Basic Income Guarantee (3 Viewers)

[msudaisy26]

Some live above their means also.   The job market is ripe for people who can acquire a marketable skill.   A lot of openings in my area.  

Some people do live above their means, but I would rather help the less fortunate and have a few people taking advantage of it then not try anything. 

There are a lot of openings in my area, doesn't mean they are good openings. Some are and some aren't. 

 

[Alex P Keaton]

It feels a bit like there is a built-in assumption is that most people's "purpose" is to go to work.    

Definitely not intended.  People can have more than one purpose — but when you spend 1/3 of your day at work, if it is completely lacking in purpose that wears on you.  People want to feel needed.  Valued.  Relevant.  In all / most facets of life.

 

[Alex P Keaton]

I get what you are saying, and I agree with a lot of it.   IMO two major shifts happened in that time frame - automation and the the societal push that "everybody" has to get a college education.   The first one is only going to get worse as we lose more and more of these jobs to automation.   That automation fed into the part of the equation that people are replaceable, and I would guess that is a good portion of stigma and treatment of the type of work they do in that time frame.   There are more and more of us every year, and there are less and less of these types of jobs.   That is a big reason many push for an idea like BIG (I read your other post that you aren't against the idea, just echoing some of your concerns).  

That second part, I don't know what to do about.  In many threads about poverty, I have advocated for getting back to having more focus on trades and getting people down those paths.   Not sure how that gets to a point we want without reintroducing it into HS again.  

The one idea that I seem to lean into more that doesn't seem to be brought up much is the idea that the American Dream is eroding for a lot of people.   Also what was possible 50-60 years ago is that those jobs would be able to land you a decent living, get a kid through school, allow for a parent to be home, etc, etc.    You pull that carrot too far away from people's faces, and their motivation to work will also start to wane.   Now how common would it be for people who work in similar jobs to support their whole family?  Is their purchasing power similar than 50-60 years ago?  That's something else that is missing - it was a secure,  valuable job that gave people a sense of pride because they could accomplish something for their family.   Now it's a job that can be replaced at the drop of a hat by a robot, little security, and probably requires a 2nd job or the other parent to get a job to make ends meet.  

Appreciate the thoughtful reply.  Most of it resonates with me.  Will respond more later today.

 

[Rich Conway]

Definitely not intended.  People can have more than one purpose — but when you spend 1/3 of your day at work, if it is completely lacking in purpose that wears on you.  People want to feel needed.  Valued.  Relevant.  In all / most facets of life.

Couldn't it be argued that a BIG frees people to seek purpose, rather than being stuck in a dead-end job without one?

 

[KarmaPolice]

Definitely not intended.  People can have more than one purpose — but when you spend 1/3 of your day at work, if it is completely lacking in purpose that wears on you.  People want to feel needed.  Valued.  Relevant.  In all / most facets of life.

Agree 100%.   

I think where I am coming from is many of the jobs we are talking about don't serve this purpose.  The double whammy is even if 60 years ago, they also didn't fulfill that purpose in life (fully loving your job), they mostly were able to provide enough for your family - so it at least fulfilled that big part of life.   In 2022 we are dealing with neither being true-  chances are is an unfulfilling job and it's not enough to makes ends meet for your family.  

 

[KarmaPolice]

Places like Wal Mart and Meijer- they will interview 10 potential cashiers and hope 2 last a month.  If you can’t get people, it’ll go more to automation also.

This is a bit of chicken and the egg, though- right.  

Imo it's more accurate to say that places choose this automation because it increases profit.  I don't think they wanted self check lanes because they couldn't hire people, they wanted them so they don't have to pay and deal with as many people.  

By your posts I take it you blame the people more than the jobs for the reason they aren't lasting more than 2 months? 

 

[Philo Beddoe]

We’ve spent 25 trillion dollars on the war on poverty and the rich/poor divide has doubled since 1989. Maybe the answer is less government in our lives rather than more government intervention.

 

[Alex P Keaton]

Couldn't it be argued that a BIG frees people to seek purpose, rather than being stuck in a dead-end job without one?

Absolutely.  Which is why I’m not opposed to BIG, as noted earlier.

 

[FairWarning]

This is a bit of chicken and the egg, though- right.  

Imo it's more accurate to say that places choose this automation because it increases profit.  I don't think they wanted self check lanes because they couldn't hire people, they wanted them so they don't have to pay and deal with as many people.  

By your posts I take it you blame the people more than the jobs for the reason they aren't lasting more than 2 months? 

I’m sure some of it is the job.  Companies also poach help from other places.  I get asked 10 times a week min if I knew someone looking for work.   Bottom line is it comes down to a skill - if you don’t have one that sets you apart, the options are not the best.  If they cannot pass a drug test, I have no sympathy.  

 

[Alex P Keaton]

Agree 100%.   

I think where I am coming from is many of the jobs we are talking about don't serve this purpose.  The double whammy is even if 60 years ago, they also didn't fulfill that purpose in life (fully loving your job), they mostly were able to provide enough for your family - so it at least fulfilled that big part of life.   In 2022 we are dealing with neither being true-  chances are is an unfulfilling job and it's not enough to makes ends meet for your family.  

Yep.  Agreed.  But I also think how people view and talk about jobs matters.  Let’s use police officers as an example.  Important job right?  But a lot of cops don’t feel valued today.  Why?  Well, I’ll avoid the inflammatory tangent, but I think we all know why.  A portion of society espouses anti-cop rhetoric, and even really good & well intentioned cops have moments where they think “is it all worth it?  Putting my life on the line every day for people who don’t respect me?”

In a different way, the same holds true for people working in trades.  Heck, my family openly jokes about how useless I am fixing or building anything.  My wife jokes that if I lived in the 1700s, I would have died at age 20 due to lack of basic skills.  So I have great respect for anyone who can fix or build anything.  But way too many people give more respect to d-bag investment bankers or hedge fund dudes or name your BS finance job……and most of those people produce nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  How do I know?  (Take a guess - that’s my world)

Too much of American society worships money and stuff.  It isn’t the same everywhere else in the world — this is what happens due to wealth inequality.   Scandinavia isn’t as wired this way as we are.  Why?  It’s a more equal society.

Time to go back to work, focused intently on the highly impactful and productive act of writing a business memo for our board of directors.  An act that will produce close to zero value for anyone.

 

[Alex P Keaton]

We’ve spent 25 trillion dollars on the war on poverty and the rich/poor divide has doubled since 1989. Maybe the answer is less government in our lives rather than more government intervention.

Absolutely.  Government has been co-opted by big business and the wealthy.

 

[Bottomfeeder Sports]

That second part, I don't know what to do about.  In many threads about poverty, I have advocated for getting back to having more focus on trades and getting people down those paths.   Not sure how that gets to a point we want without reintroducing it into HS again.  

I come from a family of tradesmen-

• millwrights
  
• welders
  
• iron workers
  
• plumbers
  
• typesetters
  

Most everyone of my parent's generation was forced into earlier retirement (assuming the lived that long) because either their bodies broke down before they reached their 60s from doing the job, or the trade itself became obsolete.  So I think a great deal of the go to college dream for these parents came not from disrespecting the jobs they were doing, but from the knowledge of just how demanding and perilous these jobs are.   And for many of those in my parents life a lifelong of solidly living in the middle class became a retirement of barely able to make ends meet and stay out of poverty.  (Many because their tiny 401Ks became tinier from being held hostage to the latest "this time is different" gambling by the investor class and getting to pay ridiculous fees for the privilege.) 

So if you want to direct people to the trades today then we need to stop talking about 70+ retirement ages.  We need to stop expecting these guys to fund the gambling habits of the investor class.  We need solid health care for 50 year old people who have given it their all, and 25 year old that took one wrong step.  We need to have retraining programs for when their job is obsolete.  We're talking trades people here, not assembly line folks so I don't think they care if government pays for college as long as government pays for their training and life time of retraining. Most of all we need to be honest and recognize that there are real reasons to look past these jobs beyond a lack of respect.   Or maybe those reasons exist out of a lack of respect from the ruling class?

 

[FairWarning]

I come from a family of tradesmen-

• millwrights
  
• welders
  
• iron workers
  
• plumbers
  
• typesetters
  

Most everyone of my parent's generation was forced into earlier retirement (assuming the lived that long) because either their bodies broke down before they reached their 60s from doing the job, or the trade itself became obsolete.  So I think a great deal of the go to college dream for these parents came not from disrespecting the jobs they were doing, but from the knowledge of just how demanding and perilous these jobs are.   And for many of those in my parents life a lifelong of solidly living in the middle class became a retirement of barely able to make ends meet and stay out of poverty.  (Many because their tiny 401Ks became tinier from being held hostage to the latest "this time is different" gambling by the investor class and getting to pay ridiculous fees for the privilege.) 

So if you want to direct people to the trades today then we need to stop talking about 70+ retirement ages.  We need to stop expecting these guys to fund the gambling habits of the investor class.  We need solid health care for 50 year old people who have given it their all, and 25 year old that took one wrong step.  We need to have retraining programs for when their job is obsolete.  We're talking trades people here, not assembly line folks so I don't think they care if government pays for college as long as government pays for their training and life time of retraining. Most of all we need to be honest and recognize that there are real reasons to look past these jobs beyond a lack of respect.   Or maybe those reasons exist out of a lack of respect from the ruling class?

My father was a mechanic for years, barely made it to 60.  I can barely climb stairs today(haven’t been upstairs in my house for 4 months) and I’m 58.  I think there is a lack of respect for those jobs because parents don’t want their children to work as hard as they did.  

 

[Shula-holic]

Then they can go get a job.   Their $1000 a month check is not contingent on them not working.  The UBI will not reduce the demand for labor.   

No, but it will reduce the supply.  Even if you want to argue that's good in the cases of allowing a parent to stay home with their newborn child longer or something like that, the labor force impact will be negative.

 

[Bottomfeeder Sports]

No, but it will reduce the supply.  Even if you want to argue that's good in the cases of allowing a parent to stay home with their newborn child longer or something like that, the labor force impact will be negative.

All markets will need time to adjust.  Some jobs will now require higher wages to entice workers to be willing to do the tasks.  Others can now require lower wages because the basics (at least some of them) are already met for the workers and they can do jobs that the enjoy and gain a sense of purpose.  Some jobs will simply go away.  None of those are necessarily negatives. And after an adjustment period there will be a new equilibrium.  At that point there will be winners and losers of course, because any change creates new winners and new losers.  But economists overwhelmingly favor this (Is @Maurile Tremblay's "What every economist agrees with" thread still around somewhere?) because winners will outpace losers and this disrupts markets (including labor markets) less than what we are doing  today,

 

[FairWarning]

Sounds like an excellent way to move more jobs to China.  

 

[Shula-holic]

All markets will need time to adjust.  Some jobs will now require higher wages to entice workers to be willing to do the tasks.  Others can now require lower wages because the basics (at least some of them) are already met for the workers and they can do jobs that the enjoy and gain a sense of purpose.  Some jobs will simply go away.  None of those are necessarily negatives. And after an adjustment period there will be a new equilibrium.  At that point there will be winners and losers of course, because any change creates new winners and new losers.  But economists overwhelmingly favor this (Is @Maurile Tremblay's "What every economist agrees with" thread still around somewhere?) because winners will outpace losers and this disrupts markets (including labor markets) less than what we are doing  today,

I don't think you'll see lower wages.  That will be the market adjustment you are talking about in your first sentence, more inflation.  We can't pump more currency into our system and not have that impact.  

I do understand the theory, I just think it's flawed on how the majority of people most impacted by this will respond.  I dare say none of us posting on this are likely impacted as far as whether or not we would be in the workforce by this decision. 

I hate empirical examples but since we've never actually done this, none of us truly know what would occur.  In my most immediate family, there are two people I can think of who this would make a large difference for.  They both have one thing in common, they've passed up promotions or job opportunities because they didn't want the work hours or responsibility.  That in and of itself is not a bad thing.  There are valid reasons for doing it.  However, in the cases in my family one basically just wants to hang out and smoke pot, the other declared bankruptcy even after turning down higher paying job opportunities.  Some of that is responsibility with money, which many people don't have.  Another part is motivation to do better.  That last part is imperative under a BIG system.  The theory is these people will largely still work because that BIG is just to help them produce at better jobs, to inspire them to do more.  I disagree with that premise and feel that the estimates of what proportion will use it in a positive way versus a way to do less to merely get by is vastly overrated by its proponents.  

 

[Bottomfeeder Sports]

I hate empirical examples but since we've never actually done this,

A bit dated  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic

 

[Bottomfeeder Sports]

However, in the cases in my family one basically just wants to hang out and smoke pot, the other declared bankruptcy even after turning down higher paying job opportunities

Would the labor market be worse off if these two family members of yours were not in it? 

 

[Shula-holic]

Would the labor market be worse off if these two family members of yours were not in it? 

Yes I think so.  Just because someone isn't a high achiever doesn't mean there isn't value to the labor markets for the jobs they do perform.

 

[Shula-holic]

A bit dated  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic

I'll say that I know we read the same article and interpret it differently.  But what I get out of this is that it's dangerous to compare other workforces to ours.  Each country has a different labor force, level of education, skill set, jobs available.  What might work in a country with an extreme wealth class in a petroleum state/theocracy such as Iran to keep the masses subordinate is a different concept than what we would be trying to do here.  

However, I did read through it.  I don't think the support it uses is very convincing.  The support the article is using for UBI is based on the following:

Brazil: A 2008-14 study using 100 individuals; a larger study group had just been started

Finland: A study of 2000 unemployed people who said it made them less stressed (obviously) but the study found the basic income didn't help them get jobs.  Finland also suspended this in 2018.  One would question if it worked, why?

Germany: Some smaller scale studies, one of which found 35% said they were more motivated now at work.  I'd argue 35% there even if true shouldn't be our targeted success rate

I could go on, but these are extremely small sample sizes.  If you ran this program for 200 families or individuals, odds are you want to show it succeeding.  Yet it seems these are being phased out or are merely temporary.  Some of the results mentioned in that article aren't exactly encouraging.  There are a couple examples where participants stated they were happier when getting money sent to them, hell I would be too.  I won't argue that point, someone could Venmo me $500 here before lunch and I'll have a happy afternoon.  It doesn't mean that if the government did that for all of us it would be a good thing.  There are downstream economic impacts, all of which are inflationary.

 

[Alex P Keaton]

A bit dated  https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic

Thx for sharing.  Good stuff in there.

 

[Bottomfeeder Sports]

I'll say that I know we read the same article and interpret it differently.

I wasn't really offering a rebuttal to that post, but just sharing some of the limited information we have.  I think the general rule from all of those examples is that the labor market more or less stayed the same.  That would be the goal actually with the labor market - disrupt it as little as possible.  The goal with the program is to lift everyone above a certain minimal income threshold required for the basics.  And then trust the "invisible hand" from there.