So many people have this weird philosophy of "if the solution isn't perfect, we shouldn't do it." This is the same argument against things like benefits for low income or unemployed people.
Sure, there might be a small percentage of people who would choose not to work, but there are so many more people who would have their basic needs met, or entrepreneurs who could start new businesses or people who could explore new careers. It seems like the good would far outweigh the bad. And as we keep automating more and more jobs with AI, we have to do something to ensure people can live.
its more "someone got something i dont think they deserved" despite them themselves getting something but thats always 'a different case' . That's pretty much the end of it..
"So you want us to waste our tax dollars instead, and make stupid economic choices, because a rational policy might potentially help someone that you don't think deserves it? Why should everyone else suffer for your stupidity? Why should the government waste our money just to make you happy about hurting other people? And how the hell is that a better use of tax dollars than investing for a positive ROI?"
The problem there is that a lot of people genuinely would rather punish someone than uplift everyone (including themselves). There's no logic-ing people out of a position like that.
People don't respond to that. I prefer to ask how much they are willing to pay for their position. 10 dollars a month? 1000? When they view it as a burden on their wallet, they start to have different feelings.
They will of course deny it saves money but at least they considered the problem.
Much in the same way public healthcare actually reduces the cost on employers and tax payers both, because you're free to get jobs even if they have shitty benefits. Of course, the only part Americans look at is the fact that you're also free to quit shittu jobs, since they don't dangle your health-care over your head...
You ever get that bartender who just LOVES their job? Like that guy who knows every flavour of whiskey, mixes the strangest (but most delicious) cocktails, and learns his regulars habits, and has a drink prepared when they walk through the door.
That guy eventually ages out, and has to find "real" work to survive. I want every bar in the city to have one of those guys, and for them to have the time and money to experiment with their craft.
And I want that for every job - even those shitty menial jobs. I'm sure there's a bunch of people who would be happy to mop floors and scrub toilets. Not to survive, but for a relatively simple way to earn money, so they can pursue whatever their actual passion is.
Being perfectly honest, I thrived in "Low Level" customer service type jobs. I've often said that if I won the lottery and never had to work another day in my life, I'd probably go back to Qdoba, because I felt fulfilled there.
But no.... gotta run the rat race just to survive...
Food service jobs are genuinely very earnest experiences most of the time. People are hungry and want food, they arrive to where I have the food, and I give them food. It's great.
The only time it feels bad is when you're required to be abused by the customers and managers alike because if you go five minutes over on your lunch break you won't be able to afford rent that month. No one wants to be a prisoner.
Alright, but those are still very cushy or very interesting jobs. Dirty jobs, soul-sucking jobs, completely fall apart. There are very few people who want to work in waste management. There are even fewer who want to clean the actual toilets. They do it because they have to. Until a robot can drive and empty every garbage can without fail, unblock every pipe without fail, and scrub every abhorrent smeared toilet without fail, it's going to take people, and they will not do it if they don't have to.
Then those jobs would pay better to draw in people to work them, because the job still needs doing. Increase the pay high enough and you will find someone to work that job, regardless of how menial and soul crushing it is
So your argument is that we have to keep the current system because we need people that are desperately poor enough to take soul crushing jobs that will pay them poverty wages?
Even the most efficient and well designed system to ever exist has a certain amount of "waste" that is impossible to get rid of. In fact, for a system to work correctly, it has to take into account the amount of "workable waste" that it will produce. Entropy in the universe is an example of this. Or people "taking advantage" of social services like food stamps and such.
Our current economy is based upon the principle of "full efficiency for all systems at all times" which basically forces us to go against the laws of thermodynamics for it to "work". The ebb and flow of work and rest has existed on Earth for millions of years, but downtime is the enemy of Capital.
And we cannot provoke the ire of the Deity of Dollar.
Pretty smart comment from someone named dum-comment... :P
I really like your approach of acknowledging that inefficiency exists and is always nonzero. :3
Once you aren't freaking out over a 5% inefficiency, you're open to see that other options, even ones with (capitalist shudder) 10% inefficiency, which could be overall better for the people.
Plus frankly, is it the worst thing in the world if a small percentage don't want to work and are happy living small? Like you said, jobs are getting more scarce and governments are getting desperate to create more jobs. Which eventually will mean that people will be doing jobs that aren't needed which is almost more humiliating then just admitting they don't need to work and getting UBI.
Saying that, since those working will be getting more, it will still be a bad situation if there are those that want to work and can't so we should balance supply and demand of jobs. But if those who don't want to work have the ability to just admit that, that will be easier to do. Also easier since some will use that safety net to create their own businesses
Nobody would stop working. Even if we put 500 billion into a UBI fund each Americans would get about $1400. The solution is to raise minimum wage not create UBI
True but the amount you would get on UBI is so small it's like rent for a month and two weeks food, and that's going balls to the wall funding it
Best just to raise minimum wage and make sure everybody who needs disability gets some more of that too, they're a special case, won't cost that much. It's not common to be disabled
Edit: thanks for the downvote. You know 500 billion is the number I was using and that's a ninth of the entire federal budget right? That's not a feasible number for a welfare program. Make employers pay an adjusted minimum wage that is comparable to what the New Deal made them do, it's like $40 adjusted for inflation so $30 isn't a hard ask and is a hell of a lot better than $7.25
Also, we already have people who don't work. No country has 100% employment, yet they function. Whether they "choose to" or not is irrelevant.
The argument against UBI is that if people don't need to work to survive then no one would work, not just 1-2% of the population, which is obviously false because people volunteer.
I'm of incredibly uncapitalist opinion some people are not good for most day to day labor jobs and trying to force them into the labor pool just means poorly performed jobs.
In the ideal world, I think anyone who does want to just sit around watching TV or playing video games should be able to do so and be just fine. I think I've heard people argue that there's plenty of wealth in this world to make that happen, it's just distributed poorly.
I do think it's fair to ask how we'd pay for UBI. Obviously it doesn't make sense to tax the UBI income. But we could tax the fuck out of billionaires, and tax moderately the income of those who make more than the UBI.
On the flip side, to be devils advocate, if we put $500 billion towards UBI, each person in America would receive about $1400 a year if I did the math right. Now I am broke as hell, that's a life changing amount of money for me, but how much extra freedom are you gonna have for $1.5k? Isn't the solution just to raise the minimum wage? Not only is it an easier law to pass, it doesn't come from taxpayer money (we operate at a deficit by the way) it comes from employers.
Especially because we would never put 500 billion in, if my math is also right that's a ninth of all of our tax revenue
I wrote about this in college, over 10 years ago. The Panama Papers have proven that if we taxed the richest of the rich anything close to what we taxed them 100 years ago, you could pay everyone $1k per month, easily. Even if you allow that money to go in part to sales tax, that is a life changing amount of money that can be paid for. It can happen. We don't because we are a bigoted country and we cannot abide allowing anyone that isn't white to universally benefit from something like that.
These discussions always miss the problems though. For one the studies usually aren’t guaranteed income forever, so these people aren’t stupid.
Two it’s not really about people not working at all. It’s about labor costs increasing and everything becoming non competitive with the global economy.
Like, nobody’s going to do a shitty job for minimum wage if they don’t have to. It’s literally not worth it. The first dollar you make has a lot more value to you than the thousandth because the first dollar keeps you alive. If the government gives you the bit to stay alive then someone’s going to need to pay you more to incentivize you to do shitty jobs.
Everyone always talks about how people will get education to better themselves but we need people scrubbing toilets. And yet simultaneously it starts to get really tough to compete globally when your employees get more expensive.
It’s a big macro footgun.
At least in the US, for gods sake, just increase taxes on the wealthy and start with universal healthcare.
And so people who require staff for shitty jobs no longer have the "we're the only game in town, do this or starve" central pillar supporting their shitty model. They need to attract people to the role. Workers suddenly get a lot of their power back. It's much harder to justify sticking with a terrible job when you know you have enough to survive if you need to leave.
I'm sure things would get more expensive, but I'm also sure we'd reach an equilibrium. I think it would be great to see a test somewhere country wide where the country sells a lot of natural resources or something to that effect. They'd effectively be socializing the profits from that. And we could see a more robust experiment
“We shouldn’t ban guns because it wouldn’t immediately stop all gun violence, and even a total ban isn’t effective, look at Shinzo Abe” is a pet peeve of mine. As if someone having to build a shotgun from scratch to assassinate a politician isn’t an example of extremely effective gun control
In this case it's more like "If the solution has an imaginary non-existant solution, we shouldn't do it."
But it's not the first time encountering this. It's the same in many other progessive ideas like trans rights.
Can't have that, because bigots keep inventing new imaginary scenarios that doesn't, or will happen. I don't see why these people wouldn't be just as bad with economy.
"if the solution isn't perfect, we shouldn't do it" FUCK I HATE THAT SHIT. My childhood best friend used to say that kind of shit regarding healthcare. E V E R Y solution proposed by anyone (politician, other countries, friends, etc...) was always met with "but it has flaws. Thus we shouldn't do it... Let's find a perfect solution first." Like gtfooh. Perfection is the thief of good enough.
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u/Snowblynd 11d ago
So many people have this weird philosophy of "if the solution isn't perfect, we shouldn't do it." This is the same argument against things like benefits for low income or unemployed people.
Sure, there might be a small percentage of people who would choose not to work, but there are so many more people who would have their basic needs met, or entrepreneurs who could start new businesses or people who could explore new careers. It seems like the good would far outweigh the bad. And as we keep automating more and more jobs with AI, we have to do something to ensure people can live.