"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort of say billionaires are inherently evil,” he said. “I think it would be great to say, we as a society will allow trillionaires in exchange for a floor for everyone.”"<p>The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power <i>will</i> be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.<p>UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing.<p>Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration.<p>Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.
I like the idea of freeing people to be able to quit and get a new job any time, where quitting today means a real threat of losing one's home, transportation, or ability to eat (never mind fueling the cycle of debt that keeps so many down). I think it would be a net benefit if people could tell oppressive employers to fuck off without fear.<p>However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month. This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land. There are a few elders who would like to teach the young how to do so, but they are not interested. Nobody wants to do better and there is high resentment towards the federal government.<p>I've seen it in other places. When you are outside the balance of exchange with someone (or some organization), resentment breeds. I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers.<p>Economically, we would have to produce enough "extra" that a full, regular distribution of that wealth could continue to work with producers continuing to produce, and a growing collection of people who would lose all interest in contributing. We would have to have a way to deal with a dramatic rise in apathetic people. We would have to have a way to deal with producers just leaving the country.<p>In The Expanse, Earth has a UBI like thing. The whole planet. You get subsistence living, and if you want to be a producer, you start by doing menial work for a period of time to prove you are willing to work hard. It is also sci-fi for a reason :).<p>Again, I would love to free people from tyrannical employers and the fear and stress of not knowing what next month brings due to finances (I've lived that the majority of my life). I don't see how UBI can work.
Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and <i>much</i> more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).
Yang does have an interesting idea for campaign finance reform too. 100$ a year for any citizen to spend on political campaigns. In some ways I think this is bigger than the UBI. If everybody spent this voucher it would be ~23B, almost 4x what was spent on federal races in 2016.<p>I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust.<p>While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)
Great to see tech leaders get behind UBI. Now is the time and Yang is the candidate of a lifetime. I never understood how people buy into the whole "break up the tech giants" argument. It makes no sense, just a great platitude with no real accomplishment. Who wants to use the 2nd best Twitter or Facebook? Not a single person.
Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?
My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.
There is already a UBI in place for veterans who suffered one of a number of qualifying disabling conditions during as a result of military service. Veterans can receive nearly $4000/mo if they are 100% service connected. Some veterans have significant disabilities like missing limbs and others qualify for things like arthritis or tinnitus. Many (in my estimation most) of them could work but choose not to once they get this basic income.
I’m confident that we can all agree that large corporations are efficient at extracting value from the economy (not to suggest that they don’t also add value).<p>If we were to take the current system, with no changes made to the rules, and send it forward 100 years in a time machine, I’m confident we can also agree that consolidation by large corporations will have increased significantly during this period of time.<p>If we can increase the velocity of the economy, I’m confident we can agree that this would have a similar effect as the aforementioned time machine scenario.<p>Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy.<p>If you’re with me this far, then you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that UBI will increase the velocity of the economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of large corporations.<p>Has it not occurred to you that there could be reasons, other than philanthropy, that many of the proponents of UBI are millionaires/billionaires, large corporations, and both of these in their roles at economic think tanks?
Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.
There are videos of this here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw</a>
How can a US Dollar based UBI solve the problems of automation when the Super Admins of the US Dollar are explicitly pursuing the opposite goal?<p>According to the Federal Reserve website, 2/3 of their main goals are:<p>1. Seeking to maximize employment<p>2. Maintaining stable prices<p><a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does-federal-reserve-seek-to-achieve-through-monetary-policy.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does...</a><p>Automation and ephemeralization minimize employment and prices, but the money system seeks the opposite. Until these contradictions are reconciled, how can a US Dollar based UBI <i>not</i> fail?
Is anyone interested in starting a member-owned "General Automation Corp" to just go ahead and UBI ourselves without waiting for politics?<p>I'm seriously you guys.<p>Bootstrap off some desert land, convert it into e.g. Village Homes[0] (but up to date) using Permaculture, et. al. including local carbon-neutral fuel production integrated into the ecosystem[1], lease/sell units, rinse and repeat.<p>Alongside that, develop a kind of super-RepRap[2] to manufacture e.g. the contents of a Daiso store[3].<p>(BTW, no cult shit, no radical new lifestyles, just a small town built as if the last few centuries of progress actually happened: food production, power capture & storage, automation, etc... You know: Star Trek TNG <i>sans</i> fictional technology.)<p>Anybody?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes</a><p>[1] <a href="http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/" rel="nofollow">http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap" rel="nofollow">https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap</a><p>[3] Not all human problems can be solved by a few ounces of plastic or metal, but those that can, can be solved at Daiso for $1.50.
Yang's proposal doesn't seem like UBI to me. A key component of UBI being the U - i.e that it is universal. However, Yang wants to pay for it, in part, by adding new taxes. In order for some people to make money, others must, on net, lose money.<p>To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not.<p>Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.
If instead of the federal government paying the Egyptian military millions of dollars, or building billion dollar buildings in Iraq, they were were giving out micro payments to citizens, I don’t see how that could be worse than our current model of spending.
UBI is not going to fix our problems. You would do more good rebuilding the million SROs we've torn down in recent decades.<p>Small, affordable residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods mostly don't exist in the US. Injecting funds won't change that fundamental fact.<p>Most likely, passing out UBI will actually make it harder to solve underlying problems of that sort because rich people, who have zero need of UBI, will have a new excuse to ignore such problems. UBI will become a reason to say "Quit your bitching!" without having fixed anything.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Welfare is a tax, and a much needed one since the alternative costs even more. I don't really see how a universal basic income (UBI) solves much of anything that other welfare programs couldn't solve more effectively. If the argument is that it's easier to just give everyone $1,000, then I think you're a lazy policymaker.
Everything I've read about UBI in experiments sounds great. But I've never heard anyone address the idea that when everyone is getting it, my landlord or some other rent seeker also knows this information, and simply raises my rent by however much I'm getting from the government because they know I can pay it and everyone else in the industry has done the same.
It's not UBI, it's a rolling stimulus package :)<p>That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy.<p>And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.
The government would need to get money somewhere for the UBI program.<p>It can only do so either through taxation, or by printing money, as the government is not a value-generation enterprise.<p>If UBI gets its funding by taxation, UBI can't work economically (not to say it wouldn't be "UBI"). Even if you tax all the rich people, it won't provide enough money for the program. Besides, you can't really tax the rich, the moment you declare an aggressive taxation regime on them, they fly their money out of the country (and possibly their businesses too, which would generate poverty). If the assumption is that it would tax "everyone but the poor" then it's not universal "income", it's just another "social program" paid by the middle class.<p>If UBI is funded by printing money, then it's a debt generation engine. The USA is already heavily indebted due to at least 100 years of irresponsible governments spending a lot more than what they made through taxes. UBI would only make matters worse, and could easily lead to a currency crash within at most a couple decades (which would wipe out retirement funds, savings, etc. therefore generating poverty and causing social unrest)
I haven’t read all of the literature on basic income, but my (admittedly semi-educated) impression is that one potential downside is that it fosters dependence on the state and is thus not anti-fragile.<p>I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough food to sustain a family. Or a 3D printer that can turn raw materials into clothing or shelter. In terms of cash needs, you could create a sort of minimum-wage Uber-style online mechanical Turk system that allows one to put in work and generate cash. You would theoretically get the benefits of basic income without having them be controlled by an external actor.<p>I don’t know enough about farming, 3D printing or biology to know whether this is feasible, but it seems within the realm of possibility. Have any economists explored options like this?
Using a concept from software engineering, why can't they just partially roll this out by percentage or by state? Try swapping current benefits w/ equivalent UBI in a handful of states and study what happens?
The most exciting thing about UBI is how versatile its benefits are for human resilience.<p>Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income.<p>Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money.<p>Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every community is getting a massive cash injection<p>Worried about a president like Trump cutting your SNAP benefits again? Opt-in to UBI and never worry about your funds getting cut without the entire country getting infuriated.<p>People rarely feel this level of freedom. I've only felt this level of security recently but I believe everyone deserves this. I was only lucky to have made it this far from the opportunities given to me by my parents and the support I had when I couldn't stop fucking up. People need to be able to take risks and have retries. Without it, you get people working jobs they hate while envying lives they'll never have.
What's to stop companies from just upping their prices to absorb the $1k given to us? We need a real UBI scheme, this policy won't solve anything.
UBI is just an excuse to do the real fix, and that's tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share.<p>It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.
My problem with UBI is<p>1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it.<p>2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.<p>I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.