Care to make an argument on why? There has been some decent arguments on why it would.
How would Universal income work?
It wouldn't.
recoups all the money to give back out again or create a Federal Reserve that just prints more money whenever it needs it and lends it to
Care to make an argument on why? There has been some decent arguments on why it would.
if the cost to make the box is 100 and you tax it at 100 % the cost to the consumer is 200, the government is still only getting half the income it needs to supply to box to the person.
the 100 tax is given to the person to buy the box. the whole scenario is based on the idea that the government provides you with an income that will sustain you and gets the money from the company that makes the stuff. But, you cant tax a company without increasing the cost to the consumer.
The situation is very warped and shows big distortions about how taxes actually work, in amount and function.
An improvement would be to say, the box sells for 100 and of that 20 is profit. Say there is a 50 percent tax on that, so 10 goes to taxes.
Things that 10 goes to pay for:
- Police protection for the security of the company and community
- Regulation of if not supply of power source for the company
- Education of people who later work for the company
- Raw scientific research that leads to better boxes in the future
- Way too many things to list
If it holds to the tax situation we have today, 10 percent of the taxes - or 1 - would go for all 'safety net programs' for the poor. If you're 'box' company Wal-Mart, that means some of your employees make so little they can qualify for some tax assistance while your owners have hundreds of billions..
That's not to say there isn't some waste. Over half of the taxes outside Social Security and healthcare would go to largely corrupt military spending, so the company would be paying for often unneeded military programs. But maybe its boxes are sold to the military so it's one of the beneficiaries?
Simplistic scenarios get wrong lessons. There's a lot more to understanding public policy, and billions spent to misinform the public.
sm625, that is totally wrong. You are missing the actual economic facts.
For example, you don't even mention the dominant economic fact of modern history - the record inequality created by the few at the top taking an unprecedented share of the wealth society creates.
They arent "taking" anything. The bottom 99% voted for it. The bottom 99% want more and more government, and this is what they get. More government in the mortgage business = more money to the rich. More government in education = more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. More government in health care = again more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. Wealth inequality voted for and by the masses. So dont give me any nonsense about right wing ideology. The bottom 99% will keep voting for more and more government, and they will keep getting screwed until they end up with Venezuela.
The bottom 99% voted for it. The bottom 99% want more and more government, and this is what they get. More government in the mortgage business = more money to the rich. More government in education = more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. More government in health care = again more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. Wealth inequality voted for and by the masses. So dont give me any nonsense about right wing ideology. The bottom 99% will keep voting for more and more government, and they will keep getting screwed until they end up with Venezuela.
Yes, it is all those school administrators $100,000 middle class salary that is the problem. Not at all the billionaire executive management of multinational corporations that are making 9 figure salaries that we didn't vote for.
That's quite wrong again. Of course they are taking - massive amounts of wealth.
Compare the distribution of wealth in the 1940's to 1960's, with the distribution today.
The wealthy have shifted trillions of dollars of income to themselves from the rest of society by gaming the rules.
The top tax rate has gone from 90% to a fraction of that and 15% or less for some of the biggest incomes to zero or even a negative tax for some of the largest corporations, instead adding all that money to the national debt draining hundreds of billions per year in interest payments.
CEO pay has gone from 25 times worker salaries to hundreds of times as the compensation system has been corrupted.
The norm for the overhead of the finance industry to the economy is 10% historically; in recent times finance has taken as much as 40% of all profits in the economy for largely unproductive and parasitical activities.
Most stock trading today is high-speed trading that does nothing to create wealth for the economy, only taking wealth out of it. The largest hedge fund in the world is owned by Robert Mercer, who it's made a billionaire, by basically nothing more than creating effective stock trading approaches, which again do nothing ot create wealth in society but instead drain it - while Mercer uses that wealth to buy right-wing policies to help take even more wealth, including his being trump's biggest billionaire backer.
Activities are largely parasitical. For a couple of examples, one of Goldman Sachs' schemes had it buying all the available aluminum supplied to profit by price gouging the industries such as soft drink makers who needed it - which gouged consumers. Because of the risk of such gouging, government had created a law requiring that supplies not sit idle and hoarded - so you saw the spectacle of trucks moving the aluminum from factory to factory in a circle evading the spirit of the law. While the law was undermined, that's not a problem with 'too much government' but too little.
For the second example, speculators in the oil industry were estimated even by the biggest gasoline CEOs to add over 50 cents per gallon to the cost of gas in the US.
That's all money not creating wealth for society, but parasitical taking of money from others.
Near monopolies in industry after industry have become the norm as the businesses have bought government that won't restrict it since Reagan. The last major breakup was AT&T by Carter. That drains huge sums as well.
I could list many more ways they drain money from the rest of the country, but bottom line is that the top 1% keep increasing their share of all wealth drastically, with the top 0.01% increasing far more than the rest of the 1% - and effectively buying our political system in the process.
You severely misunderstand the issues. Government in the mortgage business - whatever you mean by the phrase - isn't the problem and isn't what results in more for the rich.
More government in education has resulted in student aid resulting in record numbers of people who are educated - the system is not perfect, it has corruption by the rich, with Republicans passing policies from charging high interest to benefit lenders to not allowing the debt in bankruptcy.
But even more government in education - Bernie Sanders' plan to pay for higher education for public schools - wouldn't make the rich richer, and any waste in 'six figure administrators' is a far smaller issue than other issues.
Where government is the least - 'private schools' - is where you see the absolute worst criminally low-quality education for horribly overpriced schools - an utter scam.
As a practical matter today, right-wing ideology has become nothing but policies to implement plutocracy - with justifications and propaganda to get support for doing so and deny the purpose.
For example, right-wing propaganda includes claims such as 'trickle-down economics' and the claim that all tx cuts 'pay for themselves' - both lies that argue for these huge shifts of the rich paying trillions less in taxes that are all added to the public debt.
You say the 99% vote for it - but the wealth of the plutocrats is used to fool the 99% into voting for the opposite of what they want, as their voices are heard far more loudly than any other.
Congress has been entirely hijacked as an institution, with only a minority of its members actually serving voters rather than the plutocrats who fund them.
State legislatures have similarly been corrupted - a third of the legislation passed by some Republican legislatures is now bills handed to them to pass by ALEC, the corporate interest group.
The alternative policies to plutocracy have nothing to do with Venezuela - which is nothing but a cherry picking of a country with problems to misrepresent the issues. And Venezuela had utter and worse poverty for most of its citizens before moving left.
It's a red herring, a straw man. used to hide the problems the US has of plutocracy, of the trillions taken by the rich which are destroying the country, denying its people the prosperity they deserve and democracy.
The policies being reversed from right-wing policies would not make the country more like Venezuela; they would increase the wealth and power of the citizens of the US drastically.
Before the shift to the right, incomes in the US went up pretty proportionally. Since then, only the most wealthy have gone up, skyrocketing, while the majorities have been flat or worse. That means that all these huge increases in wealth at the top and inequality, mean the worker today earning $60,000 should be making $90,000 or more, but the rest is taken by the billionaires.
These plutocratic policies not only are redistributing wealth to the top, they're also bad for the growth of the economy - reducing opportunity, reducing efficiency, steering money away from productive use.
You DID vote for it. Do you use facebook? Do you use google? Do you use amazon? Go down the list. I bet you had a hand in making all or most of them rich. Your money, your vote.
From your missive it is clear you dont understand what liberalism is. This country has shifted FAR left over the last 50 years. The leftism is swallowing the economy. Yet in your mind it is this nebulous "right wing" this and "right wing" that. There is no "right wing" in this country. It is all a bunch of parasites feeding off government spending. A real true Right would actually cut governemnt. You dont see that. Wont see that. Therefore there is no Right and it is pointless to blame the right. Just like it is pointless to blame the rich. If there is a dead corpse in your living room, you dont get mad at the thousands of flies that are buzzing around. You get rid of the corpse. The only flaw in that analogy is that flies dont write laws to give themselves more corpses to feast on. But that is precisely why you vote to cut government, every chance you get. Government is controlled by the flies. Vote for more of it, and all you get is more maggots.
They arent "taking" anything. The bottom 99% voted for it. The bottom 99% want more and more government, and this is what they get. More government in the mortgage business = more money to the rich. More government in education = more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. More government in health care = again more and more useless administrators with 6 figure salaries. Wealth inequality voted for and by the masses. So dont give me any nonsense about right wing ideology. The bottom 99% will keep voting for more and more government, and they will keep getting screwed until they end up with Venezuela.
From your missive it is clear you dont understand what liberalism is. This country has shifted FAR left over the last 50 years. The leftism is swallowing the economy. Yet in your mind it is this nebulous "right wing" this and "right wing" that. There is no "right wing" in this country. It is all a bunch of parasites feeding off government spending. A real true Right would actually cut governemnt. You dont see that. Wont see that. Therefore there is no Right and it is pointless to blame the right. Just like it is pointless to blame the rich. If there is a dead corpse in your living room, you dont get mad at the thousands of flies that are buzzing around. You get rid of the corpse. The only flaw in that analogy is that flies dont write laws to give themselves more corpses to feast on. But that is precisely why you vote to cut government, every chance you get. Government is controlled by the flies. Vote for more of it, and all you get is more maggots.
This alone is a significant improvement over the current system, and will be even more of a improvement as automation makes it so that more people are unable to meet their bare essentials in the current system.the rest of the population being guaranteed their bare essentials
I'm thinking through this as I go, so bear with me.
You've got your 100 people and you want all of them to have enough money to at least be able to survive. You've got your one company that will necessarily have to make all the goods they need to purchase in the interest of surviving. Let's call all those goods "survival product X", which is a neat and convenient packaging of basic food, shelter, transportation, healthcare, and whatever else a person might need to "survive". Each person needs one unit of "survival product X" per month at a cost of $100 per month. So the government needs to apportion $100x12x100, or $120,000 per year to provide "universal basic income".
By definition, universal basic income is the bare minimum, so you can expect a portion of the population to not be satisfied with it. We could say that a conservative 33 people out of the 100 don't want to rely solely on it for survival, so they will reasonably want to find some way to supplement their income. That means they will have to go into business for themselves in some way form or fashion. It would seem that the government would have to allow these people to do so because, in addition to the company that makes "survival product x", it will be their income that is taxed to make up the difference between whatever taxation "the company" can bear and what the government needs to sustain the whole system. Those 33 people will have to be many times more productive than the rest to be able to bear taxation and still net an increase over the basic income that is worth the effort. Luckily, it seems apparent by our current system that a small number of individuals can indeed be productive enough to sustain a vast number of other individuals while still netting a profit.
What this isn't really doing as far as I can tell is stopping the concentration of wealth. The whole system depends completely on the ambition of a relatively small number of people driving them to create additional wealth which can then be taxed by the government to pay for the ones that have no motivation to pursue wealth. In order for it to work, those ambitious few must be rewarded for their ambition in the form of an increased income and presumably standard of living over those on basic, or you risk them ceasing to be productive due to the cost/benefit being so strongly against them. That means you have to allow them to amass wealth and turn themselves essentially into a higher economic class.
Aside from the rest of the population being guaranteed their bare essentials, I'm not seeing this as a significant improvement over the current system. It's human nature to resent those who have more than you, or who represent by some measure a "higher" class than you. People will still be dissatisfied and angry. Having your needs provided for you will seem like a boon at first, but after it has become the new baseline, no one will think of it like that anymore. They'll still look to those who have more than them and covet what they have. They'll come up with reasons why those productive few don't deserve their wealth and status, and plot to take it from them. To think it could be any other way is to turn a blind eye to how humans have behaved since time immemorial.
Maybe the only thing they want back is for everyone to be happy and healthy.someone invested the capital to create the robot company and wants something back though.
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I'm not sure the most murderous society ever to grace the world was the bastion of progress, also. It did was so unsustainable that it collapsed under it's own weight. The people did the things because they did not want to go to the gulogs for disrespecting the leaders.It's worth recalling the soviet union was the other superpower, with quite accomplished technical advancement/progress programs which are some of the most difficult work out there, yet paid everyone more or less the same. So the idea that nobody is willing to do said work without some kind of great monetary incentive is evidently false.