It's tempting for many to look at Universal Basic Income (and any derivatives) and dismiss it out of hand as "Oh, that's just giving people a free handout!" or taking the political route and saying "That's a SOCIALIST nightmare! No Way!"
But what are we really dealing with, here? And is it possible that there increasingly are situations and reasons why it could not only be useful, but almost essential... maybe not in its original form, but in a "hybrid" system?
Declining Employment
Here's one for you: What do Barack Obama and Donald Trump have in common? They both promised "more jobs" for the American people.
Without a doubt, that'll continue to be a talking point with future Presidential candidates — both here in the US, and overseas — for many many years to come.
What becomes more and more evident is that these are becoming increasingly "Hollow" promises that can't seriously be made, as absolute statements. Like it or not, automation and AI are taking over an ever-increasing percentage of the world's work...
The displaced workers are not readily re-employable, because their jobs simply went away, and other jobs requiring a similar education level and skill set are also being taken over by automation.
Sorry, you are simply not NEEDED to work, anymore...
The old put-down "learn to code!" is also — ironically — in the crosshairs, as AI increasingly generates superior code to humans, and at a fraction of the cost, and in minutes, rather than weeks.
Like it or not, we seem to embrace capitalism here in the USA... but if we DO so, we don't get to sweep the fundamentals of capitalism under the rug, like they magically don't exist: The Purpose of a Corporation is to Maximize Profits.
Simple enough. Maximizing profits... while operating in a world where most of your customers/consumers are actually losing real purchasing power (because they are losing their jobs) SHOULD entail reducing costs, so prices can be kept affordable.
For a while, that worked as "outsourcing," letting someone making $8 an hour in the Philippines or Thailand assemble your iPhone, instead of someone making $30 an hour. The next natural iteration of that is to have a machine that requires no salary, benefits or paid vacation do the job.
That's all well and good, but someone still has to be able to afford to buy the iPhone. Last I looked, an iPhone 15 Pro will set you back $1,000... and more.
Putting People Back to Work!... It's Too Late... or Something...
The idea of putting people back to work is noble enough... but there's something increasingly functionally impossible about it, in our day and age.
Why? Because the only way to gain significant inroads would be to reduce efficiency. Which is precisely the opposite of the corporate objective of maximizing profit. It makes no sense so send a bunch of coal miners in West Virginia back into fully automated mines... armed just with picks and shovels, in the name of "job creation."
In a sense, I sometimes think Basic Income gets a bad rap because people hear the term and treat it like a "final solution," when perhaps it is best used as a "bridge" to get us from "now" to a fully automated economy in which consumer goods cost only a few percent of what they cost today.
And in some ways, companies helping to underwrite UBI is not so much a handout, as an investment in their own survival: you won't have a company if nobody has a job, and hence no money to buy your stuff.
Of course, this is predicated on the "Growth Paradigm" that has been with us for many generations... some schools of economic thought believe that "contractions" in an economy are a necessary — and even positive — thing.
In some ways, I agree. I think about the government bailing out large companies... might it not have been better to allow those companies to fail (after all, why would they be failing, if they didn't have sketchy business practices?) and instead use all those billions to subsidize the displaced workers... in the process allowing better run companies to become the market leaders?
Automation and Freedom
There's no doubt this is all a very complex issue.
One of the thoughts I keep coming back to is that we keep thinking of "not working" a somehow being bad and a negative to avoid. Maybe that's just an outmoded way of thinking? Couldn't we re-frame our perceptions to where having some machine do our grunt jobs is actually a blessing of sorts?
"Well, you MUST have a JOB!"
Why? From where I am sitting, what we "must have" is enough goods and services for everyone. The notion that they "must" be the result of human toil... is what, exactly?
Of course, the problem we face is that gap between corporations wanting to maximize profits, and people's purchasing power shrinking as "required human labor" becomes less and less. At some point, surely, someone must realize that a company raising their prices "because inflation" while their production costs are dropping due to automation is not going to hold up, in the long run.
So, Basic Income...
If it sounds like I have wandered a bit off-track from talking about Basic Income, it was primarily to illustrate where the need arises.
I am also not using the term "Universal" in this context. Because it would be quite selective, in the sense that it would be funded mostly as a sort of tax/fee for companies that extensively made workers redundant with automation.
And the benefit would only be available to those who could directly document that their long term jobs had been replaced by automation. Or maybe even their industry. Like trucking, which will be massively affected by autonomous vehicles over the next 20 years.
Also, it's important to consider that it would be basic income, not "living high on the hog income."
Some might say that "conservatives would never accept it," so maybe the idea has to be told as a "negative income tax," instead. Conservatives love reducing taxes...
Regardless, it's one of those things I can't help but speculate on.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2024-05-11 00:33 PDT
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Saying the US embraces "capitalism" doesn't really make sense. What does that word really mean? The economy is proclaimed as a free market, but it is absolutely riddled with taxes, regulations, and crony privileges for corporate interest. Some say this, and not laissez-faire, is what they mean by capitalism, but conflation and confusion abound when it comes to economic discussions.
Where does the wealth for UBI come from? Governments produce nothing. It can only tax people who are productive, or create units of currency out of thin air. The inflation we are facing now is largely a consequence of COVID response money supply and credit expansion inflation we were told would be nonexistent or transitory four years ago.
Cryptocurrency is a threat to the monetary system of government, so they demand power to regulate and monitor our efforts to create a market alternative to their monopoly money. Meanwhile, central banks are trying to figure out how to create their own digital currencies so they can surveil us more and ensure they get every penny in extortion revenue possible. It's not for serving our needs.
Income tax was sold to Americans as a way to get the "1%" of 1913 to "pay their fair share," and the Social Security ponzi scheme was a guaranteed income for old age. Neither worked as advertised. A UBI would be different how?
Good points, everything true. We have done nothing more than jump from utopia after utopia over the centuries, all invented by the same old control freaks of always. Why not try now a different utopia invented and controlled by the people for the people just for a change?
If the prospect of Universal Basic Income were ever to be entertained, the Federal government would have to start taxing all these mega-churches. When you think of it, those institutions have ridden on the tax-free gravy train for way too long. It's egregious that televangelist Kenneth Copeland gets to fly around in an expensive airplane while people in the Appalachian mountains are starving to death.
Do Copeland's jets cause starvation? The economy is not a zero-sum game, and much as I hate seeing grifters profit, people choose to give him money. That cannot be said for government. Everything it has must be expropriated by force, threat of force, or fraud.
UBI is not an economically sound concept. It's a sales pitch to buy support for the political class from gullible people. A central planner taking wealth from the market of voluntary exchanges, filtering it through a bureaucracy, inflating the supply, and then circulating a portion back into the economy through favored interests does not generate wealth, it just redistributes it, distorting the market and privileging the politically-connected in the process.
They offer UBI in Saudi Arabia. Of course, Saudi Arabia has a wealth of financial resources from their oil and gas industry, and their monarchy has the legal ability to compel the oil and gas industry to pour money into their economy.
Do Kenneth Copeland's jets cause starvation? The answer to that question falls somewhat within a gray area. Some nations do tax religious institutions, and those nations have more tax revenue that they can use to benefit their economy. I see what you're saying about the ills of remolding our economy to be fueled by artificial means. However, the elephant in the room here is that our Federal government and the likes cannot keep addressing the problems with our economy and joblessness and homelessness with the same policies and expect different results.
Saudi Arabia does not offer UBI. They have a state-monopolized petroleum industry. Assuming it works as you say, this is still not proof UBI works. That political monopoly entrenches a political class, but at least there is actual industrial production of a market good, and not just money printing, behind such a scheme. It isn't sustainable, though. Even if the Saudis weren't deeply corrupt, there is still the economic calculation problem. We saw what happened when Venezuela relied on state oil monopoly. It was a miracle of socialist success, until it collapsed that is.
Saudi Arabia has what is called a Citizen's Account Program, which is similar to UBI. It seems to work okay in their culture.
I agree with you that Saudi Arabia has never been free from corruption, but they do appear to keep their poverty down to a minimal. When I was living in Los Angeles, California in the 1990s, I toured a museum of Saudi Arabian culture; and I learned that one of the highlights of their society is that all of their college education is free. For decades they haven't had the collective poverty that you see in India.
Nevertheless, I see what you mean about the dangers of a nation printing money blindly. Also, I realize that even if UBI could work well in one nation, it might not work at all in another nation inasmuch as every nation has a different situation than the other. A very bad mistake on Joe Biden's part was cancelling the Keystone XL Pipeline, which killed a number of jobs.
The rising level of automation is leading to an increase in the number of people who simply cannot find work. This is also due to the increasing age of the population, as older workers are often no longer desired by companies. This is resulting in a growing number of people with very little or no means of subsistence.
Poverty is a breeding ground for radicalism. And radicalism is dangerous for the whole society. If the rich and super-rich do not wake up to this, we could face very unpleasant consequences, in the form of various revolutions. And surely no one wants that.
It's already happening.
The rate at which people are losing their jobs these days is crazy. So many companies do not have enough funds to pay their staffs so they lay some of them off. At the same time, AI is snatching some of our jobs and we’re listing more jobs…
After reading this article, what comes to mind is the fact that Jesse Watters of Fox News is always running his mouth about how he feels that homeless people have failed in life. This man is so disconnected from reality that it is not even funny. He spends more time holding interviews on Fox News with alleged victims of alien abductions than he does actually investigating the causes of homelessness. Did you know that there are more than a half million people that are homeless in the United States?
Jesse Watters probably doesn't even know that fact. I've looked into his background, and he has grown up around money and has never encounterd a misfortune in his life. Therefore, he doesn't even have the faintest idea what it is like to struggle financially. He doesn't even realize that there are even people from his socioeconomic structure that end up homeless inasmuch as their abusive parents have disinherited them. This Jesse Watters gets my blood coagulating. He's not helping the situation with the growing disparity between haves and have-nots in the United States.
Universal Basic Income would alleviate the problem with homelessness in the United States, but the Federal government would still have to figure out where the funds would come from to make this benefit happen. I don't think that it's right for mega-churches to be allowed to get away without paying any taxes.
By the way, you wrote an exceptional article. Keep up the good work.😊