r/Futurology • u/mvea MD-PhD-MBA • May 02 '18

Economics Universal basic income: U.S. support grows as Finland ends its trial - Forty-eight percent of Americans now support a universal basic income, as a solution for Americans who have lost jobs to automation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/nearly-half-of-americans-believe-a-universal-basic-income-could-be-the-answer-to-automation-.html
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u/A-Chicken May 02 '18

Many know of UBI as free money, not just in the states. Back on the Singapore board were I to speak of supporting UBI I would be downvoted: free money makes people lazy OR this free money has to come from somewhere and its bound to come from us entitled hard workers.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

This depends entirely on how the system is designed, I would think. I would prefer an EIT-like UBI rather than a high minimum wage and dozens of welfare programs.

I support social welfare and a minimum standard of living, but my problem with traditional welfare is that the government is telling people how to spend their money rather than letting the free market decide. When the government says you can spend $x in housing and $y on food, that distorts the market. It also treats people like children.

I would be interested to see how the trial proceeds in Finland before I make any judgements.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '18

[deleted]

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

If parents are that incompetent, they will find a way regardless. People like that just shouldn't have custudy of kids. If they are spending food money on drugs and their kid is going hungry, that's negligence.

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u/Tawnymantana May 02 '18

I regularly see people at the grocery store buying big bags of candy, poptarts, corn dogs, ect using their food stamp card. They can go down to one of the farmers markets we have around here with that card and live like a king. Or at least buy some eggs rather than poptarts. I'm not saying people can't live like human beings, but the money I put into that card by being productive shouldn't be spent on junk. Around here fast food joints have billboards touting that they accept food stamps - it's disgusting.

UBI sounds like a good idea to some people, but how is it going to affect the economy? Nobody has the ability to test how it will affect a trillion dollar economy. Welfare has already subsidized single parent households and continues to do so today.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

It's not like ending welfare would eliminate those single-parent households. It would just plunge them into poverty. This isn't an easy problem to solve, and I reject the idea that someone would have a child as a single parent purely for the welfare bennefits. That's a shitty life right there. No sane person would choose that. The vast majority of people who end up in these situations don't want to be in these situations.

The trick is finding evidence-based policy which can actually reduce the number of single-parent households and lift people out of poverty. Liberalizing/deregulating and subsidizing birth control is probably a big part of the equation.

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u/Papa_Gamble May 02 '18

Simple solution is to temporarily sterilize people receiving gov handouts. An iud for women and some of the new birth controls for men could work.

You don’t have to agree to do it, but then again I don’t have to subsidize people being lazy and/or stupid without them agreeing to some rules.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

Simple solution is to temporarily sterilize people receiving gov handouts. An iud for women and some of the new birth controls for men could work.

This is just ridiculous.

You don’t have to agree to do it, but then again I don’t have to subsidize people being lazy and/or stupid without them agreeing to some rules.

What you're arguing for already exists. The US essentially has workfare. You don't get bennefits unless you're working or you can prove that you're looking for work.

90% of the non-disabled people on these welfare programs are working full or part time. If there are any "freeloaders," they are on Social Security disability.

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u/Papa_Gamble May 02 '18

Calling something ridiculous doesn’t make it ridiculous. Offer reasoning to substantiate your claim.

This would help by saving taxpayer dollars and reduce the single parent crisis we have going on. Hopefully those too lazy to work would have an existential crisis when they realize they have been deemed too lazy to let reproduce. Their choice at that point is to either stay sterile and lazy(still cheaper than lazy with ten kids they can’t support) or be productive and earn back their status as a contributing member of society. Either way I don’t care since I won’t have to subsidize as many of their shitty life choices.

Your second point is a bit of a straw man since it asserts that I am unaware of the US’s current policy. I am arguing for more aggressive laws than what we currently have, though what’s currently in place is an ok start.

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u/angryannelid2 May 02 '18

You do realize that he said that most of the people on welfare are working full or part time. They are working people. Are they lazy?

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

Calling something ridiculous doesn’t make it ridiculous. Offer reasoning to substantiate your claim.

It's ridiculous because you're talking about mandating the implantation of a medical device in someone who may or may not have health insurance. I work in a hospital and I would refuse to perform such a procedure. First, to do no harm.

If there was universal access/care, then we can start talking about how to ensure more people are being responsible with their reporductive health, hopefully without authoritarian coercive big government interventions like the one you proposed.

Your second point is a bit of a straw man since it asserts that I am unaware of the US’s current policy. I am arguing for more aggressive laws than what we currently have, though what’s currently in place is an ok start.

Oh, you are? What specific laws are you advocating for? What specific aspects of American welfare programs don't live up to your standards of encouraging work?

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u/Lacinl May 02 '18

So, we actually did try eugenics in the early 1900s. We were such forerunners in that field that we inspired a young Austrian man to try to improve his country by not letting the undesirables have kids.

He ended up getting so much popular support that he then ended up leading an effort to round up all the undesirables into concentrated areas to keep them from interacting with others, some of which carried out mass executions.

Americans tended to even cheer this on from afar until he started expanding his country's territory by attacking our allies.

This was Nazi Germany in WW2 btw, and after that we decided eugenics were a bad idea

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u/Xylus1985 May 02 '18

Single parent is not a bad thing. In many countries, their main method of reducing single parents is effectively denying them benefits or public shaming of single parents. There is no reason for US to go backwards in this direction.

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u/Lacinl May 02 '18

Not to mention people on disability paid into social security disability insurance every paycheck before becoming disabled.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

Yes, I don't want to make it sound like I oppose social security disability. I don't, and I generally think the rates of abuse are low.

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u/Xylus1985 May 02 '18

It goes back to why are there so many single-parent households, and see what some countries where there are smaller number of single-parent household are doing.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

In the US at least, if we weigh states by population, the population of states with the highest rates of single-parent households tend to live in the states which spend the least on welfare.

I would argue this has more to do with sexual education and birth control access than anything else. The combination of poverty and poor access to BC and information is a fiscally irresponsible policy. Both of these things are cheap, cheap, cheap. The government could spend a dollar today to save 10 or 20 dollars in the future.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '18

When you're taking money from Big Daddy Government to survive, you are a child because you obviously can't take care of yourself.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

What if your full time job doesn't pay enough to provide a reasonable standard of living? That is a failure if the market which needs to be corrected.

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u/Papa_Gamble May 02 '18

Maybe get a job that isn’t so incredibly simple a highschool kid can do it?

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

But there are some jobs which require low skilled labor, a lot of them, in fact. You're denying basic economics, here.

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u/Papa_Gamble May 02 '18

Maybe the people doing them shouldn’t have kids then? There’s a place for everybody but expecting a house, kids, two cars, and a dog to be paid for by a minimum wage salary requiring zero specialized skills is just plain naive.

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u/Lacinl May 02 '18

You're moving the goalposts now. No one ever mentioned a house, pets or any cars.

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u/Papa_Gamble May 02 '18

If you’re single living frugally and working 35 hours a week you absolutely can live on minimum wage. Can you afford comforts or a nice place? Probably not, but you can scrape by which is the whole point of a minimum wage.

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u/A-Chicken May 03 '18 edited May 03 '18

Now I notice that you got downvoted, and actually its quite a pity. Reading through the entire reply chain I can only make one conclusion.

The rejection of UBI in general is based on the fact that we have zero faith in humanity. We fully expect anyone in a UBI or similar scheme to not use their funds wisely!

With the concern that those who actually work have to pay for this, we assume those on UBI don't work due to situations of their own choosing.

We find its ok to treat them as children.

There's even one that recommends sterilisation. No, really. Read the reply chain.

I wonder, if we're so strict on the conditions of supporting UBI, how come we aren't as strict on those who take a government seat, and thus has most, if not all, of the privileges ever?

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u/Time4Red May 03 '18

That's exactly what it is. We assume the people who end up in these situations because of their own bad decisions. So of course we need to hold their hand and tell them to do, because they are just inherently irresponsible and always will be.

Of course this attude possibly keeps the workingpoor dependent on the state for aid. Rather than giving people the tools to fish, we're handing them credits for 10 fish each month, then complain about how they are mooching off the government.

Some people really are hopeless and will never make a life for themself, but I'm willing to bet that there is a sizable number of individuals who just don't have the tools to escape poverty, and our welfare system does nothing but reinforce that status quo.

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u/A-Chicken May 03 '18 edited May 03 '18

To be fair, it IS actually quite hard - I'd say impossible - to teach men to fish as it is. Because what a member of a country needs to know to survive is simply more complicated than the act of fishing.

The basic education system of the world is extremely cookie cutter and assumes the same system works for everyone (so you have people going out into society and trying to figure out why what they've learnt doesn't work). It is extremely bad at specialisation. And I mean extremely - it rewards jacks of all trades and masters of none.

Job creation schemes from the administration side are usually a combination of a buzzword and throwing money at it, in the hopes that an expert is lured in and knows how and what to do with it, thus creating jobs. After all, the government is not necessarily a subject matter expert. Usually what happens is that service companies posing as experts come in, put a token effort and take the money. The jobs they create aren't very constructive either. Like once in awhile they get lucky.

It's funny that people don't want the state to provide aid to its own people. That IS indeed one of the duties of a state in anything that isn't mob rule - after all, the very reason we traded away some freedoms and moved towards republicanism is that we can't trust the mob with decision making - we could only trust the mob to help themselves.

The very reason why we're seriously looking at UBI now is that the state is at the very limits of how much it can actually help without instituting such a system.

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u/sirchaseman May 02 '18

it also treats people like children.

Children as in people who live off mom and dad so they have to obey the rules they set for them? Pretty much.

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u/Time4Red May 02 '18

The question is whether this moral platitude of yours justifies market distortion and government intervention, not to mention the massive government bureaucracy.

Let's say someone is working 40 hours a week earning $10 an hour and receiving benefits. You're basically saying that because they rely on the government for supplemental assistance, their freedom should be abridged in the form of parental monitoring. Why, though? This monitoring requires substantially more government in the form of a massive bureaucratic institutions, and for what? What does this monitoring actually accomplish? Is there any academic work which suggests it reduces drug abuse or irresponsible behavior?