Discussing liberals' ideas on UBI

 So, the one liberal subreddit I sometimes draw content from is at it again. They decided to post about UBI, and a lot of the takes were kinda cringe, so I decided to talk about the post. For reference, this is the question asked:

Would you support or oppose UBI ?

Why or why not ?

Some people say it will create lazy people in society, do you agree or disagree ?

  And to answer, yes, I support UBI. 

I dont think it would cause significant amounts of laziness as the amounts arent high enough to do that and there's no evidence that it would. Regardless, I believe in the right to be lazy, that work exists for its product, not its own sake, and that we need to transition away from being as work obsessed as we are.

I also believe we can never structurally solve poverty as long as we stick to purely solving it via jobs and work because that's just not sustainable under capitalism.

Anyway, now I'm going to respond to comments that were actually posted.

UBI seems like a really good solution in a world getting close to post scarcity where automation has eliminated a massive number of jobs that are not then replaced with something else.

 

 Here's the problem I have with this mindset. If you ask a jobist about the idea of doing away with work, it's always 100 years away. 

In 1930, Keynes wrote about how by 2030 we should all be working 15 hour weeks. Well, here we are still working 40 hour weeks and our GDP is science fiction level by his time period.

In 2130, it will be the same. I estimate a $300k GDP per capita not accounting for inflation, and with inflation it will be in millions. Numbers will go up massively. It still wont be enough. Then they'll say, well, we need to wait another 100 years. And another. And another. 

Because jobists inherently tend to believe in infinite growth. As high as the numbers get, it will always be higher, and there will never come a time where we just magically transition to post scarcity. They will keep this system going forever and ever because their inherent belief system is self perpetuating. Any time jobs are eliminated, we need more jobs. Any time technology makes things easier, we need to apply jobs elsewhere. Their ideology is one in which work is ideologically central to their worldview, and they dont know how to transition off of it. 

Which is why I take such a hard line with it. I understand this scam for what it is. I understand we can take the off ramp now, or any time. We could've done it 50 years ago. We could've even done it 100 years ago. It just depends on when we've had enough. 

...which is still only a theoretical possibility.

Every time we've ever increased automation, new jobs have emerged. We don't really have any reason to expect that to change.

 In response to the previous comment. To them post scarcity is theoretical, and as long as they believe it is only theoretical, it will remain theoretical. because their ideology is one in which any time jobs are destroyed, new ones must be created to take the old ones' place, and the economy will continue as it is.

Absolutely. I’m actually somewhat tired of pretending that this hasn’t been the consistent pattern and that we really need to talk about UBI all the time.

 On the flip side im tired of talking about creating more jobs. 

I honestly think this opinion is kind of burying your head in the sand. Yes, we've had increased automation disrupt specific industries or group of industries, but we've never had an advancement like AI. AI has the potential to remove more humans from any given equation than any previous advancement in history.

 FINALLY the jobist circlejerk gets some pushback. I honestly dont know how much AI is gonna disrupt jobs. For as much as andrew yang talked about AI and technology disrupting the job market, I dont really accept that as an explanation. Because the jobists' faith in jobs is so great they'll find SOMETHING for people to do. It might be working some minimum wage service job or something in the gig economy, but they'll find SOMETHING. And you know what? People will suffer. Entire regions will be devastated. It's happened before. Why do you think the mississippi delta is so poor? And appalachia? Now it's happening to the rust belt. We're just leaving people up a creek without a paddle while telling them to learn to code or just move. Everything is we have to adjust ourselves to the economy. Not that the economy has to adjust ourselves to meet us where WE are. Which is why i fundamentally reject that idea of capitalism and support my own version of humanist capitalism. 

Note how I dont support it for the same reasons yang does. It's not JUST that technology has the possibility of being disruptive, it's that we need to break out of this jobist mindset of forcing humans to conform to this inhuman economy that doesnt give a crap about them. The economy exists for people, not the other way around. And we need to think beyond jobs and work. 

I love that you chose this metaphor; "burying your head in the sand" is 'choosing not to see' the evidence in front of you...and the evidence says that increased automation doesn't lead to increased unemployment.

Is it possible that it will be different this time? Sure...but we have no evidence to support that, because 100% of the time that we've increased automation, more jobs have emerged.

 And then the jobist...literally does bury their head in the sand and speaks the jobist mantra on this subject. They have an absolute faith in jobs and work.

Im not saying this CANT happen. We've had transitions before and they've been messy and destructive and destroyed entire communities, but these guys dont care. You have to get "with it". You need to adjust yourself to this new economy. And that's where i fundamentally disagree with these people. Because I'm not a jobist. 

Is that really true though? Yes new jobs that support new technology exist. But say for example, the manufacture/maintenance/development of machines for factories haven't made up fully for the number of jobs that existed before those machines. It's good because now we produce way more than before and live lives with way higher standards of living than anyone could have imagined 100 years ago. However most people used to be farmers making food for us to live. Then advances in farming and mass production moved more people to working making goods, like in factories, and then those jobs automated enough so that people moved on to services. Now we are in a service economy. That paired with women entering the workforce led to more workers than ever and there was clear downward pressure on income because of it. Idk where things are going, but if we go even further with humans not being needed to make goods and can replace/minimize their utility for services as well, what will they do? Let's imagine a world where robots can make and repair the machines/robots we use and humans are minimally necessary. In that scenario we see people struggling to survive. Idk if/when that will happen, but it feels like an inevitably in the long term, even if it's 50 or 100 years out

 More push back against the jobist guy. This is what i was saying. Weve had transitions before, they've always been messy, they've always left people behind, and maybe things WILL get worse for people if we dont get a UBI.

My support for UBI comes from a belief that at least in my community, the economy will never get better. It's screwed. It's not going to improve. It's in a cycle of poverty. We need a new paradigm. As far as im concerned, this belief system of jobs failed me, so idk why i should remain loyal to it. I dont have this inherent belief that jobs are an inherent good, and that we should make more of them, and move where the jobs are, so we can keep growing and growing and growing infinitely. This is where i differ from a lot of the successful neoliberal types. A lot of them live in areas where this stuff just works. They dont live where I do where they gotta face the consequences of the fourth industrial revolution first hand.

Yes, this is only theoretical, and yes, historically new jobs have replaced the old obsolete jobs. You are absolutely correct here.

But we do have some reason to be concerned about the future. In the past, we've increased productivity, and we've made jobs obsolete, but we've never wholesale automated most jobs at once. While we aren't there just yet, there is some real reason to be concerned that general ai (not the current llm craze) will come and will be a fairly significant upheaval in our current economic model.

Of course, this is still theoretical, as you said, and should be taken as such. It's worth speculating about, maybe testing various alternatives a bit so that we're have something to transition to if the problem does come.

All of this isnt really to disagree with you too much, only to say that there is some real reason to think that this change will be different from previous instances of automation and it's impact on jobs.

 More pushback against the jobist guy. Love to see it. Again I dont even necessarily agree it WILL be different this time. Previous transitions sucked too and theres a huge reason some regions of the country are just dirt poor. A lot of it has to do with those communities once being needed and then...not so much. Again mississippi delta, appalachia, now the rust belt.

I would rather more people be massage therapists and preschool educators than being paid for doing nothing

There is always new jobs to replace the old ones

If anything the US is in a labor crunch

 UGH. How I loathe these people.

Why do we need massage therapists? How many people need massages? This reminds me of soviet communism where you needed three clerks to sell a piece of meat because they couldnt stand the idea of people being idle and unemployed either.

This is the kind of pathology a job guarantee leads to by the way. You believe in work with a religious fervor that the idea of people sitting around doing nothing enrages you and you'll just start making up crap for people to do even if it's completely pointless.

 

It's dumb. 

It’s actually rare for people to do nothing. UBI proposals are never anything close to enough to live on. And those professions you mentioned don’t pay that well so there probably would be a lot more of them if they had a supplemental income.

 

 This is true too. For as much as i talk a big game about getting away from jobs, most people would still work on UBI and this bears itself out in the data. 

would it cause wages to go down or stagnate?

 

 This is a good question and I guess the answer is "it depends". If workers dont have enough bargaining power even with UBI, they will go down or stagnate. If they have too much, we'll see a wage price spiral. it depends on how much and what it does to work ethic. Obviously I support some form of goldilocks zone where people have freedom to pressure employers, but not too much the system begins to eat itself.

It would empower people more.

Companies now have more power because they are free to get rid of anyone easily. Whereas workers have to struggle when moving from job to job.

UBI would level the playing field for the workers that currently can't afford to go without a job for a time period.

When you give poor people resources, most do something with it.

 

 Answer to the above question. I would agree that assuming it is high enough to give people the freedom to say no, it WILL force some changes. Even if we aimed for the same "full employment" we currently do, and companies have the upper hand, even with the power to say no, companies would have to give some bare minimum dignified standard of living and work conditions.

What im saying is that if workers can say no, even if the market favors employers somewhat, employers still will be checked more than they currently are. Basically there would be a new market equilibrium where businesses cant get away with being flat out abusive, and the worst aspects of wage slavery would be removed.

This sounds like when covid relief came and there was a period of time where some people could afford to take time away from working and you instantly see business crying about how nobody wants to work anymore. Yeah, they don't want to work for shit wages. Pay more and you'll get motivated employees

 Yeah. I dont even think it will be that bad in practice. But yeah, I do think employers would squirm. But as long as they dont give in to the corporations, eventually they'll have to adjust to the new reality.

In wealthy countries sure, but our automation still relies heavily on human labor elsewhere in the world. At some point it's still cheaper to use foreigners or immigrants, especially if the job can be outsourced. IIRC some AI companies have be revealed as frauds since their "AI" was really just Kenyans being paid pennies on the dollar.

 

 Ugh, I dislike vapid virtue signalling about how omg the first world relies on third world slave labor. First, I dont think theres much at this point that wealthy industrialized systems can do to change things. We kinda set this system up to be self perpetuating, with capital kinds bypassing regulations by going overseas. This is why i have an economically nationalist streak in my politics. I dont like neoliberalism. But either way im not going to stop trying to make things better for my own country because of the guilt of relying on third world labor. If anything I would hope if the US adopted the policies i support that it would be a model for the world to adopt. I want every nation to adopt their own version of UBI. 

[Economists tested 7 welfare programs to see if they made people lazy. They didn't. -- Vox]

Ah, evidence, and this is from one of the jobist posters, by the way.

Mixed feelings, I think we are seeing already what lack of function is doing to people's mental healths.

UBI would need to be paired with a much greater investment into publically accessible cultural programs to stop a segment of the population just turning into blobs plugged into the internet

 Or how about you let people do what they want without telling them what to do? Im sick and tired of all of these authoritarians who internalized the work ethic who believe that humans inherently need to be told what to do with their lives or they'll spend their time badly. 

Let us.

Also, it's hard NOT to spend most of your time online these days. Everything is connected. Books can be read online. Most TV shows and movies are watched via streaming. Video games are a no brainer. If someone spends most of their time on twitter thats on them but yes, most people spend most of their time online. 

Even office workers spend most of their time in front of a screen. And that's their "job". 

That's just life in the 21st century.

Do some people tend to get a little too involved in certain echo chambers? Sure, but let's not act like spending time online is a good thing.

it's a lot like people who crap on introverts. Why dont i leave my room? Because thats where all my stuff is. Same with the internet.

  I think we're seeing what people who spend way too much online does to mental health. It's really easy to not spend as much time online. Put your phone in the other room and do something else with your time.

 

 I think this is a good solution for anyone who actually feels this way. 

If YOU wanna not spend as much time online, then DONT. Just be aware most offline activities worth a darn cost money anyway so unless you get a job you likely wont be doing a ton of them. 

UBI is probably a great idea.

...but implementing it would require massive tax increases, and we can't even get minor tax increases to fix problems that we broadly agree should be fixed (e.g. reducing the budget deficit, making Social Security solvent, etc.).

 

  This is from one of those jobist posters again. This is why i get so annoyed at the libs on this sub. They tend to be so entrenched in the here and now and think the realism of the current reagan era zeitgeist is insurmountable. Never mind the fact that we're currently as far from Reagan as Reagan was from FDR. So can we stop acting like things will never change? If anything i find this kind of concern trolling annoying. I feel like "political pragmatism" has become a form of weaponized incompetence among the center. Like a whole bunch of "oh gee, i'd totally want to, but we can't." TRY.

Look at biden. He didnt actually get a lot of his proposals through congress. But he tried. And that's all I can say. And i can respect that. FREAKING TRY. 

Ya know, the people who love bernie respect him for pushing these M4A bills almost no one reads that die in committee somewhere because he's the only one who believes in them, but that guy TRIED, darn it! And we need more people like that in congress.

With the way automation is going, there will come a day, maybe soon, maybe not, where it takes far less than the labor of the total number of humans that exist to meet all the needs and wants of every human. In other words, it will be literally impossible for a significant portion of humanity to be gainfully employed.

When that time comes, the only real two options are UBI or the establishment of a permanent underclass of human.

Needless to say, I hope we choose UBI.

 

 It already takes less labor than we need. We just choose to grow endlessly instead. But yes, I agree. We need a UBI so that people can live with dignity WITHOUT work.

I’m all for it. If 15k a year or whatever is enough to completely zap your work ethic then you never had one to begin with and I don’t want to employ you or have to interact with you at your job.

 

 DING DING DING! And this is how I feel. I dont wanna work, they dont wanna hire me, why not just give me enough money to F off and i wont be a lazy inefficient worker forced to work at your job? Its good for business, it's good for people like me, it's good for everyone involved. 

My position on this for a while has been to nationalize robots and AI that are going to put people out of work and pay UBI from the profits. What is laziness? Why is it bad? Let people just live and enjoy life. Is that so bad?

 

 Im not sure about nationalizing robots but i agree otherwise. And that is what drives me.

You see, once you throw off the objective morality of the christian worldview, you start actually asking questions like this. And while sociologically there are answers in favor of the status quo, they read like "well we need work to make the products and services that we need and want", and "if no one worked society would fall apart". Like there are structurally functionalist reasons why everyone working is a necessary thing. The problem is once you start putting them under the microscope, they start falling apart. Because you don't really need everyone working. And from an existential perspective, why is laziness bad if you dont need everyone working? And from there you kinda realize that the work ethic and our system is just this socially constructed thing that we made and can change at any given time assuming we want to. So my purpose is to raise awareness of this fact so we can make those changes. 

I agree, let people enjoy life. If it hurts no one, then why do we care?

Implement a UBI. Abolish minimum wage.

 Im not sure about abolishing the minimum wage. UBI would make the minimum wage less important though.

he best way would likely be a form of “negative income tax” system, as proposed by Friedman.

If you earn an agreed-upon “living wage”, you pay $0 tax. Any earnings above that “living wage” are taxed. If your annual income is below the “living wage”, you receive a subsidy from the government to pad your income (not fully up to the living wage).

For example, if $30k was set as the living wage, and there was a flat 20% tax (obviously, you can still have a progressive system, this is just for ease of the example)and 50% subsidy:

If you earned $30k - pay $0, receive $0. Net $30k.

If you earned $60k - pay $6k, receive $0. Net $54k.

If you earned $0k - pay $0, receive $15k. Net $15k.

This way, you still incentivize work and pursuing higher incomes, but provide more flexibility to people who may have to or want to engage in low-volume or low-pay labor.

That system would be considerably cheaper than giving everyone the “living wage amount” $30k - I’m not sure how you even do that at scale without it just being inflationary; you’re not actually doing anything to change the stratification there, just elevating the numbers.

  I mean i kinda agree and my system is roughly based on this, but his approach seems overly complex. They seem to do the 50% effective tax rate below the break even mark and 20% above it. I just do 20% above it in addition to the existing tax system.

So, if you earn $30k, you pay $6k, and get $15k. Net $39k.

If you earn $60k, you pay $12k and get $15k. Net $63k. 

If you earned $0k, recieve 15k, net 15k. 

Similar proposal. He just goes full on regressive at the bottom. Of course this is milton friedman's plan, not mine.

Anyway i prefer UBI with a flat tax offsetting it like I proposed. And 20% flat tax with $15k is literally what i support. Milton's plan is actually far worse for the lower classes than mine is. Of course Ive heard idiot progressives call it more progressive before because im not giving bill gates $15k or something. Ugh....

And you don't think this won't incentivize companies to pay even less than whatever the "livign wage" is?

 This was in direct response to the above plan. First of all, if we can pay people directly, why do we care about living wages as much? Despite not being pro abolishing the minimum wage if we implement a UBI, it does decrease its importance. because work's link to income is reduced.

As for whether MY plan would incentivize companies to pay less...I dont think so actually. I think that it would be high enough to discourage SOME people from working, just not everyone or most people. Even if a small fraction of people leave, a tighter labor market leads to higher wages and better working conditions. We would be more like one of those scandinavian countries with no minimum wage but due to high union participation they make more than most americans anyway. 

Ya know? Sometimes jobists just cant get away from their jobist mindsets entirely. I keep trying to hammer home that jobs dont exist just to pay people a wage. They exist so work is done. Employers dont care about you. Obsessing over regulating the relationship when we could instead fix the relationship is just counterproductive. Thats the difference between me and your typical liberal.

I think it puts more responsibility on employers to make working for them worth it. They are going to have to move on from business models overly reliant on exploitation. That's going to be a transition. But the current path is not sustainable and waiting for it to burst with no plan is already costing society a lot. It would be easier on everyone involved if we had universal public healthcare first.

I don't see any of that as making anyone lazy. That's a deceptive way to frame it

I also think it gives people the freedom to start new businesses and get education and job training without worrying about basic survival as much. This is the opposite of creating laziness. It encourages industry by this mechanism.

It's not like an incentive to make more than what most UBI plans would offer doesn't exist under UBI.

 This is roughly my framing. And yes, we need universal healthcare too.

I see it causing inflation. Much as guaranteed loans increased the price of college by making sure everyone could get the money to go, the price of goods will probably go up since everyone has the money for it. Unless this has been studied already

 

 it has, and as long as UBI isnt implemented badly, it wont increase inflation that much. On the one hand poor people simply having money is somewhat inflationary. But so what? On the other, they seem worried about the idea of helicopter money, which isnt what any serious UBI advocate wants.

Colleges are way more fancy and offer a ton more services than they did 30-50 years ago. There are many factors that played into cost increases.

 

 Yeah not to mention that student loans could ONLY go toward education, which made them just suck up the money. The market is more a matter of competing priorities so the likelihood of an abusive dynamic like that is less.

But it also follows that they were able to add those services because of the guaranteed money

 Guaranteed money that could only be spent on one thing.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think of inflation as the price going up for the same goods. College today is not the same goods as college in the 70s-90s.

 It aint.

If supply goes up with demand, this shouldn't be an issue. The trouble would be in sectors that already have severe shortages such as housing. But we can always just grow more food and manufacture more iPhones to keep up with demands.

 Yep, which is why i support expanding housing on top of UBI. Of course freeing people from jobs would also free people from having to live in certain locations which would drive down the cost of housing too. I think forcing people into cities via industrialization was actually a reason why so many of the ills that popped up with housing happen under capitalism and similar systems like socialism. 

I think before urbanization housing was probably less of an issue in general. Because people could just spread out and have their own land and their own house and no one really bothered others.

I think it is something to consider in theory, but I don't think we have reached a level of social and economic development to implement it.

Also, I think in the long term something like workfare will be better, humans have an innate drive to do useful things, and fulfilling that need should also be fulfilled.

 

 Ugh, another jobist. If people wanna do things they dont need workfare forcing them to do certain things. They'll pursue stuff themselves.

Also, when will we achieve the right level of economic development? Again, its just a dragon you can never catch. It's always 100 years away. 

I kind of like (near) Universal Basic Income as a compromise immigration policy.

Immigrants that we want (because we believe they would make our society better) would get full access to UBI benefits.

Everyone else (illegal immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, etc.) would pay the same taxes as everyone else, but not receive the benefits; this creates a financial disincentive to come to the U.S.. If they still want to come, that hints that their asylum claims are legitimate.

 

 This is that one jobist from earlier and this is actually a pretty sane take.

Imagine the economic boom each individual state would have if every person 18+ had the ability to move away without having to worry about rent cost since you have a UBI/housing credit.

You could move to California and if you don’t like it there you could move to Virginia a few months later. Most people can’t just get up and move simply due to upfront rent cost and having to secure a job ASAP.

With that you’d need rent control and to get rid of the shitty property tax system that gets people kicked out of their homes because the government constantly raises home values to random big numbers to collect more tax money.

The fact you could paint your house a new color and the government will come by a week later and think your house is worth $50,000 more because it looks pretty is a problem. Especially when they start demanding taxes on that $50,000. Extreme Makeover Home Edition was a failure of a show because the government priced those literal poor people out of their homes after renovations.

 Eh, this is what led to post covid inflation. Everyone wanting to live in their own homes when there wasnt enough supply for such a thing. Id rather NOT do this. If anything I think UBI would encourage cohabitation more because UBI stacks with every participant in a household.

I’d rather see programs expand / get easier than just give money. Cap the cost of medical services, require that clinics (medical, dental, eye, etc) not turn away preventative visits like ER’s can’t turn away patients, expand food assistance programs, make sure all assistance programs have a sliding scale with no cliff at the end, eliminate means testing beyond income, education… etc etc etc.

I’d bet this would cost the same as UBI but would do more than just pump money into the inflation machine.

 Ugh, another one of these guys.

Dont get me wrong we cant JUST have UBI, but this idea that if the government needs to control how the money is spent or it just leads to inflation is off base, that only happens in a handful of industries. Which is why i have complementary policies on healthcare, education, and housing. But getting involved in food programs and crap? We dont need that. 

I think it's going to be necessary for a huge chunk of people in the next 20 years or so.

 

 It's necessary now, it's been necessary for at minimum the past 50 years, and possibly as many as 200-250. 

I think that rather than be more productive as we become more efficient, we should just work less for the same benefit. Time with friends and family doing things we enjoy is our most valuable resource.

UBI could be part of that. Even $500 a year could move us in the right direction.

However, more importantly, we need to set up a progressive change in minimum wage that outpaces inflation so that, one day, minimum wage can be a living wage.

 

 Id support a compromise between it. Im not ANTI growth, when faced with 5 different scenarios of trading growth for leisure, i tended to actually lean on the more conservative side of supporting a 25% trade, maybe 50% at most.

over time it will still make a massive difference.

I dont think the minimum wage idea is more important though. As I said UBI makes it LESS important. Im not full on "abolish the minimum wage", but i could see it making the minimum wage redundant if its effective enough. Still, id rather it be de facto abolished via market pressures than taken off the books.

As a short term goal, I would like to see a program where people working jobs at risk of automation would be able to have tuition paid for trade school.

We'll always need plumbers, electricians, etc, and I see zero problem with levying a tax on businesses that replace their workers with automation to pay for it.

 ugh, more jobism.

It’s eventually going to become mandatory but I don’t see how everyone would be equal. I think everyone would just be poor.

 Only if implemented badly. Really, do people have such a poor imagination they cant imagine this working? Im not saying there arent hurdles to overcome. I'm just talking about this whole weird cynicism of "the free market is the best we can do, any shift from exactly as things are will make us worse."

Anyway there are more responses, but I read enough. This is taking a lot longer to get through, and yeah, I'm calling it here. 

I just wanted to dunk on some of these neoliberal tools for having such bad opinions, although some people had decent ones. This is why i dont really get along with more centrist libs. A lot of them just arent into my ideas. They tend to support the same stuff the right does, just a little more moderate. 

I also dont get along with leftists either these days. Im literally in my own category separate from the two. It's frustrating. But yeah.