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clyde

Philosophy & Economics

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Cordeos, what do you mean 'for decades'?  Didn't Russia gave it a try with Ukraine like a year ago? ;)  Or was Ukraine too unstable to count?

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Cordeos, what do you mean 'for decades'?  Didn't Russia gave it a try with Ukraine like a year ago? ;)  Or was Ukraine too unstable to count?

 

I didn't mean that countries don't support or supply opposition movements or try to push governments one way or the other. This is pretty far from the coup against Mossadegh in Iran where the US and UK were directly involved. I have no idea when the last national leader assassination was orchestrated by a foreign intelligence agency. There are rumors that the KBG was behind the assassination attempt on Pope Jean Paul II, but who knows. 

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Changing the subject a bit (but keeping the general thematic of the banking system as evil), is anyone with more economics knowledge aware of the "Positive Money" movement? It is basically a group of people trying to educate people on how money is created in the economy (spoilers: private banks do most of it*) and proposing that money creation should be returned to a democratic, transparent entity. 

 

* I had no idea that was the case, I always thought banks could only lend what they had in reserve. The following Bank of England paper on money creation is very interesting: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q1prereleasemoneycreation.pdf

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Finally, an article on the Greek debt crisis that goes more into what I think clyde had in mind when he created this thread: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/magazine/why-greeces-lenders-need-to-suffer.html

 

Note the later parts of the too-brief article, which point out that the 2008 bailout to save the bond market effectively ruined the bond market by making normally high-risk bonds low-risk by virtue of a bailout being inevitable in case of a financial catastrophe. Moreover, by bailing out the banks and the lenders who represent them while squeezing Greece dry with austerity, the Troika has created an impressive mechanism for transferring money from the populace of a foreign country to their own investor friends (if not, in the case of Schäuble, directly to himself). It's all pretty fucked, but then so's the entire world economy.

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This article is a criticism of microcredit that is oddly bitter in tone.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/microcredit-muhammad-yunus-bono-clinton-foundation-global-poverty-entrepreneurial-charity/

I can see how loans can he damaging, but I'm somewhat cynical about these suggestions that leftist revolts are what needs to occur. Maybe that's the case, I don't know. I would think that having access credit in order to buy tools would help the impoverished.

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This is a man who embraces the power of artificial scarcity.

http://www.polygon.com/2015/12/9/9878156/once-upon-a-time-in-shaolin-league-of-legends?utm_campaign=polygon&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

I've wonder if there are people who look for games in which the exploits are unlikely to ever be fixed by the developers. High population is probably a variable in the games they chose to play.

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What would it take for the US to have basic income?

 

Also is basic income proven viable? I know we've talked about it on these forums before, but I'm wondering if it's had any long-term sustained existence in the world?

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What would it take for the US to have basic income?

 

Also is basic income proven viable? I know we've talked about it on these forums before, but I'm wondering if it's had any long-term sustained existence in the world?

An actual mass movement caused by the ~80% unemployment AI and driverless cars will cause probably.

In the above case our economic system, which is heavily based on consumption would require a basic income to keep going, if no one can afford to buy things, than no one can make any money at all. 

There are some saving inherit in a basic income since it would replace all social service programs. No more food stamps, medicaid, housing credits etc, just one simple payment everyone qualifies for. So a lot of bureaucracy can be eliminated.

Canada ran a basic income experiment in the 70s. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html

Its probably viable, especially if we can tax the aristocracy more and cut the defense budget.

 

discretionary_spending_pie,_2015_enacted

 

Idealy you would have the basic income cover food, housing and healthcare. So people could survive off it and not have to worry about starving, homelessness or their health. It might actually be fantastic for the economy since people could get more schooling or start a business without having to worry about surviving.

Good article on the subject: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain 

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Interesting. Yeah in my mind I always imagine a significant chunk of it coming from our military spending.

 

How would we have to treat basic income re: immigrants (assuming we ever stop being shitty to people trying to move to America)? Might people see this "perfect" (haha) place where they don't have to worry about money and try to move in? Would that be disastrous or would it just work out okay in the end, 'cause more people means more spending?

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Interesting. Yeah in my mind I always imagine a significant chunk of it coming from our military spending.

 

How would we have to treat basic income re: immigrants (assuming we ever stop being shitty to people trying to move to America)? Might people see this "perfect" (haha) place where they don't have to worry about money and try to move in? Would that be disastrous or would it just work out okay in the end, 'cause more people means more spending?

 

If you do something like what Milton Freedman proposed, a negative income tax, you would get your basic income as a wage supplement. If you were unemployed you would file income tax with a $0 income and receive a full supplement. Lets use a $15/hour as our base. With that wage you should be making around $2,400 a month. If you make $2,000 a month you would get a negative tax of $400 added to your income. If you make $2,800 you have $400 that will be subject to whatever rate of income tax we have in this system.  If you were unemployed you would file income tax with a $0 income and receive $2,400 monthly.

 

For this system to work you would have to be registered with the government. So those who come through the immigration system or are refugees/asylum seekers would already be registered with the government and would qualify. The need to register with the government to receive basic income obviously would be an issue for those who don't use the legal immigration system. Hopefully we would legalize people who are working here, but you don't want to open the doors and say "Come to America for free money!". A better work visa program would go a long way towards fixing this.

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This is relevant because Denmark is spinning up a series of experiments on how the basic income will work. They're going to require political approval, and there's constitutional hurdles to cross, but the expectation is that for two years they're going to test out varying proposals of how a basic income would work (negative income tax, unifying social service payments, just paying everyone) across an entire community, and they'll see what happens next.

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This is relevant because Denmark is spinning up a series of experiments on how the basic income will work. They're going to require political approval, and there's constitutional hurdles to cross, but the expectation is that for two years they're going to test out varying proposals of how a basic income would work (negative income tax, unifying social service payments, just paying everyone) across an entire community, and they'll see what happens next.

One of the reasons I want to move to Europe is how far ahead it is on these issues as opposed to the US. We just keep falling further behind on social and economic issues.

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Basic income is beautiful but I'm not sure about rolling healthcare into that just because healthcare cost have wider margin and more unexpected costs associated with it than basic housing and food.

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I feel like that article largely skips over the economic impact part, which is the major objection a lot of people have to the idea. It cites a few guaranteed income studies in which hours worked didn't substantially decrease, but there's a flaw in assuming that trend would remain when moving from experiment to law. All the experiments analyzed were three-year affairs (no data on the Canadian experiment): everyone involved knew it wasn't permanent. If you tell someone "You have guaranteed income for life" they will feel more comfortable in quitting their job than if you tell them "You have guaranteed income for three years". Of course the only way to fix that problem is to make a very long-term experiment, and protect it from having its funding cut in a decade when someone is elected who dislikes the program. I know nothing about US budget law, is it even possible to set up a program such that its funding can't be cut at a later date?

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Basic income is beautiful but I'm not sure about rolling healthcare into that just because healthcare cost have wider margin and more unexpected costs associated with it than basic housing and food.

Universal healthcare sort of goes along with guaranteed wage.

 

I feel like that article largely skips over the economic impact part, which is the major objection a lot of people have to the idea. It cites a few guaranteed income studies in which hours worked didn't substantially decrease, but there's a flaw in assuming that trend would remain when moving from experiment to law. All the experiments analyzed were three-year affairs (no data on the Canadian experiment): everyone involved knew it wasn't permanent. If you tell someone "You have guaranteed income for life" they will feel more comfortable in quitting their job than if you tell them "You have guaranteed income for three years". Of course the only way to fix that problem is to make a very long-term experiment, and protect it from having its funding cut in a decade when someone is elected who dislikes the program. I know nothing about US budget law, is it even possible to set up a program such that its funding can't be cut at a later date?

Hours worked really doesn't correlate to productivity, more hours usually reduces it, see Korea for a great example: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/english/oped/opinions/3698-insider-perspective-seven-reasons-why-korea-has-worst-productivity-oecd

vs. http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/sweden-6-hour-work-day-what-u-s-can-learn/

 

A happy well fed, low stress, not overworked employee will probably do more quality work in less time.

 

The economic impact is tricky, but I do think a guaranteed income cuts down on bureaucracy costs and allows more people to purse their passions and start businesses which would benefit the bottom of the economy more. Obviously there would have to be more taxes on those that are wasting their money on multiple houses and giant yachts, but fuck the aristocracy.

 

There is a larger issue of consumer capitalism being an unsustainable economic system that generates more economic growth from car crashes than safe drivers, but that's another topic :)

The US currently is not even close to this policy or anything close, we have a party that seems hell bent on dismantling all social services so they can buy more overpriced weapons to protect us from a few brown people with old guns and poorly made bombs. European nations or Singapore are more likely to reach this point first, hence why I am trying to get out of this country ASAP.

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Just doing super simple math and man it would take a lot of money... USA has like, 325 million people? $10k per person a year is still really tight of a budget and even that would be staggering $3.25 trillion, almost 3 times the entire discretionary spending on that chart...

 

or did I fuck up this super basic math somewhere?

 

Oh and http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain link seems to be broken from my end.

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Link is working for me.

 

I think one of the key things is in this system, more money would come from the rich, because the income tax would probably be higher. Since you already have the money to live comfortably, anything over that is a pure luxury. You can then justify higher taxes beyond that basic income.

 

Convincing the money-grubbers of America to do that is, of course, the trick.

 

(I don't know the math well enough to know how much you'd need to make that tax to make it reasonable.)

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yeah it works now, nice~

 

So roughly speaking, people who don't need this kind of help have overwhelming capital... like just googling graphs I'm getting that top 20% owns roughly 93% wealth so if top 20% were taxed for roughly half of their income (I suspect that being in top 20% means that wouldn't affect anything but your ego) we can like increase the income of bottom 80% by 6.6x or 6600%???  So even assuming that bottom 80% is on minimum wage (which roughly translates into $15k annual income?), that's far more than 10k per head.  I mean I'm using some super simple math with zero regard for any other economics but I guess before I typed that 'triple current spending" I should have thought about that little more.

 

So in that sense something along the line of basic income seems completely feasible... hmm...

 

Of course the toughest part is how to actually tax the rich when the rich as the resources to fight off taxation attempt (afterall, wealth is important because it gets practical things done, like not getting taxed (fuuuuck logic and reality in this sense)).  There is this notion in my mind that wealth is collective acknowledgement of one's claim so technically at any moment, people could just bankrupt anyone but it's not the top 1% vs bottom 99%, it's more like Waltons vs some poor shmuck x 320,000,000 individually :x

 

I think it has to be done before bulk of the military is automatized.  Having bulk of the soldiers coming from poor class is actually important IMO.  If that's gone then umm yeah, I'm thinking of straight up sci fi dystopia :x

 

Apologies for being ranty and thanks to anyone who gave a thing or two~

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AFAIK in all basic income systems even if everyone gets their monthly dole, middle income and above people still pay it back through taxes. So there's a certain income at which people get the monthly check and then pay it back exactly through taxes, gaining nothing. 

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I have no idea what is going on here, but I think it's worth discussion. Is Uber able to externalize the costs of violent crime by its work-force by hiring them on as contractors?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/internal-data-offers-glimpse-at-uber-sex-assault-complaints#.xjovbaRMYm

I have a friend who works for Zendesk the company Uber tried to blame, apparently there were some awkward conversations between them and Uber afterwards. 

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