[Unsimplified]

My problem with UBI is

1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it.

2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.

I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

This forces the bag holders to pay more. What happens when companies expenses increase? They increase their costs, cut jobs, cut benefits, and in very rare cases take short term losses to implement one of the former methods.

There are not enough high paying jobs. Period. Hard stop. There won't ever be.

Now, we need gas station attendants, room cleaners, baggers, bus drivers. These jobs will be replaced by much less expensive robots. Just like switchboard operators, seamstresses, tailors, cobblers, shoe shiners, appliance repairmen have all largely been replaced.

Pray tell, what high paying jobs will these people be given when they're put out of work? Who will pay to train them? How will they afford to live during the 2-120mos of training they'll need to get these high pain paying jobs?

UBI should be funded by a proportional tax on every product and the man hours of work it replaces. A calculator can do in 15 minutes what an average American would spend a day doing. Just as an example everyone should immediately grok. Then scale these up and require companies applying for patents, patent renewals, or business licenses to figure out how long it would take to do a job without their tool by comparing to other available alternatives. A positive net benefit of this is all the new jobs made figuring out how damn hard shit is to do without tools. Companies can then use their numbers to advertise.

Mind you, both our solutions are wholly unrealistic.

[Unsimplified]

I'm doubtful of any tax-based plan as a longterm solution. Here's why. Money needs to flow in a circle for a sustainability. But we can't force people to spend all their money monthly and even then tax is not 100% so net negative monthly shortage risk. Maybe we need a spend it or lose it basic-credit system.

About high paying jobs, suppose we pay 100$/hr for people to monitor the machines, up to a cap of 1K$/mth.

Here's one of the semi startrek-esque longterm solution that works reliably but not yet possible. Suppose basic goods productivity improves 10000X. Then a small number of people can produce the basics for everyone without any money issues involved.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Just to be clear. You're doubtful that this will work so we shouldn't try, and should continue to watch people living and dying on the streets from the comforts of the lavish accommodations?

Then you go on to propose fantastical, never gonna happen, jobs just poofing into existence at some indeterminate date in the future? Perhaps when enough people have died on the streets as to make UBI palatable over more food and housing riots? That's where we are headed if we can't start fixing these problems there will be riots.

[atq2119]

> 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.

This isn't true, since the state can always just create more money.

The real limitation is in real resources and production capacity, and if a UBI was implemented by creating more money than the existing production capacity can sustain, it would likely drive up the rate of inflation.

If the UBI is set to a fixed nominal value, this would eventually balance out, possibly resulting in a corresponding UBI real value that is insufficient for people to live on. (What level of real value is sustainable is an empirical question.)

I agree with you that creating demand for labor is a better approach if done well. Ideally, you'd create a conceptually infinite demand for labor to ensure there's no involuntary unemployment. Of course, there's then the risk of increasing the rate of inflation via that labor demand, which you can fix by fixing the price at which the labor demand becomes infinite.

That's the direction that the "employer of last resort / job guarantee" proposals go in, though those also get flack from some people for being like workfare.

[Unsimplified]

Agreed money printing solves the gross income promise. I meant real income as the problem as well.

UBI, guaranteed jobs, seems all these solutions fundamentally require sufficient money flow to work. People spending slowly (rich or poor) means low tax/biz revenue causing program failure. I think the key problem is how we can guarantee the economy to sustain X velocity of money.

[AsyncAwait]

I have my own problems with UBI, but as far as 'fair work sharing', the presumption would be that the work is done 99% by machines, where you don't need to be 'fair' & the remaining 1% could be highly compensated.

[Unsimplified]

Consider absolute numbers. Suppose monthly food expenses drop to $100. That's 2-3 hours of work for each person to eat monthly. X 330M = 1 billion hours per month. And that's just food. In practice, fair work sharing still seems critical, unless you have a better example in mind.