[valuearb]

It will be paid for in inflation.

I’m a fiscal conservative but I don’t think the inflation caused by UBI will be any worse than the inflation caused by massive deficits due to military spending and other misallocations of resources. In fact UBI might be better, given it’s spent on actual human needs rather than military hardware that is 90% useless in our present world.

But UBI is still stupid. Paying people for not working is a method of producing less, ie making us poorer. I always wonder why the dorks who go around promoting UBI always seem to ignore the earned income credit, which is our best tool to reduce poverty. Why don’t they ever march to massively increase that?

[danans]

> I’m a fiscal conservative but I don’t think the inflation caused by UBI will be any worse than the inflation caused by massive deficits due to military spending and other misallocations of resources.

It's sincerely good to see a fiscal conservative acknowledge this. That said, I'll take a contrarian position (to my own beliefs) and question whether that military hardware is really so useless.

> I always wonder why the dorks who go around promoting UBI always seem to ignore the earned income credit, which is our best tool to reduce poverty.

UBI is also intended to deal with the emerging reality of routine jobs being lost to automation, and to increase the leverage of workers who would be able to be choosier in the job they take (a good thing), thus putting upward pressure on wages at the lower end of the income scale.

When there is no job, there is no earned income to take the EITC on.

[valuearb]

Automation has always created better new jobs to replace the ones it’s eliminated for 10,000 years straight. Why would that change now?

[danans]

To re-quote the adage about the automobile replacing the horse-and-buggy - the workers today (especially those lower/ more automatable skills) are what the horses were then.

[opo]

I see this analogy quite often, but I think it isn't very useful. Horses didn't have agency - horses weren't able to apply for other work, couldn't retrain themselves, weren't able to move to somewhere where they might be employed, etc. Saying workers are like horses and are helpless to do anything to help themselves isn't accurate.

This isn't to say that all (or even most) workers will be able to adapt to losing their job to automation or what can/should be done to help them.

[danans]

> Saying workers are like horses and are helpless to do anything to help themselves isn't accurate.

Not all workers, but for many workers, this is the case. Very few coal miners have been able to retrain as software developers, despite earnest efforts on the part of some organizations in coal country.

They could try to get manual labor work in another industry, but industries to which their skills are readily transferable - like manufacturing and construction - are also automating many of the most menial of jobs. A modern factory employs far fewer workers per unit of output than those of even the recent past.

Skilling-up to the point where you have value to the new economy isn't as straightforward for many workers as it seems like it should be to many of us already in the new economy.

I'm not suggesting that they are like horses in that they will be sent to the glue factory, but lots of people in that sort of position have seen their quality of life - and that of their communities - suffer a great deal over the decades of deindustrialization.

[valuearb]

Yet median incomes continue to rise, despite the swath automation takes to “skilled” jobs every generation.

The personal computer annilated lots of “premium” calculator jobs in accounting. Yet somehow it’s created far better jobs to replace them.

It’s easy to see which jobs would go away because of automation. Yet No one has ever been able to predict the better new jobs that arise with any level of accuracy. Yet that has always happened. Why should that change now?

[bryanlarsen]

Saying UBI is causing the inflation is disingenuous. It's the deficits that cause inflation. If UBI is fully paid for with new taxes, it won't cause inflation.

[whatshisface]

I think it would be fair to say that UBI causes inflation and to also say that taxation lowers inflation.

[danans]

Any government spending (whether for UBI or missile systems) not paid for with taxes increases inflation, but there are lots of countervailing forces that mitigate it, not just taxation, the largest factor perhaps being downward wage pressure on workers.