Nadia Calviño.. I read that name recently. Oh wait
> "Europe must respond united to the crisis," Nadia Calvino said in an interview with radio station Onda Cero. "I don't give up. We still think that, eventually, there must be a system of debt sharing, be they eurobonds, coronabonds or reconstruction bonds."
I think there was a test case in 2015 that said you could have tests that a resident was not there just to claim benefit, but I think the point was that it was illegal to just completely restrict a benefit to your own citizens.
> How that works, especially with freedom of movement from the rest of the EU, is anyones guess
This was already answered. Germany has a welfare-system which is basically a restrictec UBI, and there were non-german eu-citizen demanding access to it and went as high as the European Court of Justice.
Result: they have no right to claim social welfare outside their own country. Freedom of movement in EU has limits and you must behave like a proper local citizen (like working there for some time) to get access to other countries systems. And even then benefits are time limited.
Isn’t one of the central selling point of UBI that it would replace the existing welfare state with one single payment? What’s the likelihood that countries that implement this just tack it on the existing welfare state as yet another payment? I’m putting that is almost a certainty.
>We're about to test whether they are. If we somehow manage to print all this money and nothing bad happens, then why not?
Fortunately, other states already have tried this, and shown that it causes immense economic harm. Specifically, we have the examples of Venezuela (53,798,500% inflation since 2016), Zimbabwe (peaked at 79,600,000,000% per month), and Weimar Germany (merely 29,500% per month at its peak).
So you should be asking, what if we manage to print all this money and something truly terrible, horrible, and damaging to the lives of everyone in the country happens? And what if it's something easily predicted by almost any economist and with massive historical precedents? And what if it sets the stage for genocidal dictators and the most violent war in history, as it did in the case of Weimar Germany?
With EU’s declining population growth, UBI may very well be the way out of impossible retirement plans in the future. Something that IMO millennials in the EU will face sooner or later. I don’t claim to know all the economic implications of UBI, but I’m really convinced that as an EU citizen and millennial my retirement is questionable to say the least.
US citizen here. Can y'all go into detail? If you have universal healthcare, and you've paid off a residence, what shortfall and outsized expenses do you project in retirement?
I'm also interested to hear more, but FWIW as an EU-resident and millennial with a bunch of millennial and lots of 'zoomer' friends:
1) out of everyone I know, working- to middle-class, only three people 'own' a house. One of them inherited it from their father, and the other recently bought one with a mortgage and has an unusually stable job. Of the rest of us/them, I'd say a good 70% live in a flatshare (regardless of whether they're in their twenties of thirties), 20% live in a small apartment with their partner, and the remaining 10% or so have some kind of studio apartment because they make decent money or because their student organization provided them with cheap housing.
2) with the exception of those who have jobs where a pension is built up automatically, none have bothered. Which is probably about 80% of them (100+ people). And in conversation the general assumption is that any kind of pension will probably not exist by the time we need them, so why bother (not saying I agree, btw).
That said, I'd say my social network skews toward working class and educated-but-not-STEM. And urban, which favors the precariat.
I'm also aiming for a fully-owned house + enough incoming money to afford a decent life, probably back in my native country (one of the former communist ones).
However I currently live in Amsterdam, where the 47 m2 apartment I inhabit costs around 350k euros to buy, which is quite a bit for a matchbox in a 120 yr old house.
On top of that, I suspect that in NL the age of retirement for me will be around 72, which is ridiculously late; plus, whatever pension I get will almost certainly not be enough for me to have a decent life on. The state pension here is minuscule and the private ones are a racket, like everywhere else.
My point is that you can't really rely on a pension and you should act as if you won't get one (even though that's what's owed to you).
There is severe population decline and retirement payment is based on taxing working population. This issue will affect Spain and Poland the most AFAIK.
I'm from Poland and I'm not concerned at all. I _know_ that the goverment will not be able to provide my retirement.
I think that it's better to think about goverment-provided retirement as something that _might_ happend, and would be nice, but not as something that you can relay on in your golden years. Unfortunately, that will leave some underpriviledged people screwed. I also understand that I'm very lucky, with my skillset and bringing up, to be able to plan for it myself.
I'm from The Netherlands, and while I'd expect people here to expect or hope for more, millennials and under are generally pessimistic too.
As a self-employed programmer with a decent breadth of experience and as an autodidact with low needs, I consider myself very lucky too, but I worry for a lot of my friends.
The point is, I think, that the very concept of a pension will become meaningless by the time millennials retire. Why would you pay more into something that you don't expect will give anything in return?
Not to mention that for a lot of people paying more is not an option since they simply wouldn't be able to afford it.
I'm not very confident in my state pension as they can take that away any time they want, but my private pension is just a pot of money invested for me with tax benefits. Not sure what better you can do than that? Buy gold and store it under your bed?
What would that pot of money look like if you had to retire in 2020?
Do you trust the pension fund people to make the right decisions?
What happens if the pension fund collapses because it's run by crooks and morons?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't invest in that, but treat it like what it is - a relatively risky investment, not like what it's marketed as, namely a sure thing.
Every single UBI proposal I've seen has failed to work even with back of the envelope math, even when using generous assumptions and estimates. They end up either 1) Gutting existing entitlements by a huge amount (and current receipients of those entitlements get far less under UBI than they did before) 2) Raise taxes by an obscene amount that destroys most if not all of the benefit of a UBI for the middle class and most of the lower class (and that's before you get into potential economic effects) 3) Provides such a paltry amount that it fails to support the basic needs of the average person/family 4) Depend on massive amounts of money printing and/or debt well in excess of most nations' current debts, or 5) Some combination of the above.
People vastly overestimate how much money the wealthy have even if we taxed them at 100% and somehow prevented them and their wealth from fleeing to some tax haven somewhere.
Which proposals don’t work? What math are you speaking of? Do you have any data to back up your claim?
I only mean to push back on this because your comment seems to be dismissive of the entire concept while seeming to closely align with the interests of the kinds of people who don’t want it (the wealthy).
I find the idea of just not bothering to tax wealth because they’ll just find a tax haven elsewhere to be defeatist nonsense. It’s not hard to craft legislation that forces the wealthy to pay.
If we are overestimating how much wealth the wealthy possess, how is it that three people own more wealth than over half of the entire United States?
Show me a proposal for the US (since I'm most familiar with tax rates, existing benefits, etc. there) and I'll show you how the math doesn't add up.
Edit: As far as the three wealthiest in the US owning that much, it still amounts to very little per capita if redistributed to the entire population. You could give every individual in the US a one-time payment of about $3,000, after which there'd be no more money to take from them. The top 1% only have about $25 trillion in combined wealth, which would be enough to fund a UBI of ~$3,000 a month for two years, after which you'd run out of money. And that's pretending that a massive looting of the holdings of the nation's wealthiest wouldn't have any significant economic side effects (and that they wouldn't all just flee to tax havens). And that's ignoring that a good chunk of that wealth is not held in liquid assets.
The combined wealth of the entire 1% is ~$25 trillion. Population of the US ~330 million. Equally distributed and paid out over 24 months comes out to ~3,156. If you only give it to adults (~255 million) the numbers aren't much better.
$3,000 a month is barely enough to get by in several major cities. It'd be fine out in the countryside, but in San Francisco, NYC, and several other major cities it would be barely enough to get a studio apartment and barely enough food to eat.
If it's not universal then it's a misnomer. And it's just another welfare/entitlement program then.
>It’s also amazing that the top 1% can just find everyone in the United States for two whole years. Doesn’t that just prove my point that inequality is a huge problem?
No, not particularly? Why does that matter, other than the usual arguments about wealth in the hands of the poor leading to more marginal consumption and therefore possibly leading to more economic growth?
>Preventing tax haven flee is easy. The US already does this, charging income tax to high income expats. If those expats don’t pay they have big issues if they ever set foot in the country again.
And if you tax them at 100%, or whatever obscenely high rate you're proposing, they won't ever set foot in the country again, and won't have any desire to do so. And they can avoid worries about extradition etc. by simply renouncing their US citizenship before their tax burden becomes too great, something that already happens even with our current tax rates
Link me the UBI proposal you find most compelling and I'll explain why the math doesn't work. Preferably a proposal for the US since I'm most familiar with existing benefits and entitlements in the US
I accept your challenge.
Canada top %1 does ~500k a year absolute min.
Take all that and give it to the bottom 50% of the population. Thats 10k per person per year.
The issue is not the math. The issue is the ideology of redistribution.
So if we tax the top 1% at 100%, we can give the bottom 50% enough to not even make rent in Toronto or Vancouver? See item 3 on my list. Also only giving the benefit to the bottom 50% is not universal basic income.
The poor dont tend to pay the the rents of downtown Toronto. There is a number of reasons for this including government housing, roommates, living at home or with a partner.
The actual total income at the %1 is certainly higher but may only be ~30-50% more (officially)
As for not benefiting the upper 50% I think you might be arguing against some position that doesnt exist.
UBI would not benefit everyone directly. In fact if your on the upper end of the spectrum it would dramatically hurt you.
I would simply guess that it is the ideology of redistribution that you oppose, which is fine. But the math of this kind of redistribution works out. (The economics of it is a much more interesting question)
yet 6 $trillion from thin air to bail out big business, no problemo, signed by lunchtime.
Though I don't agree with UBI. It makes people dependent on government, who can fiddle figures to pay less, as with state pensions.
What's really needed is UBE - universal basic equity. Every citizen gets a stake (not 100%) in all of business, and shares in profits and dividends, derived from the economy they work to maintain and expand.
$6 trillion in debt, to be paid for by future taxpayers you mean. I'm just as against the current bailout effort as I am against UBI. A one-time $6 trillion payout is still orders of magnitude cheaper than what it would take to fund a decent UBI though.
47 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread> "Europe must respond united to the crisis," Nadia Calvino said in an interview with radio station Onda Cero. "I don't give up. We still think that, eventually, there must be a system of debt sharing, be they eurobonds, coronabonds or reconstruction bonds."
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/01/world/europe/01re...
I think the general view is "some ministers in Spain would like to implement UBI"
How that works, especially with freedom of movement from the rest of the EU, is anyones guess
I think there was a test case in 2015 that said you could have tests that a resident was not there just to claim benefit, but I think the point was that it was illegal to just completely restrict a benefit to your own citizens.
This was already answered. Germany has a welfare-system which is basically a restrictec UBI, and there were non-german eu-citizen demanding access to it and went as high as the European Court of Justice.
Result: they have no right to claim social welfare outside their own country. Freedom of movement in EU has limits and you must behave like a proper local citizen (like working there for some time) to get access to other countries systems. And even then benefits are time limited.
Why? States aren't made of infinite money.
I have some doubts about whether it can work, but if it does, we should think about the new economic reality.
At the moment though, I get the image of Wily E Coyote running over the cliff edge, but he hasn't looked down yet.
Fortunately, other states already have tried this, and shown that it causes immense economic harm. Specifically, we have the examples of Venezuela (53,798,500% inflation since 2016), Zimbabwe (peaked at 79,600,000,000% per month), and Weimar Germany (merely 29,500% per month at its peak).
So you should be asking, what if we manage to print all this money and something truly terrible, horrible, and damaging to the lives of everyone in the country happens? And what if it's something easily predicted by almost any economist and with massive historical precedents? And what if it sets the stage for genocidal dictators and the most violent war in history, as it did in the case of Weimar Germany?
bwb 1 day ago
I am in Spain and Bloomberg is just translating the comments of a far left party that has no ability to do that. Bad reporting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792359
Hear, hear! :D
I share your condition and concerns.
1) out of everyone I know, working- to middle-class, only three people 'own' a house. One of them inherited it from their father, and the other recently bought one with a mortgage and has an unusually stable job. Of the rest of us/them, I'd say a good 70% live in a flatshare (regardless of whether they're in their twenties of thirties), 20% live in a small apartment with their partner, and the remaining 10% or so have some kind of studio apartment because they make decent money or because their student organization provided them with cheap housing.
2) with the exception of those who have jobs where a pension is built up automatically, none have bothered. Which is probably about 80% of them (100+ people). And in conversation the general assumption is that any kind of pension will probably not exist by the time we need them, so why bother (not saying I agree, btw).
That said, I'd say my social network skews toward working class and educated-but-not-STEM. And urban, which favors the precariat.
However I currently live in Amsterdam, where the 47 m2 apartment I inhabit costs around 350k euros to buy, which is quite a bit for a matchbox in a 120 yr old house.
On top of that, I suspect that in NL the age of retirement for me will be around 72, which is ridiculously late; plus, whatever pension I get will almost certainly not be enough for me to have a decent life on. The state pension here is minuscule and the private ones are a racket, like everywhere else.
My point is that you can't really rely on a pension and you should act as if you won't get one (even though that's what's owed to you).
I think that it's better to think about goverment-provided retirement as something that _might_ happend, and would be nice, but not as something that you can relay on in your golden years. Unfortunately, that will leave some underpriviledged people screwed. I also understand that I'm very lucky, with my skillset and bringing up, to be able to plan for it myself.
As a self-employed programmer with a decent breadth of experience and as an autodidact with low needs, I consider myself very lucky too, but I worry for a lot of my friends.
If you know it's questionable why aren't you paying more in now so that it isn't as questionable? Rather than hoping for potential UBI?
Not to mention that for a lot of people paying more is not an option since they simply wouldn't be able to afford it.
Do you trust the pension fund people to make the right decisions?
What happens if the pension fund collapses because it's run by crooks and morons?
I'm not saying that you shouldn't invest in that, but treat it like what it is - a relatively risky investment, not like what it's marketed as, namely a sure thing.
People vastly overestimate how much money the wealthy have even if we taxed them at 100% and somehow prevented them and their wealth from fleeing to some tax haven somewhere.
I only mean to push back on this because your comment seems to be dismissive of the entire concept while seeming to closely align with the interests of the kinds of people who don’t want it (the wealthy).
I find the idea of just not bothering to tax wealth because they’ll just find a tax haven elsewhere to be defeatist nonsense. It’s not hard to craft legislation that forces the wealthy to pay.
If we are overestimating how much wealth the wealthy possess, how is it that three people own more wealth than over half of the entire United States?
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/09/gates-bezos-buffett-have-mor...
Excess wealth needs to be taxed because being excessively wealthy is bad for society as a whole, just like we tax alcohol and cigarettes.
Edit: As far as the three wealthiest in the US owning that much, it still amounts to very little per capita if redistributed to the entire population. You could give every individual in the US a one-time payment of about $3,000, after which there'd be no more money to take from them. The top 1% only have about $25 trillion in combined wealth, which would be enough to fund a UBI of ~$3,000 a month for two years, after which you'd run out of money. And that's pretending that a massive looting of the holdings of the nation's wealthiest wouldn't have any significant economic side effects (and that they wouldn't all just flee to tax havens). And that's ignoring that a good chunk of that wealth is not held in liquid assets.
The combined wealth of the entire 1% is ~$25 trillion. Population of the US ~330 million. Equally distributed and paid out over 24 months comes out to ~3,156. If you only give it to adults (~255 million) the numbers aren't much better.
$3,000 a month is barely enough to get by in several major cities. It'd be fine out in the countryside, but in San Francisco, NYC, and several other major cities it would be barely enough to get a studio apartment and barely enough food to eat.
If it's not universal then it's a misnomer. And it's just another welfare/entitlement program then.
>It’s also amazing that the top 1% can just find everyone in the United States for two whole years. Doesn’t that just prove my point that inequality is a huge problem?
No, not particularly? Why does that matter, other than the usual arguments about wealth in the hands of the poor leading to more marginal consumption and therefore possibly leading to more economic growth?
>Preventing tax haven flee is easy. The US already does this, charging income tax to high income expats. If those expats don’t pay they have big issues if they ever set foot in the country again.
And if you tax them at 100%, or whatever obscenely high rate you're proposing, they won't ever set foot in the country again, and won't have any desire to do so. And they can avoid worries about extradition etc. by simply renouncing their US citizenship before their tax burden becomes too great, something that already happens even with our current tax rates
You get amazing benefits from a government handling healthcare and I think you would get many of those with UBI.
UBI could work.
The issue is not the math. The issue is the ideology of redistribution.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-s-top-1-per-cent-saw-fa...
So if we tax the top 1% at 100%, we can give the bottom 50% enough to not even make rent in Toronto or Vancouver? See item 3 on my list. Also only giving the benefit to the bottom 50% is not universal basic income.
As for not benefiting the upper 50% I think you might be arguing against some position that doesnt exist. UBI would not benefit everyone directly. In fact if your on the upper end of the spectrum it would dramatically hurt you.
I would simply guess that it is the ideology of redistribution that you oppose, which is fine. But the math of this kind of redistribution works out. (The economics of it is a much more interesting question)
yet 6 $trillion from thin air to bail out big business, no problemo, signed by lunchtime.
Though I don't agree with UBI. It makes people dependent on government, who can fiddle figures to pay less, as with state pensions.
What's really needed is UBE - universal basic equity. Every citizen gets a stake (not 100%) in all of business, and shares in profits and dividends, derived from the economy they work to maintain and expand.
"mostly aimed at families, but differentiating between their circumstances."
Sounds really universal. How is this not typical income redistribution where someone picks the winners and losers?