Universal Basic Income - From the left to the right

[Magox]

We were discussing this the other day and it so happens that differing variations of UBI seems to be a philosophical idea that ranges across many different political spectrums. I think as time passes by you will begin to see this idea pushed forward by lawmakers.

 

The Indestructible Idea of the Basic Income Is this the only policy proposal Tom Paine, Huey Long, Milton Friedman, Timothy Leary, and Sam Altman can agree on?

 

Andy Stern is a former president of the Service Employees International Union. Charles Murray may be America's most prominent right-wing critic of the welfare state. So when they appeared onstage together in Washington, D.C., last fall to discuss the basic income—the idea of keeping people out of poverty by giving them regular unconditional cash payments—the most striking thing about the event was that they kept agreeing with each other.

It isn't necessarily surprising that Stern and Murray both back some version of the concept. It has supporters across the political spectrum, from Silicon Valley capitalists to academic communists. But this diverse support leads naturally to diverse versions of the proposal, not all of which are compatible with one another. Some people want to means-test the checks so that only Americans below a certain income threshold receive them; others want a fully universal program, given without exceptions. Some want to replace the existing welfare state; others want to tack a basic income onto it. There have been tons of suggestions for how to fund the payments and for how big they should be. When it comes to the basic income, superficial agreement is common but actual convergence can be fleeting.

In Stern's case, the central issue driving his interest in the idea is the turmoil he expects automation to bring to the economy. In the future, he and Lee Kravitz predict in their 2016 book Raising the Floor, tens of millions of jobs will disappear, leaving much of the country stuck with work that is "contingent, part-time, and driven largely by people's own motivation, creativity, and the ability to make a job out of 'nothing.'" A basic income, he hopes, would bring some economic security to their lives.

Read Murray's first detailed pitch for a guaranteed income, the 2006 book In Our Hands, and you won't see anything like that. Its chief concern is shifting power from government bureaucracies to civil society. It doesn't just propose a new transfer program; it calls for repealing every other transfer program. And automation isn't a part of its argument at all.

But onstage at the Cato Institute in D.C., Murray was as worried as Stern about technological job loss, warning that "we are going to be carving out millions of white-collar jobs, because artificial intelligence, after years of being overhyped, has finally come of age." Meanwhile, Stern signaled that he was open not just to replacing welfare programs for the disadvantaged but possibly even to rethinking Social Security, provided that people still have to contribute money to some sort of retirement system and that Americans who have already paid in don't get shortchanged. He drew the line at eliminating the government's health insurance programs—but the other guy on the stage agreed that health care was different. Under Murray's plan, citizens would be required to use part of their grant to buy health insurance, and insurance companies would be required to treat the population as a single pool.

The Murray/Stern convergence comes as the basic income is enjoying a wave of interest and enthusiasm. The concept comes up in debates over everything from unemployment to climate change. Pilot programs testing various versions of the idea are in the works everywhere from Oakland to Kenya, and last year Swiss voters considered a plan to introduce a guaranteed income nationwide. (They wound up rejecting the referendum overwhelmingly, with only 23 percent voting in favor. I didn't say everyone was enthusiastic.)

 

 

Just where you pinpoint the start of that history depends on how broadly you're willing to define basic income. The idea's advocates have identified plenty of precursors to their proposals, but sometimes the connection can be a little tenuous. It's true, as they'll tell you, that in 1516 St. Thomas More suggested that society could reduce crime by "provid[ing] everyone with some means of livelihood." It's a bit of a leap from there to the plans being debated today.

But we have to start somewhere, and for two reasons 1795 is a good place to begin. That's the year Thomas Paine started to write his pamphlet Agrarian Justice. It's also the year some squires introduced a new system of relief to the English district of Speenhamland.

Agrarian Justice, which was ultimately published in 1797, posited that "the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was…the common property of the human race." Therefore, Paine argued, each landowner "owes to the community a ground-rent" to compensate the dispossessed for their loss. From those fees, "the sum of fifteen pounds sterling" should be paid to everyone when they turn 21, with another "ten pounds per annum" paid after they've turned 50

 

.

From Huey Long to Timothy Leary

Several similar proposals circulated in the ensuing centuries. The economist Henry George, famous for arguing that government should be funded by a single tax on land, thought that any "surplus revenue might be divided per capita." The philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that "a certain small income, sufficient for necessaries, should be secured to all." The engineer C.H. Douglas proposed a "national dividend" as part of his economic philosophy of "social credit." Douglas' doctrine was briefly in vogue among modernist intellectuals, with advocates ranging from the anarchist art critic Herbert Read to the fascist poet Ezra Pound.

Pound's favorite governor, the Louisiana populist Huey Long, launched a Share Our Wealth campaign during the Depression; its planks included a guaranteed annual income of $2,500 per family (and confiscatory taxes on incomes over $1 million). In the early '40s, the literary socialists H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw proposed a basic income of $3,200 to $4,800 a year. (When The Tuscaloosa News reported this, it presented the idea to its American audience as "a sort of intellectual Huey Long Share-the-Wealth plan for Great Britain.") And there were others, from the English Quakers who called their proposal a "state bonus" to the market socialists who endorsed a "social dividend."

Some of these thinkers hailed from the left, but many did not; or at least they weren't a part of the conventional left. There is a current of thought that's deeply skeptical of both the statist forms of socialism and the monopolistic forms of capitalism, and which often fixates on quirky policy ideas—George's land tax, Douglas' monetary scheme—that aim to tame concentrated economic power without concentrating power in the government instead. The basic income fits snugly in that tradition, especially when the payments are presented not as a form of relief but as dividends to the owners of society's resources.

 

Yet another version of the idea took hold among free market economists. In the 1940s, Milton Friedman and George Stigler started exploring the concept of a negative income tax. The idea here, in Stigler's words, was to "extend the personal income tax to the lowest income brackets with negative rates in these brackets." By making sure "the negative rates are appropriately graduated," he added, "we may still retain some measure of incentive for a family to increase its income." Stigler thought this would be a good way to give a hand to low-wage workers without the market-distorting effects of a minimum wage. By 1962, Friedman was proposing it as a substitute for virtually the entire welfare state—or as he put it, "the present rag bag of measures directed at the same end."

By then a push was coming from still another direction. Convinced that automation was on the verge of driving unemployment to unsustainable levels, several social scientists argued that a guaranteed income could cure the crisis. If you're familiar with modern worries about what artificial intelligence and self-driving trucks will do to the job market, the rhetoric of the early '60s will sound familiar. "The coming replacement of man's skills by the machine's skills will destroy many jobs and render useless the work experience of vast numbers now employed," the futurist Robert Theobald argued in his 1963 book Free Men and Free Markets. Since only the most skilled workers will enjoy the "possibility of obtaining employment in one of the restricted number of new fields," he feared we were headed for "the complete breakdown of our present socioeconomic system."

Theobald's ideas inspired the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, whose 1964 manifesto declared that "the combination of the electronic computer and the automated self-regulating machine" was breaking "the traditional link between jobs and incomes." The solution, it concluded, was an "unqualified right to an income" that would "take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures." That part may not sound so different from Friedman's proposal, but the document also called for government planning and for a transition program that featured public works, public housing, public coal plants, and other interventions in areas that Friedman would leave to the market. The statement was signed by a collection of left-leaning intellectuals, from Linus Pauling to Tom Hayden, and it left enough of a mark on the culture to inspire everything from a Martin Luther King sermon to a Philip José Farmer science fiction story.

In another quarter of the left, activists formed the National Welfare Rights Organization in 1966. One of their chief complaints was the intrusiveness and humiliation built into America's welfare bureaucracies; they too soon called for replacing the existing transfer programs with a guaranteed income.

Yet another version of the concept picked up fans in the counterculture. When the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary ran for governor of California in 1969, he declared that the state "should be run like a successful business enterprise. Instead of extorting taxes from the citizens a well-run state should return a profit. Anyone smart enough to live in California should be paid a dividend."

 

 

[Foxx]

this idea has been around for quite sometime now. it has been discussed in great detail in other countries with Finland being the nation at the forefront of it. Ontario was going to try it last year as well.

the thing about free money, is that it just leaves everyone poorer. however, this just might be the best take on the whole idea of giving people free money, after all it has been going on, albeit on a smaller scale, for quite sometime now.

 

the issue of robotics is however problematic.

Edited June 4, 2017 by Foxx

[Magox]

the thing about free money, is that it just leaves everyone poorer. however, this just might be the best take on the whole idea of giving people free money, after all it has been going on, albeit on a smaller scale, for quite sometime now.

 

 

 

Not if it was a mechanism that replaced welfare as we know it.

[Chef Jim]

 

Not if it was a mechanism that replaced welfare as we know it.

I didn't read your OP (no time right now) so it may have been brought up. I know this has been discussed recently and as you mentioned by those of very different political stripes. So how will a UBI work when the basic income need varies wildly all across the country/world?

[grinreaper]

I didn't read your OP (no time right now) so it may have been brought up. I know this has been discussed recently and as you mentioned by those of very different political stripes. So how will a UBI work when the basic income need varies wildly all across the country/world?

You mean I can't get an apartment in Manhattan for $800 a month?

[Chef Jim]

You mean I can't get an apartment in Manhattan for $800 a month?

I'm not even talking that small a geographic area. Compare the west coast to the deep south. Basic equal income only works if basic fixed expense are equal which of course they are not.

 

And I'm not even talking yet about what this wouid do to the motivation to work.

Edited June 4, 2017 by Chef Jim

[GaryPinC]

My biggest problem with UBI is that we're trying to pretend currency is money. If you give everyone a UBI, it devalues the dollar and goods and services will all increase in price. Also, for those earning their own income, it devalues that income. Over time the net sum may be zero, ie. UBI won't be worth much as everything will be correspondingly more expensive.

 

I never hear how they will address this future problem so welcome any insights.

[Magox]

I didn't read your OP (no time right now) so it may have been brought up. I know this has been discussed recently and as you mentioned by those of very different political stripes. So how will a UBI work when the basic income need varies wildly all across the country/world?

 

To be honest with you, I haven't given it great thought in how it would work in practical terms. I will say this though, from my perspective a one-size-fits-all sort of implementation wouldn't be efficient for the reason that you brought up.

 

I've always like the idea of completely revamping the welfare system, I think we have too many serial abusers in the system who are perfectly content living mediocre lives and having to work as little as possible. So from that perspective I could see how a UBI could be a useful tool to replace the welfare state as we know it. Then, there is what I see as a looming jobs crisis. Blue collar workers will largely be replaced in just about every field with automation and robotics even many white collar jobs will be replaced with AI. Meanwhile, I see profits getting larger for successful corporations. I think eventually there will have to be some sort of UBI or some variation of that idea.

[Dorkington]

Eventually UBI, and even moving beyond capitalism will be necessary as technology continues to replace humans in the workforce. It's simply inevitable.

 

I mean, I suppose the other option would be having the majority of a population being impoverished/homeless, but I'd hope we'd be better than that.

[unbillievable]

Eventually UBI, and even moving beyond capitalism will be necessary as technology continues to replace humans in the workforce. It's simply inevitable.

 

I mean, I suppose the other option would be having the majority of a population being impoverished/homeless, but I'd hope we'd be better than that.

 

So you're saying that I will get my robot's salary?

[Benjamin Franklin]

Eventually UBI, and even moving beyond capitalism will be necessary as technology continues to replace humans in the workforce. It's simply inevitable.

 

I mean, I suppose the other option would be having the majority of a population being impoverished/homeless, but I'd hope we'd be better than that.

 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Benjamin Franklin

[Dorkington]

Sure, Wall-E is one example. Star Trek is another example.

 

It's anyone's guess what would happen in such a situation, and I'm sure there will be plenty of hiccups along the way. We're definitely heading into some interesting times.

[unbillievable]

Sure, Wall-E is one example. Star Trek is another example.

 

It's anyone's guess what would happen in such a situation, and I'm sure there will be plenty of hiccups along the way. We're definitely heading into some interesting times.

 

Even Star Trek doesn't believe in UBI, and they have replicators and holographic slaves.

[row_33]

I'm sure that Ontario suggestion was the biggest pile of horse manure during an election.

[Tiberius]

I didn't read your OP (no time right now) so it may have been brought up. I know this has been discussed recently and as you mentioned by those of very different political stripes. So how will a UBI work when the basic income need varies wildly all across the country/world?

Just give everyone the same amount no matter where they live

[4merper4mer]

Just give everyone the same amount no matter where they live

Let's give everyone $10M per year. That is pretty much a livable income even in NY City.

[Tiberius]

Let's give everyone $10M per year. That is pretty much a livable income even in NY City.

Nope, you wouldn't dump thirty pounds of sugar into a birthday cake recipe would you?

[row_33]

Let's give everyone $10M per year. That is pretty much a livable income even in NY City.

 

I'm going into some form of organized crime if everyone is handed free money to spend.

[Tiberius]

 

I'm going into some form of organized crime if everyone is handed free money to spend.

Like what? Prostitution? Gambling? Extortion?

[4merper4mer]

Like what? Prostitution? Gambling? Extortion?

 

 

You can play in the low end prostitution biz for any amount of money but if you want the big $$$$$$$$$ you really need to know what you're doing.

Nope, you wouldn't dump thirty pounds of sugar into a birthday cake recipe would you?

 

 

If we're making birthday cakes for everyone then sure.