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Many of the working poor don't even qualify for welfare because they are working but just aren't making enough to get by. I don't know what goes on at "job centers," but if the people are supposed to be working, then they do need subsidized daycare. If someone has no money and children too young for school, what are they supposed to do with them while they go to their job center? (Or is this is a place where one waits in line for benefits? I'm sorry for my ignorance; I'm not in New York and I've never been to a welfare office or a job center.)
I don't disagree that poor decisions are often (not always!) what lead to poverty. I don't think those poor decisions are made out of malice or a desire to game the system, though. I think a lot of the problem is that people just weren't taught any better. When people say, "I started from the bottom and worked my way up," a lot of time they're not really starting at the bottom because they had parents or other adults in their lives who taught them about hard work and about how to prioritize needs over wants, how to make decisions, etc. The ones who are truly at the bottom are the ones who haven't had two decades of proper modeling by responsible adults.
Relativity and the black holes predicted weren't buttressed by empirical evidence for decades...so if reasoning by logic isn't good enough for you, what is it you need, exactly?
UBI was already tried. It was a complete and utter failure. But it keeps being trotted out. Why? Because it will be easy to govern a "kept" population.
People conveniently ignore that part.
Here's a documentary on what the continuing tech advances and implementation of UBI what will mean to a US population. Complete and utter dependence on government. If no one is working, where will all the money come from to GIVE people?
Start at 26:10 for a short discussion of an experiment with mice, which ended with the mice violent and fighting, with no reproduction. It's followed by information of an experiment with HUMANS in Pruitt Igoe, an urban housing project in St. Louis, MO.
What happens is no one has any purpose. They don't work, they don't play, they do nothing and the population degenerates into violence for lack of anything else to do. In two years, the whole project degenerated.
Politically, I don't see how universal basic income would ever fly in the United States. The party in power today is busily rolling back what we already have for social democracy. Social Security going to chained CPI so old people 40 years from now will starve. Tax cuts that will force Medicare cuts so old people 20 years from now will get degraded health care compared to now. Medicaid is in the cross hairs. 1/3 of that funds old people in nursing homes so they'll be out in the street. Anybody with a chronic health problem who can't work is going to get much worse health care than today. Bill Clinton's welfare reform already put a 5 year cap on cash benefits. The "T" in TANF. It also stopped giving more cash benefits for popping out more children when you're on public assistance. With that as the political backdrop, you think any kind of basic income public policy has a hope of getting adopted? Dream on. The rich have figured out how to use lunatic fringe issues like gun control, abortion rights, and outright racism to get white trash to vote against their economic self-interest. Wear a red baseball hat (made in China) and shriek "FAKE NEWS" anytime an inconvenient fact comes up showing that the current public policy is wildly slanted towards rich people.
I've always been a universal health care guy. I think it should be heavily biased towards well care and keeping yourself healthy. If you do it right... don't smoke. don't drink heavily. don't do drugs. Eat properly. Exercise. Maintain proper body weight. The system is generous. If you have behavior-induced chronic health problems like heart disease, diabetes, liver/kidney failure, smoking-related pulmonary issues, etc, the system is far less generous. Why should I foot the bill for someone else's poor behavior?
I'm not a big fan of cash benefits, EBT cards, and housing vouchers. Like a lot of people, I lived in a college dorm eating cafeteria food for years and it didn't kill me. You want to live on the dole? Sure. Here's your dorm room with a bathroom down the hall, your cafeteria pass, and your free bus pass. You want entertainment? Take the bus to the library. Instead, spend the money on giving people 21st century job skills. Since you're parked in a dorm room, you're expected to better yourself and you're rewarded for doing it.
Because people have a difficult time comprehending a reality that doesn't yet exist. At this current point in time, the reality of a world run by AI and robots is something only seen in movies. Currently, it's only fairy tale.
If you could take a trip back in time during the US slave-era in the deep south, I'm sure you'd have the same type of denial and aversion towards a society without a slave economy. If you told an old southern cotton farmer that he'd eventually have to clean his own kitchen and pick his own cotton, he'd probably laugh in your face, too.
Heh heh, good point!
So a failure of the imagination, eh?
I still think it's simple denial and not a matter of imagination...and, to take your slave-owning example, perhaps there's some self-interest involved in these denials...yes, that must be it, then. Whether preserving their sense of ego, security, or even just wanting to play the naysayer (to be a contrarian for the sake of being contrary), the denial serves some greater self-interest besides awareness and the intellectual honesty required to achieve awareness.
The measure of a person's genuine contributions to society are reflected in total compensation.
Ah, okay, so you're one of those people...folks who believe that anything not quantifiable just doesn't exist (qualify as "genuine contributions").
Wow.
May I refer you to e.e. cummings and how that which is most worthy is indeed inherently unquantifiable. Or as WordPress (yes, the CMS) puts it: "priceless, but free" -- the best things cannot be quantified at all.
Numbers and numeracy are just tools...but unfortunately, as Thoreau's long noted, "men have become the tools of their tools" (incidentally, something a Buddhist [and a semanticist, for that matter] would totally understand with respect to words and language itself)....
Anyway, I don't really think you truly believe that -- people who say things like "the measure of a person's genuine contributions to society are reflected in total compensation" are not doing so because they really do believe that but, rather, because they want others to....
if everyone has it, it only resets the bar to zero again...
so what if you and everyone else has an extra $x? the business owners will raise costs and then you are still stuck being poor
Not at all -- UBI isn't "resetting the bar to zero" at all; it's not simply a matter of having "extra $x"...providing a floor is not the same as providing the furniture -- having a lowest common denominator says nothing about the numerators, so to speak.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MLSFan
why do you think unskilled people wont be at the bottom of society if they got ubi?
UBI is about making sure that the bottom of society is minimally dignified for a truly human life -- not that there would be no bottom to society, necessarily.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MLSFan
its no different than raising minimum wage, the minimum wage workers are still at the bottom because they are still minimum wage workers, not because they make $x/hr.
Raising the minimum wage is arguing about the color of the curtains of the prison cell window.
The participation trophies for all and ribbons for everyone agendas are the precursor to UBI.
It's been training kids for 20 years to accept that no matter what your skill or effort level, everyone gets rewarded the same (socialism, UBI).
It's NOT a coincidence.
(I also believe it's not a coincidence that this question is asked repeatedly every few months. testing the theory out to see how many will accept it, and in what conditions that they would accept it.)
I think the economy is moving in a direction of fewer employees and jobs. Business owners want to replace people with machines to save on costs, and there really is no reason for them not to. Businesses are not charities.
But nations are societies. Not everyone will have the cash to run one of these automated businesses, and it won't be a good thing to have people sitting around, unemployed, homeless, and starving.
That won't even be good for the business people. Who will they sell to?
This might be where universal income comes in. If work as we know it is no longer needed, maybe people can spend their lives having fun, if the nation as a whole produces enough money. I know this doesn't sound "fair" to those hard-working business automators and outsourcers, but they need consumers, too.
Note that "having fun" doesn't mean "no work" but, rather, simply not "work as we know it" -- doing someone else's bidding in order to do your own "on your own time" (this artificial division of "time" will be quite amusing to future generations) or, unfortunately, simply to "pay the bills" in order to just survive....
Indeed, UBI's most immediate promise economically is that it will unleash the latent ingenuity in most people who, freed from worrying about basic necessities, can finally "pursue their true passions" and create goods, services, and even ideas that will profoundly revolutionize human civilization and even evolution itself.
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