mhornberger t1_j7zydvc wrote on February 10, 2023 at 4:44 PM

Reply to comment by arckeid in North American companies notch another record year for robot orders by darth_nadoma

Layoffs are being offset by job openings elsewhere. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1968 or so. Wages were creeping up even before the pandemic.

And I haven't seen anyone figure out how to fund a UBI. Not one robust enough to replace all means-tested programs, Social Security, the whole bit. Not enough for everyone to live on. It's not like a UBI is a figured-out problem and someone just needs to finally get off their ass and flip the switch.

ktpr t1_j8082yu wrote on February 10, 2023 at 5:47 PM

There are many proposals for funding UBI. You just have to look. One big idea is to separate the idea of wealth from money and use negative taxation, see: https://citizen-network.org/library/how-to-fund-a-universal-basic-income.html

mhornberger t1_j80b8n1 wrote on February 10, 2023 at 6:07 PM

Money is just a store for wealth, a way to simplify exchange. It has a pretty high degree of utility, which will be hard to get away from. We know that money and wealth are not literally the same things.

The money in my checking account and even index funds isn't "lying idle." The wealth is out in the economy in the form of loans, investments, stock ownership, etc. The 'money,' the numbers with the dollar signs, are just entries in a ledger. They aren't 'things' we can poke with a stick to get to work. The wealth is already out there doing stuff.

A "negative interest rate" is just a tax, an x-percent reduction of the numbers in my ledger so you can fund benefits, government procurement, etc. We know that taxes exist. The question is whether you can tax (or impose a "negative interest rate" if you prefer that terminology) the population enough, at a high enough rate, to fund this thing, without them just voting you out of office.

Because a UBI needs to replace Social Security and all the means-tested programs already out there, but for everyone. The problem isn't that people don't understand the nature of money, but that the numbers don't pan out. "But people don't realize that wealth and money aren't the same things" doesn't address that.

OriginalCompetitive t1_j80kgez wrote on February 10, 2023 at 7:07 PM

It would be almost impossible to fund today, but might not be that hard when we finally need it.

If you figure $20k per year for 330M people, that’s $6.6 trillion. Total US GDP is $23T, so today it would be colossally expensive. But GDP grows 2% per year. At that rate, GDP will add an extra $6.6T in about ten years - and that’s after inflation.

So in theory we’ll have an extra $6.6T to play with in another decade. That doesn’t mean it still wouldn’t be difficult. But it’s feasible.