Hawaii the first US state that to officially evaluate basic income
This is disturbing, government addressing a fundamental change in economic structure through "Basic Income". Since government doesn't make any money, but takes it from everyone, isn't that really "redistribution of wealth"? I would suggest training for real jobs, real skills, something that produces value would be better, but then Hawaii would have to fundamentally change and become a producer vice a vacation colony....
Yeh bullshit....giving away freebees is not "Brave" it is pandering to the mob and will absolutely get you re-elected. This is like these Hollywood elites mouthing off about conservative politicians and acting like they are brave somehow...they aren't. There...up til Trump...has never been blowback.
On a flip side, we probably damn near do this already between Social Security, Gov Retirement, Unemployment, welfare, food stamps, incarceration, Medicaid, CHIP, WIC, heating assistance, Section 8 housing, and Disability payments.
I just want to throw up at the idea of it. Nothing would take more incentive out of work, or decline civilization faster, than something this stupid.
My only tepid support would come from - throw away all the other public subsidies, if this looks cheaper, fine. But no stacking or combining and a requirement for "public work", education, etc.. not just sitting on one's ass and exercising that medical 420-card all day.
I'm saying that if someone is getting SS, they don't get a "universal basic income" on top of that, and statistics showing the 50% that don't pay much or any income taxes are usually including a large chunk of Social Security recipients.
Hawaii probably feels 'enabled' to do something like this, by just soaking the mainland real estate owners that have properties in Hawaii by cranking up the property taxes higher, taxes on tourism, and sales tax.
We spent about a week in Waikiki last fall, I have to admit, I wasn't really that impressed. The first night we paid around $90 for a very mediocre meal by our normal standards, only edible because we were hungry. And I don't think we really ever had a memorable meal there - if anything, it was some awesome fresh pineapple while cruising the north end of the island in a Mustang convertible I rented. Compared to our RV vacations in Idaho / Utah / Arizona / New Mexico / Colorado - it was a total let-down.
I felt like a human ATM machine while riding on Hawaiian Airlines.
All insurance works only because more pay in than is paid out.
"...showing the 50% that don't pay much or any income taxes are usually including a large chunk of Social Security recipients."
They don't pay much or any because they are retired and, under current tax code, do not have the type of income that is subject to taxes. And, in many cases, the $$ they receive in retirement was taxed before it was squirreled away. BT
Personally, I'm retiring in 6 years at 55, I'll need to rely on our savings and my wife's (civil engineer) pension for 4 1/2 years before I can use my 401k investments, and then about 6 years after that before we qualify for social security, basically, drain out our business' assets as well slowly.
I intend to use the system too, I'm just pointing out that as a population, we do already do this quite a bit (UBI). I don't agree with it, but I would be surprised if it really costs much more than what we currently do if you total up all the social programs and safety nets.
I really 'used' the system in my career, I'm no different and not calling the kettle black. I've been a single-person corporation for a long time using the Solo 401k program, which allows $54,000 (tax free) invested a year into a 401k instead of the $18,000 limit the masses have to live within. My wife was a gov employee, we lived on her benefits & medical and instead of buying that stuff for myself, I threw all of the company's profits beyond my salary into my 401k - anything left, pay the fed tax on and keep it in the business accounts to slowly pay me a smaller salary in retirement with - albeit living in a state then with no income tax.
It was at one time more difficult to find steady employment willing to deal with a corp-to-corp situation instead of an "employee", but ObamaCare fixed that pretty readily for me - getting an executive without having to pay a ton in healthcare, minimum sick leave time, and the pile of PTO that I demand for my big game hunting & travel - worked out great for them.
It’s like a lot of things, it just has to get worse before it can gets better, we have to experience it in order to see how the results will affect us individually and/or as a country. Most people still think only about their personal results on all these issues (remember the draft dodgers?). It’s just too bad that we can’t divide the United States into two different entities for a while that the people could choose to participate in. Perhaps a Left Coast and a Right Coast, divided by the Mississippi. Once you make your choice you are committed for at least a decade so it can sink into your thick skull. Somehow liberals experience this but somehow turn it all around later and just blame it on those that were against it in the first place. Then they forget and just do it all over again. Most have no clue and just don’t want to discuss it. Who is more dangerous to this country, ISIS or our liberals? At least ISIS is willing to admit they want to wipe us off the face of the earth.
There are signs that the Communist party might be considering instigating external conflict in an effort to deflect internal struggle and build a sense of unity. Recent out of the blue clashes between Chinese and Indian border guards could be a sign of testing the waters for a larger engagement there. Vietnam is another likely target, but may be seen as too small to be an existential threat that would inspire patriotism. A conflict with Russia or The United States is seen as suicide, and so less likely.
A destructive internal conflict in China will not be positive for anyone, since a global consumer market has become dependent on a vast array of Chinese goods. Switching to new suppliers will take time, and could cause the collapse of some major tech companies.
I guess Hawaiians cannot see beyond their tourist's money.
They never learned:
In the land of the sunburn, the man with lotion is king.
Actually, it kinda frightens me how easily people enslave themselves and then look around and wonder how things got so bad.
I can’t see how something like this could actually working on the state level, almost all states budgets are an epic horror story where everyone dies in the end. Hawaii can’t print its own money so they have to take it from someone else, show me a Peter willing to be robed to pay Paul? Peter will ether leave or become another Paul. Pauls from other states will just show up and become new Pauls accepting the entitlements for the people of Hawaii.
The type of automation in information technology is quickly coming to the real world and it can’t be stopped. This will be a disruptive force where the clear majority of the effective employees’ ether can’t or won’t retrain to compete for the few jobs that build and maintain the automation. When your 53K dollar a year job can be replaced with a 100k dollar capital expense that will last 10+ years, you won’t stand much of a chance and neither will the business if it doesn’t replace you with a better model. Negates the benefits for healthcare, vacation, disability insurance and general shit head not showing up for work. No breaks, no vacations no sick leave and as long as its reliable, it’s a win for the business.
The alternative to the UBI is to require that productive concerns hire people at uneconomic rates. Make it illegal to use automated production equipment and hire people instead.
These are counter intuitive to Objectivism…
And they will be far less expensive to employ than people. They will even repair themselves.
The answer to this problem has always been, "new jobs have always emerged". But that's an observation about relatively limited automation, not a law of nature.
What solution do you have to this?
Our morality that you must work to eat is based on the truth that it takes the labor of people to make the food and thus you must do your share. But when that isn't true, what is the basis for insisting that people work when there is no labor that they can do at a lower cost than a machine?
The other thing I wonder is "Who owns the labor of the robots?" Clearly if I build a robot, I own its labor. If it builds another robot, I'm pretty confident that I still own its labor. And if it builds one and it builds one and ... at some point does my labor in building the first one become so diluted as to be insignificant?
Since I make my living writing code, I'm quite a bit distant from "natural law". It amuses me to contemplate that somewhere in the midwest there is someone feeding a cow so that I can have a hamburger in exchange for writing a few lines of c code.
And, to answer some of your other comments, it would lead to a stratification of humanity where some were productive and the others were not -- unless the robots manage to replace even the most human of our tasks and then no one would be productive.
Of course, there would probably be sports. We still watch football even though it would be easy to build a machine that you could give the ball to and no one could stop. There is also the robot wars sport for those who want to go that path.
Why sterilize people? What will the robot factories do if there is no one for their goods? And population is already going to peak and start to decline.
When I say, “natural law”, I’m not talking about cows but the natural law of property rights and capitalism. If I own twenty machines making and assembling widget A, I’ve expended money and or effort to produce widget A. What is my driving desire to produce widget A when free money if thrown around and has no value? If Customer B comes along and has money that he personally didn’t expend money or effort in producing, this money is worthless to him as he’ll just get more next week. Capitalism cease to exist; the system breaks down and prices inflate.
Someone will always have to design/produce/maintain, even if machines are built to do this. New features must be bootstrapped.
To my mind, the key skill is cleaning a hotel room. It requires interacting with unknown situations and dealing with a wide variety of different items in non-standard positions. Once robots can do that then a lot of the routine jobs will be theirs.
I actually think robots are the only way we are going to be able to care for an aging population (The Japanese think so too). With nursing home care going in excess of 75K a year, the budget to pay for a device which can provide care in your home for another few years is high.
So yea, there's plenty of money for this program. Our state legislature is a disgrace.
Aloha
1. Cash payments are easier to shut off than an agency. The agency has its employees lobbying to keep their job. It often builds things rather than buying them, e.g. the VA, to shut it down you have decrease employees and sell/privatize assets.
2. Hawaii can be a "test laboratory" for this idea, as the founders intended the states and local gov'ts to be. It's a smaller state by population, so fewer people are subjected to this experiment. It's remote, so the results will be less skewed by people moving there just to get the benefits.
3. It's a naked form of the government taking your money and handing to the poor. If gov't buys healthcare, for example, we can talk about "this nation's healthcare system", without saying aloud whether you're talking about the market of providers and customers, the regulations, or the subsidies. Direct cash payments make it harder to hide what's happening.
4. The poor may in some cases be surprising more resourceful than a social worker at spending the money. The social worker might be better at keeping people from blowing it all on alcohol and other drugs, but a few broke people will get that money with no strings attached and do something great with it that would not be allowed by maternalistic gov't programs.
And if Hawaii sinks or turns over from too many people moving over there to take advantage of this new freestuff (a new word), we might even get another political consequence more aggressive than Trump after his second term.
Also, it would stifle the heck out of any effort to get people to take responsibility for their lives and do what they need to do toimprove and climb the ladder, why would anyone ever want to go to school when all they have to do is draw this money and hang out at the beach. Mobs of people on the beach, reduced tourism, reduced money, need to raise taxes and fees to keep the game going...What happens if you actually DO work and earn say, 100K a year, do you NOT get the feebie? If so, why? This will be a royal mess, straight out of several Sci Fi novels I have read....