed at 100%. A poor person who can work should attempt to find work just like everyone else, and be guaranteed a living income and certain protections and benefits for their trouble. While they are searching for work they may apply for unemployment insurance and other programs just like everyone else. Is there a qualitative difference between having a "job-seeker's" subsidy while unemployed and a guaranteed minimum income? Or is it just a matter of degree? Because as a form of social welfare it has similar effects, even if it is for a limited duration: it requires taxes to fund and makes quitting a job and getting a better one easier, making things generally more expensive for non-recipients for the same reasons you think a basic income would. So do minimum wages and regulations of workplace safety. So does universal healthcare. You can say that if it is a matter of degree then basic income may require more than is feasible, but your approach to this argument is not purely pragmatic enough for this to be sufficient. You are generally treating this as a moral issue. All of the social welfare programs you favor "make America a very expensive place to live and do business for anyone not receiving" compared to their not existing. If none of them existed, you could just as easily say, "a poor person who can work should attempt to find work without any handouts or benefits while looking and without any guarantees of workplace safety or a living wage just like everyone else." (The "just like everyone else" part goes to show that not only are you arguing moralistically, your moral arguments are lazy as gently caress.) The problem with you arguing moralistically is that, if your objections to being called a poor-hating neocon or whatever are genuine and credible, you have basically the same moral political convictions as most of the people you are arguing with. You favor most of the same social welfare programs they do. So your argument with them needs to be purely pragmatic not only because you have to deal with the fact that your pragmatic reservations apply to your own favored policies in pursuit of your own moral political convictions, but because otherwise people are going to assume that you do not share their values. This is another reason that you're getting the derisive response that you feel so aggrieved by: you sound like the kinds of things they call you when you argue moralistically. Typical Pubbie posted:You're right that this could be helpful to some degree, I just think its proponents are over-stating the efficacy of mincome for bargaining. Employers as monoposony would still be a problem and the individual worker withholding his/her labor by peacing out of the workforce because their job sucks is still acting as an individual rather than as one part of a collective whole. That's because the collective action, so to speak, has already been done in this scenario. We can compare this to how unions organize workers in labor actions. When unions go on strike, they do so to get better benefits and wages by withholding labor. However, they require a degree of organization to ensure that workers can afford to not work for however long the strike lasts. The implementation of a basic income, as a political campaign and as a function of the government, is exactly that kind of organization. What would it take to actually implement a basic income? Probably a lot of cooperative action by ordinary working citizens, but in the realm of politics rather than workplaces. Hence, the entire politically-active citizenry that makes basic income happen is the organization that ensures that workers can withhold labor. It doesn't really matter anyway, though, if workers are acting individually. It's the mere potential for them to act individually in this way, when otherwise they really couldn't, that's at issue. Knowing that employees can more easily quit is something employers will have to keep in mind when deciding how they treat employees because treatment that makes one employee quit will likely make any employee quit. (And, again, this logic also applies to everything you support to the extent that it alleviates the condition of being unemployed.) Additionally, the benefits are not purely financial: Chris Bertram, 'Let It Bleed' posted:Life at Work Ask yourself how much of this kind of poo poo employers could get away with if people in general did not need to work to make capitalists rich in order to survive. Typical Pubbie posted:There seems to be the perception in this thread that the cost of any wage increase would come entirely out of employer's profits. If only there were some way to increase the purchasing power of consumers in this scenario. If only they had the spending money. This isn't just throwaway snark. The basic income is largely going to go back into the economy. If goods and services become more expensive, they'll likely will still be affordable. The critical difference is that in this scenario, not having a job is not as wretched a condition. (And once again, this same logic applies to programs you say you support, like unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.) This has implications for any question of how we can afford to make sure that people do jobs they'd otherwise quit. So... Typical Pubbie posted:Who decides what labor "needs" to be done? What is the formula for calculating what is essential labor? I don't know why you're asking someone else to "show their work" here since you apparently believe that there is "work that has to be done," which implicitly means you have an understanding of what work does not need to be done: Typical Pubbie posted:If your job is poo poo that sucks but someone has to do the poo poo jobs. Why does someone have to do them, though? "What is the formula for calculating what is essential labor?" For example, why not let garbage pile up in the streets or sewage pipes overflow with human waste? Well, probably because these things suck to have to deal with. No one will put up with a garbage and poo poo dystopia, so the idea that trash and sewage will flow freely because all the sanitation workers will up and quit because no one can afford to pay them enough to keep them from quitting just does not wash. This concern is plausible only if you believe that, for some reason, the only way to organize labor such that the tidal wave of trash and sewage can be turned back is a labor market without a basic income policy buoying workers. (Unlike, say, a labor market with unemployment insurance and universal healthcare and free education and job training buoying workers...)
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Jan 9, 2016 17:09
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Typical Pubbie posted:I see. So assuming what you say is true, you think that gross over-consumption is a problem, and your solution is to give consumers a direct injection of disposable income. Brilliant. My concerns about over-production in and of itself aren't actually at issue here, and even if what you're saying has merit (it doesn't), what results is that I have a new, tangential concern about a basic income in addition to others I already have. It would not address my reservations about your argument about supply contraction, so your evasion of the point is noted. Typical Pubbie posted:Incentives matter, so yes? The difference is that a conventional NIT or EITC ties income benefits to work to keep able bodied people productive. This helps offset the cost of social programs for people who, for whatever reason, can't work or cannot find work. The social safety net exists to help those who are able to support themselves get back to producing, while caring for those who can't. Resources are allocated based on need. I am not really concerned about a downfall in productivity so this does not compel me, but it is a qualitative difference so fair enough. It's just not one that addresses the point, which is that your objections to a basic income in terms of "making things expensive" apply to the programs you favor and in the absence of those programs, someone could come up with the same "a poor person who can work should attempt to find work under [circumstances] just like everyone else" suggestion. That should give you a bit of pause about the way you're approaching this. Typical Pubbie posted:A basic income is just a shot of money with a wildly varying degree of utility depending on the circumstances of the individual. Its greatest utility is derived by healthy, white, working age adults... What?? Why on Earth would it benefit people of color less than white people? I don't believe for a second you'll actually bother to do even a fraction of the work needed to demonstrate this because you're very intellectually lazy, so these are rhetorical questions, but seriously, holy poo poo what complete nonsense. It's like you're just in some bizarre tryhard mode to prove that you're the real progressive and your opponents just don't care about, well, first it was the middle class, and now it's anyone who's not white. Just throwing this poo poo against the wall isn't going to work, though, because none of it actually sticks. Typical Pubbie posted:I'm not going to bother responding to accusations that I am against a basic income due to some latent protestant love of work. That's great, because I didn't make any. Actually, I said the exact opposite and gave you the benefit of the doubt that you're not what people claim you are, you just argue as if your were. Even before, with your stuff about incentives? Someone could take that as proof of your supposed conservative political values. I disagreed with it but I took it as the pragmatic argument it looked like. Are you actually incapable of keeping track of who you're responding to, or are you really that desperate for that kind of antagonist that you want to corner me into that role? Well, I'm not going to do that and keeping you up to date on who your are talking to in every exchange isn't any fun, so this is where I get off the train.
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Jan 10, 2016 03:52
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OwlFancier posted:Given that being black correlates with being poor rather strongly in the US, a minimum income would probably disproportionately benefit black people. Which is good. Right. That's what so crazy! 
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Jan 10, 2016 04:25
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Reicere posted:F- Did not read the prompt, resubmit before the end of class tomorrow. Haha, holy poo poo I didn't even notice that. I guess I just subconsciously assumed that was a typo...?
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Jan 10, 2016 04:28
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asdf32 posted:It's a terrible argument either way and bringing up food waste (which is consumption by the way) in this context is identical to conservatives citing government waste. The bottom line is that these large systems (government/market) are already reasonably efficient and more importantly, there is no magic way to make them more efficient. So waste is almost completely irrelevant when talking about budgets. Good thing I wasn't talking about budgets, then.
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Jan 10, 2016 04:37
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You can't gaslight me about my own words, dude.
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Jan 10, 2016 04:52
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