Politics Thread!

[adam]

yes - i described their current system, i thought a basic income already existed in a scandinavian country though can't see anything on that page, i read something online about it, apparently a lot of people don't bother collecting it

[pogo]

I'm not as persuaded a basic income as I once was, but I wish some country would give it a try to see its effects. I imagine the main problem is the one already identified: it will create a dis-incentive to work. If time spent with your kids, or caring for your parents is more valuable than earning some more then many people might drop out of the labour force. Also evasion might rise and be harder to deal with. Right now the need to earn a living wage makes it hard to do so outside the tax system. If you're employed full time, or working full time self employed, the taxman should catch up with you eventually. But if you're only doing a few hours work to top up a basic income it might be much harder.

The biggest objection though is the one that comes with any large tax change. There are bound to be many winners and losers, and the losers kick up much more of a fuss. No matter that it's better, fairer, more efficient, the newspapers will find a few worthy people who lose out and present them as typical. They might not even lose out, but may object on principal or because they dislike the new procedures. Especially if the change is contentious and so can be presented as partisan and ideological.

[Darkflame]

Exactly, it would be wonderful to be tried as a data-point for other countries.
Its mostly just speculation until someone does it.

I must admit I am mostly persuaded by the idea. It does hinge on the number of people that would just decide not to work at all. But my (complete guess) is that wont be that many. I think minimum living and doing nothing will just be too dull for most.
My attraction to it is mostly down to it being so much more simple. Less to exploit, once settled it should be more predictable, and presumably far less effort to administer.

Hard to see what all the effects would be though.
You might shift the labor force around a bit though - people might quit jobs that simply don't like. But in other cases, people holding down two jobs in order to live might take one instead....thus freeing up a job for others.
Certainly employers couldn't exploit anyone anymore, as people always have a fall back position. Will this cause wages to rise?

Longterm effects might be even stranger; If fast food places have to pay higher wages, that raises the cost of their product. That would raise the prices of food that, at the moment, involve relatively cheap labor?
Other things might just leave the country completely and be produced elsewhere.
Although things which people go into for reasons other then money (medicine? research?) might see a rise as people would be more free to educate themselves.

They might not even lose out, but may object on principal or because they dislike the new procedures. Especially if the change is contentious and so can be presented as partisan and ideological.

Obviously, one sided, but I liked this post I found on Tumblr;

"BUT WHERE WILL THE GOVERNMENT GET THE MONEY?" screamed Joe Schmoe, slamming a meaty fist onto the table and getting mouth-froth all over the front of his greying tank top. "You libt*rds all think money grows on TREES!! HAHA!"

"But where will people get the incentive to work?!" Mindy Bindy cried, flapping her hands in front of her face. She’d had a fear of the unemployed lollygagging about ever since she was a child and her mother told her to be afraid of the unemployed lollygagging about. "You think people should get paid for nothing? I work hard for my money!”

"But who will serve me?" grumbled Marty McMoneybags. "Who will make me feel important? Who will do my laundry and cook my food and stand in front of me wearing a plastic smile while I take out all my stress—because I do have a lot of stress, you know, being this rich is stressful—on them?” He paused and straightened out the piles of hundred dollar bills on the desk in front of him, then raised his two watery, outraged eyes up to the Heavens. “Lord, if there are no poor people, how will I know that I’m rich??”

From the very pro thread here;
http://bolchysword.tumblr.com/post/9223 ... missmayhem

[pogo]

Longterm effects might be even stranger; If fast food places have to pay higher wages, that raises the cost of their product. That would raise the prices of food that, at the moment, involve relatively cheap labor?

I don't see it working like that. The minimum wage, and the higher living wage, is meant to ensure that everyone working gets enough to live on. If the basic income does that then there's no need for a minimum wage. And in practice at least some people will take advantage of this to work for less; to maybe take a job/work self employed and not be as concerned how much they're paid.

This is potentially very positive. Right now a lot of people don't work that could because they can't earn enough to improve on benefits. Others don't work as the jobs don't exist due to the minimum wage. Before I get jumped on I think this is a small effect. There are e.g. maybe a few jobs which might exist if people could be paid £5 instead of the minimum. The point is with a basic income and no benefits to be withdrawn a job that pays just £4, or £2, still leaves you better off, so many more jobs might be created than if the minimum wage were abolished.

So maybe wages and prices will fall, as more people work for less. Maybe not: maybe firms will have to raise wages to tempt people who don't have to work. Or maybe they'll just have to be more flexible, offering varying hours so people can earn a bit to top up their basic income when they want, not the usual 9-5:30, 37.5 hour week thats designed to fit the maximum hours into five days.

[(o)(o)]

Well, just emphasising my point that before privatisation BT sucked.

Competition came waaay after privatisation.

The regulator came before any competition and the regulator fixed problems.

Privatisation is not the panacea you claim it is. There's tons of hate for BT Openreach, and there ton's of hate for most privatised serial-infrastructure utility companies today, the vast majority of which have Ayn Randian, self-serving qualities.

The Chicago school brand of economics upon which the whole cack-pile is based involves :

1. gross oversight
2. oversimplification
3. theorisation over observation

Nor is it dynamic. It delivers simplistic answers to complex situations. "Markets will look after themselves.". "Privatisation is great, mmmkay."

Watch some old Friedman interviews. Margaret Thatcher pretty much based her entire understanding of free market economics on the inner workings of a corner shop.

Well now we're paying for it, literally.

[Harlequin]

probably explains why the UK hasn't performed that well against other countries

"For this reason we consider it more appropriate to compare the UK’s broadband network with those in other major European economies than with those in all EU28 countries."

Which makes sense. It's vastly cheaper per household to provide universal broadband to a densely populated country like Holland, Denmark. OFCOM is the independent regulator, not someone out to make a political point.

Denmark is less densely populated than the U.K. Indeed, almost every European country is less dense aside from Malta, the Netherlands (including Holland) and Belgium. Should it not therefore be "vastly cheaper per household to provide universal broadband" to this country than to any of those to which we were compared (especially France and Spain, with less than half our density)?

e - AFAICR, modem prices only started dipping below $1/bit/sec (exchange $ for £ and multiply by 1.5 for the UK market) at the end of the '80s

That surely cannot be right. I am almost certain the Demon modem I bought in the mid-eighties, doing at least 2400 baud, cost me less than £200.

[JQW]

Again you need a long memory but with BT pre-privatisation you had not only one telephony provider, everyone paid the same, but everyone had the same telephone. The latter was particularly ridiculous. There was no technical reason why other form factors and designs wouldn't work, and you could see them inside firms. But you only got one sort from BT which was hard-wired into the wall. It came in different colours but that was about it.

Bobbins! There actually was a choice of phones, it's just that the standard GPO model was the cheapest one to rent. Another option was the classic Trimphone design, initially introduced sometime during the mid 1960s. There were also options to rent push button phones, phones with extra buttons for home exchanges, and so on. Any phone directory from that era had pictures in the back of the relevant models - I even recall a system that used magnetic cards to store favourite numbers.

The approval system mattered too, as back then all systems used pulse-code dialling, where the time between pulses was important. Even when the GPO released their first push-button phone they initially restricted them to just one exchange, simply to ensure that engineers were on hand to monitor them.

[Darkflame]

Longterm effects might be even stranger; If fast food places have to pay higher wages, that raises the cost of their product. That would raise the prices of food that, at the moment, involve relatively cheap labor?

I don't see it working like that. The minimum wage, and the higher living wage, is meant to ensure that everyone working gets enough to live on. If the basic income does that then there's no need for a minimum wage. And in practice at least some people will take advantage of this to work for less; to maybe take a job/work self employed and not be as concerned how much they're paid.

This is potentially very positive. Right now a lot of people don't work that could because they can't earn enough to improve on benefits. Others don't work as the jobs don't exist due to the minimum wage. Before I get jumped on I think this is a small effect. There are e.g. maybe a few jobs which might exist if people could be paid £5 instead of the minimum. The point is with a basic income and no benefits to be withdrawn a job that pays just £4, or £2, still leaves you better off, so many more jobs might be created than if the minimum wage were abolished.

So maybe wages and prices will fall, as more people work for less. Maybe not: maybe firms will have to raise wages to tempt people who don't have to work. Or maybe they'll just have to be more flexible, offering varying hours so people can earn a bit to top up their basic income when they want, not the usual 9-5:30, 37.5 hour week thats designed to fit the maximum hours into five days.

*shrug*
I was just thinking pretty much no one, or no adult at least, would want to work in a fast food joint if they didn't have too.

What you say makes sense in that theres always going to be an advantage to working - theres no "benefits or work" debate that (might) factor into equations elsewhere.
I am just not at all sure all job places would be filled if people wernt desperate enough to need them. I worked in Subway purely to pay for my rent and food though college. I don't think I would have done that if I had a choice.
(Subway, to be fair, being infinitely better then some other fast food places I briefly worked in)

[Dio]

I was just thinking pretty much no one, or no adult at least, would want to work in a fast food joint if they didn't have too.

When the boss of Dominos was complaining on R5 that without immigration he'd never be able to find staff in London, one of the other panellists (can't remember if it was an MP or a journalist) made the very reasonable point that if he paid a decent wage then he might find it easier.

[pogo]

I was just thinking pretty much no one, or no adult at least, would want to work in a fast food joint if they didn't have too.

On the other hand the fantasy of many adults (i.e. those old enough to have gotten over their dream of being an astronaut) is to quit whatever their current job is and run a restaurant or pub. Not all of these dreams are realistic - people see the relaxed environment, nice food/drink, genial staff; not the long hours, hard work, fragile finances – but it can be a vocation. It's other things, like cleaning, working in a warehouse or call centre that might be impacted more.

Then again there might be no such negative effects. One of the main touted benefit of a basic income is it removes disincentives to work. No longer is a low paid job unrewarding because after expenses and loss of benefits you are little better off. Now you get to keep most of what you earn, less 20% tax say. So all jobs will become more financially rewarding, low paid ones especially so.

[(o)(o)]

The point is with a basic income and no benefits to be withdrawn a job that pays just £4, or £2, still leaves you better off, so many more jobs might be created than if the minimum wage were abolished.

Benefits should be withdrawn.

Otherwise you're just subsidising businesses with taxpayers money!

[(o)(o)]

BTW it should also be noted Basic Income is a monetarist policy advocated by such dum-dums as Milton Friedman.

I was just thinking pretty much no one, or no adult at least, would want to work in a fast food joint if they didn't have too.

When the boss of Dominos was complaining on R5 that without immigration he'd never be able to find staff in London, one of the other panellists (can't remember if it was an MP or a journalist) made the very reasonable point that if he paid a decent wage then he might find it easier.

I think the boss of Iceland said something similar.

But in the press the 'reasonable point' is drowned out.

[pogo]

[Benefits should be withdrawn.

Otherwise you're just subsidising businesses with taxpayers money!

Of course. Benefits should go to those who need them, which means those without the means to support themselves.

The problem is though it introduces perverse incentives. If benefits are withdrawn 1:1 as you earn, so every £1 you earn you lose £1 of benefits, then it can be a great disincentive to work. Once you take into account the costs of working you can actually be worse off. It's only worth working if you can earn more than your benefits, which can rule out e.g. many part time jobs.

You can make it progressive, so you lose 50p in benefits for every £1 earned. But this is little better: it's in effect a 50% tax rate on everything you earn, up to 2x your benefits so the effect goes on much longer. It makes things very complex for low earners who end up with an initial 50% rate, then 0%, until the base rate kicks in at the personal allowance limit.

This is the biggest attraction of basic income. You give everyone an income that's enough to live on. So no more means-tested benefits. No more complicated calculations on how to treat income while you're on benefits.

Also no more personal allowance as all additional income is taxed, at the same rate except for the highest earners. So every £1 you earn you pay 20p, say. Far simpler and fairer than the current complex system. In particular there are no disincentives to work built in because of benefit withdrawals.

[Governmentyard]

Came across many people who had decided it 'wasn't worth it' to go to work because they'd be no better off than if they claimed dole, when I was working in the employment initiative field in South Wales. Sometimes mentioned two points to them...

1: If working people took the same attitude we could all go home at lunchtime on Friday if we agreed to stop paying for people to sit on the dole.

2: Being in work for 'the same money' as being on the dole (it's never really that simple) allows you to get experience and training and opens promotion opportunities. From the long-term dole you'll probably only ever get an entry level job, from an entry level job you've got a myriad further options. To say it's not worth it is to say that if you were in a job, you'd never get a better one - and that's a reflection on your opinion of yourself, not on the employment market because people demonstrably do get better jobs all the time.

Broadly speaking though, people prefer to be in work. No stats but that's my abiding experience in a workless part of the UK.

[Darkflame]

to say that if you were in a job, you'd never get a better one - and that's a reflection on your opinion of yourself, not on the employment market because people demonstrably do get better jobs all the time.

hmz..not sure that logic follows, however, as it doesn't take into account the odds, or the perceived odds anyway.

ie.
Just because you can win the lottery - and its demonstrably that people do all the time - does not mean buying that lottery ticket is a good investment.

If you perceive the job market as being extremely unlikely to be able to move upwards in, reducing your chances to zero by "not buying a ticket" might not seem much of a lose.

I think people need to see movement around them from friends or family, else they are going too see it all as hopeless.

Not sure what can be done to encourage that though, nor if a basic income would help that situation. You need some way to form more higher job positions.