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0 pointsqqqwerty1y ago0 comments

Do we really need academic studies on this topic? When Republicans cut taxes on the rich, it is not like they are making sure they have academic consensus on their side.

We know welfare works. It is pretty simple. People need to eat, they need shelter, and a few other basic necessities. When they fall on hard times, not having those things can make it infinitely harder to get back on their feet.

Our current welfare system is a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare and has a stigma attached to it. The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop. No fuss, no stigma. They are going to need that money to survive anyway, so might as well just give it to them rather than forcing them to suffer the indignities of poverty.

Public policy is a messy business. But I find it odd that this topic is so controversial as it only took me a few minutes of ruminating on it before realizing how good of an idea it is. Maybe it is because I have had a brief encounter with poverty myself, and ever since my anxieties around finances, access to healthcare, etc.. run deep. Or maybe I just realize that a ton of people were born into poverty and due to no fault of their own are now stuck in it. Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database. The fact that we could just flip a few bits and instantly make the lives of so many people better, boggles my mind why we wouldn't try that.

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anon2911y ago

You don't need anything to implement any policy. You just need someone with power to implement it. There's multiple ways of doing that. One way is to do so democratically, in which case you need to convince the population to vote for you. This can be done through religious means (I.e., appeals to a greater authority or set of morals) or -- ignoring metaphysical concerns -- evidentiary means (i.e., appeals to science and studies). The authors of this study are clearly trying to do the latter, because they want to convince you to vote for these policies.

The other way to implement it is to stage a coup, gain power by sheer force, and implement it that way.

In either case, you don't need an academic study.

> Money might not grow on trees, but it quite literally exists as 1's and 0's in some database.

Except money does grow on trees (and in supernovae and a few other places). Money is not a number in a database is a unit of net work owed by someone else to you. No work can be accomplished without sunlight and trees.

Money has to come from somewhere, because there's only so much work being done.

Highly recommend Debt: the first 5000 years by Graeber if you're confused.

StackRanker30001y ago

> The nice thing about UBI is it is universal, and simple. The second your income goes below a threshold, you start getting a little bit of money. The second it goes above, you stop.

UBI is typically not envisioned as means-tested (hence ”universal”).

qqqwertyOP1y ago

But in practice, the funds are going to have to come from somewhere. Most likely from taxes. So assuming it comes from income taxes, and assuming those income taxes are progressive, at some point along the income scale your UBI is cancelled out by an increase in taxes. It would be a bit silly to give someone $12k/yr in UBI if they are making $500k/yr in income and we would need to increase their taxes by $24k/yr to pay for the program. Just tax them $12k/yr.

This is why I like NIT. It is much more transparent about how the benefit scales with income. At this point if anyone mentions UBI, I just mentally substitute that with NIT as it is a much more practical and easy to understand implementation.

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