> basic income SHOULD disincentivise work; it's a boost for society, health, well-being, children, etc
Less work means less is produced, so society as a whole becomes poorer. There's simply less goods.
Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them also to work less. Now there's more people wanting basic income, so more needs raised......
Sure free money gives some people nicer lives, but in this case it is not free - it is taken from other people. Maybe instead of calling it basic income, call it "larger tax transfers for those not needing it as much as current tax transfer systems."
Number of hours worked is not equal to production or richness of a society.
Productivity equals production.
A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.
A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.
To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.
What makes the people in Singapore New York and silicone valley more productive? The fact that they work in successful businesses and earn lots of money? So what? Tobacco is a successful business.
How can you even define more economic output? You can't, you just use a very flawed proxy for economic value, money exchange.
I believe a good teacher is 100 times more productive than a software engineer. But that guy that wrote some tracking code earns a boat load more money. So you consider him more productive.
That's just a huge fallacy. Value cannot be fully quantified, we use proxies for that reason, but we should always remember that.
It's funny because the post you responded to would be better as a refutation of this post rather than the other way around
OP just explained why people (or rather, the upper middle class tech workers) of these two cities for out produce potentially thousands of people. A team of software engineers who can nail software for flipped classrooms will replace thousands of teachers AND improve educational outcomes
Yep, and when significant numbers of people simply stop working, as has been demonstrated in every experiment on basic income, production drops similarly. 0 work * any finite rate of production = 0 output.
Recessions/depressions are caused by smaller drops in production than those seen in basic income. Production includes food, medicine, services, and things that make life better for all.
>A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.
Then let them do it. That they have not done so thus far is not because we didn't have basic income. Postulating this mythical event as a counter to the empirical evidence that production did drop significantly during actual basic income is not compelling.
>generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them
Then start such a company, and your better, happier, more efficient workers should beat out those other inefficient companies.
Again, this hasn't happened, despite many people trying to make such companies, only to realize that things don't work this way for valid reasons.
And this is exactly why we have a 7 day work week with 20 hour work days and never retire, because the only measure of us as a people is how much money we produce. /s
Society doesn't become poorer, in fact UBI will probably lower stress and allow more creative thinking and longer life spans with lower medical costs. Even if it doesn't I'd just be happy to know that the people struggling at the bottom have to struggle a little less because, as a person in the middle, I'm happy to give a little bit of my income to someone who needs it more.
If we were all just moving rocks around, that statement might be true. But human productivity is a much richer equation than time work in == value produced.
Where would we be if we took that to its logical conclusion and put kids to work rather than send them to school? If we all worked 16 hour days?
Your model doesn't consider productivity/unit time, nor the case of win-lose bargaining in the case where the 'lose' party is at a disadvantage and bargaining to lose less rather than for gain.
Disincentivizing work (in the near term) can be a net positive over time if the person that turns away from that trade uses their unsold time to increase their overall productivity/unit time or if they use their enhanced alternative to a negotiated agreement to turn a negotiation that would have otherwise been a 'lose but lose a bit less' or 'tread water' situation into a gain for themselves.
My only question is whether the productivity and value gains from enhanced productivity/unit time and employee/employer negotiations where the employee always has a workable alternative to employment will be more than what is lost in the reallocation through taxes?
Considering how much the top has and how little it would take to move those still in desperate poverty to merely being poor, I'd be willing to bet the overall value creation would far outstrip the losses in taxes. But it's a fair question.
> Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them also to work less. Now there's more people wanting basic income, so more needs raised......
This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the basic income, so there is no "more people wanting", but if the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less revenue would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI amount, more people would work. It's self-balancing.
>This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the basic income, so there is no "more people wanting"
?????
Less time worked correlates with less things made. Less things made means less sales. Less sales means less sales tax. Less people working means less income. Less income means less income tax....
Sure this doesn't shrink the tax base? After all, when a few percent of people are put out of work during a recession, there are severe tax revenue issues. Basic income experiments so far show that 10% of people simply drop out of the workforce.....
>if the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less revenue would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI amount, more people would work. It's self-balancing.
So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI people will get really screwed....
Everyone gets the UBI, not just people who don't work. If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.
> Less time worked correlates with less things made.
In general this goes the other way. The history of progress is to make more stuff in less time. If people had more "disincentive to work" then companies would have to pay them more -- which increases the incentive for automation, which creates more stuff with less people working, which solves the problem.
This is also why your "disincentive to work" calculations are off. If you pay <1% of people a UBI, it's not going to affect wages. If you pay it to everyone and there is a "disincentive to work" then to get people to work, companies will have to pay more. Which creates a countervailing incentive to work that keeps people working. It also increases wages (and correspondingly spending), which increases the tax base, so there goes that too.
> So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI people will get really screwed....
Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP, not a percent of the stock market. Have a look at the GDP graph:
Difference from the height of the housing boom to the bottom of the crash was ~3%. Not a huge difference. And it was back to where it was at the height after one year. (Compare to ~50% drop for the Dow. The stock market is not the economy.)
>If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.
That money comes from taxpayers. If less people work, less pay into it.
>In general this goes the other way.
If less people work today, less will get made today. When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.
The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.
>Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP
Because people are working. Drop 10% of workers, you lose a massive amount of tax base. Expenses are still fixed for many items, which is why when less people work deficit spending increases.
>And it was back to where it was at the height after one year
Because people were getting back to work.
I also never mentioned the stock market as the indicator to measure - that is a strawman you brought up.
> That money comes from taxpayers. If less people work, less pay into it.
But none more receive it.
> If less people work today, less will get made today.
What do you expect companies to do if some of their employees quit? Give up? No. Either they'll pay higher wages to get employees again or they'll automate the job.
There are millions of jobs that could be automated right now, this year, except that the automation equipment costs slightly more than paying current wages, so they pay the wages instead. If it becomes somewhat more attractive to not work and employers have to pay higher wages, some of them will get automated instead. The same work gets done with fewer people.
> When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.
Tax revenues fell and deficits rose because they cut taxes and increased spending. The reduction in GDP (i.e. the tax base) was, again, only ~3% and only for one year.
> The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.
I have already explained this. If you give one person a UBI and not everyone, they don't need work as much, but everybody else still does, so employers don't have to pay higher wages since they can still hire any of the other >99% of people who didn't get the UBI and pay them the existing wages.
If you give everyone a UBI, employers do have to pay higher wages to retain employees, so they do, and then more people stay working.
Someone else also pointed out that your 10% also mostly "stopped working" so they could go to school. Which is obviously not a permanent condition and generally precedes taking a better job, which pays more and generates more tax revenue.
> Because people were getting back to work.
The unemployment rate went from 5% in 2007 to 9.9% in 2009. It was still at 9.3% in 2010 when GDP had fully recovered. Apparently the economy did just as well without the other 4.3%.
Less work means less is produced, so society as a whole becomes poorer. There's simply less goods.
Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them also to work less. Now there's more people wanting basic income, so more needs raised......
Sure free money gives some people nicer lives, but in this case it is not free - it is taken from other people. Maybe instead of calling it basic income, call it "larger tax transfers for those not needing it as much as current tax transfer systems."