Comment by dgfitz a day ago
You're also not listening. It won't work. There is no reality where it works. We all know this and pretend otherwise.
Everyone on this forum with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in the bank will just stop working. Who pays for the UBI?
It just will not work, there is no path forward where it can.
The main effect of UBI getting people to not work is that it raises the bar for working from “I don’t want to live outdoors and starve” to “you are paying me more than my time is worth”.
People that use ubi to quit their jobs mostly end up investing their time in things like additional education, higher paying (per hour) part time positions or entrepreneurship.
>"Everyone on this forum with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in the bank will just stop working."
Why would UBI stop the category from working? From my personal perspective - I am an independent, make good money, have savings and work on my own terms and schedule. I just can't imagine stopping doing what I do and loose the income and freedom it gives me for some meager $1000 or so a month.
> There is no reality where it works.
except for all the trials already done that show that it _does_ work
"Trials" by true believers who don't understand their own proposal?
We don't need trials to know if UBI can work or not. Basic economic literacy is all you need. It's like saying there's a bunch of trials that show 2+2=5. No review of the trials is required, all the statement means is the trials were incorrectly designed/run.
The concept of UBI boils down to "something for nothing", which is incoherent, practically a violation of the laws of physics. Money is not wealth. You cannot simply pass a law that magics wealth into existence. The only way to give everyone a minimum standard of wealth is via the already heavily used strategy of taking wealth away from other people who are creating it, and then hoping it doesn't bum them out so much they stop working.
We're not creating something out of nothing unless you ignore improvements in productivity and automation over the past few centuries, as well as the ones that are coming.
As time goes on, we need fewer and fewer people to do the work required for a population of given size to survive. That is an indisputable fact - how does that factor into your mental model?
Productivity levels don't matter! UBI isn't just a more generous welfare scheme, with conditions on who gets it and where the rich lose wealth because it's being transferred to the poor. UBI says everyone can receive wealth unconditionally. In other words, that it would be possible for 100% of the population to stop working and still receive a spendable income that buys some meaningful standard of living.
UBI taken literally is a demand for an economic perpetual motion machine: it's not merely hard, it's an impossibility.
That's why if you apply even a little bit of pressure to UBI arguments they collapse and a mass retreat to the bailey begins, e.g.
• In reality most people would work even if they didn't have to. Doesn't matter: the claim is still wrong, and hoping people don't call your bluff is no strategy.
• People in high tax brackets will pay more into the scheme than they take out. Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income (wealth has to come in to be an income).
• The near future will be a hard sci-fi scenario in which self-repairing robots and AI do every imaginable job both now and into the future. In other words: UBI is a utopian fantasy from a children's book, not something governments should be wasting time and money trying to implement. Arguably, people who propose UBI should be seen as very dangerous, given the long history of utopians who became tyrants when their dreams hit the rocks of reality.
There are no real-world scenarios in which UBI makes sense as a concept, sorry. It's just /r/antiwork rebranded.
That's the core misunderstanding found in every discussion of UBI. Welfare doesn't create something out of nothing, it redistributes wealth by taking it from those who created it.
UBI is fundamentally different to welfare at a conceptual level. It posits that everyone receives money unconditionally. This is technically possible if you don't care what that money buys - just inflate the currency - but that's merely an accounting trick and doesn't achieve anything by itself (it makes things worse). If you replace the word money with wealth, which is what people mean, it isn't possible at all. It's the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
The lower overhead argument also doesn't work. You can't eliminate most of the overhead of welfare distribution by using UBI. Any UBI scheme would still need at minimum:
1. A strong ID verification scheme to verify that each person only receives UBI once.
2. Bureaucratic systems for ensuring people's births and deaths are always found and tracked correctly, and cannot be forged.
3. Management of name/address changes, immigration, emigration etc to ensure the above.
And so on. Look at the stuff DOGE has been doing to the existing US social security system and notice that none of the problems identified are at the level of means testing going wrong. They're all the absolute basics, like "do dead people keep receiving money". UBI doesn't fix that. You would still have a massive bureaucracy.
I don't think there has been a trial that shows what happens if you do it, permanently, for everyone, and raise taxes enough to pay for it.
I don't agree with dgfitz's dogmatic "it will not work". But I don't agree with your claim, either. There has never been a city- or state-wide trial, let alone a national one, that increased taxes to pay for it. So under actual conditions, no, we don't have evidence that it works.
Where is even the theoretical argument that raising taxes in a progressive manner to pay for it will adversely effect the way it works?
I agree there have not been any permanent trials (wouldn't be a trial, then). However, we were discussing whether "it works" or not, in terms of the impact on society (i.e., "nobody will work anymore!", etc.), not how it would be paid for, which is an important but separate question.
Raising taxes is only one mechanism. There's also reduced spending (the defense budget is now approaching $1T).
Its seems there are two opposite arguments taking place: 1) AI will eventually displace a very large number of jobs and there are no ideas emerging as to what new industries will appear to provide jobs for the displaced (and that is because the new industry would have to be something that AI is incapable of doing cost-effectively, and we only need so many barbers), and 2) people who are capable of working but do not work should not be receiving compensation from the government.
I honestly don't know if UBI is the solution (I prefer means-tested BI rather than UBI but I concede that means-tested is problematic). But there had better be a solution, because 1) above is inevitable (probably not in the next 5 years, but in the next 25 years, certainly).
That's a different claim than the one you made in reply to hedora. There, you claimed post-Covid inflation as evidence, despite the fact that it didn't disprove hedora's position at all. Here, you claim (without any proof) that everyone will stop working. Even people with millions in the bank, who are working now, will stop working... because they get an extra $1000 a month?
You could be right, but I'd like more than a bald statement that "it is so" before I believe you...
If you have millions of dollars in the bank, you can invest frugally and get more than UBI off of interest/dividends today. If you're not happy with just that and still working, you won't be happy with just UBI either.