Tag Archives: ubi

UBI Continues To Be Wildly Unpopular

by IngeKWKdxrhvg Posted on June 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The concept of an Unconditional Basic Income has become a hot topic on the interwebs. Conservative Charles Murray started things up in 2006 with the publication of In Our Hands, which created a brief stir and then sank into oblivion because (surprise!) conservatives were distinctly uninterested in cutting unconditional checks to lazy welfare bums.

Then it came out of hibernation a few months ago for reasons that escape me. At the time, I vaguely figured that much of the credit belonged to Vox’s Dylan Matthews for his tireless advocacy of a UBI. It also, of course, had something to do with the explosion of Bernie mania. Bernie doesn’t actually support a UBI, but he’s said that it’s “something that must be explored” and it pretty plainly fits into his general worldview. Nonetheless, after another 15 minutes of fame, it went into hibernation again. But it refused to die, emerging from its lair yet again a few weeks ago. Considering the fact that a UBI has less chance of being enacted than a law guaranteeing everyone a pet unicorn, this is a little odd. What’s going on?

I’m still not sure, but much of it was probably due to an upcoming UBI referendum in Switzerland, engineered by the lefty Swiss community a couple of years ago. Today, after months of anticipation, they finally voted on it—and the results weren’t pretty. Even in the heart of social democratic Europe, the mere concept of a UBI1 ended up with only 23 percent approval. It’s still in pet unicorn territory.

But eventually it will become reality. We just have to wait for the robot revolution to evolve to the point where lots of middle-class white people are permanently put out of work. Then it swiftly will go from pet unicorn to “duh.” I imagine this transformation will take a surprisingly short time and will happen sometime around 2030 or so.

1Despite endless headlines suggesting the Swiss were voting on payouts of $2,500 per month, the actual text of the initiative directs the Swiss parliament only to enact a UBI that “shall enable the whole population to live in human dignity and participate in public life.” The actual level and financing of the UBI are not specified.

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UBI Continues To Be Wildly Unpopular

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Is It Finally Time For a UBI?

by Leesa78508779713 Posted on April 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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UBI is having a moment. Not a big moment, mind you, but a moment nonetheless. Why?

UBI stands for Universal Basic Income, and it’s just what it sounds like. It guarantees everyone, rich and poor alike, a certain minimum cash income and replaces the alphabet soup of current welfare programs. No more food stamps. No more Section 8. No more unemployment compensation.

On the right, UBI got a boost a few years ago from Charles Murray, who championed the idea in his book In Our Hands: A Plan To Replace The Welfare State. On the left, the rise of Bernie Sanders has given it a bit of new momentum, even though it’s not part of Bernie’s campaign platform. It’s also gotten some attention thanks to planned experiments in Finland and the Netherlands, and a referendum for a national UBI in Switzerland this summer. On his Freakonomics podcast last week, Stephen Dubner suggests it’s “an idea whose time finally may have come.”

So what are the pros and cons? Here’s a quick, extremely non-exhaustive rundown.

THE GOOD

#1: A UBI eliminates bad work incentives.

There’s a problem inherent with all means-tested welfare benefits: they phase out as you make more money. Suppose you make $15,000 per year, and above that point you lose 50 cents of welfare benefits for every dollar you earn. This means that working more hours or taking a more challenging job doesn’t pay much. On net, a raise of $5,000 per year only gets you $2,500 of actual compensation. This reduces the incentive to work harder in order to escape poverty. But a UBI is different: Since you continue to receive a UBI no matter what your income, it has no effect on work incentives.

#2: A UBI reduces admin costs.

Means-tested programs all have to be administered, and that costs money. A UBI reclaims nearly all of that. The government just sends out a monthly check to every citizen, and that’s it. Admin costs are minuscule.

#3: A UBI allows the poor to live freer lives.

Poor people no longer have to endure a demanding gauntlet of welfare offices and complicated forms. They don’t have to prove their income is low, or that they have kids, or that they’re actively looking for work. Nor do they have to accept only the specific forms of welfare the government feels like giving them. They just get a check every month, and they can spend it as they please.

THE BAD

#1: It costs a fortune.

A reasonable UBI would probably amount to about $10,000 per year, which works out to a total cost of $3.2 trillion. Of course, we’d also eliminate lots of welfare payments, so the net cost would be less than that. But even accounting for that, it would probably require the federal income tax to be doubled or tripled. That’s a pretty tough sell.

#2: It can’t replace everything.

You can—barely—live on $10,000 per year. But that won’t pay for health care. It won’t pay for public schools for our kids. We’ll still have to keep some welfare programs around even with a UBI. On the plus side, as long as these programs are universal, they generally retain the benefits of a UBI: low admin costs and no bad work incentives.

#3: What about children?

This is tricky. Option A is to simply include them like everyone else. But this provides a substantial incentive to have children in order to get their UBI, and that’s not something most voters are likely to accept. Option B is to give children a smaller UBI than adults. But would that be enough to provide for them properly? Nobody wants kids to suffer because their parents are poor. How do you ensure that?

#4: What about the elderly?

Should retirees be folded into the UBI? If so, their pensions would be quite a bit lower than they are now. If not, we’d basically be guaranteeing a higher UBI for old people than for young people. Would that seem fair to most people?

#5: Money is a sadly vulnerable commodity.

It’s an unfortunate but painful truth that poor people are often vulnerable to having cash taken away from them. It can be stolen, of course, but more likely it’s simply confiscated by someone they’re living with. This is obviously a problem with earnings of all kinds, but one advantage of existing welfare programs is that it provides a minimum floor to this. A drunk and abusive husband can’t take away your Section 8 voucher or your food stamps or your Medicaid in order to blow it on beer and smokes.

This is just the briefest outline. And it may be that in the near future we no longer have much choice about this anyway. As robots take away more and more jobs, a UBI may be the only realistic answer to a nation full of robots that can replace low-skill workers at almost no cost. If we get to a point where a substantial number of people flatly don’t have the skills to perform any job for any wage, what are we going to do? The most likely answer is that we’ll end up with a UBI whether we like it or not. And that makes it worth thinking about right now.

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Is It Finally Time For a UBI?

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Does My Mother Deserve Reparations For Raising Me?

by DemetriusBeike Posted on January 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the New York Times today, Judith Shulevitz makes an argument in favor of a Universal Basic Income. She puckishly frames this as “reparations” for the work that stay-at-home mothers do without compensation—work necessary to keep the human race going and which the rest of us free-ride on. But if that’s the case, why propose a UBI for everyone, even men and childless women? Here’s the answer:

Politically, the U.B.I. looks a lot more plausible than a subsidy aimed only at mothers, because, as Social Security and Medicare make clear, policies have more staying power when perceived as general entitlements rather than free cash for free riders.

Hmmm. Politically I’d say it’s a nonstarter no matter how it’s framed. But Shulevitz’s essay prompts me to write about something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. She is, of course, echoing a sentiment so widespread on the left that it has its own catch phrase: “programs for the poor are poor programs.” As Shulevitz says, the idea here is that means-tested benefits are unpopular and constantly under attack. Conversely, universal programs like Social Security and Medicare are beloved and politically invulnerable.

But is this really true? I think it fails on two counts. First, although means-tested benefits (EITC, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) are, indeed, often under attack from conservatives, they’ve nevertheless increased rather smartly over the past few decades. The chart on the right, from Brookings, shows the growth of means-tested benefits since 1980. It comes from Ron Haskins, a conservative, but it pretty closely matches a more recent analysis from the CBO. Adjusted for inflation, means-tested benefits over the past 30 years have increased steadily; have never decreased; and even before the Great Recession were more than 4x higher than in 1980. And this chart accounts only for the ten biggest federal programs. If you add in the rest, and then include state and local programs, total spending is about 50 percent higher.

So in terms of spending, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that means-tested programs are disastrous for either participants or for the liberal project more generally. The public may or may not be thrilled about safety-net programs, but one way or another they seem to tolerate assistance to the poor pretty well.

Second—well, we don’t really need a second way the familiar aphorism fails, do we? If means-tested programs do, in fact, have plenty of staying power, then there’s no need to support a UBI if your real intent is to pay stay-at-home parents. We should just pay the stay-at-home parents. But here’s the second point anyway: just as it’s not really true that spending on the poor is precarious, it’s not clear that universal programs are all that beloved. The two usual example of this are Social Security and Medicare, which share three characteristics:

  1. They are universal.
  2. They are aimed at the elderly.
  3. They are perceived as benefits that retired people have paid for during their working lives.

I’d argue that the first is irrelevant. It’s #2 and #3 that make these programs beloved and politically untouchable.1 Is there a way to test this? Is there a universal benefit that’s not aimed at the elderly and not perceived as paid for? Not really. There are tax credits that fall into this category, like the mortgage interest deduction, but I can’t think of any actual cash payouts that do. The closest, I suppose, is unemployment insurance, which is semi-universal. But is it beloved? Is it politically invulnerable? Based on events of the past few years, I’d say it’s at least as vulnerable as other safety net programs. Maybe more so.

Bottom line: it’s time to retire the ancient shibboleth about programs for the poor being poor programs. It doesn’t really seem to be the case. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of good arguments for a UBI. There are. I don’t really buy them at the moment, but I probably will in the future when the robots take over.2 In the meantime, if you say something like this:

The feminist argument for a U.B.I. is that it’s a way to reimburse mothers and other caregivers for the heavy lifting they now do free of charge. Roughly one-fifth of Americans have children 18 or under. Many also attend to ill or elderly relatives. They perform these labors out of love or a sense of duty, but still, at some point during the diaper-changing or bedpan cleaning, they have to wonder why their efforts aren’t seen as “work.” They may even ask why they have to pay for the privilege of doing it, by cutting back on their hours or quitting jobs to stay home.

….Society is getting a free ride on women’s unrewarded contributions to the perpetuation of the human race….I say it’s time for something like reparations.

Then you just need to make the case for reparations. Proposing a UBI instead won’t do any good and will just make the price tag higher.

1Though it’s worth noting that for all their alleged untouchability, Republicans sure do spend a lot of time trying to suggest ways to pare them down.

2No, I’m not joking.

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Does My Mother Deserve Reparations For Raising Me?

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