It’s so strange that you cant see yourself doing it. It’s bigotry plain and simple, spurred on by propaganda that can only come from one of the tabloids or channel 5. But hey, that’s me generalising people with your opinion. How’s it feel being being generalised? Not nice is it. Just because your opinions are the same doesn’t make you a daily mail reader, just like being poor doesn’t automatically make you lazy or work shy.
Universal Basic Income
- Thread starter esmufc07
- Start date
It’s so strange that you cant see yourself doing it. It’s bigotry plain and simple, spurred on by propaganda that can only come from one of the tabloids or channel 5. But hey, that’s me generalising people with your opinion. How’s it feel being being generalised? Not nice is it. Just because your opinions are the same doesn’t make you a daily mail reader, just like being poor doesn’t automatically make you lazy or work shy.
Can trade anecdotes all day. You need more evidence to support your assertions about how many people are poor because they are terrible with money.
End of the day this is a football forum. I gave my opinion based on my own experiences, which is what the vast majority of people do on here. I’m not going to do a load of research on why poor people are poor. I stand by my points. I just find it funny because if you don’t have the ‘right’ opinion I must automatically be some right wing, daily mail reader.
Why do you think people are poor? How do some people get out of that situation and others can’t?
For.
It’s not a case of reacting but it’s a common thing on here. I have provided an opinion that someone disagrees with. They then make an assumption and get personal with it. You know you can have an opinion without it being based on politics or reading newspapers or watching shite TV. I literally have no interest in all 3.
Honest question here -'how long have you thought about this ? And how did you come to this conclusion ?
You said that there's a large problem of benefit fraud in the UK, and that the UK wastes money on the NHS. I pointed out that fraud is very small and UK healthcare spending is quite low by western standards.
How did you reach those conclusions? Both those "facts" are talked about a lot in most newspapers and by some politicians, so it could have percolated down to you from there. Less charitably, you made the mistake of taking a few cases and extrapolating from those anecdotes.
Either way, you have reached a very political conclusion (the govt needs to primarily crack down on benefit fraud and rein in NHS spending) without apparently having any interest in politics or news.
I'd expect someone would do research before coming to a strong conclusion that you are willing to "stand by" for no reason other than what you feel. Nothing to do with being a football forum. You are basically saying you believe whatever you want because of subjective feelings and don't care what the facts are.
Every individual case is going to be unique so anecdotes don't mean much. First my original reasoning still stands. Poor people can't afford to make a single mistake. Rich people can afford to make many mistakes. That's an inherent advantage to the heavily market based systems.
We can also look at some trends in data and social mobility. The data shows the higher the income inequality the lower the social mobility.
This isn't even factoring in wealth inequality:
The conclusion from the data would be there are strong structural factors that inhibit greater social mobility. We can certainly get deeper into incentives and incentive structures as well. How when the elites control policy, incentive structures are created that do not benefit the poorest (or even the bottom 80%).
Then there is this:
"It all starts with the psychology concept known as the “fundamental attribution error”. This is a natural tendency to see the behavior of others as being determined by their character – while excusing our own behavior based on circumstances."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/us-inequality-poor-people-bad-choices-wealthy-bias
@oneniltothearsenal lots of charts, but none address the context of the thread. How will UBI help more than other similar programs?
You need to distinguish between benefits vs income. The moment they get blurred, it will only end in confusion. It was a nice sleight of hand to call a benefit as Income, but UBI is at end of the day a benefit, albeit which everyone receives.
You need to distinguish between benefits vs income. The moment they get blurred, it will only end in confusion. It was a nice sleight of hand to call a benefit as Income, but UBI is at end of the day a benefit, albeit which everyone receives.
fecking hell, mate. I find it funny you can’t see the point being made to you, yet you're arguing the same thing in defence of your opinions. Poor people aren’t automatically lazy just like your opinions don’t automatically make you a daily mail reader.
The “it’s my experience” argument has been used for quite a long time to justify bigotry. Just any black man that cant shop without being followed around by security. And before you start with “that’s a ridiculous comparison” argument, sorry, but you are refusing to see your bigotry no matter how it’s explained to you. So maybe an extreme comparison will clear up what it is that your doing.
Nobody knows that yet. We, as a society, are still just beginning to test it. No one can say with any degree of certainty right now whether or not its the best alternative. I don't think its the best use for the US at the moment but in Europe where they already have sane health care policies it might be.
No idea what your second point is though.
Theoretically it is a far more efficient in that the fully employed would be further taxed by approx the same amount as they get in UNI but we would save a huge amount because we wouldn't have to employ tens of thousands to means test a huge variety of payments.
Given that what we think of as full employment will gradually become a thing of the past this would also allow a more frictionless change to most of us working less than 35/40+ hours per week. It would remove benefit stigma, allow part time work, casual work and self employment without the hoops you now have to jump through, with the inherant risk that you will lose all benefits, making it uneconomic to try, so lots of people sensibly don't.
Given that what we think of as full employment will gradually become a thing of the past this would also allow a more frictionless change to most of us working less than 35/40+ hours per week. It would remove benefit stigma, allow part time work, casual work and self employment without the hoops you now have to jump through, with the inherant risk that you will lose all benefits, making it uneconomic to try, so lots of people sensibly don't.
This is the thing though, it doesn’t obviate the need for a large administrative overhead. For one thing, it cant replace housing benefit, so we still need that system of benefit, which would still be both means tested and regionally varied.
With UBI itself you’d expect a take up by maybe 90% of the population, all of whom would need to prove their identity & entitlement as a citizen at least once. This would require something along the lines of a national identity register to track, since you’re talking about almost everyone. This doesn’t exist currently & would need to be created. Both legislatively and IT-wise this would be a major undertaking, you only need look at the ballooning costs of Universal Credit to see where that could go.
Then you have the natural churn of life that would need it to be kept up to date - babies are born, people die, couples separate, kids reach 18 etc, so payment records for those people would need to be updated. No systems exist in the UK that keep track of these in such a way that the process can be readily integrated & automated. Instead it would require the applicants to find a touch point to let Government know about changes, to resolve disputes and that sort of thing. this couldn’t be online only, so you’d need Jobcentre Plus still for people to contact about disputes.
Despite all these it may on balance be easier than what we have now, but its more complex than simply setting up a Direct Debit for everyone and there’s certainly still a complex administrative overhead. And given that we’d be talking about 50M+ people getting it vs the 6M people getting working age benefits, the increased volume may largely offset the reduced complexity.
Again I haven't said anything about people on benefits being lazy. Saying poorer people are bad with money does not constitute me saying they're lazy.
I'd expect someone would do research before coming to a strong conclusion that you are willing to "stand by" for no reason other than what you feel. Nothing to do with being a football forum. You are basically saying you believe whatever you want because of subjective feelings and don't care what the facts are.
Every individual case is going to be unique so anecdotes don't mean much. First my original reasoning still stands. Poor people can't afford to make a single mistake. Rich people can afford to make many mistakes. That's an inherent advantage to the heavily market based systems.
We can also look at some trends in data and social mobility. The data shows the higher the income inequality the lower the social mobility.
This isn't even factoring in wealth inequality:
The conclusion from the data would be there are strong structural factors that inhibit greater social mobility. We can certainly get deeper into incentives and incentive structures as well. How when the elites control policy, incentive structures are created that do not benefit the poorest (or even the bottom 80%).
Then there is this:
"It all starts with the psychology concept known as the “fundamental attribution error”. This is a natural tendency to see the behavior of others as being determined by their character – while excusing our own behavior based on circumstances."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/05/us-inequality-poor-people-bad-choices-wealthy-bias
I admire your research but where does this prove UBI would work? As far as I know none of these countries ahead of the UK have UBI in place so they have reduced the inequality by other means.
I think you are all assuming I don't want to help the poorer in society, that is simply not the case. I just think there are better ways to help people than giving them a blanket cheque of money each month and saying 'spend it on whatever you like'. Invariably there will be people that take advantage of that system. And 'in my opinion' people who receive UBI are not likely to use that money to start a business or invest wisely.
If you really want to help people in society follow the Scandinavian model. We need higher tax rates in this country so we have sufficient funding available for the NHS, social care, social housing, public transport & education. But at the same time they need to find out why public spending is always ridiculously over-budget.
Oh well that’s fine then. As long as it’s some other bigoted assumption and not that one.
I believe this is the part where everyone comes to the conclusion that you’re being purposefully obtuse. I don’t know how else it can be made clear to you that judging an entire group based on your own limited experience is wrong. Kinda typical of daily mail readers if I’m being honest, are you sure you don’t thumb through it every now again? Oh wait look at me making assumptions based on limited information. Don’t you hate it when people do that?
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I like the idea of free money so naturally i'd support UBI, but I agree with you, we need to wait and see the outcome of the experiments to see what the results are and exactly how UBI works.
I think we need to re-assess how we look at benefits. So many people consider it as "stuff for the poor", but we all use the health system, we all went to school. We need to look at it, as support for our society. Personally I think we should have more state funded stuff, I think we should pay more tax towards it -but i don't think it should always be income tax. We need to look at wealth tax (if the wealthy leave - F-them, they're currently keeping it all to themselves anyway) and we should look at taxing profits for businesses, rather than incomes for households.
Now before people cry about their few thousand pounds in saving and their poor local greengrocer who's going to be driven to ruin by my commie taxes - i think there should be a cap on where we start, so that the average joe pays on wealth tax or very little wealth tax, SME's are looked after and protected by tax bands, and the only businesses paying more taxes are those successful enough to afford to do so.
The thing about tax is - if you earn a million quid a year in profit and you suddenly have to pay 2% more in tax, it won't ruin you, it'll mean you earn a few thousand less after tax; not economic ruin.
Another great point made was about the inefficiency about how it's spent. I think we need an independent, non political body which looks into every government contract which is handed out. We need to stop stupid financing decisions - like hiring expensive IT contractors rather than permanent staff, or outsourcing services on contracts with great initial rates which go through the roof when you need to renew in a few years time and you've lost all the infrastructure and in house knowledge to provide that service yourself. Most of our money is wasted by government - not benefits dodgers.
Please god, lets not go back to the era of mammoth Local Authorities and central Government again, The historical joke about inefficiencies in the public sector are absolutely true. One of the few things Ive agreed with John McDonnell on is the need for more mutuals, coops & other forms of NfPs, these should be the vehicle for procurement in the future, not the return of monolithic in house Government services. External procurement is a good thing, lets just give those contracts to charities and other businesses that focus on value rather than profit margins.
I disagree. Government ineptitude is not because of the size of departments or the services they offer, but rather because the people who work in them have archaic skill sets and are led by people with political agendas rather than service driven attitudes. If we'd run government just like we'd run successful businesses we'd be fine. I refuse to believe that British people employed by the British government are unable to run the buses cheaper than British people hired by a company owned by the German government. The only difference is the German government runs our buses as a business, the British government ran them as political tools.
Why can't we make our version of Arriva and run it with the profits going back into the transport network/taxpayer pockets? Lack of political will - that's all.
I work in IT and have worked in the private and public centre. The public centre is only inefficient because of political interference and cowardice. The NHS IT setup is no more complicated than systems managed by Amazon, Google, Facebook etc.
Well said. And it’s so obvious it’s a wonder that it isn’t said more often.
Also I'd like to add i'm not against a role for private companies in delivering government services - i just know for a fact that it's not the golden cow it's made out to be. Sometimes keeping things in house is cheaper, sometimes it's not. I think something like the Arriva model - is a good compromise, but i'd rather the focus be on providing the best service possible, rather than making the most profit from the contract.
What you’re describing there is exactly what I’ve described, outsourcing Govenment contracts to third party entities that give the Government better value than traditional private companies. The only difference is you’ve outlined a For Profit company owned by Government and I’ve outline a Not For Profit company, which is the same difference - the Government benefits from the profits either way. I have no problem with either model, what I dislike is large monolithic centralised power structures.
The one thing I really like about it is that if you get a job, you still get the UBI. I think that would actually encourage more people that are on wellfare to work.
Becoming a bit childish really.
I’m in agreement with both your response to me and this.
Becoming? Mate, you started off childish and went down hill form there. Typical daily mail reader.
As I told Edgar Pillow it is a new idea. No one can prove that it works or does not work because as a society we haven't tested it enough. My point was that its worth testing and observing the results. My objection was to you implying outright that it simply wouldn't work based solely on your own personal experiences with some poor person you know being bad with money.
I would envisage this happening alongside a massive simplification of government and the tax system (fully pay for the basics which we don't do now and remove much of the rest especially the bits that enrich "people like us") which would make the super wealthy and big business actually pay tax for a change. Obviously some welfare means tested payments would have to exist in the transitory period but the gold standard UBI would be enough that rent assistance wouldn't be necessary, although I don't know how you overcome the huge regional differences in the cost of living without enforcing economic movement on a massive scale.
Obviously I don't have all the answers but we need to do something as we are sleepwalking towards a huge problem with no plan and UBI would potentially address many of these issues.
And if you use a combination of government records you have almost everyone's details already so I don't think payment arrangement is a huge issue or at least not an insurmountable one.
Yes. It is bullshit.
Just because you know poor people who are bad with money doesn't mean they are poor BECAUSE they are bad with money. Being poor doesn't exactly teach you how to manage a share portfolio or put a bit away each week for the fees at Eaton.
Obviously, I exaggerate but you only learn how to manage money if you have money otherwise you learn how to live had to mouth and your goal changes from saving for your retirement to paying the rent and when the basics are paid for it isn't unreasonable for people to want a bit of leisure and/or not have to use a 1990's Nokia. It is Tory diversion nonsense 101.
I don't believe UBI would solve anything. The longer term solution should be towards reducing benefits and only targeted people (disabled, aged etc) should be eligible. The focus should be to improve self reliance and provide opportunity for everyone to earn their own keep. Increased wages and in some cases less automation should be encouraged. Lesser the need for benefits means a more robust and effective society.
I'm definitely in favour of giving it a go. But don't make it universal. How much money do some people need?
The whole point of it is that it is universal. The employed would broadly get the same with increased income from the UBI and increased taxation making their income the same.
Encouraging less automation is like encouraging unicorn ownership. Pointless and futile.
UBI is intended to increase self reliance and provide opportunity for everyone to earn their keep without the huge barriers that currently exist. Our current approach is also totally unsuited to cope with a situation where there isn't 40hrs a week employment for everyone. Unless you want some sort of hunger games event you need another plan.
I fully support UBI, and indeed see it as being an inevitability with the advent of automation and AI. However, this support comes with the caveat that it is funded entirely by the top 1% of earners nationally, and/or a tax on corporations with a revenue above a certain size (billions).
Not sure I'm understanding correctly, sonifbthe employed get taxed more heavily to make their income the same as someone unemployed, why be employed? Surely of its a universal income it can provide for the unemployed whilst being a nice extra for the employed?
That's a contradiction of terms, you can't encourage self-reliance by encouraging people to take money from someone else.
The theory is that if we pay everyone enough money, they'll get 'fulfilling' work and be artists or something. And binmen will be people who somehow get a hard-on for picking up bins.
No everyone gets the UBI - not just the unemployed.
This isn't a bad summary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
I get that. But the top 1-5% of the wealthy, for example. Feck giving them any more money. It should be means tested at the top end.
Right wing rhetoric 101.
Someone in the poverty trap has very little ability to be more self reliant.
Nailed it.
That misses the point of a UBI. The top end should be taxed appropriately.