There's thousands of lobbyists that need similar takedown exposes. Even the "good" ones, where you may agree with their stated goals: look at what they're actually doing. Look at the parties they fund for which politicians.
I don't like when wrong is made to seem tolerable by calling it merely messy.
The world is of course actually messy and not b&w, but that fact doesn't change that.
It's like saying that killing is wrong, but sometimes we still have to kill. Yes we do, and killing is still wrong. If you kill someone, it's not because "humans are messy". Oh humans are just imperfect and sometmes you just kill your neighbor, it just happens, no way to avoid it. If you actually want to get anything done you can't be so aspberger absolutist and figure out how to work WITH the neighbor killers.
My point is the line 'no one stays clean in the beltway' is and very much greater than thou attitude. We all like to rip on k-street and politicos however I don't think tech is on some great white horse that we can speak down on everyone else.
Unrestricted campaign donations is a huge issue in US politics. It allows for the repeated undermining of democracy in favour of rich people's interests. It is anti-democratic to the core.
And I do not mean rich people who are in the upper 10% of income, it favours the ultra rich for whom a $100,000 political donation is pocket change.
As a European I already think there is not much democracy left in the USA. At a federal level it's moving towards an autocracy at a rapid pace, and a large part of the electorate seems keen to cheer it on.
At a local level money, gerrymandering and propaganda make it impossible to elect politicians who give a fair representation of people's interests. And with a two party system, it's more than likely that both of them fail to represent their policy preferences to begin with.
It frightens me that people are so easily manipulated and exploited.
Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.
More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.
The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.
As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?
I am not only talking about elections. I'm saying money and gerrymandering result in politicians ignoring the policy preferences of a large part of their electorate, especially after they have been elected. If your interests are no longer represented, why bother voting at the next election?
"Even without being able to gauge the actual political power of wealthy citizens, we can confidently reject the view that extensive political power by the wealthy would be of little practical importance anyway because their policy preferences are much the same as everyone else’s. On many important issues the preferences of the wealthy appear to differ markedly from those of the general public. Thus, if policy makers do weigh citizens’ policy preferences differentially based on their income or wealth, the result will not only significantly violate democratic ideals of political equality, but will also affect the substantive contours of American public policy."
"Still, the researchers hold that gerrymandering harms our democracy. “Elections are a way to hold politicians accountable for what their constituency wants,” said Kosuke Imai, professor of government and of statistics as well as leader of the ALARM Project research team, which uses big data and computational algorithms to study redistricting. “But if many lawmakers are in safe seats, guaranteed to win by a relatively comfortable margin, there’s less incentive to respond to what voters want."
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.
And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.
All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.
Yes, that’s why OP cited the Congressional popular vote. What’s happening is that both parties gerrymander, so it largely cancels out. For example in Maryland, democrats won 65% of the 2022 Congressional popular vote, but hold 87.5% of the House seats. The 450,000 or so excess Republican votes—votes for republicans which didn’t contribute to a Republican house seat—cancels out some excess Democratic votes in Montana or Wyoming.
You can speculate about such factors, but the House popular vote tends to line up pretty well with opinion polling of the "generic Congressional ballot"--which is a nationwide measure that isn't affected by gerrymandering. For example, republicans were leading by up to 10 points in polling in 2010 before they ultimately won by 7 points: https://news.gallup.com/poll/142718/gop-unprecedented-lead-g....
Republicans won the Congressional Popular vote exactly half the time since then: 2010 (by almost 7 points), 2014 (by almost 6), 2016, and 2022.
As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, Democrats benefit tremendously from the quirks of the US Presidential system, which lends itself to nationwide machine politics.
One of these complaints, that Republicans benefit from the structural tilt away from densely populated states, is objective. The other, your argument that Democrats reliance on immigrants enables machine politics, is subjective. They aren't directly comparable arguments; the latter argument feels like special pleading.
I understand the “structural tilt away from densely populated states” to be a different thing than gerrymandering. Whichever party outperforms in sparely populated rural states (historically, it was democrats) has an advantage under the US system.
The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.
It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.
'wall street and silicon valley', as if there weren't hundreds of millions of dark money billionaire slush funds and the world's biggest and most effective propaganda network in play.
Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.
Can be said for UK, France at least. Current UK prime minister is basically a guy who was parachuted in after the previous nominee was couped by her own party, France massively reformed the pension system last year by using a legal hack. Germany we'll see where it is in a year.
> Large part of electorate to cheer it on
When parties that are "far-right" (as labelled by mainstream media) are above 20% in most countries sure seems like we are getting there (given that most of these parties like RN, AfD, Vox, etc are branded as anti-democratic/autoritarian).
>Gerrymandering and propaganda
I mean in France 2 of the biggest TV stations (BFM/Cnews) are billionaire owned and run a certain line. Same can be said in UK(Skynews). Germany has dark money campaigns exactly like the US, only you don't hear about them(because all the money goes to CDU/CSU).
>Two party system
I guess this is the European innovation, but with the concept of Brandmauer/Cordon Sanitaire you effectively have that any opposition party can be frozen out of government by the "establishment" parties.. I don't care that CDU/CSU and SPD are 2 different parties when they basically switch between each other for the last 20 years. Same thing was the case with PS/LR in France.
I am not familiar with Nordic countries, they are probably fine, but in the heartland stuff is not going in the democratic direction. And I didn't even mention countries like Poland, Hungary, etc.
I agree with you on most points. But none of the countries have a candidate that publicly admires is yearning to please dictators, who says that "presidency for life" sounds "pretty great" and who talks about political opponents as "enemies", who "have to be dealt with". The simple fact that another violent upheaval at the next election would surprise no one, is a dead giveaway that the USA is on a very dangerous trajectory.
I understand your sentiment. I just don't think that thinking that we in Europe have it a lot better than the US simply because we did not yet get a person with Trump's BSing skills is very prudent, given that the directions that our systems are headed to seem to be very similar.
A politician with Trump's Reality Distortion Field is bound to arrive in Europe within the next decade or so, at which point it will be the same thing.
As an American, I don't disagree about the threat to democracy in the United States, but I caution against excessive cynicism. Autocrats and would-be autocrats rely on the populace losing interest in politics and tuning out entirely.
We need to realistically acknowledge the problems and work toward solutions. Not throw up our hands and give into injustice. The solution to democratic revival is citizen engagement, not despair and fatalism.
Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.
I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations. I'm also curious as to the reasoning by which you think this would undermine democracy, given that the election result is still being determined by the voters, and the candidates seek money primarily to use in their attempt to persuade voters.
"SuperPAC" is a loaded term used to refer to independent advocacy groups that spend money to publicize their own political positions; direct coordination or transfers of funds to any actual political campaign is prohibited to them, so referring to these as campaign donations is not really accurate.
An that's already illegal, so there's already a basis for legal action against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns. So what else are you proposing?
> An that's already illegal so there's already a basis for legal action
Is it? It looks to me like they're exploiting loopholes, which is legal.
The article's from 2015, and I understand that stuff is still going on (e.g. Ron DeSantis's campaign and SuperPAC coordinating through open letters discussing strategy).
> against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns.
Who said anything about "directly"? I've noticed you doing that a lot in this thread: missing the meaning, twisting it, then quibbling with your reinterpretation.
> The article's from 2015, and I understand that stuff is still going on (e.g. Ron DeSantis's campaign and SuperPAC coordinating through open letters discussing strategy).
If this is actually happening, again, it's already illegal.
> Who said anything about "directly"?
The only thing the law applies to is behavior that directly violates precisely-mapped rules. I don't know what alternative you're proposing, other than to allow subjective, ever fluctuating criteria to determine who is and is not acting within the law -- if so, that is just not the way our society works.
The idea of allowing the state to preemptively control public discourse because some people might occasionally break the law and get away with it -- a risk with all laws in all cases -- is both based on a dysfunctional approach to law (that increasingly encumbers the general case to address worst-case outliers until the general case no longer functions), and also has the terrifying implication of allowing incumbent politicians to manipulate public discourse for their own factional benefit.
Since the 2012 cycle, groups nominally independent of the candidate have formed single-candidate superPACs for almost every major candidate in every election, and the coordinate message and activities with the formal campaign committees indirectly via public messaging, even if they avoid other coordination (they certainly try to avoid being caught in other coordination.)
Legality aside, not considering donations people make to these single-candidate SuperPACs as just as much “campaign donations” for all practical purposes as those made to candidate committees is willful blindness.
>> Unrestricted campaign donations is a huge issue in US politics. It allows for the repeated undermining of democracy in favour of rich people's interests. It is anti-democratic to the core.
> Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.
It's pretty obvious he probably wasn't referring specifically to hard-money campaign donations, but referring to the post Citizens United situation. That's pretty clear, if you don't read the comment pedantically and over-literally.
So a rich guy can give unlimited amounts to a candidate's Super PAC, an those have ways around the restrictions on coordinating with the campaign itself.
I don't know if that's obvious, and I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and explicitly state their positions before I presume that they are simply regurgitating erroneous media hype.
Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.
> Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.
Only when viewed over-literally. If you take a perspective akin to "duck typing," it's both.
But even if you're totally right, this whole digression on the term "campaign donations" is a nitpick that doesn't undermine the OP's point. Which was billionaires spending unlimited money on politics is anti-democratic (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is).
Well, I don't agree that it's both in the slightest. The FEC attempted to justify prior restraint on speech by making a spurious argument that speech is equivalent to money and is therefore within the scope of its power to regulate campaign contributions. The court ruled that no, speech remains speech regardless of whether money is spent to facilitate it, and is always under first amendment protection.
Further, the problem with unlimited campaign donations -- i.e. actual transfers of funds into the hands of candidates -- is that it creates a situation in which a given candidate might become materially dependent on a specific individual or organization to the point that it creates an entrenched quid-pro-quo relationship that would control the exercise of their duties in office.
But in this case, the complaint of "billionaires spending unlimited money on politics" doesn't describe an instance of that problem at all, because the money is being spent in an attempt to persuade voters, not create patronage relationships with the candidates themselves.
The elections are still up to the voters, and to describe people using their resources to publish their opinions in open discourse as "anti-democratic" is exactly backwards -- creating an apparatus that can preemptively restrict what political information voters are allowed to see is about as anti-democratic as it gets.
> (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is)
The closest thing to "one-party control of the media" being threatened here is a situation in which a state body (ultimately under the control of incumbent politicians) is allowed to preemptively curate what information may be distributed by the media. This is the exact thing that the Citizens United ruling put a stop to.
Except Citizens United, the actual entity, was a relatively small non-profit. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has 3-4x the revenue and over 20x the assets.
UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs). Instead, what we find is that UBI recipients either spend it on essentials, stuff for their kids children or paying down debt.
I don’t really have any horse in the race but the experiments I’ve seen are hardly universal nor sufficiently guaranteed. It’s basically just a one time payment spread over some period, so it’s not surprising people would use money they know won’t be around forever for essentials.
On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal.
I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.
Strictly economic theoretical speaking, inflation wouldn't happen if the money isn't "new" money, but instead is fully reallocated money.
A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
That's false, "strictly economic theoretical speaking" inflation is a function of spending and savings (among others). If you take savings and use it to increase spendings, that causes demand-pull inflation.
Very few wealthy people keep their wealth in savings. Maybe now with interest rates up it is higher, but any prudent wealth advisor will steer most of that money pile back into the economy.
Inflation is generally defined by the price increase of a basket of goods. If you relocate money from things outside that basket to things inside that basket then inflation can increase without the money pile getting bigger.
Inflation is gauged by a basket of goods, not defined by it.
At heart, inflation is a mismatch between the real value of the economy and the currency placeholder used to represent that. This is why governments can (and need to) keep printing money as the economy grows.
Money supply has little to do with inflation. You can print like crazy and have about 0 inflation (a decade before Covid) or you can raise rates and have huge inflation. It's because inflation happens when supply of goods is limited. Covid messed up the supply chain -> inflation happened.
Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen.
If you just print and just helicopter money you will have some inflation but this doesn't happen at scale significant enough to matter in any civilized country.
that’s actually OP’s point, which you missed - CPI change is different from money supply change. They are related and often move together but CPI can technically go up even if money supply goes down, if the demand for money increases.
UBI experiments have been going on for decades. Pensions, annuities, trust funds, retirement savings. People spend it on living expenses. And a few amenities if there's anything left over.
Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.
Presume 80% of the country wants to increase taxes for the rich and corporations, tax churches, have Universal Healthcare and a Universal Basic Income, reform your educational system, legalise abortion, make sexual education mandatory, legalise dreamers, have easier immigration and they all vote for a party who has detailed plans on how to finance and realise those ideals.
That's a big hypothetical, but first I'd be pretty devastated because I've been told my whole life we have checks and balances to protect the minority from the raw will of the majority, but I would probably try to sue for violation of my rights as laid out in the constitution. Barring that I would try to leave for another country.
Mandatory sexual education violates my freedom of religion, as my believes around sex are a deeply held religious conviction.
Edit: The rest I would just try to leave. I think they're the wrong direction for any country and I wouldn't want to be part of a country that voted that way, but you can't fight with that kind of majority.
I'm very sympathetic to that I think we need far more ways for people to opt out based on freedom of religion/conscience to be able to maximize personal liberty. I don't like being forced by the government but I don't like others being forced either.
I'd say yes, and yes for your child if that is what you want. I think you know better for you than I do. So as long as me and my family don't have to participate.
Just so you know. A growing part of Americans feel that there are a lot of laws in place that force them to participate in something a shrinking part of America wants. You know all the talking points. Try to think from their point of view. Hopefully in a couple hundred years humanity has evolved to a point where we don't need religion to form clubs.
Do you know anybody who is financially struggling? Would you tell them to their face that you consider them to be human pigeons?
One problem with UBI is that it would go to millions of people and surely there will be tens of thousands that fulfill the stereotype that poor people just waste their money and a layabouts. That 5% or whatever will be provided as evidence ad nauseam that UBI is a boondoggle, entirely dismissing the 95% who are helped by it.
> Do you know anybody who is financially struggling?
I know plenty of people who are financially struggling. I am not convinced that the best way to help them is to make them perpetually dependent on the state for direct subsidies, instead of addressing the problems that are making it difficult them from becoming more financially secure within a pluralistic economy.
I agree that addressing the systemic issues that are contributing to inequality is ideal, but that is a huge tangle to unwind. UBI doesn't solve those issues.
But UBI is a pragmatic help to people here and now in a single stroke. The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes, undoing much of the corporate welfare, getting society to be truly colorblind (vs those who just claim they are as an excuse to not recognize racial discrimination), and so much more.
> But UBI is a pragmatic help to people here and now in a single stroke.
I'm not sure that it is. It sounds like a transfer of dependency to an even more centralized institution with even more dubious motivations.
> The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes
I'm not sure how making corporations pay higher taxes would resolve any such problem. It seems like it would have the opposite effect, and centralize more control over wealth in the hands of political institutions.
The discussion pertains to a political position, and all political questions are fundamentally normative ones, on the "ought" side of the gap. Both intended aims and ethical limits are defined by what you're calling "ideology".
The "is" side of the question defines the empirical constraints within which those aims are pursued, but that's an instrumental question: it bears out the means, but has little to say about the value of the ends.
In other words, "is this course of action likely to produce the outcomes we intend?" is a question to be substantiated by evidence, but "are these the ends we wish to pursue?" and "are these ends worth the cost and/or risk to other things we care about?" are normative questions for which subjective values ("ideology") determine the decision criteria for all parties in the debate.
Sure. My main point is that the economic system is so perverted, that it is silly to refute UBI on common sense grounds. I don't think I am an advocate.
If you live in a 1st world country, your country believes in the coercive appropriation of other's property.
You already participate in that appropriation. The coercive appropriation is called taxation. You can choose to not pay, but you'll be incarcerated. You cannot choose where your monies go, or what they go for.
You're already a participant, and you don't seem to realize it.
Also, eleemosynary... really? Means charitable or charity. Did you really have to use a word most of the world hasn't ever heard of to prove the point that you don't like charity?
You should stop using our roads then. You should stop using our schools. You should stop using emergency services, voting, or participating in the first world country you're living in.
Because every single program, service, or project uses confiscated monies from the masses to benefit the smaller minority that use those programs, services, or projects.
Taxation is social charity. UBI is social charity. What's the difference?
Taxation to address collective action problems like the military or the legal system is not charity. This is captured in the US Constitution which provides for the "General Welfare" not welfare for individual citizens.
I disagree with you, but I upvoted you. It sucks to wade into a discussion like this where you are going to get piled on.
The most effective way for “my side” to win is to convince enough of “your side” to join me. I can only do that through understanding your position. So I appreciate your participating, even when it is unpopular.
The US handed out $1.8 trillion to individuals and families and $1.7 trillion to businesses during COVID. And then a few years later began experiencing the highest inflation rate in 40 years.
And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on.
I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.
Communism is indeed worse, but that doesn't automatically make our current system 'good'. Yes it's the best we tried so far, but it's not like we tried soo many others and this one ended up being the best out of all the ones tested.
I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.
> I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
That isn't an obvious conclusion. To the extent the current system is one, improving it with such an approach doesn't account for:
- It having too many parts to understand without resorting to highly lossy models.
- Its non-features being far more impactful than its features.
Dismissing entire categories of systems and approaches under a multitude of different situations and circumstances speaks more to how effective you personally have been propagandized.
Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production.
Collective worker ownership of the means of production is extraordinarily normalized in Germany (and a frequent source of conflict with US politicians who solicit automaker facilities in anti-labor locales) as well as other european countries (Husqvarna Vapensfabrik, Royal Dutch Shell Company, etc). There is no particular slippery slope here, some companies operate for centuries like this.
The communistic nature of kibbutzim in israel were/are also extraordinarily successful.
These things generally are good for workers and bring equality and stability to their countries. You just have to get past the trite third-grade "communism is actually bad" soundbyte (and the tendency to funnel anything that's mildly pro-worker into the "communism" bucket of course).
And remember, there's plenty of Pinochets and Suhartos and Malaysian juntas to go around for all political systems. Just like there are also plenty of inefficient capitalist organizations too - capitalism is not a magic wand for efficiency either.
In fact when you get down to it... corporations are really their own small little centrally-planned economies and dictatorships. And if they become too large to fail you get exactly the same failure modes as state corporations etc. Boeing might as well be a soviet OKB for all it matters. What, precisely, is the value or merit in quibbling over such a distinction?
Human societies surviving the next century is going to require a great deal of collectivism and cooperation, let alone the obvious internal problems with social equity. But people still think “but communism is bad” (by which they of course mean anything from German cooperatives to Stalinism) is the height of political discourse like they’re in a Fox News primetime special lol. Like, they got you real good didn’t they?
I think it's also something of an X-Y problem... people identify with "capitalism = rugged individualism" and don't realize that Boeing siphoning taxpayer dollars for airplanes the doors fall off of, or pinochet giving citizens "helicopter rides" or suharto burning citizens alive in barrels or the world's most repressive prison system is just as much a feature of capitalism as OKBs or the gulag archipelago or stalin's purges were a features of communism. Because those are orthogonal problems, those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization.
But "communism bad" - thank you so much for that contribution to the discourse! Nobody's ever said that before! /s
> Dismissing entire categories of systems and approaches under a multitude of different situations and circumstances speaks more to how effective you personally have been propagandized.
> those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization
Communism requires authoritarianism. It's inherent to operating system. When you take resources from some and distribute to others, who, exactly, does the taking and giving?
Monoculture micro-communities like kibbutz don't show anything. Nation-states are diverse groups of hundreds of millions with competing beliefs, values, and goals. Communism cannot serve these diverse interests. It requires a group of authoritarians that choose from whom to take and whom to give and the abject suffering of many is the result, every time. There is no freedom or liberty, that's by design. It's a failure with disastrous consequences.
The total amount of money being the same doesn't imply that there would be no inflation. The total demand being the same (for a given supply) would be what you'd need there.
If you give the rich more money, they're not likely to spend it on restaurants and merchandise and services: they can already afford as much of those as they want.
If you give money to people who couldn't afford them without the extra cash, though, you're artificially boosting demand, which would impact inflation.
No it isn't. The problem is that all these programs never actually end up redistributing wealth, but they always end up redistributing income, usually taken via higher taxes from the already shrinking middle class, leading to further deepening of wealth inequality.
As the super wealthy don't just have a public bank account with billions of $ under their own name, like your grandma, but have their wealth under various assets, entangled corporations, trust funds and non-profits, spread across various tax jurisdictions both on- and off-shore, making their wealth very difficult to track and tax correctly, plus gaming the financial system so that their companies are always billing each other for services till they're running at a loss, never seemingly generate any meaningful profits in their home "high-tax" jurisdictions.
FFS they have entire teams of well paid experts dedicated to these "tax optimization schemes", something the middle class and small business owners can never afford. THIS IS WHY WE HAVE WEALTH INEQUALITY, not because some middle class people earn higher wages after busting their asses in school and university. Just look at IKEA's elaborate tax dodging scheme. [1] Why can't he pay Swedish taxes like all Swedish businesses?
> As the super wealthy don't have a public bank account with billions of $ under their own name, but have their wealth under various entangled corporations, trust funds and non-profits, spread across various tax jurisdictions on and off shore, making very difficult to tax.
Report it and have it taxed. A private company can land a rover on the moon but we can't perform ETL operations on asset reporting?
When you say the wealthy own too much, you mean they own productive assets. They run companies. Sure there are some that just have a pile of cash sitting in a vault but that's rare.
So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive over time, kind of like what happens when a state expropriates businesses as if there is some magic in the walls of the building that generate value
> When you say the wealthy own too much, you mean they own productive assets. They run companies. Sure there are some that just have a pile of cash sitting in a vault but that's rare.
> So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive...
No. People who run companies very, very frequently do not own them outright or even have a controlling stake.
So even in an extremist toy model, where you "take away their wealth," you can still leave the existing manager in place or make the former owner a manager-employee.
You could even be very capitalist about it, and motivate the former owner to do a to do a good job as a manager, by making it clear that he will starve if he doesn't (that's how capitalism works for most people).
You might have this idea that people just fall into great wealth through random happenstance and then just buy ETFs passively but that's not true. There are a lot fewer bill Gates types holding ETFs than there are 8 figure net worth guy that owns half a dozen car dealerships. Or doctors/lawyers that own their own practice. A lot of ceos also get paid huge amounts in stock. That's much more the norm
> Family businesses account for 64 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, generate 62 percent of the country's employment, and account for 78 percent of all new job creation.
The 'bottom' spend a much large proportion of the income on 'stuff' that counts towards inflation than the the 'top'. If you take money out of rich peoples art and private jet budget and add it to poor peoples food and heating budget, then that can drive up inflation since food and heating make up a bigger part of the inflation calculation than art and private jets.
> Global supply chain disruptions following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the rapid rise in U.S. inflation over the past two years. Evidence suggests that supply chain pressures pushed up the cost of inputs for goods production and the public’s expectations of higher future prices. These factors accounted for about 60% of the surge in U.S. inflation beginning in early 2021. Supply chain pressures began easing substantially in mid-2022, contributing to the slowdown in inflation.
> The causes of the housing supply crisis are widely understood. After the Great Recession, new home construction dropped like a stone. Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s. By 2019, a good estimate of the shortage of housing units for sale or rent was 3.8 million. The pandemic-induced materials and labor shortage exacerbated the trend, however, as evidenced by the surge in rents and home prices in 2021.
> Corporate profits rose quickly in 2021 along with inflation, raising concerns about corporations driving up prices to increase profits. Although corporate profits indeed contributed to inflation in 2021, their contribution fell in 2022. This pattern is not unusual: in previous economic recoveries, corporate profits were the main contributor to inflation in the first year and displaced by costs in the second year.
> “We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation,” the report said.
> The author’s analysis of financial reports from 1,350 companies listed in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Brazil and South Africa found nominal profits were on average 30% higher at the end of 2022 than at the end of 2019.
>You are attributing to federal fiscal policy what was caused by supply chain dysfunction, housing inventory shortages, and corporate profits.
Would you be shocked to learn the inflation had a number of causes, including the vast COVID stimulus? I mean, your quote above attributes 60%, and that supply chain issues resolving "contributed" to inflation easing.
I'm for UBI if we can figure out how to implement it. We've experimented with it here in Canada. But handing people money has inflationary consequences, it's not rocket science. Otherwise, generic extreme argument: give everyone a billion and we all win.
>asking you to validate the assertion with data. I brought citations, I will wait for yours.
Try any economics textbook, and common sense. I couldn't care less what you believe. This stuff has been written about for 100 years, currency is susceptible to the laws of supply and demand like any other commodity; over supply affects prices.
>No reasonable person takes this argument seriously.
Oh, really? What's the right amount we should give to people then? Please bring data.
You sound like the MMT folks, who endlessly told us printing money didn't matter. Until it did. Then "real MMT has never been tried!"
The whole "corporate profiteering drove inflation" narrative is/was entirely driven by click farming economically distressed people. It never was the case and even mild understanding of economics/finance quickly unravels the narrative.
Inflation was driven primarily by low interest rates, very generous financial support/relief(rent moratorium, student loan pause, bolstered and extended unemployment), and the ability for most white collar workers to keep on working from home.
Supply chain issues didn't help, but it's not even clear if 2019 supply chains would have been able to keep up with the insane consumer demand of 2021.
> The whole "corporate profiteering drove inflation" narrative is/was entirely driven by click farming economically distressed people. It never was the case and even mild understanding of economics/finance quickly unravels the narrative.
My citation is the Kansas City Fed in case you missed it.
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/18/once-a-fringe-theory-greedf... ("In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.)"
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/brainard202.... ("Retail markups in a number of sectors have seen material increases in what could be described as a price–price spiral, whereby final prices have risen by more than the increases in input prices."
So you admit that inflation is caused by corporations that can raise prices and keep them high? Because, in this thread, you've gone from "this narrative is/was entirely driven by click farming economically distressed people" to "of course they did this, they clearly can" as we've worked our way down to here from my top level comment.
Corporations didn't discover that they can raise prices in 2021. They need headroom in order to do it.
You are confusing the manifestation of inflation (rising prices) with the cause of inflation (more money on the table than hard value underneath it). Yes, rising prices perpetuate inflation (a price-price spiral as mentioned in the research), but the root cause of inflation was not corporations suddenly learning of this new tool called "raising prices". It was a reaction to the unrivaled level of economic stimulus pumped into the economy.
Strangely, there were also massive supply chain disruptions, hoarding, and a program that basically handed out free money to business owners for any sort of purchase they wanted, all around the same time.
You don't make double-digit inflation by giving people barely enough money to cover rent in most low-cost American cities.
EDIT:
Also, let us consider why these payments were necessary and why they had to be funded the way they were. They had to be funded by printing money because the US government is deep in debt and there hasn't been a real tax increase since George HW Bush killed his political career with one in 1992. There is no rainy-day fund for the American people, so the FRS had to make one, and quick, lest you have people in the streets in general revolt, which given that the George Floyd protests were around the same time, was a real risk.
The payments were necessary because the American economy is not only leveraged from top-to-bottom, but in fact requires a good chunk of the population be in a good amount of debt with no savings in order to maintain growth of the credit products that many financial institutions rely on for the production of value for their shareholders. If you had over a hundred million people suddenly not making money, it's like the 2008 financial crisis, except instead of mortgage-backed securities, this time, it's every kind of securitized debt.
Don't forget that that 1.7 trillion was largely forgiven, especially in the case of some of the largest recipients. The president at the time made sure that there was absolutely zero oversight of the corporations that got money, and of course that's going to cause problems.
Yes, printing money wildly leads to inflation. Nobody is arguing that it doesn't. Giving the poorest members of society means the velocity of that money (or the M1 number) doesn't actually cause rampant inflation, as it stays in circulation because it is used quickly.
Giving 1.7 trillion largely to corporations who don't NEED it causes inflation. A corporation who sits on that cash (and then doesn't actually have to pay taxes on that cash, nor actually distribute it to employees) does cause inflation, because that's a whole lot of money just sitting around instead of flowing through an economy.
> UBI's critics expected these programs to have terrible outcomes, where recipients would spend their money on trivialities (or worse: drugs).
The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance.
This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.
I'm talking about the ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital. At least with federal programs there's _some_ ability for the average person to influence how the program is run, even if it's abstracted through Congress and elections.
I don't agree that there's any substantive difference in what you're complaining about and what you're proposing as a solution. The scenario in both cases is people being dependent for essential livelihood on organizations administered by strangers with their own motives.
However, the status quo reality doesn't fully reflect what you're complaining about, because the "ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital" is something that is distributed widely across society, with a vast plurality of institutions and communities, having varying and often opposing motivations, all having the capacity to independently develop their own capital.
Conversely, the political state is a single institution with structural incentives that converge toward a single set of objectives, and no, the electoral process is not a sufficient mechanism of accountability.
Effectively, what you are arguing for is taking the pattern that you find unfavorable in the first place, and putting it under the control of a single centralized monopoly with insufficient safeguards against abuse.
I'm not sure the article itself is an unbiased source, given that it is published by a pro-UBI website.
It seems likely that the article's assumptions about who is opposing UBI and why they are opposing it are erroneous. I personally oppose UBI for the reasons I described above, by my motivations have nothing to do with anything the article is talking about.
It's also possible that various factions are using positioning around UBI proposals as a proxy or as a tactic to advance other, more complex, political aims.
Didn't we have an experiment with ubi during COVID. Everyone basically got a big check. You can see the huge impact it has on savings. You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that but what I noticed it coincided with is a huge run up in asset prices (especially speculative things like crypto), and to eventually led to broad consumer inflation.
Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways.
I believe many of these UBI experiments were also advocated by different billionaires. One idealistic group and one pessimistic group.
Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense).
For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.
As a critic of UBI, that's not what I expect at all. I expect all of these tests to have wonderful outcomes where people who get their share are able to make good choices, invest in their future, and become better off than their neighbors. I expect that this will always be the case for any test done with UBI, because I understand that these tests are modelling a situation fundamentally different from what would happen if the basic income granted were actually universal - publicly known and guaranteed by the government.
In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation.
What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning.
True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why.
Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't.
Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely.
How does UBI avoid encouraging excessive inflation on basic goods? If there are more people to afford them, then surely demand will rise and supply will decrease, driving prices up until UBI must rise to compensate.
To extend the already really tortured analogy, we've got people who've managed to hoard many billions of... willing blowjob givers? And we've got people who... die from lack of blowjobs.
I mean, even if you take all the billionaires money and somehow liquidate it in efficient way it will only be enough for basic income of 500$/month for about 30 months (in USA). It's not like you can turn Tesla into housing for the poor though with any kind of efficiency so even that scenario is very unlikely.
If you want UBI long term you would need to heavily tax the middle class - people who work a lot and provide value every day. This is what always happens with such programs and happened in my country as well (where the UBI was very limited to 125$/month and only given per child).
It's easy to point into "evil billionaires" and say to take for them but in reality you need to take a lot more from a guy who built his career for 15+ years and is now a doctor or a programmer or a small business owner. This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
"A study by White House economists released on September 23 found that the 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018."
To fix the Senate, you need to make it more proportional to the number of people in the states. The other option would be to get rid of the Senate all together, as it’s undemocratic to begin with.
North Dakota should not get the same power as all of CA. ND is the same population as San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine the original writers of the constitution would have thought that a 50x imbalance of representation would be a good thing.
I thought that was the whole point - if you make California all powerful in the house and Senate, smaller states get trampled on. It's no longer a union of states at that point, might as well rename the country California.
Only way a 3 (or more) party system works in the US is if we change the way we vote to a ranked-choice type of system with runoff elections. With first past the post, winner take all elections, multiple parties just makes it possible for politicians to win with smaller and smaller pluralities.
I agree with you that billionaires reflect an obscene system. What is a fair, and loophole-free way to avoid them?
Asset taxes? Do you just tax every dollar over $1B at 100%? What if they own shares in a company that grows beyond $1B? Do they have to sell the shares? What if they then lose control of the company as a result? Maybe that is good. IDK.
Also, is it $1B per person. Could the person get married to let them grow to $2B?
If the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit, then what happens? Do all the billionaires just buy citizenship in Estonia or something?
Again, I am not opposed to the idea. I just think it needs a lot of work. Otherwise, these rants seem like a distraction. If it is never going to happen, maybe we are better off focused on trying to achieve UBI than Universal Asset Equality or whatever.
It's sad that people at the next election only have a choice between extending democracy and accepting autocracy. It never really was about policies, but in the last 10 year all discourse about policy seems to have disappeared. All discourse seems to be about perpetually misinformed culture wars.
No, they want you alive. They want you to procreate. And they want you to be desperate enough to accept jobs on unfavourable terms, to make sure society continues to provide them with the luxuries they've become accustomed to. The only alternatives for those jobs will have to be "living on the streets" and "joining the military".
UBI experiments are mostly pointless until they reach a national level. Otherwise you end up giving people a bunch of extra cash from the working economy, and surprise surprise, people are generally happier and better off with more free cash. The question is what happens when you do this on a large enough scale to affect economic production.
A lot of the point of the experiments is specifically to provide for evidence that critics tend to have about what poor people do with money. Because a great, great many people basically believe (falsely) that poverty is essentially a choice made by poor decisions more or less and that it is a personal or moral failing. There’s so little evidence for this it’s kind of crazy but then we take a look at those with that kind of attitude and see a huge bias
That doesn't solve the whole problem. It requires more interaction with the state instead of just allowing an opt out. It also doesn't allow opting out at the paying in layer.
As a general rule, "if you don't like this rule we're adding, don't take advantage of it" is a pretty terrible argument. It's absolutely fair to say that a rule shouldn't be implemented while also acknowledging that if it is, it is the best strategy to take advantage of it if it is.
For instance, imagine if the NFL decided to give up to two extra points after a touchdown for how stylishly the players celebrated, as voted by a panel of judges in the end zone. This would be a terrible addition in most people's eyes. If it went through anyway, though, you can bet that every team would start dancing their hearts out after each touchdown.
> This would be a terrible addition in most people's eyes.
Implementing UBI nationally in the US would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment, which is going to require overwhelmingly positive sentiment about it from the electorate.
Individuals remaining opposed at that point will have the same fiscal recourses they have to not liking NASA sending probes to Mars.
Things look pretty dystopian as it stands, and if concentration of wealth continues, we'll speed down that dark road even faster. If not UBI, what other solution is there? Especially as automation sweeps through cognitive work?
I'm not proposing anything. It's just inevitable that when a right wing throwaway account posts about anything, it's just so they can steer around to their favourite topic of The Foreigns.
At some point it has to come down to that. The USA is (mostly) not growing through birth so any proposal to gradually decrease the population has to include immigration. As AI advances I believe having a lower population will be a competitive advantage.
Nothing ever "has to come down to" foreigners unless that's your preassigned agenda that you want to bring everything around to. Pretty much every study ever done has concluded that immigration is a net benefit to a country's GDP and emigration is a net loss.
> The USA is (mostly) not growing through birth so any proposal to gradually decrease the population has to include immigration.
You're going to need to explain how you've managed to bring The Foreigns into this, you've just glued together two unrelated statements. You say that the US population isn't growing through birthrates, and then talk about population decrease and immigration as though that's related. If the US population isn't growing through birthrates, and people continue to die (which is pretty much a given), then you've got your wish without ever needing your racism.
Out of interest, which of the First Nations tribes were you born into?
> You're going to need to explain how you've managed to bring The Foreigns into this, you've just glued together two unrelated statements. You say that the US population isn't growing through birthrates, and then talk about population decrease and immigration as though that's related.
As far as I can tell, population growth in the USA is from people moving here from other places. Not as a result of growth from people having children.[1]
Assuming we live in a world where AI eats jobs, which as far as I can tell is what we are talking about, I would expect population growth, regardless of birth or flowing from another country to stop being beneficial. I agree with you that under current system it is a net benefit.
>Out of interest, which of the First Nations tribes were you born into?
> Assuming we live in a world where AI eats jobs, which as far as I can tell is what we are talking about
No, this is a thread about billionaires lobbying against UBI. You brought AI into it so you could have a go about the foreigners.
> How is that relevant?
It's relevant because you're so anti-immigration that surely you must be native to the land you live on, otherwise you're just another racist pulling the ladder up behind you.
> You brought AI into it so you could have a go about the foreigners.
I think you'll find I was answering danielbln about AI and a lack of jobs.
> It's relevant because you're so anti-immigration that surely you must be native to the land you live on, otherwise you're just another racist pulling the ladder up behind you.
Why are you wasting your time with me when you could be winning a James Randi Educational Foundation million dollar prize for showing off your mind reading? Since you're wrong about my internal state I have no use responding to you.
There are more than enough jobs. If your deepest fear is that people with different cultural backgrounds will replace people like you, you don't want have an actual debate about policy. You just want to remain in your safe space.
You are leaving money on the table if you haven't used your mind reading skills to get the James Randi Educational Foundation million dollar prize.
The question was how do we deal with the coming lack of jobs without UBI. The answer is we peacefully reduce our population. This pre-supposes a lack of jobs. If you want to change the conditions of the question and say there will be more than enough jobs then we don't need UBI.
The more likely scenario if the US implements UBI, is they'll probably need to import a lot more people on various work visas (and who won't get UBI) to do all the jobs people on UBI won't do any more.
That's OP's argument, I don't think UBI is a solution that makes things worse. That said, I'd like to know what the alternative could be, hence my line of questioning.
What do you see is the fundamental problem with concentration of wealth (by which I assume you mean concentration of relative wealth, which seems to be what most people who discuss this topic are looking at)?
I'd agree that if absolute wealth is being concentrated, that could pose a serious problem, because it would ultimately make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth.
But I'm not sure how UBI -- a program that would make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth -- is a solution to this problem rather than a de jure entrenchment of it.
The labor 'market' is totally asymetric, since workers are forced to work ... or starve, whereas companies can and do stop hiring, and even fire people, sometimes in a cynical move to suppress wages (witness the current tech scene).
UBI would turn it into a real, consensual market.
No doubt people benefiting from the status quo do not want change.
191 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadThere's no one stays clean in the Beltway.
The world is of course actually messy and not b&w, but that fact doesn't change that.
It's like saying that killing is wrong, but sometimes we still have to kill. Yes we do, and killing is still wrong. If you kill someone, it's not because "humans are messy". Oh humans are just imperfect and sometmes you just kill your neighbor, it just happens, no way to avoid it. If you actually want to get anything done you can't be so aspberger absolutist and figure out how to work WITH the neighbor killers.
The corrupting influence of DC can't be avoided. You swim in the cesspool with the gators, you come out covered in crap.
And I do not mean rich people who are in the upper 10% of income, it favours the ultra rich for whom a $100,000 political donation is pocket change.
At a local level money, gerrymandering and propaganda make it impossible to elect politicians who give a fair representation of people's interests. And with a two party system, it's more than likely that both of them fail to represent their policy preferences to begin with.
It frightens me that people are so easily manipulated and exploited.
Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.
Within the Republican Party, billionaires billionaires wanted someone other than Trump: https://fortune.com/2024/02/26/ken-griffin-koch-brothers-rep.... But he’s going to win the primary.
More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.
The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.
As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?
There are different kinds of results.
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets my favored politicians into office” which apparently isn’t working out too well.
There’s “Money spent on campaigns gets politicians to give me favors at the expense of their constituents” which unfortunately works very well.
And, there’s “Money being spent on campaigns gets politicians to favor laws that encourage donatory competition between big donators even if it is at great expense to everyone including their constituents” which is also going just swimmingly.
All of this is because politicians know that if they don’t play the asshole here, their competition will and they’ll end up with a large multiple of their campaign budget. And, that will put them out of office. A small difference like 2x might not work so well, but 10x certainly does.
Without gerrymandering the Republican party would have last controlled the House in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...
Emphasis on this part
As long as we are talking about counter-factual political systems: If the US had a parliamentary system like most democracies, Republicans would have controlled the presidency for 8 of the last 16 years. Given their coalition of disaffected minorities and recent immigrants, Democrats benefit tremendously from the quirks of the US Presidential system, which lends itself to nationwide machine politics.
The point that directly elected executives give rise to different political dynamics is no less objective. Among those political dynamics is the feasibility of blasting a nationwide message that embodies the party in a person low information voters can relate to. That’s been a major enabler of Democratic machine politics aimed at immigrants. And these days, it’s an enabler of MAGA machine politics.
It’s quite different in Westminster style parliamentary statements, where people in different districts vote for different candidates.
Gerrymandering absolutely has an effect, and this has been well documented. Here, for example: https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2024/01/analysis-of-pr...
Essentially, the likelihood of a particular bill being passed doesn't matter at all on how many average citizens want it to pass. It does matter greatly, almost 100%, on how much the economic elites want it to pass.
Can be said for UK, France at least. Current UK prime minister is basically a guy who was parachuted in after the previous nominee was couped by her own party, France massively reformed the pension system last year by using a legal hack. Germany we'll see where it is in a year.
> Large part of electorate to cheer it on
When parties that are "far-right" (as labelled by mainstream media) are above 20% in most countries sure seems like we are getting there (given that most of these parties like RN, AfD, Vox, etc are branded as anti-democratic/autoritarian).
>Gerrymandering and propaganda
I mean in France 2 of the biggest TV stations (BFM/Cnews) are billionaire owned and run a certain line. Same can be said in UK(Skynews). Germany has dark money campaigns exactly like the US, only you don't hear about them(because all the money goes to CDU/CSU).
>Two party system
I guess this is the European innovation, but with the concept of Brandmauer/Cordon Sanitaire you effectively have that any opposition party can be frozen out of government by the "establishment" parties.. I don't care that CDU/CSU and SPD are 2 different parties when they basically switch between each other for the last 20 years. Same thing was the case with PS/LR in France.
I am not familiar with Nordic countries, they are probably fine, but in the heartland stuff is not going in the democratic direction. And I didn't even mention countries like Poland, Hungary, etc.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1220443867/trump-s-rhetoric-i...
A politician with Trump's Reality Distortion Field is bound to arrive in Europe within the next decade or so, at which point it will be the same thing.
We need to realistically acknowledge the problems and work toward solutions. Not throw up our hands and give into injustice. The solution to democratic revival is citizen engagement, not despair and fatalism.
For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations. I'm also curious as to the reasoning by which you think this would undermine democracy, given that the election result is still being determined by the voters, and the candidates seek money primarily to use in their attempt to persuade voters.
SuperPACs, one of the main engines of US spending on politics.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/10-ways...
Is it? It looks to me like they're exploiting loopholes, which is legal.
The article's from 2015, and I understand that stuff is still going on (e.g. Ron DeSantis's campaign and SuperPAC coordinating through open letters discussing strategy).
> against SuperPACs that engage directly as part of candidates campaigns.
Who said anything about "directly"? I've noticed you doing that a lot in this thread: missing the meaning, twisting it, then quibbling with your reinterpretation.
If this is actually happening, again, it's already illegal.
> Who said anything about "directly"?
The only thing the law applies to is behavior that directly violates precisely-mapped rules. I don't know what alternative you're proposing, other than to allow subjective, ever fluctuating criteria to determine who is and is not acting within the law -- if so, that is just not the way our society works.
The idea of allowing the state to preemptively control public discourse because some people might occasionally break the law and get away with it -- a risk with all laws in all cases -- is both based on a dysfunctional approach to law (that increasingly encumbers the general case to address worst-case outliers until the general case no longer functions), and also has the terrifying implication of allowing incumbent politicians to manipulate public discourse for their own factional benefit.
Legality aside, not considering donations people make to these single-candidate SuperPACs as just as much “campaign donations” for all practical purposes as those made to candidate committees is willful blindness.
> Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.
> For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It's pretty obvious he probably wasn't referring specifically to hard-money campaign donations, but referring to the post Citizens United situation. That's pretty clear, if you don't read the comment pedantically and over-literally.
So a rich guy can give unlimited amounts to a candidate's Super PAC, an those have ways around the restrictions on coordinating with the campaign itself.
Despite much misinformation to the contrary, Citizens United had nothing whatsoever to do with campaign donations and was standard first-amendment jurisprudence striking down an attempt by a federal agency to exercise prior restraint on speech.
Only when viewed over-literally. If you take a perspective akin to "duck typing," it's both.
But even if you're totally right, this whole digression on the term "campaign donations" is a nitpick that doesn't undermine the OP's point. Which was billionaires spending unlimited money on politics is anti-democratic (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is).
Further, the problem with unlimited campaign donations -- i.e. actual transfers of funds into the hands of candidates -- is that it creates a situation in which a given candidate might become materially dependent on a specific individual or organization to the point that it creates an entrenched quid-pro-quo relationship that would control the exercise of their duties in office.
But in this case, the complaint of "billionaires spending unlimited money on politics" doesn't describe an instance of that problem at all, because the money is being spent in an attempt to persuade voters, not create patronage relationships with the candidates themselves.
The elections are still up to the voters, and to describe people using their resources to publish their opinions in open discourse as "anti-democratic" is exactly backwards -- creating an apparatus that can preemptively restrict what political information voters are allowed to see is about as anti-democratic as it gets.
> (in a similar, but less extreme, way as total one-party control of the media is)
The closest thing to "one-party control of the media" being threatened here is a situation in which a state body (ultimately under the control of incumbent politicians) is allowed to preemptively curate what information may be distributed by the media. This is the exact thing that the Citizens United ruling put a stop to.
First, to bring every reader up to speed, basic income (or UBI)...
Note also that the word citizens is used on the Wikipedia page.
I have a feeling the US will manage to bungle that too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal.
I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.
A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
Wouldn't that be in aggregate? So maybe some inflation for food and deflation for luxury yachts.
At heart, inflation is a mismatch between the real value of the economy and the currency placeholder used to represent that. This is why governments can (and need to) keep printing money as the economy grows.
Some printing may even lower prices because it allows production at scale to happen.
If you just print and just helicopter money you will have some inflation but this doesn't happen at scale significant enough to matter in any civilized country.
You are aware that the increase in money supply from 2020 to 2022 is about the same as the increase from 2010 to 2020, despite ~45% lower GDP growth?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS
Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.
Presume 80% of the country wants to increase taxes for the rich and corporations, tax churches, have Universal Healthcare and a Universal Basic Income, reform your educational system, legalise abortion, make sexual education mandatory, legalise dreamers, have easier immigration and they all vote for a party who has detailed plans on how to finance and realise those ideals.
How do you react?
Edit: The rest I would just try to leave. I think they're the wrong direction for any country and I wouldn't want to be part of a country that voted that way, but you can't fight with that kind of majority.
One problem with UBI is that it would go to millions of people and surely there will be tens of thousands that fulfill the stereotype that poor people just waste their money and a layabouts. That 5% or whatever will be provided as evidence ad nauseam that UBI is a boondoggle, entirely dismissing the 95% who are helped by it.
I know plenty of people who are financially struggling. I am not convinced that the best way to help them is to make them perpetually dependent on the state for direct subsidies, instead of addressing the problems that are making it difficult them from becoming more financially secure within a pluralistic economy.
But UBI is a pragmatic help to people here and now in a single stroke. The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes, undoing much of the corporate welfare, getting society to be truly colorblind (vs those who just claim they are as an excuse to not recognize racial discrimination), and so much more.
I'm not sure that it is. It sounds like a transfer of dependency to an even more centralized institution with even more dubious motivations.
> The ideal solution would require somehow rewinding the clock to make corporations pay more taxes
I'm not sure how making corporations pay higher taxes would resolve any such problem. It seems like it would have the opposite effect, and centralize more control over wealth in the hands of political institutions.
The "is" side of the question defines the empirical constraints within which those aims are pursued, but that's an instrumental question: it bears out the means, but has little to say about the value of the ends.
In other words, "is this course of action likely to produce the outcomes we intend?" is a question to be substantiated by evidence, but "are these the ends we wish to pursue?" and "are these ends worth the cost and/or risk to other things we care about?" are normative questions for which subjective values ("ideology") determine the decision criteria for all parties in the debate.
You already participate in that appropriation. The coercive appropriation is called taxation. You can choose to not pay, but you'll be incarcerated. You cannot choose where your monies go, or what they go for.
You're already a participant, and you don't seem to realize it.
Also, eleemosynary... really? Means charitable or charity. Did you really have to use a word most of the world hasn't ever heard of to prove the point that you don't like charity?
You should stop using our roads then. You should stop using our schools. You should stop using emergency services, voting, or participating in the first world country you're living in.
Because every single program, service, or project uses confiscated monies from the masses to benefit the smaller minority that use those programs, services, or projects.
Taxation is social charity. UBI is social charity. What's the difference?
The most effective way for “my side” to win is to convince enough of “your side” to join me. I can only do that through understanding your position. So I appreciate your participating, even when it is unpopular.
And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on.
I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.
There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
Our system is far from perfect but I believe history shows that communism is even worse.
I'm sure if we took all the top math, quant, economy and finance grads in the world and book them for a few months in that fancy Swiss Alps resort at Davos where world leaders meet up every year to discuss how to screw us, they could come up with a better system than the one we currently have.
The problem is most likely the new system would not end up favoring the same winners of the current system, hence there's no desire to ever change the status quo, so we have the communist system as a perpetual boogieman to discourage any other systems being trialed as if that's the only other option.
That isn't an obvious conclusion. To the extent the current system is one, improving it with such an approach doesn't account for:
- It having too many parts to understand without resorting to highly lossy models.
- Its non-features being far more impactful than its features.
Even the US has had outright state-sponsored corporations at times (Springfield Armory etc) and it’s fine. The Manhattan Project literally won the war, alongside collectivization of the economy for war production.
Collective worker ownership of the means of production is extraordinarily normalized in Germany (and a frequent source of conflict with US politicians who solicit automaker facilities in anti-labor locales) as well as other european countries (Husqvarna Vapensfabrik, Royal Dutch Shell Company, etc). There is no particular slippery slope here, some companies operate for centuries like this.
The communistic nature of kibbutzim in israel were/are also extraordinarily successful.
These things generally are good for workers and bring equality and stability to their countries. You just have to get past the trite third-grade "communism is actually bad" soundbyte (and the tendency to funnel anything that's mildly pro-worker into the "communism" bucket of course).
And remember, there's plenty of Pinochets and Suhartos and Malaysian juntas to go around for all political systems. Just like there are also plenty of inefficient capitalist organizations too - capitalism is not a magic wand for efficiency either.
In fact when you get down to it... corporations are really their own small little centrally-planned economies and dictatorships. And if they become too large to fail you get exactly the same failure modes as state corporations etc. Boeing might as well be a soviet OKB for all it matters. What, precisely, is the value or merit in quibbling over such a distinction?
Human societies surviving the next century is going to require a great deal of collectivism and cooperation, let alone the obvious internal problems with social equity. But people still think “but communism is bad” (by which they of course mean anything from German cooperatives to Stalinism) is the height of political discourse like they’re in a Fox News primetime special lol. Like, they got you real good didn’t they?
I think it's also something of an X-Y problem... people identify with "capitalism = rugged individualism" and don't realize that Boeing siphoning taxpayer dollars for airplanes the doors fall off of, or pinochet giving citizens "helicopter rides" or suharto burning citizens alive in barrels or the world's most repressive prison system is just as much a feature of capitalism as OKBs or the gulag archipelago or stalin's purges were a features of communism. Because those are orthogonal problems, those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization.
But "communism bad" - thank you so much for that contribution to the discourse! Nobody's ever said that before! /s
> those are the problems with authoritarianism not the unit of economic organization
Communism requires authoritarianism. It's inherent to operating system. When you take resources from some and distribute to others, who, exactly, does the taking and giving?
Monoculture micro-communities like kibbutz don't show anything. Nation-states are diverse groups of hundreds of millions with competing beliefs, values, and goals. Communism cannot serve these diverse interests. It requires a group of authoritarians that choose from whom to take and whom to give and the abject suffering of many is the result, every time. There is no freedom or liberty, that's by design. It's a failure with disastrous consequences.
If you give the rich more money, they're not likely to spend it on restaurants and merchandise and services: they can already afford as much of those as they want.
If you give money to people who couldn't afford them without the extra cash, though, you're artificially boosting demand, which would impact inflation.
No it isn't. The problem is that all these programs never actually end up redistributing wealth, but they always end up redistributing income, usually taken via higher taxes from the already shrinking middle class, leading to further deepening of wealth inequality.
As the super wealthy don't just have a public bank account with billions of $ under their own name, like your grandma, but have their wealth under various assets, entangled corporations, trust funds and non-profits, spread across various tax jurisdictions both on- and off-shore, making their wealth very difficult to track and tax correctly, plus gaming the financial system so that their companies are always billing each other for services till they're running at a loss, never seemingly generate any meaningful profits in their home "high-tax" jurisdictions.
FFS they have entire teams of well paid experts dedicated to these "tax optimization schemes", something the middle class and small business owners can never afford. THIS IS WHY WE HAVE WEALTH INEQUALITY, not because some middle class people earn higher wages after busting their asses in school and university. Just look at IKEA's elaborate tax dodging scheme. [1] Why can't he pay Swedish taxes like all Swedish businesses?
[1] https://www.greens-efa.eu/legacy/fileadmin/dam/Documents/Stu...
Report it and have it taxed. A private company can land a rover on the moon but we can't perform ETL operations on asset reporting?
So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive over time, kind of like what happens when a state expropriates businesses as if there is some magic in the walls of the building that generate value
> So if you take away their wealth you're transferring ownership and control from one group of people (who have managed and grown that productive asset) to another (randomly chosen). Naturally you would expect the productive assets to stop being so productive...
No. People who run companies very, very frequently do not own them outright or even have a controlling stake.
So even in an extremist toy model, where you "take away their wealth," you can still leave the existing manager in place or make the former owner a manager-employee.
You could even be very capitalist about it, and motivate the former owner to do a to do a good job as a manager, by making it clear that he will starve if he doesn't (that's how capitalism works for most people).
> Family businesses account for 64 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, generate 62 percent of the country's employment, and account for 78 percent of all new job creation.
https://www.familybusinesscenter.com/resources/family-busine...
So yeah, allocation will lag a bit behind where the money is.
https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
> Global supply chain disruptions following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the rapid rise in U.S. inflation over the past two years. Evidence suggests that supply chain pressures pushed up the cost of inputs for goods production and the public’s expectations of higher future prices. These factors accounted for about 60% of the surge in U.S. inflation beginning in early 2021. Supply chain pressures began easing substantially in mid-2022, contributing to the slowdown in inflation.
https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...
> The causes of the housing supply crisis are widely understood. After the Great Recession, new home construction dropped like a stone. Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s. By 2019, a good estimate of the shortage of housing units for sale or rent was 3.8 million. The pandemic-induced materials and labor shortage exacerbated the trend, however, as evidenced by the surge in rents and home prices in 2021.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/cor...
> Corporate profits rose quickly in 2021 along with inflation, raising concerns about corporations driving up prices to increase profits. Although corporate profits indeed contributed to inflation in 2021, their contribution fell in 2022. This pattern is not unusual: in previous economic recoveries, corporate profits were the main contributor to inflation in the first year and displaced by costs in the second year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/08/excess-profits-of-big-firms-...
> “We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation,” the report said.
> The author’s analysis of financial reports from 1,350 companies listed in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Brazil and South Africa found nominal profits were on average 30% higher at the end of 2022 than at the end of 2019.
Would you be shocked to learn the inflation had a number of causes, including the vast COVID stimulus? I mean, your quote above attributes 60%, and that supply chain issues resolving "contributed" to inflation easing.
I'm for UBI if we can figure out how to implement it. We've experimented with it here in Canada. But handing people money has inflationary consequences, it's not rocket science. Otherwise, generic extreme argument: give everyone a billion and we all win.
> Otherwise, generic extreme argument: give everyone a billion and we all win.
No reasonable person takes this argument seriously. The discussion is "will providing for everyone's basic needs through UBI cause inflation?"
Try any economics textbook, and common sense. I couldn't care less what you believe. This stuff has been written about for 100 years, currency is susceptible to the laws of supply and demand like any other commodity; over supply affects prices.
>No reasonable person takes this argument seriously.
Oh, really? What's the right amount we should give to people then? Please bring data.
You sound like the MMT folks, who endlessly told us printing money didn't matter. Until it did. Then "real MMT has never been tried!"
Inflation was driven primarily by low interest rates, very generous financial support/relief(rent moratorium, student loan pause, bolstered and extended unemployment), and the ability for most white collar workers to keep on working from home.
Supply chain issues didn't help, but it's not even clear if 2019 supply chains would have been able to keep up with the insane consumer demand of 2021.
My citation is the Kansas City Fed in case you missed it.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-review/how-m...
https://www.ippr.org/media-office/revealed-how-powerful-comp...
https://www.axios.com/2023/05/18/once-a-fringe-theory-greedf... ("In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.)"
https://www.interest.co.nz/business/122533/paul-donovan-what... ("Paul Donovan on what profit-led inflation is, how it happens and how to combat it")
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/brainard202.... ("Retail markups in a number of sectors have seen material increases in what could be described as a price–price spiral, whereby final prices have risen by more than the increases in input prices."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/business/pepsico-earnings... | https://archive.today/RgxsB ("Price Increases Lead to Big Jump in Profit at PepsiCo")
Yeah of course corporations were racking in cash, so were consumers.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLN40059
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2REAL
You are confusing the manifestation of inflation (rising prices) with the cause of inflation (more money on the table than hard value underneath it). Yes, rising prices perpetuate inflation (a price-price spiral as mentioned in the research), but the root cause of inflation was not corporations suddenly learning of this new tool called "raising prices". It was a reaction to the unrivaled level of economic stimulus pumped into the economy.
You don't make double-digit inflation by giving people barely enough money to cover rent in most low-cost American cities.
EDIT:
Also, let us consider why these payments were necessary and why they had to be funded the way they were. They had to be funded by printing money because the US government is deep in debt and there hasn't been a real tax increase since George HW Bush killed his political career with one in 1992. There is no rainy-day fund for the American people, so the FRS had to make one, and quick, lest you have people in the streets in general revolt, which given that the George Floyd protests were around the same time, was a real risk.
The payments were necessary because the American economy is not only leveraged from top-to-bottom, but in fact requires a good chunk of the population be in a good amount of debt with no savings in order to maintain growth of the credit products that many financial institutions rely on for the production of value for their shareholders. If you had over a hundred million people suddenly not making money, it's like the 2008 financial crisis, except instead of mortgage-backed securities, this time, it's every kind of securitized debt.
Yes, printing money wildly leads to inflation. Nobody is arguing that it doesn't. Giving the poorest members of society means the velocity of that money (or the M1 number) doesn't actually cause rampant inflation, as it stays in circulation because it is used quickly.
Giving 1.7 trillion largely to corporations who don't NEED it causes inflation. A corporation who sits on that cash (and then doesn't actually have to pay taxes on that cash, nor actually distribute it to employees) does cause inflation, because that's a whole lot of money just sitting around instead of flowing through an economy.
The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance.
This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.
The alternative is neo-feudalism.
However, the status quo reality doesn't fully reflect what you're complaining about, because the "ability of people to concentrate soft power with capital" is something that is distributed widely across society, with a vast plurality of institutions and communities, having varying and often opposing motivations, all having the capacity to independently develop their own capital.
Conversely, the political state is a single institution with structural incentives that converge toward a single set of objectives, and no, the electoral process is not a sufficient mechanism of accountability.
Effectively, what you are arguing for is taking the pattern that you find unfavorable in the first place, and putting it under the control of a single centralized monopoly with insufficient safeguards against abuse.
wouldn't the people that the article is accusing of being against UBI, want this outcome?
sounds like if they want more control, they should be for UBI
It seems likely that the article's assumptions about who is opposing UBI and why they are opposing it are erroneous. I personally oppose UBI for the reasons I described above, by my motivations have nothing to do with anything the article is talking about.
It's also possible that various factions are using positioning around UBI proposals as a proxy or as a tactic to advance other, more complex, political aims.
Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT
https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/
Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense).
For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.
In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation.
What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning.
True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why.
Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't.
Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...
That's about how much those experiments are worth.
If you want UBI long term you would need to heavily tax the middle class - people who work a lot and provide value every day. This is what always happens with such programs and happened in my country as well (where the UBI was very limited to 125$/month and only given per child).
It's easy to point into "evil billionaires" and say to take for them but in reality you need to take a lot more from a guy who built his career for 15+ years and is now a doctor or a programmer or a small business owner. This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
> This group already pays a lot in taxes, often in excess of 50% of what they make.
In theory, on paper, without any fiddles. In practice... nah. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/forbes-400-pay-lowe...
"A study by White House economists released on September 23 found that the 400 wealthiest U.S. families paid an average income tax rate of just 8.2 percent from 2010 to 2018."
Wonder if having 3 senators per state would help this along.
North Dakota should not get the same power as all of CA. ND is the same population as San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine the original writers of the constitution would have thought that a 50x imbalance of representation would be a good thing.
Asset taxes? Do you just tax every dollar over $1B at 100%? What if they own shares in a company that grows beyond $1B? Do they have to sell the shares? What if they then lose control of the company as a result? Maybe that is good. IDK.
Also, is it $1B per person. Could the person get married to let them grow to $2B?
If the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit, then what happens? Do all the billionaires just buy citizenship in Estonia or something?
Again, I am not opposed to the idea. I just think it needs a lot of work. Otherwise, these rants seem like a distraction. If it is never going to happen, maybe we are better off focused on trying to achieve UBI than Universal Asset Equality or whatever.
If you don't like that, you better vote in the next election.
How did concentrating extreme amounts of wealth work out for the French and Russian royalty?
Furthermore, how did it work out for their nations economically?
This is the case for every other program, right?
For instance, imagine if the NFL decided to give up to two extra points after a touchdown for how stylishly the players celebrated, as voted by a panel of judges in the end zone. This would be a terrible addition in most people's eyes. If it went through anyway, though, you can bet that every team would start dancing their hearts out after each touchdown.
Implementing UBI nationally in the US would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment, which is going to require overwhelmingly positive sentiment about it from the electorate.
Individuals remaining opposed at that point will have the same fiscal recourses they have to not liking NASA sending probes to Mars.
Just like donos to bathtub streamers and influencers via patreon, this is also a significant waste of money and time.
Doesn’t look like these gifts would be tax deductible either. Lol
> The USA is (mostly) not growing through birth so any proposal to gradually decrease the population has to include immigration.
You're going to need to explain how you've managed to bring The Foreigns into this, you've just glued together two unrelated statements. You say that the US population isn't growing through birthrates, and then talk about population decrease and immigration as though that's related. If the US population isn't growing through birthrates, and people continue to die (which is pretty much a given), then you've got your wish without ever needing your racism.
Out of interest, which of the First Nations tribes were you born into?
As far as I can tell, population growth in the USA is from people moving here from other places. Not as a result of growth from people having children.[1]
Assuming we live in a world where AI eats jobs, which as far as I can tell is what we are talking about, I would expect population growth, regardless of birth or flowing from another country to stop being beneficial. I agree with you that under current system it is a net benefit.
>Out of interest, which of the First Nations tribes were you born into?
How is that relevant?
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-census-projections-sh...
No, this is a thread about billionaires lobbying against UBI. You brought AI into it so you could have a go about the foreigners.
> How is that relevant?
It's relevant because you're so anti-immigration that surely you must be native to the land you live on, otherwise you're just another racist pulling the ladder up behind you.
I think you'll find I was answering danielbln about AI and a lack of jobs.
> It's relevant because you're so anti-immigration that surely you must be native to the land you live on, otherwise you're just another racist pulling the ladder up behind you.
Why are you wasting your time with me when you could be winning a James Randi Educational Foundation million dollar prize for showing off your mind reading? Since you're wrong about my internal state I have no use responding to you.
The question was how do we deal with the coming lack of jobs without UBI. The answer is we peacefully reduce our population. This pre-supposes a lack of jobs. If you want to change the conditions of the question and say there will be more than enough jobs then we don't need UBI.
I'd agree that if absolute wealth is being concentrated, that could pose a serious problem, because it would ultimately make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth.
But I'm not sure how UBI -- a program that would make large swaths of the population dependent for their livelihoods on a small, centralized set of people who determine the disposition of wealth -- is a solution to this problem rather than a de jure entrenchment of it.
I normally don't reply to such accounts at all.
Just because yours looks real doesn't make it so. Anyone can make up a real-sounding name.
UBI would turn it into a real, consensual market.
No doubt people benefiting from the status quo do not want change.