We worry about providing Universal Basic Income because people might stop working, but here's a thought: maybe, just maybe, with a little financial security, people might actually pursue work they truly choose rather than work to just not die. Imagine that world for a moment.
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As someone who is strongly against UBI, and strongly supportive of welfare I can earnestly say people simply not working is not at all the reason I (or most people against UBI in my opinion) are against it.
The reason i am against it is because it causes people more harm than good. People who are in a position where they need assistance need to be given the tools to get out of their situation, and the help to get there needs to be conditional on this (and we should be spending the money that goes with that). Financial assistance should be conditional with mandatory job training or mental health therapy needed to help someone succeed, not just money.
In fact when there are underlying bad habits, as can often be the case, it is possible money can even make a persons condition worse and cause them to sleep farther into poverty.
Bruh. Let's maybe go total anarcho-capitalism with no welfare? Honestly, it will be more efficient and friendly to poor people.
> it causes people more harm than good.
The shitty conditional welfare just lock poor uneducated people out of jobs. For example, someone have no job and therefore receives unemployment benefits. If this person finds a job, they will no longer receive unemployment benefits. But they only have an option to apply for a shitty job with salary lower than their unemployment benefit, therefore, it is not profitable for them to look for a job at all. This (and high minimum wages) is the exact mechanics that cause ghettos in france.
I am not suggesting welfare in its current form be used. I am suggest it be conditional on one getting the training to no longer need welfare, in which case welfare will get you through that time,
And how it should work 🤔
The concept of ubi didn't pop up into existence because economists were bored, it was created to address the issues with the current version of welfare and its conditioning.
Yea that was the attempt and it fails miserably at achieving it. IT proposes a state that doesnt fix the underlying problem, just dumps an infinite firehose of cash at it hoping to alleviate the symptoms. Which is hugely problematic in so many ways.
I am a strong believer in addressing root problems,and not wasting those same resources fighting a raging fire with a squirt gun.
I'm not educated enough to make any strong arguments here, i'm not an economist, but i reeeeally don't want to accept the idea of conditional welfare. It's always end up with something horrible and constant system abuse where people receive """help""" but live in poverty anyway, it consume shitload of money and do nothing :<
How is money along side free education help that "consume a shit load of money and do nothing".. when literally just giving them money for ever for the rest of their lives is somehow not? That makes no sense to me.
Yep it's a counterintuitive idea but ubi is actually could be cheaper:
"anyone can access the money without jumping through bureaucratic hoops, thus also theoretically making a UBI cheaper to implement than traditional welfare programs. The “poverty trap” created by traditional welfare options, which stop giving benefits after an individual reaches a certain income level, could be eliminated, and the stigma of receiving welfare would no longer be a factor"
No UBI isnt cheaper... It spends less money but gets you no solution, which is more expecive.
Cheap means value, not low cost. Paying more to solve the problem is cheaper than paying less to not solve it (and therefore need to payout for an entire persons life)
I dont want something that is the cheapest, I want to solve the problem, and will pay what it takes to do so.
I suppose our core disagreement is about which solution works at all. I don't think conditional welfare works, imo it's useless, and if i have to choose between conditional welfare and no welfare, i'll choose the latter 🤔
How would you know it doesnt work, it hasnt been implemented. What are you basing that off of? Right now welfare is not conditional, if your poor you get welfare, Which doesnt work, which proves that non-conditional aide doesnt work, so why would UBI (taking the current system to a more extreme state) suddenly start working?
Rather than doing more of the same that we already know doesnt work (unconditional help) perhaps try it the way I propose first so you actually have some data to judge it.
inb4: In my case im basing it off data, personal data in a way that isnt exactly the same, but its an educated decision. I spent my life taking many homeless and poor people into my house to get them off welfare. I've seen success and I've seen failure and im basing my position off what ive seen works.
> Right now welfare is not conditional
🤔
There are no unconditional support anywhere as far as i know, you always need to apply for it and match certain criteria.
How do you see your variant then?
What's difference between current conditioning and your proposed conditioning?
You are correct, we are talking about conditional in a very different sense of how it applied.
I am not talking about conditional in the sense that "I filled out paper work and am in poverty"that is obviously a condition no one should have any issue with. I am talking about the condition that you must be taking steps to get out of poverty to accept the money. In other words you must demonstrate you are taking higher education classes, a trade-skill class, job training, psychiatric help, basically whatever it is that is needed to get you out of poverty you must persue in order to get the welfare. All of these avenues must be included free of charge with welfare.
This does not exist. I grew up on welfare, from the day i was born till the day I got my own home at 15 years old, I was on welfare that entire time. There was no conditions placed on it in terms of anything my mom had to do to get out of welfare. The only condition is you were poor enough to need money, and you would get it. Which is the very reason my mom never got off welfare, in fact, she made it a point to stay on it because to get off of it she would actually have lost money due to the welfare gap (another issue that needs addressing).
So yea, conditional welfare, in the sense that I describe it doesnt exist. But UBI is closer to what we already have (non-conditional in terms of any effort you need to make on your part to get off of it, in fact its designed to keep you on it). So why take what we already have that is broken and crank it to 11 , rather than actually trying to solve the problem for once?
> But nope! It is also a working solution to a problem you described, it don't create that "poverty trap" because no one will take your money away if you get a job, you just get more money. If you will find a good job, you eventually will contribute to system more than it pay to you.
This is called the welfare gap. It trivial to solve in either solution. As long as welfare is calculated continuously, rather than in steps, and the amount your welfare goes down is less than the proportion your income goes up, problem solved.
Also since welfare is conditional on you getting our of welfare it is self solving.
So this is a moot point.
> Also, i expect the pressure on poor people that they must do something to prove they're not a camel will have a huge demotivation effect, people will just mimic the activity.
You'd be wrong. Like I said after years of trying almost every tactic when helping the poor the fact is when I just gave them moneya nd put no conditions on them they literally freeloaded forever. It was only when I paid for their university, gave them real oppertunity, and put conditions on my help that i must seem them progressing that in almost every case the people got out of poverty.
AS someone myself who was in poverty who also followed that pattern, to me it seems quite obvious what the outcome of UBI is, and its not good.
I'm pro-ubi and anti-conditional, freemo is anti-ubi and pro-conditional.
I think implementing conditional welfare will end up with something horrible, and freemo think that implementing ubi will end up with something horrible 😀
There was field experiments with implementing ubi in different economic landscapes and it looks like it doing its job fine. Freemo's version wasn't tested at large scale, he only has his own personal experience and he say his variant is also doing its job fine, that's the sum of the whole thread.
IMO it's rather market-friendly. Socialists are trying to supply people "free" stuff by using centralized or semi-centralized planning, which lead to not optimal resource allocation. For example, we want all school kids to have a free ride on public transport. We count all school kids in some area and based on that allocating some money to fund it. But some of these kids simply don't need to use public transport, they rather need something else (e.g. food in school) but can't buy it because money allocated to solve their problems were already spent. So it will be more simple to just give them money so they could spend it on a thing they really need.
It also doesn't break pricing through the mechanics of supply and demand because the government doesn't spend money on things that citizens don't need.
The problem with socialist redistribution of wealth is not that it is redistribution in principle, but primarily that it works shit, it breaks the economy, and people are still poor.
If we had a working principle of "redistribution" that does help people instead just raising taxes and breaking the economy, it would be silly not to use it.
@lonelyowl13 @freemo @scottsantens >It also doesn’t break pricing through the mechanics of supply and demand because the government doesn’t spend money on things that citizens don’t need. I mean you say that, but look at what has happened since stimmy checks. Minimum wage would also be a decent example.
Can I say with some absolute certainty it won’t work? No, I can’t say that I cannot see the future. But if you look at all the times some government program that was intended to put money back into people’s pockets didn’t work, and not for lack of trying, I just don’t see it working out at all.
I mean, if we want to get rid of literally every other form of welfare, get rid of the entire model of central banking, and then dole out some kind of UBI I suppose that’s fine, but at that point we might as well go back to money for government projects. I.E. the government creates, say, an infrastructure project and people work on it and get paid directly by the government. Then things get done and no one has to worry about where it’s coming from or why. Otherwise, and admittedly this is just an educated guess, it will easily spiral into “why am I not getting more?” or “my standard of living isn’t high enough but I don’t want to work.”, thus increased taxes to make up the difference or worse debt on a personal level skyrockets, and we’re basically back to where we started.
But really I am just speculating. We could look at real life examples where the redistribution doesn’t work, but admittedly there has never been a government on this planet that has not eventually devolved into negative authoritarianism so there’s no way to say with absolute certainty we won’t get a literally endless supply of people who just want to do good for the people and have absolutely no personal stake in the outcome. Maybe with robots, but you can already see the gears turning to get rid of this possibility, so I doubt it.
> But UBI is closer to what we already have
But nope! It is also a working solution to a problem you described, it don't create that "poverty trap" because no one will take your money away if you get a job, you just get more money. If you will find a good job, you eventually will contribute to system more than it pay to you.
Also, i expect the pressure on poor people that they must do something to prove they're not a camel will have a huge demotivation effect, people will just mimic the activity.
I think someone must run an experiment with such conditioning to see if it does anything useful.