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Lumifer comments on Open Thread June 6 - June 12, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (126)
It's actually a bit worse than that.
The GBI is a guaranteed income stream, right? So, can I sell it? Can I put it up as a collateral for a loan? Can I get that shiny car right now if I sign over my GBI to you for the next ten years? Deal!!
It's actually not that bad.
People on welfare can already borrow money on credit cards and so on. If they get into default the only legally enforceable repayment arrangements are ones where they are not forced below subsistence levels. Yes, lenders can end up getting pennies a week. Yes, it is basically their fault,
You can get the situation where someone borrows against their livelihood in some kind of libertopia where the lenders right to their money overrides the borrowers right to eat.
Also, if someone is using GBI to start a business, borrowing to buy equipment is pretty reasonable,
And what happens if the business fails?
Your picture of people on welfare seems a bit rosy. You think everyone has credit cards?
Correct. However that generally involves declaring personal bankruptcy, at which point you're locked out of all credit (including credit cards) for a few years.
It is, of course, possible to make GBI, to use a legal term, "non-garnishable" meaning it cannot be collected to satisfy a judgement against a person. But that would make it impossible to use it as collateral for a loan to buy equipment, for example. The child support payments also could become an issue.
Does it? I didn't say it was a good thing.
I don't need the premise that everyone has credit cards to support the conclusion that some people on welfare do. I hear news stories about it.
But you could set a non-garnishable component that is less than the whole GBI. I am still not seeing a novel problem.
I'm not saying there is a novel problem. I'm saying there are old problems that GBI does not magically solve, mostly revolving around the very old observation that a fool and his money are soon parted.
Did anyone say it solved those problems?
Penicillin doesn't cure the common cold either.
It's up to the willingness of the country giving out the loan to regulate whether it wants to enforce those loans. Many countries have a legal system where you can't collect money from people who need that money to live.
Generally speaking yes, it does. What particular kind of contracts do you think a country wouldn't want to enforce in this context? As to subsistence-level income not being collectable, see my answer to TheAncientGeek.
Welfare payment in Germany aren't basic income because people need to active look for a job to receive them.
Those payments are also non-garnishable. The don't exist to finance loans. The point of basic income isnt to give people collateral for loans but to provide them with money to cover their basic needs.
If you want a higher income of say 1500$ you can make 1000$ non-garishable so that the person can always cover their basic need and make the rest garnishable.
True, but Germany has big tax breaks for entry-level, low-income jobs - what they call MiniJobs, MidiJobs etc. So the combination of unemployment insurance (the 'welfare' you describe) and easily available work acts much like a UBI as far as low-income folks are concerned.
The United Kingdom is now trying the same strategy, but with less success: though entry-level work is untaxed and quite widely available, many people there are still living on the 'dole' and not working, perhaps because the economy is still in bad shape and this lowers wages/worsens working conditions. A low-level UBI would be a nice solution to this issue.
No, UBI means that you get money even if you decide against working. That's inherently different than conditional welfare payments.
There nothing unconditional about receiving money from an entry-level low-income job.
That's an often-quoted reason, but it's far from "generally-agreed". For one thing, there is the obvious retort to it: we'll consider UBI when the robots actually make people unable to "support themselves even by working" and not before that.
A lot of people (e.g. Charles Murray) support UBI as a less-painful alternative to the metastasizing bureaucracy of welfare, etc., and with less mis- and disincentives, too. It is basically seen as a welfare equivalent to the "taxes on a postcard" (or maybe flat tax) movement.
Various people support UBI for different reasons. It's not true that nobody in Germany calls for UBI. You might personal oppose UBI in a country like Germany but that doesn't mean that other don't want it.
Milton Friedman also wasn't concered about growing use of automation when he proposed UBI as negative taxation.
Huh? As far as I know, the "War on Poverty" policies weren't motivated by the fear that the poorest will be unable to support themselves (after all, they managed to do so throughout all the preceding times). They were motivated by the optimism and can-do attitude -- the economy was growing very well, the middle class was booming, the progress towards the shining future was inevitable, so the Federal government should help the less fortunate get on the shining-future bus.
One of the most influential politicians in favor of UBI in Germany is Dieter Althaus from the CDU (the right). I also don't think it makes sense to see billionaire Götz Werner as wanting to give his consituents free money for votes.