they'll suffer in massive numbers, homelessness will rise in a spike, a housing crisis will come about, money will be spent on bank bailouts instead of helping the people who lose their homes just like 2008 crisis, the stock market will crash killing retirement savings for anyone who managed to keep their house, millennials will be forced in large numbers to support their near-retirement parents, etc.

and in a few decades or maybe a century everything will equalize, work weeks will be reduced from 40hrs/week standard closer to 30hrs/week, and many other changes. things will work out, in the same way that kidney stones find their way out, too. people only seem to be interested in 2 questions, "can we pay everyone in america 1000$/month starting now with no other changes?", and "will things be ok, eventually?". both are hopelessly callous and willfully ignorant. hopefully they come from the same people that will have to find a spot in the basement for Mom and Pop.

It's like people forget all the riots and civil unrest that happened with the industrial shift that happened at the turn of the 20th century. And now we are facing something similar and arguably maybe even worse.

People are too lazy to riot now in the modern age. The most extreme they'll ever get is take a break from their netflix couch to vote for sanders or yang.

Their desire for revolution is based on comfort, not honor. There will be no violence

Underestimating people with little/nothing to lose.

Not much to gain either. What do you think motivates them?

I figured we’re following the convo and talking about people threatened with homelessness. We can look at damages done on bank foreclosures from people on the way out to recognize that people with little to lose are willing to cause unrest.

I think both thesnipa and ofthevoid make good points.

Snipa is right in that automation might cause a drastic change in the economy/the job market, and will pose great challenges to our current economic/social/tax/welfare systems. He's also right about drastic challenges calling for drastic answers.

Ofthevoid is right in his call for putting a lot more math, a lot more brain power into the UBI before head-jumping into it. He also correctly points to a crucial yet highly nontrivial question: how do we ensure that people receive the purchasing power equivalent of 1000 (or whatever the number ends up being) present-day dollars when injecting this much (nominal) money into the economy? Under the assumption that the bulk of current welfare/social security spending is going towards persons who really need it, we cant really make a lot of cuts to those existing programs in favor of the UBI while still expecting it to solve new problems. At the end of the day, additional money has to be introduced into the economic cycle, and this money has to come from somewhere.

This "somewhere" could be melting away pensions and savings via inflation (which is caused by just printing the money), it could be drastic cuts to existing programs like medicare (which would present us with a new problem), it could be a "robot tax", or something entirely different. But the money has to come from somewhere, and no, this whole ridiculous "new monetary theory" sorcery is bogus and wont work. "Just printing it" would inevitably lead to rampant inflation when talking about sums in the dimension of trillions of dollars per year.

thought the idea behind ubi was to scrap the entire welfare system and it's administrative overhead to replace it with it

Negative income tax, corporate transaction tax, close loopholes.

NIT doesn't work any more than socialism does.








/e I mean it's all well and good to shout: "just close the loopholes". In practice, it has been found to quite a bit harder to implement.

This post was edited by Ghot on Apr 22 2019 07:37pm