Except UBI doesn’t work. It’s still based around the exploitation of foreign countries and the very basis of it is still built upon the existence of income inequality
First don’t rely on morals to make your argument. It, unfortunately, does not change capitalist minds.
Second, frame your argument in capitalist rhetoric. For example you can say, “UBI is important to stimulate the economy by enabling Low-Income-Americans to spend more on essentials.”
Seriously, not joking, this is how you change people’s minds.
I am a libertarian. One thing I think people of all political stripes need to do is to start judging policy proposals by their outcomes and stop judging policy proposals based on their intentions. So you want minimum wage because a higher minimum wage will lower poverty? But is raising minimum wage the right way to achieve that goal?
Here are ten studies that provide some evidence that raising minimum wage does a poor job of lowering poverty:
See the thing with every policy is that it creates unintended consequences. If you tax gas, gas becomes more expensive and the price of food goes up, if you add zoning regulations it makes it harder to build and house prices go up, if you raise wages through legislation (even though we all want to make high wages) that raises the costs to businesses and they have to raise prices or reduce labour at the margin. This has the effect of helping specifically minimum wage workers but for people without a job making it harder to find one. In the long term prices will go up to make minimum wage feel like less than it used to, necessitating the need for constant minimum wage increases. Do you really want to be fighting the same fight all the time over minimum wage only to have it raised when it’s far too late and most people are already making more than the minimum wage? What a waste of political will.
IMO UBI is a great option, Milton Friedman was famously very pro-UBI, but also need to be sensible about what regulations and laws we are passing and use a science and evidence-based approach, not one that sounds good when you first hear it.
Why should the majority of people settle for the leftover scraps of the capitalist class? I do see that it is possible for UBI to exist within a system where the means of production is under public ownership and democratic control, which I believe is necessary for social justice. However, if UBI is ever implemented in a fundamentally capitalist society, it only means that the wealth disparity has grown so large that the capitalists, in the act of preserving their heads on their necks, allow for a crappy standard of living for the rest. Although I could see myself welcoming UBI for a multitude of reasons, I am also scared that it would entail some form of permanent class disparity with the majority of people forever impoverished.
That’s why the developed world is taking about universal basic income and not minimum wage. Guess the US will get there at some point too. If they stop falling back into the dark ages at some point.
True deregulation would result in a form of psuedoregulation eventually.
Companies would abuse people and behave unethically. Workers would get angry. Eventually workers would organize and employers would have to follow worker demands to be able to continue operations.
Scrip is kinda low key a thing again. My SO works for wawa and there is definitely some scrip vibe. They have a company store, a points reward system, they will put you through school if you take classes that benefit the Corp, and the only way to move up is to basically bootlick management at weird company festivals.
It all has this very dystopian vibe of “everything within the corporation eco system” and my SO is a very principled women who is shy and kind and she refuses to take a step to elevate herself within the Corp, but getting a union going is pretty hard where we’re at, everyone is very much of the boot tasting, welfare queen bad variety.
Please provide them then and make sure they are studying UNIVERSAL basic income and not targeted basic income. If they didn’t give it to everyone and instead selected applicants it isn’t studying UBI.
This isn’t a list of studies it is a wikipedia link and if you are going to insult people’s intelligence you should probably understand the difference between a link and a study.
Nobody making under 250k would be paying into it and unrealized gains would be included in figuring all personal income. The ultra rich are paid mostly in services like corporate jets, meals, stocks and options. Salary is pretty minimal compared to all the other perquisites that come with SVP/Director on up to the c-suite level jobs in the top 1000 US companies.
If I made 350k all in and UBI takes 35k, I still take home 315k.
Heck, that portion of income that goes to UBI doesn’t even have to count toward regular income taxes. It can be all pre-tax dollars.
The thing is, the economy works best when everyone can participate fully. Locking huge swaths of it into personal fortunes nobody could hope to ever spend in a lifetime is wasteful and puts a huge drag on the overall economy. Sure, they can pop for houses and planes and yachts but that doesn’t really come close to the kind of economic power generated by millions of working poor buying their daily essentials.
Link your end with the start. The top earners don’t have the income to finance it.
My point is not that UBI should be a tax on the rich but that regular citizens can finance it right now if they want it.
You hope that UBI comes for free. It won’t. The majority has to pay it with higher taxes, voluntarily or not. So if they want it then don’t wait for politicians but implement it right now.
Zakat? It’s only 2.5% (can be up to 20% depending on what school of thought you follow) and it’s not distributed to everyone. There’s only a subset of people who are eligible in receiving zakat so it’s not UBI.
Although there can be a lot of things that can make someone require to pay zakat, like income, wealth, business assets, and others.
OK, total personal income for the US is 21 trillion so you’ve raised $2.1t. 260 million adults. That’s about $8000 each. Can you live off that? I’m not sure I could and I own my home outright.
If you look outside the US, you can get housing for a price that leaves enough of the 4000 for other expenses.
The easiest option is to connect some barren land to a city center with public transport in a climate zone that doesn’t need much insulation. But that just as a proof of concept. More clever options can be realized.
The point of UBI is that you could just live off that if you were frugal.
Everybody gets it of course, but you’d lose 10% of your current wages too. Everyone under $80k would be better off, everyone over that would be worse off.
The thing with UBI is that you’d lose all other state benefits too. Pretty much anything means tested would go and be replaced with one payment that everyone gets.
When they live off, I think they mean is that enough to where you could live on that and not work. And the answer to that is no/not well in the majority of cases.
Norway doesn’t have a minimum wage because the unions don’t want one. They believe having a set minimum wage sets a low anchor for negotiating, and that they can negotiate higher wages without one.
Select industries do have a minimum wage for their specific field, though. And there’s a legal minimum you must pay teens working in summer internships, because they’re not unionized and often get lowballed.
IMHO this strategy helps to prevent chewing. Workers will say “I need this union for a high wage” instead of “what do we even need these union dues for anymore”.
You can’t really compare US and Norwegian unions apples to apples. They don’t work the same way. In Norway they’re way more mainstream, work closer with the government, and they don’t employ people. There are no “union shops”, and no vote to join a union. You just join one while employed directly with your employer.
You can still negotiate your own compensation, but the union may also negotiate raises for the entire workplace separately (including for non-members). In a way you could say the union negotiates a workplace-specific minimum wage.
The risk of union workers getting fired and replaced with scabs is far less in Norway, because there is much stronger worker protection. These protections apply to everyone, not just the unionized workers, but they were achieved due to unions, years ago.
I don’t think you necessarily can draw any conclusions about strategy for Norwegian unions based on experience with US unions, or vice versa. They’re just different beasts.
Note: Apologies if some of this is mildly incorrect, I have not been directly involved with union work in either country, and so I only have a high-level view of it all. Someone more experienced should be able to give more detailed information about union strategy in either country.
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