Yang 2020. Let's put humanity first. It's time for Universal Basic Income.

[yallerdawg]

Let's get paid for the wages they're taking from us and putting in THEIR pockets!






https://www.yang2020.com/

[wasupaloopa]

1. I have these questions about basic income.

Do the rules of economics I learned in college cease with basic income.

If poverty is say a level of $10,000 yr income and everyone gets a basic income of say $20,000 why doesn’t the poverty level raise to $30,000? Basically everything raises up a notch right?

Also why do the rules of inflation cease with basic income? With an influx of money into the economy why don’t prices rise to compensate for the increased money supply?

And where does the money come from? If we just print more money why doesn’t that devalue money by lowering it purchasing power? Again why do the rules of inflation cease with this increase in money supply?





Any economists out there? If you answer my questions what is the economic basis for your answer?

[yallerdawg]

2. "Rules of economics?"

You mean rules of capitalism.

We can't have living wages, feed our families, have any kind of economic security in the name of income equality at the expense of the ruling class, because blah-blah-blah.

But $1,000,000 cruise missiles? - no problem!

[wasupaloopa]

3. Thanks for the reply but that is not an answer

If you work in a defense plant, you help create something of value that gets sold. Part of the income from sales is paid to you. You spend on something of value created by another person who helps create a good or service that is sold.

If I just give you money without it coming from the creation of something of value to someone else it only adds to the money supply that is chasing a limited supply of things to spend it on which decreases the value of the money because the increase in demand caused by the increase in money forced prices up.

But then those thoughts do not fit your world view.

[yallerdawg]

4. When a robot creates something of value...

who is going to buy it?

The worker has been replaced - but so has the consumer.

Why produce anything at all if no one can consume it?

Henry Ford started paying his workers enough to buy his product. He created both the product and the consumer. You need both.

We can ALL benefit from automation, robotics and technology.

You just have to expand your world view.

[wasupaloopa]

7. Henry Ford paid $5 a day because the jobs were so bad workers

would not stay on the job.

At $5 a day they would put up with the lousy working conditions. Also it was $5 a day as long as the company was profitable.

You need to get a realistic world view.

[yallerdawg]

8. Your world view may be realistic - in a capitalist system, of course.

Higher wages were necessary, Ford realized, to retain workers who could handle the pressure and the monotony of his assembly line. In January of 1914, his continuous-motion system reduced the time to build a car from 12 and a half hours to 93 minutes. But the pace and repetitiveness of the jobs was so demanding, many workers found themselves unable to withstand it for eight hours a day, no matter how much they were paid.

But Ford had an even bigger reason for raising his wages, which he noted in a 1926 book, Today and Tomorrow. It’s as a challenging a statement today as it as 100 years ago. “The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

It might have been just another of Ford’s wild ideas, except that it proved successful. In 1914, the company sold 308,000 of its Model Ts—more than all other carmakers combined. By 1915, sales had climbed to 501,000. By 1920, Ford was selling a million cars a year.

“We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on,” Ford wrote. “It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this country.”

http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/03/history/post-perspective/ford-doubles-minimum-wage.html

[PETRUS]

9. Good questions.

I'm not sure you got particularly satisfying answers. I'll do my best.

I'll start from the end and work backwards.

Where does the money come from? The same place money already comes from. US dollars are a creation of the Federal government. I know most people thing the government taxes, then spends. That's not true. It actually spends, then taxes. (This is the case with the Federal government, but not state and local governments - they have to tax or borrow to spend.) The Federal government can spend as many dollars as it cares to, it's not financially constrained in any meaningful way.

This leads to your second question about inflation. Even though the Federal government has an infinite supply of dollars, there is not an infinite supply of labor and resources. So is is possible to create a situation of too much money chasing too few goods and services, which will result in inflation. There are a variety of ways the government could handle this. The usual method is for the Federal Reserve to create higher unemployment (by raising interest rates); an alternate method would be to cut spending or raise taxes.

Whether or not a universal basic income will create inflation depends on a lot of other variables. I think the argument is that productivity increases will be significant enough that we can provide more goods and services with less labor (already true vs. anytime in the past). If we build capable enough robots, (and natural resources aren't exhausted) then the goods and services should be available. Personally, I'm not sure. In spite of all the hysteria about robots taking jobs, productivity growth has been very slow in recent years (much less than it was from WWII through the 60s), but maybe there a productivity boom on the horizon.

I'm not sure I understand your question about poverty. There's "absolute" poverty and "relative" poverty. Right now there are plenty of people in the US who don't get enough to eat and don't have a roof over their heads. But there is enough food, and enough housing, so it should be possible to remedy that sort of poverty without creating inflationary pressure.

Myself, I'm not sold on the idea of a universal basic income. I'd much rather see a full employment policy of some kind, and some different (i.e., other than UBI) revisions of laws governing property and labor markets first. But I'm still considering all the arguments around these issues.

Hope that helps.

[wasupaloopa]

10. To me universal basic income does not

Last edited Thu May 3, 2018, 08:45 PM - Edit history (1)

fit in to any of the economic models I studied in college.

It is not only a political argument. Yet most folks here see it as only a political argument.

I think we need some type of wealth redistribution to reverse income inequality and social programs to help those caught in poverty.

We need several generations of progressive government to overcome the conservative era.

It is up to us

[PETRUS]

11. ?

It fits into the models I studied. It's just public spending/a transfer program. Nothing new about that.

As an aside, conventional economic models are pretty bogus. They have glaring omissions and use flawed assumptions.

[wasupaloopa]

12. I would like to hear from an economist who teaches, to give me the model with a

line for guaranteed income.

To me that means income that does not come from investing or producing. And on a national scale not something like Medicaid. The operative word is UNIVERSAL. The income would not result in savings or investment but would be spent to consume goods that were produced from money other than that given as universal income.

I want to see that model.

You can't just explain it in simplistic terms like transfer payments. It is a new concept. I have yet to be enlightened by someone who understands the whole concept and ramifications.

And no economic models are not bogus. Our whole economic existence are planned with them.

[PETRUS]

13. You can believe whatever you want, of course.

But I'd be curious to know why you think a UBI is qualitatively (not quantitatively) different from other public spending or transfer programs.

And given that economics is a field with significant disagreements among professionals, and that consensus opinions are often proven wrong by actual events, I'm wondering who you think is correct. Even (maybe especially) Ph.D. economists admit that their economic models are incomplete simplifications of reality.

And lastly, if you're interested in a teaching professional's opinion/analysis on a topic, there are better uses of the Internet than asking anonymous posters on a political discussion board to weigh in.

[wasupaloopa]

14. I think I told you twice now. The money does not come from any type of productive effort on the

part of those receiving it. Since the payments are universal meaning everyone, they are unlike anything we have done before. Most payments like medicaid go to a small segment of people. So they are not simply transfer payments like we have in the past.


I think the idea of universal basic income is over everyone's head since all anyone here can do is explain it in simplistic terms that make no sense.

I will have to research the idea to get my answers.


I studied global economics in graduate school so I have a reference point to where I am coming from. I don't give your responses much weight. Especially since you poo poo economics like you do.

I was hoping some DUer had an economics background. And I was trying to point out that the idea isn't simply a should we or shouldn't we political issue.

[PETRUS]

15. Take your fingers out of your ears.

I've pointed out that the government already makes categorically identical payments. Think of things like TANF or disability. The only meaningful distinction here is scale - a difference in degree, not kind. So yes, one can run this idea through existing models, and people have been doing just that.

There's a broader, more sophisticated point to be made about Federal spending in general (involving what money is, where it comes from, and how it works) that applies, if you have the patience for it. If you're interested, you could start here.

My criticisms of economics come from extensive research (both in school and on my own) and are shared by many highly credentialed people in the field. It's not that I don't think it offers useful tools, but it has faults - the models are not reality, have baked in biases, and don't (can't) take everything into account. The more one studies economics, the more apparent its flaws (as generally practiced). Within the last month, I read a text by an Oxford University-trained economist outlining a number of the discipline's shortcomings. It's not just me.

[fleabiscuit]

17. Productive effort? Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?

[geardaddy]

5. 很好!

我會為他投票!

(trans. "Very good! I would vote for him!" )

[yallerdawg]

6. We have to recognize our own obsolesence!

In the '80's, I worked in banking for five years.

"Automatic Teller Machines" were a novelty.

We did hand-entered ledgers in Loan Department - no room for error.

We would never replace checks with "electronic transfer cards." It would never be convenient, and everyone likes a little time to "cover" that check!

All checks were sorted at the bank, and then transported to a clearinghouse and routed to the correct bank! Everything was checked and double-checked!


Most of the companies I worked at - and that bank - are long gone. And jobs, pay and benefits got worse year after year.

It has all turned out exactly as predicted.

[Music908]

16. I agree with your reasoning, and have one concern.

Don't we still have to have complete congressional tax reform in order to mandate the money be required from the top 1% or so, and also a system for determining who needs the money first, and for how long. If we still have a capitalistic system, then we are going to have to start by balancing the two sides of the see-saw. After we figure out how to legally take the needed income from the wealthier citizens then we need to ensure that people don't play games to benefit from this genius overhaul at the expense of the tax-payer.
I still think the idea is great and necessary, but convincing everyone is going to require some proof that mobilization will put workers out of their jobs quickly.

[fleabiscuit]

18. How about we start by taxing ALL forms of compensation as regular income?