So, I'm mostly just gonna add to Seder's commentary, he did an excellent job here in discussing the situation, but Joe Rogan recently had an interview with Dr. Phil and they discussed UBI and work ethic. Basically, it was two rich guys complaining about people getting too much money and losing their work ethic, it was cringe.
As Seder himself pointed out, here's these guys' perspective. They basically are rich dude who want people to serve THEM. They basically get pissy they couldnt get restaurant service on demand during the pandemic, when honestly, restaurant service is a LUXURY, and not typically a necessity. Just wanna point that out. You dont NEED to get food out, ESPECIALLY in a sit down restaurant, and quite frankly, as you guys can probably tell based on that one rant i had on vacation, I dont even like getting food out as humans make mistakes and provide poor service in the first place a large portion of the time. I dont blame workers for this, but yeah if we could like automate or streamline the process that would be great. Just nothing about the experience is attractive, people get mediocre experience, these guys gotta bust their ###es to give me a mediocre perspective, they dont really wanna be there, and they shouldnt have to be, it's totally fair. And if restaurant service becomes more expensive or goes the way of the dodo because of UBI, well...so be it. Maybe the karens of the world will have to adjust but the world shouldnt revolve around them, and yes, I consider Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil to be male Karens.
These guys were talking about people being paid not to work, yes it happens when you give people high UNEMPLOYMENT. Basic income is technically work neutral, it doesnt mean people HAVE to work, but it doesnt mean people can't either. Conditional aid is what causes welfare traps where people are punished for not working.
The reason welfare sucks and someone who works might only earn marginal amounts more than not working is also due to the safety net being conditional and then having steep cutoffs. Welfare traps are actually an argument FOR a UBI, not against it, and under a UBI, anyone would earn more money working than if they didn't. If you make $15k minimum wage, my UBI would lead to an increase in $3k in taxes, but you would also get $15k back. Given your standard payroll taxes and maybe a light income tax, you'd pay maybe 30-40% of your work income, losing maybe $5-6k of the $15,000 earned. You would be up to $24-25k rather than $15k staying home. If that isnt enough, then that means your employer should have to pay you more, and let's face it, $15k for a WAGE is hot garbage and you SHOULD be paid more.
So anyway, say you get $30k. Okay, so you pay an additional $6k in taxes, maybe paying $12-15k total, and with UBI you get $15k and you probably take home something equivalent to your gross pay. And...that's bad why? You stay home you get $15k, you work, you get $30k or maybe more. Keep in mind Im talking the 20% flat tax on top of your normal taxes, ya know, the 9% you pay for payroll taxes give or take, a marginal income tax rate based on the current tax system of 0%, 10%, and then 15% in taxes. Maybe some local taxes of 4-6%, so yeah. You might pay 50% of your earned income. Although UBI more than compensates your tax burden. As it is, you'd pay like $9k of that $30k anyway, so this just raises it up while giving you $15k, you get more money in net.
$60k, you might pay an additional $12k in taxes, but UBI still gives you $15k back. Same deal. And yeah. These taxes sound high, but it's no different than living in most of Europe and UBI refunds the money below $75k anyway. Would there be some reduction in work ethic? Between higher taxes and less need to work in the first place, perhaps, but not the end of the world if the social science is to be believed. Because most people dont wanna live on $15k a year, so the question is how high do wages need to be to attract people to work and can the economy sustain that without significant inflation. UBI would likely have to be set at the level that is high enough to sustain life, but not too high to discourage work ethic too much. Keep in mind the higher the UBI the higher the taxes so its a bit of a double whammy. But yeah, even if $15k is too much perhaps we should try $12k or something like that. Some amount will work.
Now, as for Dr. Phils discussion about your typical person on disability, and how when they dont work they get their ability from things that arent work and might not spend time working, uh....maybe thats a good thing. Not saying being in rehab is good, heck, being in rehab is expensive, my mom is in rehab right now over an injury she sustained somewhat recently and it's expensive AF, even with medicare. People dont pay for that unless they HAVE TO.
Anyway, so people who are in that stuff might identify more with that than they do with a job...so what? Maybe not everything in life is work, and that's what conservatives seem to fear most, that without work being forced on all of us, we might lose our work ethic and realize there's more to life than work, so we need to force work on people so that they spend all of their time working and never have time for anything else.
I know I have already gone into ideological indoctrination and mind control with the Bushnell situation tonight, but yeah, this is cult like behavior. Cults like to make people work themselves half to death...because if you give people time to think, they might question the cult. So the goal to keeping them in the cult is keeping them busy all the time. Society at large is like that, except with work, we keep people indoctrinated in the cult of work and dont want people to get too comfortable outside of work because they might realize there's more to life than work. it's why the rich and the elites fought work from home so much. It didnt matter if work from home workers could do more in less time, what mattered was that when people worked from home bosses couldnt CONTROL workers and impose a certain environment and work ethic on them. It's all about CONTROL. They wanna keep us beaten down and brainwashed like little wage slaves. This is also why when hiring people get so obsessed with gaps in your resume, they see people who havent worked constantly since age 16 to be unreliable since...they might have a mind outside of a slavish work ethic, so they'll highly prefer people who have been in the work force constantly for a while over someone who has been out of it, and the idea that workers cant just get back into the work force isnt so much the fact that people might not desire to get back in but the fact that businesses dont wanna hire them as they see those workers as less reliable. Businesses want wage slaves, and nice worker bees, they dont want people who might be independent minded. They dont want people who might see through their bullcrap and stand up to them. They want obedience. WE ARE SLAVES IN THIS ECONOMY.
And that's what Dr. Phil and Joe Rogan and conservatives seem to fear, that if we get a taste of freedom, many of us won't want to go back. I admit, if too many people decide that at once, then maybe it IS bad for society. We still need workers, but I think it is desirable over time to reduce the amount we NEED working at any one time, with the active goal of working less and less. But the cult of jobism is about keeping people working forever and ever for infinite growth so they just oppose that at all costs. For the jobists, there's never a future that involves less work, it's always a hundred years away, a thing of sci fi, where it will never happen in our lifetimes. Maybe, though some social process we dont understand, it will magically happen, but no one thinks through the logistics of how, it just magically does. Like one day we wake up and "yay we reached post scarcity, robots do everything, we dont have to work any more". No one thinks about the process of how we get from A to B, except, well...thinkers like me.
Because if we keep going, we're gonna be exactly where we are now in 100 years. Same 40 hour work weeks, same poverty and economic insecurity, same crappy attitudes, dependence on jobs, technological unemployment, etc. It's a system's problem, and we need to reform our system to fix it. And my ideas are intended to put us on the path to that kind of post work future.
But...conservatives like Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil, ie, conservatives, fear that future. Because they think that if we arent all working all of the time, no one would work and society would fall apart. I admit, if we end up going from one extreme to another, yes, society WILL fall apart, but again, these people dont think in increments, they think in terms of everyone doing A, or everyone doing B. I think in terms of "some people doing A and some people doing B", as long as the common good is served, so what if people make different choices? I understand everyone has different motivations, different inclinations, and different levels of ambition and work ethic. And the goal is to ensure that we just have enough warm bodies in the positions to do what we need for the time being, while maximizing freedom under the economy we have now. let the ambitious conservative types work, and let the lazy people don't. And the common good will be served and while conservatives will grumble and complain, i mean, let's face it, i dont care. People as rich as Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil should be taxed, and taxed heavily, and they might nto like it, but tough. 70% rate. 47% they currently pay and then 20% on top of it. Maybe a little more for healthcare. And boom. Social science says many will still work at those levels, and while they might complain, it's their choice. ANd let's face it, 1/3 of many many millions is still many many millions. I'm not concerned.
The fact is, the only value to work ethic is filling jobs in a society that needs and values work. As we become more advanced, our work needs should DECREASE, the only reason they increase or stay the same is because we live in capitalist death cult that values work to insane degrees, because they operate according to the thinking of people like this. And these guys are authoritarians, they want to boss people around and tell them what to do with their lives, and wanna force them to work. They dont trust people to make the right decisions, people need to be FORCED to make the decision THEY deem right. And that often involves a lot of coercion in order to do. The logic of these guys is how we got the work houses, it's why the alternative to work is crushing poverty and homelessness, the system is literally structured to make the alternatives to work as miserable as possible to make them work, they think if you make not working comfortable, no one would work. And that is, in and of itself, the core source of poverty, those contradictions under capitalism. I dont always go into the "contradictions of capitalism" like a marxist, but that is a valid point here. We have a society in which everyone is expected to work, and then a system that doesnt provide enough jobs. A system in which we say people end up where they are based on the merits, but a system dedicated to fail and punish so many people. A system that promises plenty, but a system that condemns many to poverty. And all because we cant break this stupid cultish work obsession.
Really, that's why we have poverty. That's why capitalism sucks. That's literally the root cause of the employer side of the problems of capitalism. Im not saying it's the root cause of all of the consumer side problems, like high rent, or high prices in other industries, those are a separate set of problems that deserve consideration and solutions, but honestly, if we had a UBI, capitalism would be a much better, more fair, and more just system. Not saying it would be perfect, we obviously will need things on top of capitalism, but if you wanna make it not suck, we gotta drop the work thing. The attitudes expressed by people like Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil are why we're still living in capitalism's dark ages. Like, LITERALLY. People like THAT are the real problem with the system.
Because if capitalism worked as intended, working would be a choice, then jobs would be filled by supply and demand, and the market does what it does, and while the government needs to engineer a sustainable outcome, it doesnt have to engineer this current existing sustainable outcome, which is just a system of wage slavery that leads to most of us spending most of our lives working for little valid reason at all.
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