677
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
677 points (98.8% liked)
News
23275 readers
3497 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The conclusion is basically of course a UBI works - you give most people extra money, they'll spend it on things they need and things that are worthwhile rather than blowing it all on vices.
It's something we see time and time again, and anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is either rich or blind.
Or antisocial in the psychological sense, ie "I see it, and I'm not rich, but people suffering under me makes me feel superior, gives me the dopamine rush of schadenfreude, and I'll just go ahead and make shit up in my head about why I believe they deserve their suffering so I can just revel in how much better I'm doing guilt free."
As an American, its a tragic reality that 10s of millions of us are proud sadists. Not entirely our fault, our owners gained their fortunes by not caring about how their profiteering hurt others, ane they propagandize us to worship and deify them and their mindset of If I hurt you to benefit myself, its just business.
I’ve always felt that the push back comes from people who assume others are at the same level of means as they are. A lot of people don’t understand food insecurity, or that “you have a car” doesn’t mean the oil was changed this year.
The thing that keeps it from working is the cost. None of these experiments test the U in UBI.
Giving even a measly $10k in UBI to every US (for example) citizen of working age would cost over $2 trillion annually.
The sum of all welfare spending last year was $1 trillion. So, the common argument that cutting other programs to replace it with UBI holds no water--cutting all of it only gets you halfway to a paltry sum that's far below the poverty line, and the whole reason we're talking about UBI to begin with is because people don't feel that those programs do enough to help the impoverished.
What about military spending? The sum of all defense spending last year was $800 billion. Cutting 100% of it (which would be objectively stupid for reasons I hope wouldn't need explaining) won't get you there either.
What about taking the billionaires' wealth? The total estimated net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even if you could wave a magic wand and convert all of this "net worth" 1:1 into cash, that still funds this shitty tiny hypothetical $10k UBI for less than 3 years.
We are simply not in a state where true UBI is even close to financially viable.
so, basically, according to your example, we could take yearly welfare spending, assuming it's 1 trillion. Every year, delete an entire section of bureacratic bullshit, and then everyone would get 5 grand annually.
Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
Now to be fair, that is all of welfare, so not exactly ideal, but still. It's a pretty manageable concept in that regard.
If you remove every welfare program that exists, sure. But that's not good--remember that UBI goes to everyone, while welfare program dollars go based on need. So it stands to reason that the average person who gets some sort(s) of welfare now, will end up able to buy less care with that $5000 annually, than they're getting now.