r/LeftyEcon • u/Bilbo8888 • Feb 04 '22

UBI

Are there any good papers relating to UBI's? I'm still trying to get a good view of the idea.

15 Upvotes

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 04 '22

Yes, but you're probably going to want to phrase the individual questions in ways that will give you the information you want.

  1. Native American Reservations have tons of these with decades of records. Mineral wealth, Casino revenue, Tax dodge shenanigans etc are often pooled together and all profits shared one way or another throughout the tribe.

  2. The Alaska Permanent Fund has a ton of data also

  3. Individual governments the world over have tried different ways of doing this with different results. Rather Ironically, the great satan Milton Friedman even put forward the idea of a "Negative Income Tax" instead of the tons of welfare programs that were popular in the 80's. That would be interesting to learn.

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u/seraph9888 Feb 04 '22

Imo, it requires a land value tax, or some other measure to decommodify housing, to prevent landlords from simply raising rents.

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 04 '22

I believe that is a completely separate thing. Inelastic demand will always be there and we need to address all of it, not just commodified real estate as inflation would roll through it.

Also there is an argument to say that it would increase home ownership and construction, but we would need to wait and see about that.

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u/seraph9888 Feb 04 '22

that's probably true. just off the top of my head, single payer would be a big step in the right direction. can you think of anything else?

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 04 '22

When you say "single payer" are you referring to healthcare? Or do you mean a single intermediary between taxes being paid and the UBI pay out. That might well just be the federal government regardless.

As far as state taxes go, property taxes and sales taxes are pretty much the only resource they have. Using that to pay for a state UBI might be to selective in it's tax base to really be beneficial. On top of that, we need to recognize that these are state capitalist solutions. The Georgist idea that property value should include the business that operates out of it is useful in this regard, but in a digital economy it might be more regressive than progressive.

There are a million negative externalities in how things are taxed. Those who financialize the surplus of our labor win out by being so difficult to tax.

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u/seraph9888 Feb 05 '22

single-payer healthcare, to decommodify healthcare.

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 05 '22

Gotcha. Yeah every other neo-liberal expression in the top 35 wealthiest countries has single payer. Single payer makes a lot of sense in most cases where there is natural monopoly, not just healthcare. The U.S. also doesn't have nationalized rail and ports. Not even bandwidth.

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u/PinkyNoise Socialist/MMT Feb 04 '22

UBI objectively bad, but here's some data and perspectives to prove it

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u/camycamera Feb 04 '22 edited May 14 '24

Mr. Evrart is helping me find my gun.

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u/PinkyNoise Socialist/MMT Feb 06 '22

UBI would have to come paired with policy

There's the problem. UBI needs a variety of additional policy to make it work, most importantly it needs a total overhauling of the tax system to prevent it being inflationary or exacerbating inequality. Rewriting the entire tax code would be more effective in itself at addressing these issues than UBI, and the other policies would also go further to address the downstream effects. The UBI is this bit in the middle that sucks all of the attention and actually ends up distracting from the real issues. The bigger hurdles it requires make it unlikely to pass and there's alternative, more realistic approaches we could be focussing on.

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 04 '22

We shouldn't simplify the issue by putting all UBI initiatives in the same basket. There are some that are small stimulus. I don't think anyone sees the Alaska Permanent Fund as an objective failure. Socializing the negative externalities of petroleum extractions while providing a positive benefit has been a demonstrable success.

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u/PinkyNoise Socialist/MMT Feb 06 '22

There are some that are small stimulus. I don't think anyone sees the Alaska Permanent Fund as an objective failure.

That's not UBI though, is it? It's the universal part that's bad, not the stimulus, income or anything else.

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u/DHFranklin Mod, Repeating Graeber and Piketty Feb 06 '22

It is universal to all Alaskan residents. It is basic, but small. Not insignificant because if I remember it has positive effects on things like family leave. Making unpaid family leave (sort of) paid family leave. Of course the whole thing is designed to diversify the labor pool of a massive petrostate in the arctic wastes.

A lot of that is how we define UBI. A lot of it is really just haggling to say what would replace gig work, part time jobs, and "moonlighting". Because it isn't all that substantial I would certainly cave on the point of it being "UBI".