US economic decline

[kallend 2,117]

10 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

I'm going to need a bit of reprogramming before I'll be willing to believe that people who are given all they need to survive will work out of the goodness of their hearts or to benefit the greater good.

Did you ever see this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Sex_Olympics

 

[jakee 1,571]

2 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

I'm going to need a bit of reprogramming before I'll be willing to believe that people who are given all they need to survive will work out of the goodness of their hearts or to benefit the greater good.

So? No one who has far more than they need to survive does anything for the greater good. I'd argue the more they have the less likely they are to do so.

Take Covid as an example. In this country our entire vaccination scheme relied on thousands of dedicated volunteers - all of them ordinary everyday people of the working or middle class - standing in the rain hour after hour, day after day, organising queues, checking appointment slips, keeping order, doing all the thankless grunt work for nothing but a sense of duty to their communities. We also had politically connected businessmen and women already so priviliged that they're on the Sunday Times Rich List who thought it appropriate to leverage those connection to make tens of millions of pounds simpy for acting as middlemen between chinese mask and PPE factories and the UK government. Honestly show me a single rich bastard who jumped in to organise a PPE supply during the emergency who charged less than a 100% markup and then we can start talking about who's working for the greater good.

[olofscience 490]

3 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

I'm going to need a bit of reprogramming before I'll be willing to believe that people who are given all they need to survive will work out of the goodness of their hearts or to benefit the greater good.

A life on a universal basic income will be pretty crap. It's just that - the basics.

Do you really think most people will have no more ambition or passion than that?

 

And you've had a LOT of programming. Everyone has. Me too, but I've realised I've been mostly taught rubbish. My own mother thinks that if she wasn't cruel to me I'd just be a lazy slob with no ambition...when what she really wanted was an excuse to be cruel.

[JoeWeber 2,871]

4 minutes ago, jakee said:

So? No one who has far more than they need to survive does anything for the greater good. I'd argue the more they have the less likely they are to do so.

Take Covid as an example. In this country our entire vaccination scheme relied on thousands of dedicated volunteers - all of them ordinary everyday people of the working or middle class - standing in the rain hour after hour, day after day, organising queues, checking appointment slips, keeping order, doing all the thankless grunt work for nothing but a sense of duty to their communities. We also had politically connected businessmen and women already so priviliged that they're on the Sunday Times Rich List who thought it appropriate to leverage those connection to make tens of millions of pounds simpy for acting as middlemen between chinese mask and PPE factories and the UK government. Honestly show me a single rich bastard who jumped in to organise a PPE supply during the emergency who charged less than a 100% markup and then we can start talking about who's working for the greater good.

And people pass sand bags to stop the rising waters, too, but I don't think it's comparable to what will motivate someone to work when pay is a given. Now might they help out organizing queues if they weren't obligated to stay for their daily pay? I don't doubt that at all.

[olofscience 490]

Just now, JoeWeber said:

Now might they help out organizing queues if they weren't obligated to stay for their daily pay?

Do they really need to be threatened by homelessness and hunger to do that though?

[jakee 1,571]

31 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

And people pass sand bags to stop the rising waters, too, but I don't think it's comparable to what will motivate someone to work when pay is a given. 

When some pay is a given, what will motivate most people to work is a) more pay and b) wanting something to do. Most people would be bored shitless sitting at home on a subsistence wage and would much rather take an honest occupation and more money as a significant win-win situation.

Contrast that with the behaviour of major companies who will do the sum total of sweet fuck all divided by a million for the greater good. Who will cut as many jobs as they can as often as they can and will treat the low level workers they sweat for 40+ hours a week (on whatever schedule benefits the company most) as lazy shiftless parasites.

In 1930 Keynes predicted that technology increasing productivity would bring about universal 3 day weeks and a near utopia of personal freedom and leisure time. Instead, 40 years of increasingly neo-liberal global economic policies since the dawn of the Reagan and Thatcher era, which treat corporate growth and profit as the end goal from which all other good will somehow, somewhen flow (and every time that fails to occur the answer is we just haven't increased profit enough yet for the billionaires to be able to start sharing it) mean we are way past the point of technological advancements increasing quality of life for most people and are rapidly regressing the other way.

Increasingly ruthless exploitation of the non-executive workforce at almost all levels is resulting in an increasing lack of employment opportunities for ordinary people, an increasing return to the workhouse conditions of the Industrial fucking Revolution for people that are employed, and an increasing concentration of wealth for people already so wealthy they live in an exclusively low tax environment. This leads directly back to quality of life for most people as local governments are asked to support more and more people for less and less money. Is anyone here going to stick their hands up and say their city has better public transport than it did 30 years ago? More childs playgrounds per capita than it did then? More parks and green spaces in general? Better roads? Better any public service of any kind? Someone did that, and it absolutely positively was not lazy benefit scroungers.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/sep/01/economics

Edited May 27 by jakee

[JerryBaumchen 1,451]

4 hours ago, kallend said:

Did you ever see this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_the_Sex_Olympics

 

Hi John.

From your link:  the play depicts a world of the future where a small elite controls the mass media, keeping the lower classes docile by serving them an endless diet of lowest common denominator programmes and pornography

I think we are very close to there.

As soon as Trump/Miller can control the media, it is all over.

Jerry Baumchen

[gowlerk 2,260]

2 hours ago, olofscience said:

Do they really need to be threatened by homelessness and hunger to do that though?

No, but it does need to be a temporary assignment, not a permanent job.

[dogyks 10]

2 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

And people pass sand bags to stop the rising waters, too, but I don't think it's comparable to what will motivate someone to work when pay is a given. Now might they help out organizing queues if they weren't obligated to stay for their daily pay? I don't doubt that at all.

"We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us."

Anonymous Soviet Citizen

[JoeWeber 2,871]

9 hours ago, olofscience said:

Do they really need to be threatened by homelessness and hunger to do that though?

I need to better understand what level of living this "Basic Income" provides before I can answer.

[olofscience 490]

6 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

I need to better understand what level of living this "Basic Income" provides before I can answer.

This is where opinions will start to vary. In mine it's just basic food, shelter (a bed), and physical safety for adults. For children, education will have to be added to that. That's it.

[kallend 2,117]

44 minutes ago, olofscience said:

  For children, education will have to be added to that. That's it.

But we love the poorly educated.  They vote for us!

[JoeWeber 2,871]

40 minutes ago, olofscience said:

This is where opinions will start to vary. In mine it's just basic food, shelter (a bed), and physical safety for adults. For children, education will have to be added to that. That's it.

It’s also where policy starts. Are you thinking a small apartment, a room off a common area, or a dorm bed? What is basic food? Three meals prepared in a cafeteria or food vouchers. I’m not picking at you. I truly want to know what is being considered when I hear about a basic income being a solution.

[BIGUN 1,440]

37 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

It’s also where policy starts. Are you thinking a small apartment, a room off a common area, or a dorm bed? What is basic food? Three meals prepared in a cafeteria or food vouchers. I’m not picking at you. I truly want to know what is being considered when I hear about a basic income being a solution.

The Yang model would be $1,000/month to each adult + basic health care. His contention was that it was not enough to live on and people should supplement that UBI. Unfortunately, his plan would have cost the government 2.8 trillion a year and his solution for that burden was to establish a VAT and other taxes, but the backfill was 50% of the cost. 

For me, it sounds good, but the real solution is to create more jobs, and get folks education for those jobs.  

Edited Wednesday at 11:23 AM by BIGUN

[wmw999 2,560]

2 minutes ago, BIGUN said:

For me, it sounds good, but the real soution is to create more jobs, and get folks education for those jobs.

And getting business owners and stockholders and the like to invest in more employees is tough; employees are one of the riskiest parts of business, and large businesses do whatever they can to reduce risk.

Wendy P. 

[dogyks 10]

29 minutes ago, wmw999 said:

And getting business owners and stockholders and the like to invest in more employees is tough; employees are one of the riskiest parts of business, and large businesses do whatever they can to reduce risk.

Wendy P. 

Only the ones that want to stay in business.

[jakee 1,571]

4 hours ago, BIGUN said:

For me, it sounds good, but the real solution is to create more jobs, and get folks education for those jobs.  

Creating jobs isn’t in itself a solution, it’s a goal. How do you create those jobs? That’s where the solution would lie.

Conventional neo-liberal ‘wisdom’ is that encouraging wealthy people and funds to invest in businesses so they can grow, make more profit and then create more jobs is the way to go. Top down investment in business, therefore top down tax cuts and incentives. But we’ve been trying that for a long time now and is it really working?

Two major issues: 1) Rich people hoard money and businesses prioritise shareholder returns over employees.

2) Don’t businesses ultimately become truly successful by selling more of what they offer, bringing money in through the front door not the back door?

In this way, a basic subsistence income is a job creation measure. Unlike with a rich person, if you give a person below the poverty line more money, they will spend all of it. Every single penny will go directly back into the economy through the front door of local shops and service providers which will have a direct effect on both profitability and need for new employees to manage the extra business. Plus the government gets an immediate rebate on its investment through sales tax which is a not insignificant discount in the overall cost.

 

Of course if all that sounds too complicated you could just nationalise utilities and a range of public services and run them in a more socially responsible manner. 

[olofscience 490]

7 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

It’s also where policy starts. Are you thinking a small apartment, a room off a common area, or a dorm bed? What is basic food? Three meals prepared in a cafeteria or food vouchers. I’m not picking at you. I truly want to know what is being considered when I hear about a basic income being a solution.

Dorm bed. If I was the policy maker then I'd have a budget for the food too and try to find ways to get it as low cost as possible. Robot-flipped burgers, robot harvested crops.

But the specifics can distract from the big picture - did you not see the other side of the equation I proposed, eradicating minimum wage? Lots of people will be able to start their own companies and innovate because they're not stuck in a minimum wage job to survive anymore. Lots of companies would finally be able to hire at the correct rates, like pay $2 per hour for a job that's worth $2 per hour and not have to worry that their employees will starve or go homeless. But companies won't be able to force government policies by holding people's livelihoods hostage anymore. The economy would skyrocket. Of course, you'd have to tax properly to be able to pay for it.

But it'll never happen. Too many egos, too much focusing on what "basics" people deserve. Because we think all we've achieved is ONLY because of our hard work, not luck. I have it too - I've worked *so* hard, we can't have other people getting something for nothing, right? We'll be riding this capitalist ship down with Trump and all the others.