And I do not mean rich people who are in the upper 10% of income, it favours the ultra rich for whom a $100,000 political donation is pocket change.
At a local level money, gerrymandering and propaganda make it impossible to elect politicians who give a fair representation of people's interests. And with a two party system, it's more than likely that both of them fail to represent their policy preferences to begin with.
It frightens me that people are so easily manipulated and exploited.
We need to realistically acknowledge the problems and work toward solutions. Not throw up our hands and give into injustice. The solution to democratic revival is citizen engagement, not despair and fatalism.
Let’s take these two separately. As to money: the evidence shows money isn’t buying results. Wall Street and Silicon Valley strongly supported Clinton in 2016. She outspent Donald Trump by 70%: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/09/trump-and-cl... ($340m to $581m). But Clinton lost.
Within the Republican Party, billionaires billionaires wanted someone other than Trump: https://fortune.com/2024/02/26/ken-griffin-koch-brothers-rep.... But he’s going to win the primary.
More generally, the donor money in US politics supports globalization/free trade, and mass immigration (for cheap labor). The money is losing that battle not just in the US, but in Europe too.
The problem in U.S. politics right now is that Internet-based donor networks have eliminated the ability of large donors (and institutions) to control the candidates.
As to gerrymandering, what makes you think it has any real effect? Do you have a numerical estimatr in your head of what the party split would look like in Congress if there was no gerrymandering?
For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
I'm curious as to where you are seeing unrestricted donations. I'm also curious as to the reasoning by which you think this would undermine democracy, given that the election result is still being determined by the voters, and the candidates seek money primarily to use in their attempt to persuade voters.
> Only individuals are allowed to donate to political campaigns, and the FEC sets maximum contribution limits per individual that are far below $100,000.
> For this election cycle, the maximum campaign donation is $3,300, the cap for a committee donation is $2,000, etc. See: https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
It's pretty obvious he probably wasn't referring specifically to hard-money campaign donations, but referring to the post Citizens United situation. That's pretty clear, if you don't read the comment pedantically and over-literally.
So a rich guy can give unlimited amounts to a candidate's Super PAC, an those have ways around the restrictions on coordinating with the campaign itself.
SuperPACs, one of the main engines of US spending on politics.
On the other hand it would be nice to know what happened with all of the Covid checks since that also was given to many, but again hardly universal.
I think the main criticism against UBI is inflation and I haven’t seen any reasonable argument to why it wouldn’t happen.
A likely picture would be less money going into assets (where wealthy people money tends to end up) and more money going into consumables (where poor people money tends to end up). However the money pile should stay the same all else being equal.
Let's not overthink this. We don't need to pretend it's a mystery how UBI would play out. It's been commonplace for a century.
The worst possible outcome is the intended one: where UBI recipients spend it on essentials, and society adapts over time such that a large swath of the population becomes dependent on state-issued subsidies for basic sustenance.
This would create an entrenched concentration of "soft" power that gives centralized political institutions -- and by extension, the factions that control them -- an unprecedented level of top-down control over society, which will invariably leveraged for ulterior purposes.
wouldn't the people that the article is accusing of being against UBI, want this outcome?
sounds like if they want more control, they should be for UBI
Of course a lot of other money was spent (1 trillion in direct payments and income support respectively out of roughly 13 trillion in total new COVID spending). But I think giving out free money distorts markets in unpredictable ways.
And that wasn't even enough money for anyone to live on.
I think this needs to be solved before UBI has any chance of working.
You don't make double-digit inflation by giving people barely enough money to cover rent in most low-cost American cities.
EDIT:
Also, let us consider why these payments were necessary and why they had to be funded the way they were. They had to be funded by printing money because the US government is deep in debt and there hasn't been a real tax increase since George HW Bush killed his political career with one in 1992. There is no rainy-day fund for the American people, so the FRS had to make one, and quick, lest you have people in the streets in general revolt, which given that the George Floyd protests were around the same time, was a real risk.
The payments were necessary because the American economy is not only leveraged from top-to-bottom, but in fact requires a good chunk of the population be in a good amount of debt with no savings in order to maintain growth of the credit products that many financial institutions rely on for the production of value for their shareholders. If you had over a hundred million people suddenly not making money, it's like the 2008 financial crisis, except instead of mortgage-backed securities, this time, it's every kind of securitized debt.
There won't be inflation if you take money from the top and give it to the bottom. The total amount of money stays the same.
Yes, printing money wildly leads to inflation. Nobody is arguing that it doesn't. Giving the poorest members of society means the velocity of that money (or the M1 number) doesn't actually cause rampant inflation, as it stays in circulation because it is used quickly.
Giving 1.7 trillion largely to corporations who don't NEED it causes inflation. A corporation who sits on that cash (and then doesn't actually have to pay taxes on that cash, nor actually distribute it to employees) does cause inflation, because that's a whole lot of money just sitting around instead of flowing through an economy.
https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/eco...
> Global supply chain disruptions following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the rapid rise in U.S. inflation over the past two years. Evidence suggests that supply chain pressures pushed up the cost of inputs for goods production and the public’s expectations of higher future prices. These factors accounted for about 60% of the surge in U.S. inflation beginning in early 2021. Supply chain pressures began easing substantially in mid-2022, contributing to the slowdown in inflation.
https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...
> The causes of the housing supply crisis are widely understood. After the Great Recession, new home construction dropped like a stone. Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s. By 2019, a good estimate of the shortage of housing units for sale or rent was 3.8 million. The pandemic-induced materials and labor shortage exacerbated the trend, however, as evidenced by the surge in rents and home prices in 2021.
https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/economic-bulletin/cor...
> Corporate profits rose quickly in 2021 along with inflation, raising concerns about corporations driving up prices to increase profits. Although corporate profits indeed contributed to inflation in 2021, their contribution fell in 2022. This pattern is not unusual: in previous economic recoveries, corporate profits were the main contributor to inflation in the first year and displaced by costs in the second year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/08/excess-profits-of-big-firms-...
> “We argue that market power by some corporations and in some sectors – including temporary market power emerging in the aftermath of the pandemic – amplified inflation,” the report said.
> The author’s analysis of financial reports from 1,350 companies listed in the U.K., U.S., Germany, Brazil and South Africa found nominal profits were on average 30% higher at the end of 2022 than at the end of 2019.
That's about how much those experiments are worth.
In the test, wealth is coming from outside the system to individual economic agents within it. Of course those agents become better off than others who are not granted this wealth. But a government does not create wealth by fiat; they take it through taxation to distribute and spend according to priorities (ideally) set through popular decisions. They cannot make the group as a whole objectively richer - schemes to try anyway through blanket money printing result in unwanted inflation.
What I would actually expect to happen, should UBI somehow be implemented, is an immediate capture of the extra wealth by the capital-owning class. It won't be used by the currently homeless to afford homes, because the day after it's announced, rent prices will shoot up by about 70% of the amount. You will still need a job to afford a place to live. Likewise all basic goods; food, fuel, education, all their prices will rise to consume the greater discretionary income that people have. You can't win the Red Queen's race. Speeding everyone up the same amount doesn't change their relative positioning.
True, it would make debts suddenly worth a lot less. The government could also choose to do so by fiat, but they are very unlikely to. It's not difficult to imagine why.
Worse, the expense of doing this - it would cost more than the federal budget in the USA, assuming everyone is given a modest $2,000 monthly - means that taxes would have to rise, making it harder for people to actually rise in economic status through productive labor. I can see, assuming that this state of being continues long-term (which I personally doubt it would), a permanent divide appearing in the economic strata in the population over this, between people lucky enough to own property at the time the UBI was implemented and those who weren't.
Despite the woe about wealth mobility that already exists (at the moment, people in the bottom quintile economically have a 40-60% chance to escape it[0]), it can always get worse. Ideas to fix it should not be judged based solely on their intent. UBI is a solution that is conceptually simple (there are poor people? just give them money!), politically easy (who doesn't like free money?), and absolutely rife with harmful second order effects. People change their behavior according to incentives - this is true both of the poor who historically have been the targeted beneficiaries of UBI tests, and the landlords and corporations that will change their policies to optimally harvest a new bounty if these policies were ever implemented more widely.
[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/stuck-on-the-ladder-wealt...
Communism is one big UBI. Everyone has something to do and everyone gets paid enough to buy basic goods and services even if sometimes some good and services become scarce. Communism proved it works, but it's not efficient. It means you have to choose between a somewhat stagnant society and a progressive society (not progressive in the political but rather technological sense).
For some this would be good. But for others not. Moreover, the government can dictate what it wants from you since you are beholden to it and don't have much mobility.
There's no one stays clean in the Beltway.
The world is of course actually messy and not b&w, but that fact doesn't change that.
It's like saying that killing is wrong, but sometimes we still have to kill. Yes we do, and killing is still wrong. If you kill someone, it's not because "humans are messy". Oh humans are just imperfect and sometmes you just kill your neighbor, it just happens, no way to avoid it. If you actually want to get anything done you can't be so aspberger absolutist and figure out how to work WITH the neighbor killers.
UBI would turn it into a real, consensual market.
No doubt people benefiting from the status quo do not want change.
How did concentrating extreme amounts of wealth work out for the French and Russian royalty?
Furthermore, how did it work out for their nations economically?
First, to bring every reader up to speed, basic income (or UBI)...
Note also that the word citizens is used on the Wikipedia page.
I have a feeling the US will manage to bungle that too.
If you don't like that, you better vote in the next election.
