Scott Santens
Reflect on this - if we eradicated poverty by constructing a #basicincome floor, think of the ripple effects. We would reduce crime rates, improve health outcomes, and even boost our economy as people gain the ability to spend more.
UBI isn't charity; it's a high ROI investment.
Brendan Jones
@graydon @Flux @scottsantens I completely agree, but the other side to that is also worth looking at: abolishing the ability of great wealth to buy legislative outcomes is necessary to functional democracy.
As in, abolish political donations completely, or at least put very tight caps on who can donate and how much, and make donations completely transparent with a public register.
Graydon
@Flux @scottsantens I think we're structurally unable to do so.
The cost of buying an election really is quite small compared to the expected cost of effective taxation of great wealth on great wealth; the selective outcome is obvious. (E.g., Michael Bloomberg spent thereabouts of a billion dollars to keep Elizabeth Warren out of consideration in the Democratic primaries because that cost less.)
I'd argue that abolishing great wealth is necessary to functional democracy.
Paul Lalonde
@graydon @scottsantens we're unwilling to tax wealth. Until we get that right pretty much all money will flow back into fewer pockets.
Graydon
@Flux @scottsantens Modern Monetary Theory supposes a contrafactual, which is that the persons most necessary to tax can be taxed. (Obviously not true. The cost to buy a government is much less than the taxes; existence proofs of this abound.)
It supposes a second contrafactual that taxation is fast enough to impose a functional and sufficiently low lid on great personal wealth. We know that's not true because it was tried and failed hard across generational time.
Paul Lalonde
@graydon @scottsantens UBI is a natural partner to Modern Monetary Theory. Use tax policy to control inflation and flatten wealth, while using UBI as an effective negative tax.
Graydon
@scottsantens It would do nothing but transfer public funds to the very rich, as rents increased, other prices increased, and de facto "sign it over" practices spread.
There is no way forward that is not eternal chattel slavery as the (possibly indirect) possession of an oligarch OR the utter and comprehensive destruction of great private wealth, world-wide.
Once we've done the later, we can have UBI. But not before.
Brendan Jones
@graydon @Flux @scottsantens A bit of a chicken or egg problem - very hard to do one without the other!
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.