My issue, and I only have one, with these pilot projects for basic income is that its not realistic. The people in the project know that it will end at a fixed time, so their actions are different compared to what would happen in a BI/UBI system.
This is very true. Honestly asking: Is it working? I haven't seen lots of data on the topic. I also know the climate and endless day/night issues weigh into this too. I'm curious if academia sees this as a success or not.
If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so privately? (And if they don't want to save, why should the government force them? Isn't a democracy supposed to reflect what the people want?)
> If people wanted to save, why wouldn't they do so privately?
The "why" is complicated, but the "they generally don't" is not.
> Isn't a democracy supposed to reflect what the people want?
People wanted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. There aren't many pure democracies out there as pure mob rule isn't super awesome in the long run.
Alaska's dividend is particularly odd given they were proposing 40% budget cuts to the state university system recently in order to keep the fund payouts up.
> Dunleavy, who took office in December and is an outspoken supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, has called for major cuts in higher education, health care and other social programs as he pushes to sharply raise the annual oil revenue dividend that Alaska pays to nearly every state resident.
In general, just giving people money should be the null hypothesis for how to spend, and any government spending programme should be measured against this 'placebo'. Instead of against the weaker standard of 'does the spending do any good at all?'
I have no clue whether those programs he wants to slash are any good or bad.
Higher education is mostly a signalling game. So very useful for individuals to spend on; but a zero sum game at the level of society.
> People wanted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc. There aren't many pure democracies out there as pure mob rule isn't super awesome in the long run.
I'm not a fan of democracy either. But lots of people are. And it beats some of the alternatives.
The dividend is not particularly large as far as basic income goes, but it's an inflation-proof setup. The principal is currently somewhere around $67b. With about 700k residents in AK, that's about $90k per citizen.
Now that the annual oil revenue has declined, there's debate every year about what to do with that principal. AK has been cutting services the last few years, even though we have almost $70b in the bank.
A fixed time before renewal is fairly common for legislation though; For instance, many of the tax cuts expire in 2025; Or the Bush capital gains cuts had to be renewed for 10 years.
One question about expiration dates; are study participants more likely to take caution them than general populace.
Absolutely true, but they also tend to work in jobs where they have essentially full control over how much they work, when they work, etc.
And in some cases, that might still end up being much more lucrative than a "normal job". But I'm sure that in many cases, it doesn't - we just don't hear about it, because they're still rich, and nobody really knows what they're really doing anyway.
Do they tend to work in those jobs? There are people with trust funds working at McKinsey, Google, Harper Collins, Cravath, and Goldman Sachs right now. They all pay well but they aren't places where one has "essentially full control over how much they work, when they work, etc."
You don't need to work to stay rich when you have a $25M trust fund.
There are plenty of people who were born rich who nonetheless go to work everyday. They are engineers, doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, inventors, teachers, professors, and business owners.
Having money doesn't discourage people from working. We won't run into a shortage of astronauts, teachers, or even police officers. But we may find it difficult to find people willing to work as a janitor for $8.00 an hour.
As self reported by many truly rich folks, money is not a motivating factor in their daily lives. If they want a good burger, they'll get one and not care if it's $1 or $1,000.
Such an attitude would certainly apply to their reasons for working.
Well, the rich almost always make most of their day-to-day income from investments. The opportunity cost calculations change pretty dramatically when a person's labor provides little to no monetary value (especially given the context of going out for a burger).
After all, there's a practical limit on the value of a person's labor - let's postulate that it's around $7,000 a day - there's no such limit on what investments can return in a day.
* $7,000 is Elon Musks's $2.2M salary from 2019 divided into 340 working days.
I don't think you can figure out the practical limit like that.
First: musicians and athletes in their prime can make more, and that's definitely labour income. Second: if a bus were to hit Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett, their companies would lose lots of value. So even though their day-to-day income looks like it's coming from investments, a big part of it is actually labour income.
(I'm taking 'hit by a bus' here as an exogenous event that would make the CEOs unable to work, but wouldn't touch the companies at all and crucially wouldn't imply to investors any other information about the companies.)
Similar for running a hedge fund: as far as the tax man is concerned, a lot of the income they generate for the people running the fund is some kind of capital returns. But in an economic sense, it's mostly labour income: if you want to estimate the capital side, just see how well the hedge fund's customers are doing out of their investment; any returns insiders make above that are labour income.
People are already complaining about taxes too high and lazy welfare recipients. With UBI this would get even worse and I agree that most likely it would get voted out very quickly. If we can’t even get universal health care, robust social safety net or secure retirement going without political fights, forget UBI.
The argument for UBI in place of those other things is that it's extremely simple. Legislatively, bureaucratically, etc. Just give people more money to offset all of these systems that are too expensive. Simpler also means cheaper to implement.
It does avoid dealing with the root problems in some sense, but it's certainly elegant.
I'm tentatively a UBI fan, but just switching to single-payer healthcare would do a lot of that. So much damn bureaucracy, public and private, for that. I think the public side's under-accounted-for, actually—so many government agencies end up having to deal with health insurance crap for one reason or another.
Some would remain for private supplemental plans or whatever, but 90+% of that work would just go away. Plus all those uncompensated hours individuals spend fucking with insurance and medical provider billing departments.
Yep. People who oppose universal healthcare because "have you been to the DMV?" don't consider the fact that in this case private industry already has dramatically more bureaucracy than the government equivalent would. My health insurer is already the DMV, just without any legal obligation to help me.
Of course, it would still take tons of legwork to make the actual transition. But the end result would be a net win for simplicity.
Universal healthcare is a prerequisite for UBI. How could you ever rely on it if you have the threat of a six figure hospital bill whenever you get sick or have an accident? Affordable housing is also a prerequisite or the UBI money will go straight into the pockets of landlords (I often suspect this is the secret plan of billionaires who propose UBI).
A lot of the poor that qualify for benefits can already get equivalents through family or friends if the program were not offered. If we just give cash, they're likely to spend it on other things and combine expenses where possible.
It's popular because everybody gets a check each fall that's been around $1500. One year the dividend was higher, just over $2k. There was also an "energy rebate" of $1200 that year, so every qualifying person in the state got $3200 that year. In a family of four, that's over $12k. Large families, for example 8 people, got $24k that year!
Some people use it well, putting some in the bank for their kids, paying off loans, etc. But many people just splurge every fall. There's an increase in alcohol and substance abuse-related incidents.
It has impacted politics significantly. We are no longer getting large influxes of cash every year, so there's an open question about how to fund our state's services. We could implement an income tax, but that's a hard sell. We could start tapping into the permanent fund principal, but anyone who proposes that gets trounced by politicians willing to "protect" people's pfd by slashing services. We could offer so much as a state, but people won't have it because they want their $1500 each fall.
I appreciate your posts on the Permanent Fund here.
I have a friend who moved to Alaska last year for work last year and will probably be there for a few more years. We had discussions about the fund recently because this is the first year he qualifies for it. He will very much be in that camp of using the check in the fall to splurge and will do so until he is able to move in a few years.
As an outsider, it seems frustrating to me that the funds aren't used to improve the state (schools, utilities, infrastructure). I've expressed this to my friend and kind of derided him a bit for being what I see as part of the problem. In reality I guess I can't really blame him for taking the money and (eventually) running, but it just feels wrong to me.
I feel vaguely similar, having moved to Texas a year ago. No income tax, also money needed for services, when I point this out people just kinda go "oh you crazy new york folks."
The property tax burden (if you own) is fairly high, especially if one is not getting a high tech salary. The sort of permanent fund equivalent in Texas is dedicated to the state university system - they make a pretty big deal of this in civics classes in Texas.
Also, there is a delayed reckoning in the public school system in Texas - they keep on cutting state funding to systems to avoid having to increase state taxes so local school systems have to try to make this up, and the state for a long time fraudulently worked to deny children with special education needs the correct diagnosis - since special education (for whatever reason/cause) children cost a lot more to educate. https://www.chron.com/politics/texas/article/Delayed-or-deni...
The Alaska thing is different. It's a) not enough money to be considered b) a reasonable response to the direct revenues from an Oil windfall.
Now, it might be a good example of how a nation should distribute revenues from natural resources, i.e. right into the hands of the people. But it's not a UBI substitute.
Well yeah, if someone says, "would ending this program cause you to change or cancel current plans?", I would say yes in the hopes that it would encourage the program to continue. Free money is nice.
