Ask Lemmy

I tend to support it because who says no to free money, but I'm not informed enough to form a strong opinion one way or another.

I'm going to wait and see - there are always unintended consequences and sometime those are bad enough to kill and otherwise good idea. Other times they mean you need to tweak with the simple program to make it work. And as always politicians will have their hand in the whole thing and might completely mess up the implementation until it looks nothing like the name.

Yes, I am in support of UBI.

The trajectory we're headed we're going to need it or something like it.

With improvements to AI and physical automation there will be a metric fuckton of people out of employment completely and there are only so many jobs for the rebuttal of "the people will still need to maintain the robots and check the AI"

Unfortunately with our concept of ownership there will be massive resistance to it as "I own the machines that make the products/increase productivity, why should you get anything from my profit?" They're going to have to relearn the lesson Ford learned about "well paid employees are your customers" the hard way.

As it stands, at least in America, "The Century Of The Self" has lead to a complete atomization of society, every business is entirely independent from society, every individual is separate from society, so each individual owner won't see the need for a well paid workforce/population at the owners "expense" actually being beneficial to their own existence. They'll think "someone else" should deal with that issue, or worse "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" :/

I support it. It's an insanely expensive policy though and should be implemented carefully and be based on income. An example would be:

• No income $1000 a month
• Min wage $500 a month

Combined with better tax policies that don't tax poor people. Health, education and other basic services should be almost free while having a strong social housing programme.

This way nobody gets priced out of living and there's still plenty of incentive to get a job while having some funds to invest in hygiene and clothing to land the job.

This amount and threshold should be increased in the future.

I really support UBI since you can better model the demand curve with externalities instead of making things free while having it accessible to poor people. Free school might be too low of a cost when calculating benefits to the individual and society so giving people money to afford a heavily subsidised cost would allow for more accurate economics.

One method of structuring it is that if UBI is $20k/year, then you have $20k/year taken out as taxes as long as you have a job. The income is neutral, so there's no basis for companies to raise prices.

Yes, full support from me. Multiple localized tests of UBI have been shown to drastically improved people's lives. I think there are multiple other measures that would need to be put in place too in order to help minimize corporations just obliterating it's usefulness by raising prices.

I'm not as informed as I'd like to be, but my understanding is that things like VAT taxes can help get around online retailers like Amazon dodging taxes, as well as CEO to base worker pay ratio caps to ensure the people in a company that are actually producing the profits get rewarded for doing so. The CEOs could keep giving themselves raises, but it would come with the requirement of actually giving everyone in the company a raise too, which, quite frankly, is what should happen when your employees do a good enough job to bring in record profits.

My understanding is that Alaska already has something similar in nature to a UBI where every citizen gets a dividend from the state each year based on taxes collected from certain businesses. This is a dim recollection from me and I am probably completely mistating how it works/where the money comes from.

Everyone gets some sort of income, but wouldn’t companies just subside the income by raising their prices? Also, do you believe capatilism can co-exist with UBI?

Kinda defeat the purpose, because a UBI is supposed to support a decent, respectable livelihood. So the higher their prices are, the more taxes they'll have to pay, to support a higher UBI. You cant have UBI without capitalism, because capitalism creates the conditions where a UBI is necessary.

and yes, I do. Companies are moving towards full automation, all the more possible with the advent of AI.. and they are doing that explicitly to fire human employees to save costs. There will soon be a time where there wont be enough jobs for people, Which will be a fork in the road of incredible civil unrest, violence, and possible war... or a UBI so people can live with dignity, freed from the labors of capitalism by automation.

I'm sceptical of it. where would all of that money come from? the "data industry", that is all about making the most believable lies and most effective ads? or land value tax that will make sure to outprice you from your own house if rich people flood it, or if improvements happen around the area?

the pension system, while I believe it is needed, I worry it cannot be sustained for too long anymore because currently it relies on infinite growth everywhere: year over year more people needs to work and pay taxes to finance the pension of the elderly.
or did I misunderstand something and this is not a problem?

only if that income is required for basic necessities and everyone will need in their lives. for a generalization, there are three things I can think of the top of my head that everyone needs. It is to have housing, healthcare, and food. There are many more basic needs people should have fulfilled but I digress.

Currently in many first world and third world countries/classes are reliant on funding to fulfill most if not all basic needs. That is when it should be mandatory for UBI. How is something like that funded? like everything else. we all pay for it. Call it taxes, call it charity, call it whatever you want.

Yet, Why would someone need UBI for basic needs? well mostly because the general public is more divided and distrustful of centralized sources/authorities. Yet the only way UBI would be able to occur is with that kind of system.

So in all I don't think UBI would be supported by me. I like federated services and decentralization. I don't like the current state of all basic needs being behind paywalls. It is disappointing. I don't know what would help us the most, but moving into this direction is just not what I can see would be kind to people who are low on economic scales or helpful for most who are barely scraping by. Even if I live more or less comfortably right now, I see many basic needs in my life that I would still want to improve substantially or become available for me to act on.

Yes I'm 100% for it, And no, companies DGAF where your money comes from as long as you buy stuff. UBI is the only way capitalism can exist at all long-term, because to exist it requires customers. With the continuing drive to eliminate employees, eventually so many people will be unemployed that if nothing happens to supply them with money for shopping, they won't be able to shop. Before we even get to the stage of food riots and massive social unrest, businesses will start feeling the drop in sales and profits. They really have no motivation to oppose UBI - which of course won't stop the more short-sighted ones from opposing UBI, because people often do things that hurt themselves in the long run (see MAGA). But overall UBI is ultimately one way of keeping capitalism afloat as employees become less and less necessary.

Maybe depending on the situation, and whether or not we can properly tax those who need to pay for most of it.

If it continues as it is now, with corporate entities and billionaires paying nearly nothing in taxes, I wouldn't support it. It only alienates the upperclass who we want on our side. Millionaires compared to billionaires is a similar scale to min wage workers to millionaires. We need to make it clear we are not after the 1%, but the 0.1%.

In addition to a UBI there needs to be some kind of price control. Otherwise I would fear that it'd simply subsidize corporate price gouging. Rents would immediately shoot up.

What is ubi? Univeral bread initiative ?

I've wondered the same thing. Seems like it would need to be paired with price controls or public control of essentials, but that's sort of a "seize the means of production" conversation that I don't think would be popular unless something like AI genuinely puts enough people out of work.