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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.
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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.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11784536
This article here really sums up the "underclass" situation for me
When I was in the Police, we used to deal quite a lot with some of the homeless people, or people who were living on that fringe. They were responsible for an enormous amount of crime in the city, and not just some sort of Robin Hood stealing from the rich to get some food.
Breaking into cars, sexual assaults of females walking alone home from town, violent and indiscriminate beatings, homicides etc. Most of them had at some point been blacklisted from Housing NZ homes for trashing them, not paying rent, making drugs in them etc. It's not like they hadn't been offered help, they had just thrown it back in the face of the relevant agency. Plenty of them were trespassed from WINZ offices and/or the City Mission because of abuse/violence they had directed at them.
I could imagine a universal income being given to these people would result in it just being wasted the exact same way their welfare payments are, and then hands going out again asking for more money and complaints that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
I'd rather see some sort of incentive offered for people to get sterilised once they've decided that they've had enough kids. A lump sum payment for someone getting the snip, or their tubes tied might stop a homeless woman like this winding up 12 weeks pregnant. It'll also stop a bleeding heart story from the Herald or Stuff in 27 weeks time about how she is on the streets with a newborn baby.
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It is staggering that given her living situation she has decided to keep that baby. Its effectively emotional blackmail, and we need to find a way to stop it. While I am not in favour of sterilisation I am in favor of benefits being conditional of a contraceptive implant.
I also would be fully in support of whoever handles child protection in NZ to be waiting at the birth to remove that child from her immediately. There can be no argument that she is fit to have a baby making a decision like that.
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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.
Unemployment would have to be massive for it to be a wash - targeted welfare is substantially cheaper than a UBI would be based on current figures because our unemployment-based welfare eligibility criteria are quite tight, even if Super was replaced by a UBI.
All that said, when it comes to ferals, I'd rather pay them to stay home high as a kite on weed and play on a console or watch sky, than pay to jail them (freaking expensive), or attempt to force them on employers by demanding they look for work or force them into (more) crime by refusing them welfare payments. These people are dangerous at work, and often negatively productive, and while a bullet would be cheaper, I don't believe in the death penalty either directly or by starvation/hypothermia, so that's my personal least worst solution.
Also don't agree with offering sterilisation in those circumstances, but taking the children at birth is fine.
For housing for these "charming" individuals, I recommend shipping containers with minimal furniture - if they are particularly destructive, they can have a bolted down steel frame for a bed, a blanket or two and an indestructible toilet and wash basin. If that sounds like a prison cell, that was my inspiration.
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I wonder if the herald expect us to give a shit about her? Her poor kid is never going to stand a chance with a monumental feral like that for a parent . Basically all they proved that Bob Jones was right.
When they were thrashwanking last year about homelessness they interviewed a couple that trashed their flat so no one would rent them a new one so they moved to Auckland and lived in their car with their newborn . They didn't go to Winz because they thought they might take the kid.
Universal income