Universelles Grundeinkommen: die schlechte Idee, die nie ganz stirbt

From the article: The idea of a universal basic income has long achieved the rare feat of seducing both the political left and the libertarian right. The redistribution involved in paying everyone an income without any conditions appeals to socialists, while the free-market right likes the absence of bureaucracy inherent in the policy. More recently, it has gained another support base among tech bros, who see it as the future in an idealised robotised world where there is no place for work.

To date, however, boring mainstream economists have persuaded governments not to introduce a universal basic income at any scale by appealing to maths over ideals. When you run the numbers, either the level of basic income is pathetically low or the tax rates needed to fund a reasonable income would be unacceptable. Neither of these outcomes, nor a blend, is desirable.

Before the pandemic, a comprehensive OECD study found that it would always “require very substantial tax rises if it were to be set at a meaningful level”. In the US, for example, the suggested $1,000 monthly payment for all 258mn adults would cost more than $3tn a year. That is roughly equivalent to the combined cost of US social security, Medicaid and Medicare, yet it would provide an income too low to prevent poverty.

We just don’t need to give such payments to everyone at exorbitant cost unless the robots take all our jobs. And even then, let’s not fool ourselves that it would be a utopia.

The worst idea, other than every other idea we have on how to handle automation and the growing lack of need for labour while our population spikes, and our climate disasters have already started.

There are still oh oh so so many bad ideas that literally passed and still haven’t been repealed to this day… that does nothing for the poor and everything to benefit the rich. And i don’t trust economists one bit they have been oh so wrong most of the time being no better than a coin flip. Can’t be a bad idea if it has never been done at a large scale before. But every single small scale experiment has been mostly a success

Pray tell, Financial Times: how does one keep the global economy from grinding to a halt once AI and robotics really get cooking and half the planet is unemployed?

If no one has a job then no one will be able to purchase the goods and services that the company that automated their jobs sells. There will also be less tax dollars from income tax and sales tax.

Will be interesting to see how capitalism cracks this nut.

Sigh.

The author of this needs to read Capital by Marx. Say what you will about Marx’s proposed solutions to the problems capitalism represents but his critiques are completely accurate.

100 years ago, someone once hypothesized that the growth of the phone system would necessitate hiring every woman in America as a phone operator. The invention of the integrated circuit and packet-switched network obviated most of that quite effectively. This same fate will befall most of the busy-work jobs that capitalism has created.

Also on the list of “things capitalism has created” is enormous wealth. BUT, just as Marx predicted, the consolidation of that wealth in the hands of a wealthy few has created a lot of problems. One of those is many communities don’t own much of the staggering wealth that the most effective workforce ever has created.

Understanding that wealth and money aren’t the same thing – wealth is something that is capable of generating money for the wealth owner (land is a good example, you can always farm land) – and considering much of the working world has no wealth to speak of, we either have to embrace ideas like basic income or we have to embrace alternatives to capitalism.

Would pension be considered a special form of UBI? If so we are already struggling to fund it

I don’t think it is a bad idea, just not the silver bullet to our problems that the biggest proponents like to push.