- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
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As an fella from that country right beneath Canada, I hope something like this works, would love to watch our neighbors in the north do something awesome while we fail to do it for decades and decades.
If Universal Basic Income becomes commonplace the United States will probably be the last country on earth to adapt.
nah there’s always the Congo
Even as a joke, countries ruined by colonial interference shouldn’t be counted.
The Clovis people would love to enter the chat, but they were totally massacred in a genocide.
Fair point, my choice of wording wasn’t precise. But comparing indigenous peoples would be even more complicated.
I mean if we’re lightly joking about countries, there isn’t a single one where you can’t dig into it’s history and find some day-ruining atrocity.
“Day-ruining,” seriously? Try comparing apples to apples.
begone irksome troll
I only asked you to think twice about punching down, dude. Go ahead and block me if you think that’s “trolling.”
If I see someone saying harmful things (whether they realize it or not) about misunderstood people that don’t deserve to be made fun of, I’m going to comment (unless it’s obvious bait).
I was going to say Cuba, but then I remembered the healthcare is better than America already.
As is tradition.
Your neighbors in the north have something like that already. Alaska redistributes income from oil companies to their people. IIRC it’s only ~150$ per month, but that’s pretty good nonetheless!
$150 a month would cover several bills for us. Does each individual get it or is it per household? Because if it’s per individual (presuming adults only), that’s $300, which would cover some debt too. So yeah, pretty good!
I believe it is every member. They also get a large yearly chunk depending on pricing what not at the end of the year. It works allot like how Indian casino pays work across the tribe.
Doing things per household is just weird. Like, what even counts as a household? And why should people who live together receive less than if they lived apart?
I don’t expect these things to make sense.
Downside is it’s expensive to live there. But they also have no state income tax.
I mean… I think the downside is you’re living in Alaska and the winter is like 10 months long.
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For Alaska the downside is that oil companies make less profit. That’s where the money is coming from.
( the cost of living is not influenced by the existence or absence of such a UBI scheme.)
We legalized weed, which is cool af, but we made living otherwise impossibly prohibitively expensive.
Oh just you watch out we’re one Republican presidency away from oxygen and fresh water being a limited resource.
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Yeah I would love to see them do it. I mean hopefully it works and we can use it as a reference. If it fails, well that’s their program.
Unfortunately they will bungle this shit the same way the fucked up their healthcare and it will just be a disaster.
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I lived in the north my whole life. Never came across this situation. Is there a statistic for this?
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The part of the discussion you’re missing is that our governments have been sabotaging health care for decades in an attempt to bring back the political will needed to reestablish private health care. You Americans have had a similar experience with your public education: some of your governments are pushing for “education vouchers” rather than public schooling. Who is driving both of these pushes? As usual, you just need to follow the money.
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You know the way the funding system is designed is more-or-less destined to cause this exact effect, right? Struggling schools get less money, which leads to more struggling. The inner-city schools failing is by design.
Neat, thanks for the source. I’ll look into this more.
Small nuance compared to the title
The Senate’s national finance committee will study a bill on October 17 which would create a national framework for—but not actually implement—UBI, according to a press release
They’re considering thinking about talking about it.
Hey, any progress is progress. I’m not a fan of the liberal government right now but just the fact that they are talking about this and (hopefully) implementing some sort of structure for it is a big deal imo. I think UBI is a good idea but I would imagine implementing it successfully is going to be a very difficult task.
Is it? Count the # of people in the country, appropriate the money to cover them all + some additional % for those who slip through the cracks for x amount of years, and cut checks. Done.
I think the main challenge is convincing enough people it’s a good idea. You can see some weird arguments against it in the very thread.
Well you don’t want the people who slip through the cracks to wait in line for months to get their money, so you probably need to figure out a system to handle those people, and employees to make it work. Deciding how to handle requests from the people like that, without allowing abuse of the system, and training staff takes time.
I’m sure with research you can find more practical issues that get in the way of implementing it tomorrow, which is before getting to the political issues.
But they need to discuss if those people really deserve to live.
And its looking like conservicrooks are gong to get back in soon which means all talk of this plan will die the second that happens
If Canadians are dumb enough to vote in conservicrooks after watching what happened to the USA, I wish them luck.
Every country is either dumb enough to do that or just barely smart enough not to.
Im not much of a fan of liberals cuz they are corporate centrists basically, I tend to vote NDP as they align the closest to my ideology. What I do like is coalition governments that join together to opposite consevacrook policies
The Senate is actually doing something interesting for once, but the Senate doesn’t usually put forward legislation, and they’re completely unable to put forward spending bills. And on top of that, they’re not The Government.
And on top of that, they’re not The Government.
That phrasing confused me for the longest time. In the US, the senate is part of The Government. It seems like most countries use “government” to mean something like what we Americans call “the administration”.
Yes, that’s more or less right. Different systems will slice it different tlt, but for the most part there’s “government”, which includes all the mechanisms of state, and then there’s The Government, which is the cabinet.
Many systems have independent heads of state and heads of government. In these cases, you have a president with executive powers somewhat similar in concept, but generally less broad in scope, to the US president, and a prime minister or chancellor who is elected by Parliament or the legislative assembly to form an independent cabinet.
It would be like if your executive secretaries were selected by the majority party leader.
In British Commonwealth countries, things are slightly different, because our head of state is the British monarch, and the monarchy has operated under a policy of non-interference for, like, almost a century now. So, they just rubberstamp whatever the head of government presents to them.
Westminster parliaments also operate under a principle of parliamentary supremacy. There’s none of this “equal powers” stuff. The head of state asks parliament for things, but for the most part thr head of state exists to enact the will of Parliament.
Thanks for explaining!
Just Canadian government things.
Don’t we already have that framework with EI, AISH, and the more recent CERB payments?
If everyone gets it we can streamline a ton of stuff by removing all the positions that we current use to scrutinize whether or not people deserve EI, AISH, CERB, whatever.
No bi-weekly reporting would also decrease the demand on the servers. Once you’re signed up, you get it and you only need to log in to change your bank info.
Yep that’s the gist of it. That’s where it becomes cheaper than what we currently do.
Canada doesn’t even give people on disability enough to afford rent, let alone groceries, power bills, car insurance, etc.
Maybe start there. Help the disabled survive.
And God forbid you’re under 65 and disabled. Big load of “fuck you” from the government.
This is actually a big reason why there are so many opponents of the MAID law.
Too many people with disabilities are taking the euthanasia option simply because, they don’t have any way to live.
Which is simply despicable euthanasia has to be chosen, a sign of a broken system all the way around.
UBI is supposed to replace other need-based social programs such as disability, welfare programs, government housing, etc. The entire point is that the money from those programs, which collectively have quite a lot of waste, goes into UBI so everyone can participate in society on a more fair level.
Also read the reply to that comment for an example of the waste: https://lemmy.world/comment/4589897
There’s basically an entire industry dedicated to denying and minimizing payouts. With UBI, that entire industry becomes obsolete.
If UBI is done properly, it replaces those other social programs. The payouts are bigger and for more people, and the program administration costs are smaller.
My friend is on disability and bring home the equivalent of $20 dollars an hour in a province with a minimum of $15. From my understanding he is on one of the lowest tiers of the benefit. There are a huge variety of levels of disability benefits depending on the type of disability.
My aunt is on disability from the military and brings home over 6000 a month. We definitely need to cut the military budget.
LPC is at least forcing grocery stores to have fair pricing.
There’s a difference between disability paid as income assistance from government services, and disability from private insurance.
Even at the maximum disability allowance, you get about $15.50 a DAY.
In Ontario, disability gets you $1200 per month if you are lucky and max out everything. Most people get $800-900.
For one person on disability, you get $497 for rent. You wont even find a ROOM for $497.
Tell me where you can even rent and pay utilities for less, let alone groceries, clothes, etc.
If you’re a fellow Canuck, here’s a petition to get this realised. It’s not much, but it’s something.
I’m not sure I want this to happen. I’ll read the bill, but I’m not convinced they’ll do it right. For example, UBI is supposed to replace other need-based social programs such as disability, welfare programs, government housing, etc. The entire point is that the money from those programs, which collectively have quite a lot of waste, goes into UBI so everyone can participate in society on a more fair level.
For example, I have a neighbour who is on some kind of government assistance. He gets very little money, and his rent for an entire house is $105/mo. With UBI, he’d get a full basic income, but his housing would no longer be subsidized, removing the need for a public housing corporation known for being awful and wasting money.
Yes.
This is the thing people don’t understand about a ubi.
I had a coworker who’s wife was a… Case manager? For welfare. Her whole job was determining whether or not people were lying/exaggerating about various elements of their claim.
First of all, government union paper pushers make decent money. There was an entire office full of people that covered cases in their region only.
Second, it’s a soul sucking job. Her primary assumption was that everyone was cheating and lying and she needed to minimize everyone’s payout.
UBI solves both of those things and by plugging it directly into the tax system people can be free to try to earn a better living, which studies have shown most people want when they are given a UBI.
Increased productivity, increased employment, increased entrepreneurship, increased mental health outcomes, there is literally no downside except for needing to tax the rich.
literally no downside except for needing to tax the rich
So literally no downside at all then?
Can’t eat them and tax them at the same time 😞
There are downsides.
Some people require more income to stay alive than others. Think of people with decreased mental or physical capabilities.
Those would loose a big chunk, which need to be subsidised somehow.
But the upsides outweigh the downsides.
Not necessarily, that depends on how it shakes down.
It’s a political downside, because anything involving taxes will turn some people against it.
The housing crisis needs to be addressed separately. There is 7 times the amount of housing needed to house the homeless
There shouldn’t be homeless in Canada at all regardless the income. This Airbnb bullshit breaking cities needs to stop.
Everyone tunnel visions on airbnb, when in reality the institutional single family rental industry (SFR) is the true evil.
Many people also say it’s not x but y; however, both are true. It is an equation of multiple variables, some of which will have a greater effect on the outcome, some not so much.
Both issues need fixing. The point isn’t to win the shit Olympics.
It’s not about winning, it’s about ensuring a spotlight is on the issue that is growing at an exponential rate and threatens private home ownership for majority of the population.
There is no spotlight when there’s enough humans to make it ambient. Literally no one is setting a quota on empathy here but you. There is no good excuse to be kicking the legs out from underneath others. You’re making problem solving harder than it should be.
UBI is supposed to replace other need-based social programs such as disability, welfare programs, government housing, etc.
Not necessarily, or, better put, some programs should be replaced, others not, and the general dividing line is “do people need approximately the same amount of money for this, or not”. Blind people, for example, are always going to pay more for a basic computer setup with Braille readers and whatnot than sighted people, so such programmes shouldn’t be axed. Housing and transportation costs might differ between cities, thus the amount you get paid out in UBI for it should probably differ by residence – the difference doesn’t need to fill the whole e.g. rural/city divide, but it should take the edge off. When it comes to e.g. food though prices are probably approximately the same pretty much everywhere (at least in places with supermarkets), and everyone’s eating approximately the same amount, so everyone should get the same.
No, an UBI isn’t going to slash administrative effort to zero, ever. But it doesn’t have to. If you ask me all the people doing penny-pinching right now should be retained in the fist place, it doesn’t harm to have an excess of social workers, and those that don’t fancy that kind of work can move to the tax office and go after billionaires instead.
He gets very little money, and his rent for an entire house is $105/mo. With UBI, he’d get a full basic income, but his housing would no longer be subsidized, removing the need for a public housing corporation known for being awful and wasting money.
It sounds like there’s some good and some bad that would come from that in his particular case. I don’t live in Canada and haven’t read the bill, but is the income he’d receive close to enough to afford housing? If not his current housing, then at least not slums or whatever?
The housing in Canada is a joke right now. They have homeless but there’s 7 times the amount of housing that could house them. Instead there’s a bunch of empty buildings owned by people who don’t even live in Canada hoarding housing. This should be addressed separately from this matter. Income doesn’t even matter at this point. They’ve pushed people into homelessness even people who have more than one job can’t even afford housing right now.
Not at all. Most people in the program still struggle, and still become homeless if they lose their spot to some inane policy. E.g. if you’re on disability, it’s voided the moment they find out you’re living with a spouse. In the view of the administration, your spouse can now pay for everything. It is not their only source of income though, many of the people rely on support from various NPO’s just so they can live, that too is not enough. This system often fails to help, as evidenced by the various encampments in Canada’s cities, particularly in the warmer areas on the west coast.
It doesn’t ask you any ID, even non-Canadians could sign this petition lmao.
There isn’t a person on the planet who will input their personal ID to sign an online petition. The number of non-Canadians who care enough to tilt the petition is probably relatively low. It’d be a huge barrier to participation.
I’m not Canadian and I did it, because wtf not. It doesn’t ask for much, the hardest thing was the postal code.
Honestly the more countries there are with UBI, the better. If done right, more countries will follow suit. Good luck fellas 👍🏻
well, ukraine uses id verification (using digital signature or the Diia app) for it’s petitions website and it just works ™
well it only asks for signature (jks keystore) which reduces chance of something going wrong to near zero.Sending personal state issued ID and all its info, including your photo =/= writing a signature digitally. Especially not in the age of accessible AI/“Big Data.” God imagine if they coupled that with your telemetry.
Besides, almost any company with the scale and resources to properly store and secure that data for potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of people is not a company I would trust with all that information. Because let me tell you, feel good petitions are not what drives their revenue lol. And if they’re smaller then a data breach is all but inevitable (large company is also a juicy target).
Look at porn, which far more people want to access online then petitions. With each state requiring ID verification it the US, VPN searches on google rise by orders of magnitude in the respective states.
Things are a bit different if it’s a government asking you to authenticate yourself. You’re proving you engaged in that particular transaction (which is presumably the point), but otherwise you’re not revealing any information they don’t already have about you.
If you have a link to a more official one, please post it, thanks.
I never sign petitions like this unless it is directly submitted to the government through it’s own petition system. Everything else is just a way to hoover up information on the pretext of helping.
Is that a real petition that the government will actually look at or a meme one like all the others?
Depends on how many people sign it, I would imagine.
How will I know now if Im better than someone else if they aren’t homeless or begging? /s
I think the real problem will be, “how do we stop landlords from jacking up rent simply because everyone has some extra money now?”
The same way we do with minimum wage: competition among landlords.
Along with companies raising prices of items. As a non Canadian, I’ll be curious to watch this play out.
Removed by mod
No company operating in a capitalist system has ever needed an excuse to raise prices. That’s not how it works at all.
Imagine getting a raise because of the quality of your work and not because if you don’t you can’t afford to live
I wonder how UBI would affect homelessness and addiction. I imagine the mental health and housing crises would continue, but differently?
In all of the studies of UBI homelessness decreased. I don’t know about addiction, but drug abuse is generally reduced with increased economic stability since a lot of people use to escape their stressful living situatuon.
Capitalism will find a way to fuck it up
And if not capitalism, then defeatism will surely do it.
In practice during covid, it made it worse. People came to BC, Canada explicitly because it had the best covid benefits, and on TV said that they were collecting the benefits for the purpose of doing drugs with zero intent on helping society.
There will always be some abuse of services. It just turns out to be negligible most of the time. The benefits will far outweigh the losses. Also - people shop for services all the time. If they want to move to a province that has better benefits, that would be normal and smart. If the program ends up being mostly federal, this won’t be as much of an issue as things will be more standardized, though.
CERB (the federal Covid benefits) was federal so B.C. was the same as Alberta which was the same as all the other provinces and territories.
So you are full of shit.
BC Recovery Benefit.
You were saying?
The BC Recovery Benefit provided a one-time, tax-free payment of up to $1,000 for eligible families and single parents and up to $500 for eligible individuals. It was calculated based on net income from your 2019 tax return. Applications were closed effective July 1, 2021.
Generally, the benefit was available to people:
- Who were residents of B.C. on December 18, 2020
- Are at least 19 years of age on December 18, 2020, or meet specific eligibility criteria
- Have filed a 2019 Canadian personal tax return, or meet specific eligibility criteria
- Have a valid social insurance number (SIN), individual tax number or temporary tax number
So you’re saying people moved to BC between December 8th when it was announced and the cut off on December 18th for $500?
This absolutely is not true, and even if somehow there was a clip of someone saying that, the person saying it was an idiot and/or you misunderstood them, because CERB was federal and BC didn’t offer a single cent more than any other province.
BC (specifically the lower mainland aka the area around Vancouver) has always had more homeless and transient people, because it’s the only province where the winter won’t flat out kill you if you are outdoors.
The documentary of Oppenheimer Park’s homeless “camp” has multiple people saying it.
One was a former welder from Ontario.
O…k… And? Anyone can make a documentary and anyone can say stuff. I’m very confused as to how this is proof.
Well whoever they were, they had no fucking clue what they were talking about, BECAUSE CERB WAS A FEDERAL PROGRAM AND PAID THE SAME AMOUNT TO EVERY PROVINCE.
Who cares what anyone said, the entire foundation of your argument is false, this is meaningless to the conversation and I specifically said either they are an idiot or you misunderstood.
Also I notice how you didn’t actually link anything, and expect me to go watch an entire documentary (without naming it) to see your “proof”.
By that logic, provinces should compete to provide the worst social services so people will move away and they can reduce their spending.
Congratulations - you just reinvented red-state USA
Human beings will always find a way to show they are better than everyone else.
Please do this, and do it right, Canada, so your neighbors to the South can use you as an example in trying to push for the same.
This won’t work in the US because we NEED some sort of national health care system first.
We’ll be shoveling money into medical debt even with UBI.
While I agree with you overall, it’s not like it would be a bad thing if a whole bunch of folks who currently choose between healthcare and eating could start choosing both.
The health care system in Canada isn’t that great right now. There is a huge shortage of doctors. You have to get prescriptions diagnosed and filled from the pharmacist and they are moving people into urgent care (you don’t see a doctor you see a nurse) as there is no doctors. the best you can hope for is you’re not in a situation where where you’re looked at by spiteful nursing staff who determine if you’re allowed to live. Or that you’re not in a hole between antibiotics where you’re hoping you can live long enough that someone will see you before the sepsis takes you.
Every single one of those things is also true in the US. After factoring cost, Canada still wins.
And what’s the end game point here? You win the shit Olympics? Then have at it. Meanwhile it still needs fixing regardless how you feel about it.
No… I’m pretty sure the point was that Canada is still doing something right.
That’s your perspective. The underpriveged who are getting assisted suicide because the system left them behind would disagree if they were still alive.
Lol I wish. I genuinely do. But as long as we stay stubbornly opposed to basic shit that the rest of the world is doing like providing everyone with healthcare and maternity leave and stuff, there’s no way.
The US isn’t exactly known for imitating the best aspects of other countries…
We’re much better at creating giant problems, and spending decades pointing fingers over whose fault they are.
The hexbears would be very upset about this if they could read.
Why?
Because liberals can’t beat Leninists to sustainable socialism
I have no idea what you mean by that, but okay.
In plain English, people who support oppressive dictatorships do so a lot of times because they think that distributing economic output in a way that eliminates poverty is impossible in a democracy governed by the rule of law.
If Canada achieves the elimination of poverty without becoming autocratic, the dictatorical evils of the CCP or the USSR are shown to be unnecessary.
The Chinese Party is not even communist. It’s all a façade. The wealth inequality in China is goddamn awful. It’s basically capitalism on steroids but red. Red capitalism.
Interesting.
Thank you for clearing that up.
Holy shoehorn, Batman.
Apparently any dumb post trying to dunk on hexbear will amass upvotes, no matter how nonsensical and sloppy.
This needs to happen and make it so some Conservative government can’t come in and undo it willy nilly. These current Conservative fucks want to attack the CPP and aren’t having much luck federally so they’re using Alberta to do it. Fuck Conservatives, never vote for them. We need electoral reform ASAP as well so we can stop having our Conservatives get radicalized like the shit political system south of us.
Good job making this about labels and blame!
I keep seeing small scale UBI experiments ‘proving’ that recipients thrive more. But as I see it that’s not the part that needs proving.
what’s the part that needs proving?
That it can scale up to an entire society. That it can be sustained indefinitely, or can be made self-sustaining.
What proof would be satisfactory though?
All monetary policy is experimental to some extent… but you don’t need to start with the big money.
Here in Australia average full time salary is $80k. I don’t really know but maybe an appropriate UBI in a utopia might be half of that, or lets just say $3k a month. You wouldn’t just start transferring $3k to everyone’s bank account every month and see how it goes.
You’d start with a small refundable negative tax. We already have these in our tax system they’re called rebates or offsets. You don’t start with $3k a month, start with maybe $2k a year. So everyone pays $2k less tax every year, and people that pay less than that in a full year would get the balance refunded to them.
With something like this it would be fairly easy to measure whether or not it’s providing the purported benefits.
Something other than a tiny pilot program that ‘proves’ people do better when they have more money, for starters. That’s all we ever see, but if that’s the best it can do then UBI is a pipe dream and we should focus our efforts elsewhere.
With something like this it would be fairly easy to measure whether or not it’s providing the purported benefits.
Again, that’s not the part that needs proving in my mind.
I think what needs proving is that society at scale can work without this. So far as I can tell, it can’t. At the same time, I’d rather not give anyone the “my ‘whatever’ supports you so get in line behind me” bullshit they like to say.
The state of Alaska has been doing this for some time with the Alaska Permanent fund. Just under a million people in Alaska. Seems rather significant to me.
That money comes exclusively from oil and gas export revenue, though. It’s not a model that most other states can follow.
Are we going to tax the wealthy to pay for it?
Because otherwise this is basically corporate welfare at best, and inflationary at worst.
How would this be corporate welfare? It’s been shown that a UBI is less expensive than what is wasted on the overhead of need-based welfare systems, and eliminates the poverty trap where making more money (such as from overtime or a small raise) disqualifies your household from a higher value of welfare benefits that you would otherwise qualify for.
Because it allows companies extracting extreme profit from labour, paying their upper management exorbitantly and their labourers starvation wages to just keep doing that.
Edit:
There seems to be a significant misunderstanding of my post.
The question posed was “How could one understand this to be corporate welfare”, in conjunction with the previous qualifier of “If the rich aren’t subsidizing the program”
I’m not against UBI.
I AM against record profits. Profits are the extraction of surplus value from labour. Profits are unpaid wages.
The fact that we have an environment where a working person can not meet their basic needs while their employers take in record profits is a massive problem.
If the wealth transfer happens by way of increased wages, fine. If it happens by way of government transfers via UBI paid for by those same corporations, fine.
The premise to which I was responding was one where the wealthy were NOT the ones footing the bill.
Not every step that makes it slightly easier to exist as a poor person that doesn’t solve capitalism is corporate welfare. Celebrate the steps in the right direction or you’ll make progress impossible.
Never say “It’s not good enough” when you could say “that’s good, what next?”
Never say “It’s not good enough” when you could say “that’s good, what next?”
Man, what a beautifully positive outlook
Employees who have UBI to fall back on aren’t forced to accept that starvation wage. UBI gives everyone a small amount of fuck-you money. Employers paying starvation wages would find themselves with a lack of qualified employees because people can afford to quit and look for a better job.
If you believe that you must believe all programs to help poor people are corporate welfare. And you’re missing three essential other half of the equation that makes UBI possible: increasing taxes in the rich. If a direct transfer of wealth from the upper class to the lower class is corporate welfare, then what isn’t corporate welfare?
pvsrh@lemmy.ca wrote:
Are we going to tax the wealthy to pay for it? Because otherwise [corporate welfare]
Wilzax@Lemmy.world asked:
How would that be corporate welfare…
The line of questioning was specifically about if the programisn’t funded by the wealthy.
If UBI is done right, no one will need to work to survive, so they can just quit that exploitative job.
Correct. In fact, this applies wage pressure upward because employees no longer feel the necessity to stick with a shit-paying job.
So I’m curious, and this is a legitimate concern of mine, but what happens when corporations (and the local mom and pop) raise prices, because you can now afford to pay them more? Should there be a limit enforced by the government to have a freeze on the price of goods? Wouldn’t it be equally effective to skip the UBI and just do the freeze?
In line with the freeze on the price of goods, wouldn’t it be beneficial for the government to demand lower medical costs as well, since the exact same medical and pharmacy companies are selling their stuff in other countries for cheaper than in the US?
if the capitalist class isn’t up in arms about all this then there’s a very good, very profitable, reason.
They probably just don’t take it seriously. And they’re probably right.
This is just another way to keep up the mythical “infinite” growth. Just a little bump as things are starting to stagnate. More money to people = more business = growth.
I think this is the reason why capitalism will keep working properly. Can’t keep growing if you can’t find more people who can pay for your goods or services.
Or maybe I’m just too naive.
How on earth is this corporate welfare?
The only possible way I can see someone interpreting this as corporate welfare is if you’re already so corpo pilled that you think a corporation should be required to pay for an employee’s social services instead of thinking that a human’s basic needs shouldn’t be tied to their employment.
I’ll try to explain my concern with UBI, because I’m genuinely curious:
- It seems like it lets employers off the hook for paying a living wage; in this sense, it’s like food stamps in the US: we’re socializing the costs of underpaying people
- If it isn’t paid for by increasing taxes on the top earners, this would be even more the case, since everyone but the wealthy is pooling the cost?
- I’m also confused as to how it isn’t inflationary: without either price controls on necessary goods and/or public options for housing, wouldn’t this result in companies raising the floor on prices and eating up the benefits of UBI?
- And this is the part that worries me, as someone who knows people on ODSP (Ontario, Canada’s disability-payments system): what’s to stop some jackass right-wing politician from freezing, means-testing or cutting UBI when they want to “balance the budget”?
I like the idea of UBI in principle, but my concern is that it–especially without curbing runaway inequality on the top-end and a pivot away from neoliberal “the market does everything” policies–it doesn’t really solve much at best, and at worst it’s yet another way to transfer money to the wealthy and absolve government of actually providing services.
It seems like it lets employers off the hook for paying a living wage; in this sense, it’s like food stamps in the US: we’re socializing the costs of underpaying people
What about people who do not have employers? What about people who have disabilities that prevent them from working or building up an employment history that would let them work? What about the elderly? What about children?
Not everyone in society is an employee.
Making employers pay for basic human needs, like Healthcare in the US, means that if you lose your job and get sick you what, can just go die? In this situation it’s not employers underpaying employees, it’s the government acting as a buffer in the system that disconnects basic human needs from your employment status.
If it isn’t paid for by increasing taxes on the top earners, this would be even more the case, since everyone but the wealthy is pooling the cost?
Everyone but the wealthy is already pooling the cost of mass homeless and addiction crises, and people not having the social support and safety nets that they need to be able to meaningfully improve their lives.
I’m also confused as to how it isn’t inflationary: without either price controls on necessary goods and/or public options for housing, wouldn’t this result in companies raising the floor on prices and eating up the benefits of UBI?
Giving consumers money is not inflationary. Full stop.
Companies raising prices and price gouging is inflationary, and that does not happen in the face of consumers having more money, that happens in the face of inelastic demand or markets that are broken in other ways. A truly competitive market will still keep prices low even if consumers are wealthier since they are competing and undercutting the firm next to them to get your business.
Broken non competitive markets that are dominated by massive corporations will price gouge and do their best to suck up excess consumer profits, but that has nothing to do with UBI and by that logic why give consumers money at all or ever try and raise their standard of living? Two things need to happen, we need to empower regulators and competition laws to prevent corporate consolidation that causes inflation and sucks up excess money in the system, and we need to provide people with enough money to achieve a basic standard of living. Both need to happen and both cannot and will not happen simultaneously with one stroke of a pen so you may as well start working on one of them if not both.
Housing is slightly trickier and requires different solutions, since you don’t want to encourage limitless growth into nature (hence greenbelts), which constrains supply of inherently in demand resource (and might suggest that maybe capitalism, a system based on limitless growth, isn’t the best system of resource allocation when it comes to housing) but again, this is already an issue with corporations and landlords increasingly profiting off of consumers in the current market, giving consumers more money doesn’t change that.
And this is the part that worries me, as someone who knows people on ODSP (Ontario, Canada’s disability-payments system): what’s to stop some jackass right-wing politician from freezing, means-testing or cutting UBI when they want to “balance the budget”?
That’s a problem sure, but that’s a problem right now with all other social programs. ODSP has effectively been frozen since Doug Ford got into power / has slid backwards since those payments are not tied to inflation or cost of living.
Probably not.
It would be the solution, though. Redistribute excess to those who have less because there is no egregious excess without egregious poverty.
If they’re not planning on taxing the wealthy, where is the money supposed to come from?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFhKVCaadzE
Governments don’t raise taxes to pay for things.
I’ll watch that when I’ve been awake more than five minutes, but the question that immediately comes to mind is why do governments collect taxes at all? Sure, they could just print money to pay for everything, but I can see some problems with that approach.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kFhKVCaadzE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Removed by mod
I’m very curious to see how they roll this out. I’m a big advocate for UBI, so this is super uplifting news. I really think this will benefit a lot of people!
Well this is just the very first little baby step and would outline how we’d approach UBI. It isn’t necessarily going to lead to a usable widespread solution anytime soon… but hey, positive motion!
Positive motion indeed. Just having the government acknowledge UBI as a potential positive thing is good imo. We still don’t even have universal dental care so realistically UBI is a long way off, but I like that it’s being talked about.
And as with all things that help average people, like the proposed universal dental, it will be killed the instant the conservacrooks get back in
Oh absolutely, I’m just super jazzed that this is a serious conversation that we are having, and that there is real movement on it (however small)
There’s the thing though - you know how drug trials get killed because they’re having too many bad effects? Experimental UBI projects have literally gotten killed off because they were so wildly effective across the board that certain groups lobbied to stop them
Once a “white”, “wealthy”, Western country (that can’t have an “accidental regime change”) actually tries out the idea at scale, the winds are likely to change pretty quick
I know this is just first small step but still excited to see it happening. Every wildfire needs a first spark, let’s just hope it spreads,
Every wildfire needs a first spark, let’s just hope it spreads
Still kinda too soon, didn’t have a different analogy?
Damn, sorry. It was the first thing that poped up in my head. We don’t really have wildfires here so didn’t really realize it might be sensitive phrase.
I was being more sarcastic than anything. I was just laughing to myself that wildfires was the analogy you chose.
I didn’t have any directly close to me, but boy did those smoky days mess up my allergies for months. Had one of the worst sinus infections since I had surgery years ago.
Maybe they will be able to afford it with their economy. In other parts of the world where the situation isn’t that bright, similar measures are being canceled due to lack of financial sustainability. And this is not entirely bad for the economy either. Each country is choosing and only time will tell who is making a sensible choice.
UBI should have the best impact invocations with instability caused by wealth inequality and lack of job security. It is likely that includes the places where they are canceling it due to lack of financial sustainability that would most likely be more sustainable with economic stability for all.
You underestimate the need the liberals have to show they’re Doing Something^TM Since the only thing they really know how to do is sign checks, they’re going to do that.
Personally, I’m not looking forward to the day I get a check I didn’t ask for and then a year and a half later they ask for it all back.
You should read about it.
I know you neeeeeeeeed to hate the non-conservative in power doing nothing for a 1% you may one day be, but get some details on it. So at least so you can rebut it point by point, and remember that you probably make way too much to get a cheque.
It’s not “Universal” if people are disqualified for earning too much or whatever. (The logic being that the administrative and enforcement overhead isn’t worth means testing, just accept that you’re getting more taxes from the rich to make up for it)
I’ve read plenty. I’m not talking about the good or bad of UBI, I’m talking about the certainty of the liberals fucking it up.
Oh boy I love labels, blame, and bitterness with no clear purpose!
I am on ssi, which is as close as America has to a program like this, and I honestly don’t understand how people survive without the guarantee that there’s going to be money in the bank next month. I mean even if you have a job, job security is getting rare these days with all the jobs that get created being those with high turnover rates.
Walmart and Amazon are going to have to start taking people off of their hire Blacklist because they basically gone through the entire Workforce at this point.
Or at the very least drop the no felons policy, there are more legal crackdowns on those kinds of things anyway, and pretty much every human’s rights advocate worth their salt is eager to point out how punishing ex-convicts by denying the access to food, medicine, and a steady paycheck, is only going to encourage them to become better criminals, when the option ultimately boils down to rob a gas station or don’t eat.
Okay I am literally a published author, and that being a single sentence hurt me to write.
If you didn’t mention the lack of periods I wouldn’t have noticed.
Let’s go! To the future!
