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Not sure if there was a thread on this but it's being trialled now
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11783405
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Love it!!!!
I would totally vote for it. I would just retire and live on my passive income plus my universal income.
Screw the country over.. but I will be alright Jack! -
didn't Labour float something similar last year?
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@taniwharugby said in Universal income:
didn't Labour float something similar last year?
Was the Greens.. but same difference nowadays!
Open border plus Uninversal Income.. what could go wrong in Europe?
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Universal income:
Love it!!!!
I would totally vote for it. I would just retire and live on my passive income plus my universal income.
Screw the country over.. but I will be alright Jack!I'd say to pay for it your tax rate on your investments is going to feel like you're having a colonoscopy. Maybe on of the dozen or so ferals who's existence you're subsidising will name their eighth kid after you as a thank you gesture ?
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Most of the systems floated claw back the Universal Income via tax on your other income once it hits a certain level, so the people with money flowing in don't really benifit. Its a saftey net.
Only way it works for me is if its tied to HUGE sin taxes on shit like booze, junk food etc. Otherwise you are basically saying to a big unmotivated chunk of the country "get a Playstation & just stagger from your couch to the door to get the deliveries from Dominos & The Pub forever"
So you'd need something to pay for the huge diabeties spike. Maybe tie it to implanted tech that counts your steps and body fat %. You brought that in it'd be the biggest boost ever to the NHS in the UK - £1k a month free if you do 10k steps a day & keep your body fat under 20% & stop smoking.
I'm not sure we are ready for that level of nanny state just yet tho'...
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Maybe I misunderstood but my understanding of the universal income was that it was enough to pay for food and basic shelter if you wanted luxuries you either had to be pretty good at saving or go out and augment it with some other work. So it wouldn't be XBOXs and SKY for all.
Then you remove all other benefits gut the government departments that managed them and tax all income as income capital, gains, dividends, inheritance etc.. Now it depends somewhat how efficient your government was to start with but even then I find it hard to believe the numbers would balance that easily.
Its an interesting idea, in theory. I can see how it is supposed to free up those who want more to go and get it and for those who were never going to contribute anyway to do what they would have anyway. I have to wonder though if it was not for the need to work would mankind have ever stepped on the moon. Invented the microchip or even the internal combustion engine.
Its all well and good saying that people with brilliant ideas would be able to work on them with a safety net but for every genius with a brilliant idea there is millions of hours of work from people who just want to get paid that goes into bringing it to life. Without that work I doubt many good ideas would have gotten off the ground.
How would it work for kids? Would they get it as well that would surely encourage bad parents to reproduce. If they don't do we just let hungry kids starve? Or worse do you introduce some sort of Orwellian population control?
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@mooshld said in Universal income:
Maybe I misunderstood but my understanding of the universal income was that it was enough to pay for food and basic shelter if you wanted luxuries you either had to be pretty good at saving or go out and augment it with some other work. So it wouldn't be XBOXs and SKY for all.
At the basic "pure" level its a flat payment you can anything you like with, replacing unemployment benifit etc. So in the same way you can use your unemployment benifit to buy booze, lotto cards, an XBOX & ciggies, there's nothing stopping you doing that with your UI too. Hence I would want all those taxed to fuckery to nudge folks towards capping their spend on that stuff.
Tho' there was a Freakanomics I think where they linked the decline in youth crime with the rise in consoles - basically lower socio-economic youths staying home playing Fifa rather than walking the streets getting into trouble.
@mooshld said in Universal income:
Its all well and good saying that people with brilliant ideas would be able to work on them with a safety net but for every genius with a brilliant idea there is millions of hours of work from people who just want to get paid that goes into bringing it to life. Without that work I doubt many good ideas would have gotten off the ground.
Not sold on that, most advances recently (last 30 odd years) have not been but poor folks desperate to move up, they have been by rich kids with a huge safety net under them knowing they could fail as much as they liked & they'd get bailed out. Struggling to think of an innovation started by anyone poor actually -
Bill Gates - olds fucking loaded
Zuckerberg - very upper middle class (emphasis on upper)
Eduardo Saverin - fucking loaded
Dustin Moskovitz - same as Zuck
Elon Musk - dad seeded him cash to start out
Reed Hastings - parents & grand parrents loaded
Jeff Bezos - his family owned Texas
Serrgy Brin's dad was a uni professor - so not loaded, but not badOnly one I can think of who started in the gutter was Jobs, and he latched onto Wozniak early & just clung on for life.
Most innovation comes more from free time & a brilliant inquisitive mind as opposed to people fighting their way out of the hood. That was the case 200-300 years ago where options like the East India Company or the opening of the American West were a chance for a peniless guy to become a millionaire within a generation
Now its best to start with a trust fund & daddy getting you into Harvard.
And they'll still have people to work for them, people will always want more than minimum wage
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I think you have totally misunderstood what @mooshld said
My take is that he is saying that these innovators still often rely on numbers of workers to help bring their ideas to life. Any construct that reduces the availability or desire to work from 'normal' people will still effect progress in that it may become more difficult to get people resource.
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@Crucial said in Universal income:
I think you have totally misunderstood what @mooshld said
My take is that he is saying that these innovators still often rely on numbers of workers to help bring their ideas to life. Any construct that reduces the availability or desire to work from 'normal' people will still effect progress in that it may become more difficult to get people resource.
Yeah. True, but I don't really buy that either as, again, almost all the innovations recently require feck all people, eg Ford or GM at their peaks employed way over 1m people to produce their inovations, Facebook, Google, Netflix get by on a fraction of that.
Space X has 5,000 employees.
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I'm not a fan of the idea on the whole, but I wonder if it will come into it's own if all the predictions of jobless innovation continue. Technological change in the past has tended to involve one occupation group being destroyed and replaced by another, but if that does change, I wonder where the $ come for demand driven growth . Or putting food on the table.
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@Donsteppa maybe you have to buy a robot to go to work for you, or in the case of lazy fluffybunnies, buy a cheap bot to sit at home, have parties and drink with you, for less income of course...
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@jegga said in Universal income:
You can't declare bankruptcy on a student loan but is it fair to be paying a loan on a qualification for a job that doesn't exist anymore?
Bankruptcy wipes student loans in NZ (but not in USA). Lesser cousins don't however e.g. No Asset Procedures (NAPs). The only tax-related debt not wiped by bankruptcy is child support.
On the subject, I'm all for it at a subsistence level. The Big Kahuna (Gareth Morgan's book on a Universal Basic Income) has a sustainable scheme, for example, with a flat tax rate of around 30% and payments of $11000 p.a. which is about the same as the dole + accommodation supplement. With technology and automation removing jobs at a great rate, and the gig economy getting bigger and bigger, having this as a backstop will make more and more sense.
Another way of looking at it is as a Citizen's Dividend - basically, the government runs as a business (of sorts), and the annual surplus is divided up equally and paid to the citizens living here on the basis of 1 citizen = 1 share. That would be more variable, but could be planned to generally pay a minimum amount.
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@Godder said in Universal income:
@jegga said in Universal income:
You can't declare bankruptcy on a student loan but is it fair to be paying a loan on a qualification for a job that doesn't exist anymore?
Bankruptcy wipes student loans in NZ (but not in USA). Lesser cousins don't however e.g. No Asset Procedures (NAPs). The only tax-related debt not wiped by bankruptcy is child support.
On the subject, I'm all for it at a subsistence level. The Big Kahuna (Gareth Morgan's book on a Universal Basic Income) has a sustainable scheme, for example, with a flat tax rate of around 30% and payments of $11000 p.a. which is about the same as the dole + accommodation supplement. With technology and automation removing jobs at a great rate, and the gig economy getting bigger and bigger, having this as a backstop will make more and more sense.
Another way of looking at it is as a Citizen's Dividend - basically, the government runs as a business (of sorts), and the annual surplus is divided up equally and paid to the citizens living here on the basis of 1 citizen = 1 share. That would be more variable, but could be planned to generally pay a minimum amount.
What happens if there's no surplus?
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@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Universal income:
@Godder said in Universal income:
@jegga said in Universal income:
You can't declare bankruptcy on a student loan but is it fair to be paying a loan on a qualification for a job that doesn't exist anymore?
Bankruptcy wipes student loans in NZ (but not in USA). Lesser cousins don't however e.g. No Asset Procedures (NAPs). The only tax-related debt not wiped by bankruptcy is child support.
On the subject, I'm all for it at a subsistence level. The Big Kahuna (Gareth Morgan's book on a Universal Basic Income) has a sustainable scheme, for example, with a flat tax rate of around 30% and payments of $11000 p.a. which is about the same as the dole + accommodation supplement. With technology and automation removing jobs at a great rate, and the gig economy getting bigger and bigger, having this as a backstop will make more and more sense.
Another way of looking at it is as a Citizen's Dividend - basically, the government runs as a business (of sorts), and the annual surplus is divided up equally and paid to the citizens living here on the basis of 1 citizen = 1 share. That would be more variable, but could be planned to generally pay a minimum amount.
What happens if there's no surplus?
If it's being run on that model, either no payment is made, payments are made out of cash reserves, the country sells assets to pay for it or the country borrows money to pay it. Obviously all of those have different pros and cons.
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I'd be in interested in seeing the figures with scrapping most social welfare payments and replacing it with universal income.
If it's basically a wash then you could save money with less red tape and free up access to help those that need help. The flip side would be personal responsibility and no further handouts.
Can't help but think we are at the beginning of a permanent underclass.
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@Kirwan said in Universal income:
I'd be in interested in seeing the figures with scrapping most social welfare payments and replacing it with universal income.
If it's basically a wash then you could save money with less red tape and free up access to help those that need help. The flip side would be personal responsibility and no further handouts.
Can't help but think we are at the beginning of a permanent underclass.
All part of the neoliberal agenda apparently.
Universal income