Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: Eleventy billion dollars!, in reply to Rae Sott,
It is clear, well to me it is, that there will be many, many fewer taxpayers on which to call to pay a UBI, so elsewhere will have to be looked for the source of it.
It’s certainly a problem, and in the very long run, this will be the case. There are many possibilities. One of the most compelling I’ve seen is to look to the actual creation of money itself, taxing capital indirectly via inflation. It’s a model which counters uber-capitalism with hyper-socialism. But this is futuristic stuff. Until we even buy into the eradication of abject poverty, we’re stuck with money creation via debt, how we have it now. Which is no less inflationary, but far, far more punitive. The model for thousands of years has been for debt to spiral ever upwards until some crisis point where there is massive debt forgiveness all around, typically after some kind of revolution or war. We could break the spiral. If we had the vision to do it. We could spiral it downwards until there is only positive wealth, no moneylending, all capital is equally shared and the profits equally distributed. It could even be done slowly. Wouldn’t that be a nice, refreshing sign for our species.
Or we could just have another massive fuck-off war. I think we’re poised at the decision point between those two pathways.
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Another shortcoming of my picture is that it is only on individuals. Companies aren't in there. Obviously I don't think companies should be getting the UBI. Quite the opposite, they should be doing a lot of the paying for it.
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I'll do this on a computer sometime soon. It is a little difficult to make it look good, though, because the actual shape of the income distribution is so hockey-stick like that the y-axis becomes grossly enlarged, and you can barely see the UBI. The top bracket being the 250k plus range, which has mean income 40 times the size of the proposed UBI which means it's hard to see the conceptual areas I'm drawing.
Also, as I said above, income isn't all of the story.
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Rough outline of 2 scenarios, graphical. The second one is obviously the extreme case. The first one is what I understand the idea of the UBI to be. The devil is in the detail of how to get it to work like that.
Also, note I only put Income on the y axis. A more honest version of what I would like to see in society (at least to start with) has that axis as Financial Wellbeing. Income is a very blunt measure of it, particularly at the low end. It's possible to have no income, but be perfectly well off (if you had, for example, a stack of gold bars in a bank that you spent when you felt like it). It's possible to have no income, but so many assets that you live like a king. It's also possible to have a high income, but still be effectively impoverished, if all your costs are so high that you're struggling to pay for basic things. People with large families can easily be in this situation.
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For people who earn more than nothing but less than the UBI, it would seem to me fairly clear that the aim is for them to earn no less than the UBI.
Beyond that, it's murkier. It's my opinion that actually, no one who has any kind of self-made-income should LOSE some of it on account of getting the UBI. But when it comes to incomes from benefits, then probably it's fair all other things held equal for that to be adjusted taking a UBI into account. At least initially. That way we don't have to radically reorganize our understanding of what the other entitlements mean (with the exception of the jobseeker one - my opinion is that it should be entirely subsumed by the UBI, that there should be no such thing in future). Obviously such entitlements can and will and should be the subject of ongoing review. But in order not to instantly kibosh the UBI, a sound way to do it is to try to make it "beneficiary neutral" for as many beneficiaries as possible.
This is obviously very complicated if you consider WFF to be a benefit. Yes, it was always going to be a very complicated matter to deal with middle class welfare since the idea was first thought of. I don't have any certain answers for this, haven't thought about it enough.
One thing is certain to me, though. A UBI that acheives the first goal I set out, but has no other affects on income can only be a new cost to the government, and would have to involve a cut in spending on something else. If we find that too unpalatable, then changes to incomes outside of that group MUST be made. But that first goal is nowhere near as large as the $86 billion being bandied about.
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FWIW, I don't think it's a terrible own goal for Labour to open this dialog, rather than just announce in massive detail some UBI that pleases no one. At the very least, it's a clear signal that they're open to the idea of this change, and genuinely want to know what the public think about it. The response of those against is, OTOH, a clear signal that they are not open and they genuinely don't want the public to think about it.
Because it's pretty clear to anyone who does think about it, that there are any number of ways that the UBI could be made affordable. The discussion at this point should really be about what the point of it is, what the goal would be, before trying to massage the numbers to fit the goal.
To me the main goal is pretty clear - it's designed to eliminate the very worst kind of poverty, those people in NZ who have literally no income at all. Beyond that, there are other goals, which it acheives as a bunch of trade offs. But that main goal sets at least the first condition that we should at the very least be putting at least the UBI into the hands of those who currently get nothing at all. As I understand it, the main idea is "No one in this country AT ALL, should have less income than the UBI".
Beyond that, there aren't any hard rules. How it's paid for, and who gets it, and how they get it, are all up for debate. But the point of it is the elimination of poverty on the basic assumption that every person on the planet deserves at least this level of access to the "social dividend", the value that our civilization returns to us because we are lucky enough to be born at this end of it, rather than a time when there pretty much was no society.
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I'm guessing this discussion will morph into how it's all Labour's fault because they didn't provide a detailed policy, therefore the only sane thing the Government can do is wildly speculate and make up their own numbers. Rather than just ask for them, or decline to comment.
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Great post, Six.
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Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to linger,
By definition, surely if it’s only applied to some groups, or in some communities, it’s not a UBI?
It could be universal within the group or community. Which most benefits aren't. So it's not entirely crazy to trial the idea. I don't think that's how it should be trialled here, though. This isn't India. This is about as far from India as you can get on so many levels.
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Hard News: Media Take: Crime and punishment, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The way it’s been building, the Herald will soon be claiming that these mostly pointless meth exorcisms will be a bigger driver of the economy than the Chch rebuild.
But are they bigger than the burglary epidemic?
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