There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
This is a very America-centric idea. Most of Europe works on a 'human dignity is inalienable' principle that gives everyone, even immigrants, access to public welfare if the circumstances necessitate it.
This isn't correct though; in the Netherlands, you cannot get a residence permit unless you have a sponsor, income, family, or whatever. If you have a residence permit, you can lose it if you apply for welfare [0]. I do believe you're entitled to child benefits, but that's about it.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
My experience as an immigrant to Europe (Ireland, specifically) was that I had no recourse to public funds, and when I first arrived, needed to pay for my own private health insurance. In addition, while you _can_ avail of public welfare (if you're on stamp 4, which you can get after 2 years of employment on a critical skills employment permit), doing so will negatively impact any application for naturalisation or permanent residency.
You have also made a comment in this thread that the Irish policy of building in the countryside is xenophobic, which considering the major changes to the demography of Ireland in recent times feels quite ungracious.
Can you elaborate? The current system says that you can build a house in the countryside, but _only_ if you have strong ties to an area and meet "local needs", which in effect means if your parents live there. This is a de-facto ban on immigrants, since they (by definition) will not have parents from there. It's also a de-facto ban on city people, but everyone I knew in the country hated Dubs for some reason, so they probably wouldn't differentiate much between them and foreigners.
Funny enough, I _did_ build a house in the countryside, and as an immigrant, but only by buying a very old house and refurbishing/extending it. I hardly view this as a claim on the public purse; I imported my job (by working remote for a US company), dumped hundreds of thousands of Euro in to Ireland (half a million just in taxes), then built a house after working with asinine planners and finally sold it at a huge loss. So Ireland got a bunch of money and another house. They're welcome.
As far as Ireland's demography, I don't see how people immigrating (mainly to the cities) changes what I said? Ireland is noteworthy in that it _also_ has a huge problem with emigration; it treats nurses terribly and more or less pushes them out the country, for instance.
Yes, it was the use of the word xenophobic which I do not feel was justified, and considering the huge changes to Ireland's demographics brought about by immigration, it felt particularly harsh. I do appreciate you meant by extension of the fact you need to be from the area.
Personally, I have some sympathy with these types of laws. As someone whose home town in the UK became greatly gentrified before I was able to get on the housing ladder, I find myself living a little way out from where I want to be. Some people are "Anywheres" whilst others are "Somewheres". I am very much a "Somewhere" and need to be based around where I grew up and where my early memories reside. My sister is an "Anywhere" and lives in sunnier climes, apparently with no sentiment for where she grew up.
What "Anywheres" tend to take for granted is they usually have a somewhere they can go back to, but the displaced "Somewhere" does not.
BTW, I certainly did not mean to imply anything about your use of a public purse.
> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
Economies of scale are huge here, so no government is going to win in any reasonably functioning government.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
You’re describing an inferior product (cold PB and J, apples, unhealthy chips ? drink) that also has higher costs due to packaging to get to those lunch ladies and more packaging to families as you can’t use lunch trays.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
Why must we presuppose all these health and safety regulations that make it too difficult for a charity to just deliver a big batch of healthy meals at the school can't be eliminated, but somehow we can suppose we can increase taxes enough (apparently, in areas impoverished enough that free school lunches have this massive economy of scale you reference) to cover government or corporation supplied school lunches? This is just a rigged game.
In terms of economies of scale Schools can prepare any food using public logistical networks (grocery store etc) a hypothetical donator can do, but they just get more options and easier distribution. A friend ran a nursery school with ~25 kids and even at that scale she could provide snacks cheaper than individual parents. This was a for profit school and parents were themselves paying for the food in both cases, school wins even without considering the cost of ‘free’ labor.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
> It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches.
>If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Restaurant licensing and "health inspections" always seemed so absurd to me. If somebody makes shitty food or their place is gross people just won't go there. We don't need daddy government saying which places are safe.
Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this.
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
... people care about definitions. We all care about definitions. What are you even talking about? We're not politicians and we're arguing definitions. Dude, go out and touch grass.
It's impossible because actually removing precarity from people's existence would mean that they wouldn't need to to toil so existing capital owners could capture the value they create in return for being permitted to have a home. The implicit threat of ruin is a feature, not a bug. It's why housing must always be kept scarce.
That's why I defined the term. Any practical implementations end up looking exactly like welfare with another name because UBI is impossible. This also informs on how long we should spend discussing it...
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
It's impossible in any case, but if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all (well, as long as that money is worth something, as pointed out) then the whole society would collapse...
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. It depends on luxuries being valued enough by some people that they're willing to overcome the tax and bothering to produce and there being enough of that to cover everyone's necessities.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value.
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
Government expenditures are ~30% of GDP in US. Theoretically you could just distribute ~30% of the gdp/capita (about $28,000) to every person in the USA, make them buy all government services on the private market (government now gone except to collect and distribute the single UBI), and you'd not have much tax effect on productive enterprise (or alternatively, distribute ~20% or almost $20,000 and return to pre-1913 non-wartime government services).
> make them buy all government services on the private market
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
The national drinking age? Really that's just an outgrowth of how dysfunctional the US is, especially along the Federal split. Not really an issue in Ireland or the UK, neither of which is federated.
Don’t forget about giving the government almost all of your bio data, such as your fingerprints and eye-scans. All in the name of “keeping the system fair / keeping the s scammers away” or some other similar bs.
