Universal Basic Income

[Drumcollie]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing, lately,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501

.

We saw that happen already with Obamacare, which started life as a conservative pet project, designed by the right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and championed by Mitt Romney. We've seen how quickly support of something by leading Democrats can cause conservatives to turn 180-degrees on their prior convictions. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless.

This is too rich Ark...thanks for pointing out how stupid progressives can be.....it's like saying we can hire people not to work because we are 17.3 trillion in debt....and we get tax to pay off this debt by people working..who then pay taxes by which we can run a govt...so we now hire people to not pay taxes but to take the taxes we were supposed to pay the debt with and then give to the non working who then spendit on consumable goods which just make the rich get richer...nice job.

BTW...we did see what already happened with Obamacare:

Democrats took an idea from the heritage foundation that was never voted on because the plan was so bad...and then decided this will be our healthcare plan....Republicans already knew this was a bad plan...and I am sure Democrats as well knew it was a bad plan...file that oneunder stupid Democrats ideas.

 

[Drumcollie]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing, lately,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501

.

We saw that happen already with Obamacare, which started life as a conservative pet project, designed by the right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and championed by Mitt Romney. We've seen how quickly support of something by leading Democrats can cause conservatives to turn 180-degrees on their prior convictions. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless.

This is too rich Ark...thanks for pointing out how stupid progressives can be.....it's like saying we can hire people not to work because we are 17.3 trillion in debt....and we get tax to pay off this debt by people working..who then pay taxes by which we can run a govt...so we now hire people to not pay taxes but to take the taxes we were supposed to pay the debt with and then give to the non working who then spendit on consumable goods which just make the rich get richer...nice job.

It is a stupid progressive idea none the less.


BTW...we did see what already happened with Obamacare:

Democrats took an idea from the heritage foundation that was never voted on because the plan was so bad...and then decided this will be our healthcare plan....Republicans already knew this was a bad plan...and I am sure Democrats as well knew it was a bad plan...file that one under stupid Democrats ideas.

Here is a hint to start you on te right path...you wont get this.... but 2 + 2 =4 and 2 - 2 = 0...you wont get it...but there is your start...figure that out and you are on the right path to your govt handling our money.

 

[connieb]

sputter...

who here is maligning the old Mickey's wide mouth??

a staple of many a youth...once upon a time...

RickWA - you know how he he is... such an elitist.

connie

 

[RickWA]

RickWA - you know how he he is... such an elitist.

connie

Look, I said that Mickey's was all the rage in school. That doesn't make it good - just cheap...and potent for those knuckleheads on a budget. It's nasty, foul stuff.

 

[Alinvegas]

Well thank you! It's been a couple of years now, but technically I haven't quit yet since I still chew the gum. I though I was ready awhile ago, but I wasn't. I should probably try again.

Ya pussy. Just go cold turkey. I did it lots of times. LOL

 

[connieb]

Look, I said that Mickey's was all the rage in school. That doesn't make it good - just cheap...and potent for those knuckleheads on a budget. It's nasty, foul stuff.

Again, with the maligning Mickey's. Tsk Tsk. I did actually like it when I didn't like beer. But, after learning to like beer, I didn't like the taste of Mickey's anymore. Its probably like how you can eat all manner of candy and junk as a kid but then you grow up and now the thought of eating a mike and ike's make your teeth hurt.

 

[fairsheet]

Ya pussy. Just go cold turkey. I did it lots of times. LOL

Funny...sad thing is, I didn't smoke in high school or college. I was too "good" and "smart" for that. Then.....I had a girlfriend who smoked.........

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkady,

Yes, I have noticed that instead of defending yourself because you are the one who associated black folk with those stereotypes, you cowardly diverted the blame.

Dude, accept that you are a racist, then began the healing.

You're fooling nobody. If anyone was not already clear on the fact you're a race baiter, and probably a bigot, that has now been cleared up. And, as an added bonus, you've also marked yourself as a weasel. Nice two-fer!

 

[ya-ta-hey]

You're fooling nobody. If anyone was not already clear on the fact you're a race baiter, and probably a bigot, that has now been cleared up. And, as an added bonus, you've also marked yourself as a weasel. Nice two-fer!

Mr. Arkady,

And yet, you've yet to point out what was racist in my post.

I, on the other hand, pointed out that you were the one who pointed out the relationship between all those stereotypes and black folk...

Why does it sound like I'm repeating myself?

Oh, right, you keep making the same inane accusations without any evidence to back it up, and I come back with the same astute observations.

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkady,

And yet, you've yet to point out what was racist in my post.

I, on the other hand, pointed out that you were the one who pointed out the relationship between all those stereotypes and black folk...

Why does it sound like I'm repeating myself?

Oh, right, you keep making the same inane accusations without any evidence to back it up, and I come back with the same astute observations.

It sounds like you're repeating yourself, because you lack a point, and you hope that reiterating your rhetoric repeatedly will cover that up.

Tell me, what made you think to specify menthol cigarettes specifically? As I pointed out, it's a small portion of the overall cigarette market, so it's not a natural detail to insert. As you could see in the link I provided, there is a demonstrated racial link to methol cigarettes, and, as everyone here realizes, that's the real reason you chose to insert that detail. But I'm curious, what is the reason you'd like people here to think you inserted it, if it wasn't for the race-baiting?

 

[ya-ta-hey]

It sounds like you're repeating yourself, because you lack a point, and you hope that reiterating your rhetoric repeatedly will cover that up.

Tell me, what made you think to specify menthol cigarettes specifically? As I pointed out, it's a small portion of the overall cigarette market, so it's not a natural detail to insert. As you could see in the link I provided, there is a demonstrated racial link to methol cigarettes, and, as everyone here realizes, that's the real reason you chose to insert that detail. But I'm curious, what is the reason you'd like people here to think you inserted it, if it wasn't for the race-baiting?

Mr. Arkady,

Where had I heard that before? Oh, right, I said I was repeating my reply because you kept repeating your racial stereotyping of black folk.

I said menthol cigarettes because that what po folk smoke. And again, yous the one who be saying "Menthols, why that be what them black folk be smokin"

 

[Arkady]

Mr. Arkady,

Where had I heard that before? Oh, right, I said I was repeating my reply because you kept repeating your racial stereotyping of black folk.

I said menthol cigarettes because that what po folk smoke. And again, yous the one who be saying "Menthols, why that be what them black folk be smokin"

It's too easy with you. A smarter poster would come up with a more plausible explanation than the idea that he thinks poor people smoke menthols (in reality, although there is a well-known racial tendency there, I've never seen a sign that poor whites smoke menthols in particularly large numbers). More importantly, a smarter poster wouldn't double-down on the race baiting with faux dialect in a post where he's trying to dodge charge of race-baiting. Morons are self defeating and, honestly, that takes the fun out of a administering beat-downs to the likes of you.

 

[ya-ta-hey]

It's too easy with you. A smarter poster would come up with a more plausible explanation than the idea that he thinks poor people smoke menthols (in reality, although there is a well-known racial tendency there, I've never seen a sign that poor whites smoke menthols in particularly large numbers). More importantly, a smarter poster wouldn't double-down on the race baiting with faux dialect in a post where he's trying to dodge charge of race-baiting. Morons are self defeating and, honestly, that takes the fun out of a administering beat-downs to the likes of you.

Mr. Arkady,

I couldn't tell you that. I just know that poor people smoke menthols. But you done told me something I didn't know befores, black folk likes them their menthols.

Being a post racial type of fellow, I really did not know that.

 

[Sunset Rose]

Ms. Rose,

That cannot be. Correct me if I am wrong, but you said that you are half black. Arkady said that all blacks drink malt liquer.

At first you were amusing. Now you are annoying and ignorant. So off to The Land of Ignore you go.

 

[ya-ta-hey]

At first you were amusing. Now you are annoying and ignorant. So off to The Land of Ignore you go.

Ms. Rose,

I'm just saying, Arky says black folk smoke menthols and drink malt liquer.

 

[Doubter]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing, lately, to try to meet conservatives half-way, is a universal basic income, in lieu of welfare. The idea is that rather than things like food stamps, with all the rules about what people can buy with it and what they can't, and other things like subsidized housing, etc., you just have a simple cash payment the government hands to everyone, with which people can do whatever they want. Traditionally, this has been seen as a conservative alternative to liberal jobs- and welfare programs. Some conservatives like it because there are very low costs: no auditing for eligibility, no overhead for jobs programs, no policing what the money gets spent on, almost no bureaucracy, etc. And the distortions to the market are minimal, since government isn't trying to dictate where the demand and investment will be.

Switzerland, which is an arch-conservative nation by Western European standards, is considering a monthly basic income of around $2800 for its citizens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501

For practical purposes, Alaska, one of our most conservative states, already has something like this (although it's quite low, relative to what Switzerland is considering). Fans of the minimum income concept include arch-conservative economic godfather Milton Friedman, and Austrian Economic god-to-the-libertarians Friedrich Hayek.

Of course, in the US, implementation of this conservative-friendly idea would be confounded by the nature of our partisan politics. The moment some major Democrat starts pushing it, it will be labeled "socialism" and the Tea Party crazies will all go around screeching like little girls who got their hair pulled. Before long the very conservatives who promoted the idea will be leading the charge to attack it, and every ninny dittohead on the Internet will memorize the new talking points so they can provide the obligatory denunciations in chat forums. We saw that happen already with Obamacare, which started life as a conservative pet project, designed by the right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and championed by Mitt Romney. We've seen how quickly support of something by leading Democrats can cause conservatives to turn 180-degrees on their prior convictions. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless.

I think it is a very interesting idea but for very unideological reasons. In a Rapidly changing world where an exponential rate of productivity growth is slamming into an exponential rate of technological growth, jobs are going to get very Scarce and the meaning of work will likely change.

 

[Arkady]

I think it is a very interesting idea but for very unideological reasons. In a Rapidly changing world where an exponential rate of productivity growth is slamming into an exponential rate of technological growth, jobs are going to get very Scarce and the meaning of work will likely change.

That's an idea that sociologists and futurists have been thiking about at least since the 1950s. It was clear that as fewer and fewer people were able to do more and more work, there was a potential mis-match between consumer demand and available labor. How does one address that mis-match?

There are lots of potential solutions. For example, one could, by law, dictate shorter hours for people, with long paid vacations, lots of holidays, and overtime pay rules to encourage shorter work-weeks. To some extent, some European countries have taken that route. In the Netherlands, for example, workers work an average of 1381 hours per year, or less than 27 hours per week. That's more than a fifth fewer hours than we work here in the US, and about a quarter fewer than we worked just a few years ago, when the economy was stronger.

Similarly, you could have people retire younger. If 45 years of working used to be enough to have earned, say, 12 years of retirement (3.75 working years per retirement year), and people are twice as productive per hour now, then couldn't 37 years of working be enough to earn about 20 years of retirement (@1.875 working years per retirement age)? We could, in theory, have people retiring around age 55. And some European countries aren't so far off from that. In Luxembourg, the average person retires at 57.6 years (versus 65.0 in the US). Right now the US looks more like Mexico, with very high number of hours worked per year and very late retirements.

Or your could have it handled through increased consumption. But, as we see during recession, consumption doesn't necessarily keep up with productive capacity, and that's especially true if income inquality is high. Although most peope are twice as productive as their counterparts were in the past, they aren't paid twice as much, in real terms, as their counterparts, and so their consumption doesn't rise much. Vast piles of money sitting in the hordes of the wealthy just don't stoke consumption the same way.

So, as a practical matter, the US is mostly dealing with this mismatch between productive capacity and consumption tendencies by way of having a persistent elevation in the unemployment rate, to keep actual production down. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if unemployment weren't terribly painful, thanks to a guaranteed minimum income. The wealthier European countries provide something of a model for that -- generally their uneployment rates are elevated relative to ours, but it doesn't tend to show up in the form of social disfunction that we associate with poverty (squalor, obesity, crime, teen pregnancy, infant mortality, preventable diseases, etc.), because the Social Safety net there makes unemployment a very different thing for a person in a wealthy European country than in a more laissez faire country.

 

[Sgt Staples]

An idea that some progressives have been pushing, lately, to try to meet conservatives half-way, is a universal basic income, in lieu of welfare. The idea is that rather than things like food stamps, with all the rules about what people can buy with it and what they can't, and other things like subsidized housing, etc., you just have a simple cash payment the government hands to everyone, with which people can do whatever they want. Traditionally, this has been seen as a conservative alternative to liberal jobs- and welfare programs. Some conservatives like it because there are very low costs: no auditing for eligibility, no overhead for jobs programs, no policing what the money gets spent on, almost no bureaucracy, etc. And the distortions to the market are minimal, since government isn't trying to dictate where the demand and investment will be.

Switzerland, which is an arch-conservative nation by Western European standards, is considering a monthly basic income of around $2800 for its citizens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501

For practical purposes, Alaska, one of our most conservative states, already has something like this (although it's quite low, relative to what Switzerland is considering). Fans of the minimum income concept include arch-conservative economic godfather Milton Friedman, and Austrian Economic god-to-the-libertarians Friedrich Hayek.

Of course, in the US, implementation of this conservative-friendly idea would be confounded by the nature of our partisan politics. The moment some major Democrat starts pushing it, it will be labeled "socialism" and the Tea Party crazies will all go around screeching like little girls who got their hair pulled. Before long the very conservatives who promoted the idea will be leading the charge to attack it, and every ninny dittohead on the Internet will memorize the new talking points so they can provide the obligatory denunciations in chat forums. We saw that happen already with Obamacare, which started life as a conservative pet project, designed by the right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, and championed by Mitt Romney. We've seen how quickly support of something by leading Democrats can cause conservatives to turn 180-degrees on their prior convictions. But it's an interesting idea, nonetheless.

Question, what if your small business can't afford to pay your mandated universal minimum income? What happens to that business and the entry level jobs it would have normally provided?

It and those jobs go bye bye. That is exactly what happens in Marxist countries.

By the way, the only similarity between Romneycare, the Heritage plan and Obamacare is the individual mandate. The other two didn't force you to buy coverage you didn't need, and didn't force insurers to provide it to people who didn't want it and didn't mess with existing group insurance plans.

BIG DIFFERENCE.

And while a mandated income might work in a tiny country such as Switzerland, with a population smaller than most of our states, with just about everyone holding degree or some skilled trade, it would be impossible to pay that amount in our country with a demographic which is comprised of 50% of high school grads who didn't even bother to learn the three R's and dropouts who can't do simple math and read or write intelligently.

That' why we need those minimum wage entry level jobs.

And that is one huge difference.

 

[connieb]

Mr. Arkady,

Where had I heard that before? Oh, right, I said I was repeating my reply because you kept repeating your racial stereotyping of black folk.

I said menthol cigarettes because that what po folk smoke. And again, yous the one who be saying "Menthols, why that be what them black folk be smokin"

All the po folk I knew growing up smoked menthol. In fact, smoking the longer cigarette forget the name - slims or something - was sort of a sign that you weren't low class smoker. Trailer park types are the menthol smokers I knew growing up - all of them white by the way. Perhaps what Arkady is missing - is that menthol is the poor folk's cigarette. Perhaps more black people purchase it - but perhaps that is because a larger percentage of the black population is poorer. The thing about smoking is - you tend to smoke what your group smokes. So, if you are poor - and hang out with poor people - you likely smoke what other poor people smoke. Be it black or white.

 

[Doubter]

Question, what if your small business can't afford to pay your mandated universal minimum income? What happens to that business and the entry level jobs it would have normally provided?

It and those jobs go bye bye. That is exactly what happens in Marxist countries.

By the way, the only similarity between Romneycare, the Heritage plan and Obamacare is the individual mandate. The other two didn't force you to buy coverage you didn't need, and didn't force insurers to provide it to people who didn't want it and didn't mess with existing group insurance plans.

BIG DIFFERENCE.

And while a mandated income might work in a tiny country such as Switzerland, with a population smaller than most of our states, with just about everyone holding degree or some skilled trade, it would be impossible to pay that amount in our country with a demographic which is comprised of 50% of high school grads who didn't even bother to learn the three R's and dropouts who can't do simple math and read or write intelligently.

That' why we need those minimum wage entry level jobs.

And that is one huge difference.

I don't think you have quite got a grasp on the concept yet. UMI comes from government, not an employer.