>Right now there are explicit subsidies for housing and healthcare. If they get replaced with a UBI in the same amount
Good luck with that. UBI is barely tolerated by the left and progressives but only under the constraint that it doesn't replace any existing social welfare programs. The minute UBI advocates start pushing it as a replacement is the minute that progressives will squash it.
As an exercise, try and advocate for getting rid of Medicare for Seniors in return for increasing the pension payout rate (to whatever reasonable number of you choose). How do you think that will go ... and that's just one program. If you think you can get rid of food stamps and 10,000 other programs, you're dreaming.
Honestly I think public health is so well ingrained into the Australian psyche that it's not really considered to be welfare - it's just a state service like roads or parks. UBI in Australia wouldn't change our healthcare system.
UBI is barely tolerated by the left and progressives but only under the constraint that it doesn't replace any existing social welfare programs.
Where can I read some of these articulated positions for myself? Any particular articles or writers that made a substantial impression on you with these positions that you'd recommend I read?
>Where can I read some of these articulated positions for myself?
Imagine if you were to come up with a policy where you increase senior pension rates by $3000/mo but you get rid of Medicare - do you think Bernie Sanders would go for that deal? I'll tell you right now: ZERO chance he would support it. And that doesn't even take into account that there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of jobs that support the current entitlement programs. Do you think those employees will just let you lay them off without a fight?
I don't have any links, but I have gone out of my way to find out what different groups think of UBI when I was excited about UBI a few years ago. My excitement has since deflated and I now think UBI isn't a solution to any actual issues with automation. Specially it doesn't solve the following:
- It doesn't get rid of existing entitlement programs.
- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developing world which can't afford to pay its citizens and will be hit especially hit hard by automation.
- It doesn't solve automation issues for the developed world since people derive meaning and self-worth from work (there's a difference between working and supporting yourself and being supported by government handouts). To reinforce this point: communities that are supported by government welfare programs tend to have issues with drug and alcohol abuse and crime. Furthermore, the social welfare programs in the developed world are already extensive enough that healthcare, food, and shelter will always be available regardless of the state of automation.
I imagine he's talking about the response to the Yang campaign, where liberals quite rightly derided his plan to replace all "entitlement" programs with the dramatically smaller $1000/mo UBI. If someone who has been a life-long libertarian looks like he's trying to drive a wedge into social welfare programs, that's probably what is happening.
Was this just general derision in the form of "people on twitter" or had an economist somewhere made a cogent economic rebuttal? It's the latter I was interested and hoping someone could point me in the direction of. Not particularly interested in hearing what twitter person thinks about UBI-I'm rather ignorant to certain economic arguments about UBI myself, and am trying to address this, if that makes sense.
I doubt any serious economist could corral up enough spare tike to waste on a rebuttal of this idea. Not every idea rises to the level of serious discourse. The Yang UBI amount was much smaller than the amount paid by social welfare programs to the people who receive them. That's just arithmetic.
That is because it was proposed with cuts to everything else. That leaves people to fall through the cracks in the meantime. If you transition to UBI without those issues, progressives like the idea.
Right. But this is the unbridgeable gap between Libertarian-types, who see UBI as a way to cut entitlements and progressives who (at best) see it as a supplement to ALL existing programs. What's the compromise here?
Agreed. The momentum of welfare service providers alone would see to that, with somewhere around a million US workers having a vested interest in keeping their jobs as gatekeepers/facilitators, vs "everyone gets a check" covering what they control access to. Should UBI be enacted, the very same system would agitate to provide specialty services on top of UBI for special cases, building pretty much the same bureaucratic structure as exists now.
UBI simply redefines $0 income to a higher number functionally equal to $0.
Good luck with that. UBI is barely tolerated by the left and progressives but only under the constraint that it doesn't replace any existing social welfare programs. The minute UBI advocates start pushing it as a replacement is the minute that progressives will squash it.