UBI: manton.org
@manton We do need some serious exploration of this concept and I have a feeling it’s coming along too slowly.
@manton this exists because they want more money. Billionaires don’t want to pay us. They won’t support UBI any more than they support Medicare. They want us making just enough to have to give it back to them in order to persist.
@manton The answer is yes. And Yang wasn’t early. Imagine if we had UBI in place during Covid. Or for the past 50 years instead of this?
@scottsantens.com True. I was thinking just politically, the message didn’t resonate enough in 2020 because we were distracted with so many other problems. It really needs to be part of the conversation now.
@manton With respect, I think the idea of UBI is a bandaid and a red herring designed to pacify the masses. Specifically, how much are we talking about? $30K? $50K? I wouldn’t settle for anything less that $80K in today’s dollars. It has to be enough for one person to be able to buy a house, have a car, have quality health care, and guaranteed long-term care. The billionaires pushing AI into everything we do digitally will owe us at least that much if they insist on scraping up every bit of our digital and private information.
@apoorplayer I wasn’t imagining UBI at that level. More like a base amount of money to ease stress, allow people to save, and avoid complete disaster when losing a job. So maybe start with $20k/year and grow from there? I haven’t thought deeply about it yet.
@manton I’m broadly in favor of some sort of UBI. But…something like 7.5M people in the US times $20K is $150B to be found somewhere. Hard to see how that happens with federal debt bomb already poised to mess up the economy completely. Welp, I guess hard problems are hard.
@ffmike Yeah, it’s actually way more people than that, so you’re right the numbers become unmanageable quickly. Would have to start at a much smaller scale.
@manton Obviously it depends on your definition of “basic.” My wife and I receive Social Security, and to me it’s evident that an expansion of SSI, including taxing all wages AND dividend income so the rich can’t avoid paying into the system, has to be the start. Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns The Future posited a system of micropayments to anyone who has a piece of their personal information scraped off by web crawlers and now AI. It’s an interesting thesis and one worthy of attention IMO.
@manton I was discussing this with a friend the other day.
If the lower socioeconomic groups are going to have no jobs, we as a society need to look after our society.
The only way to do that is a UBI for those groups of people.
The issue with UBI is ultimately we’ll all be on money that’s enough to “own nothing, and be happy”.
Just enough money to pay our rent, lease on vehicles/transport, food and consumerism.
No tax to the UBI earners, and the money going straight back into consumerism.
The tax though, should then be put on the rich, and the companies that supply the products. They should be heavily taxes in order not to line the pockets of those in control of the companies and instead those monies go back into helping society as a whole with universal welfare and improving our way of life as humans in general.
@manton I oppose UBI but I strongly favor job guarantees. Look at the state of our nation’s infrastructure and the homelessness epidemic. Plenty of work to be done. Hire people to do it.
@manton Great thoughts.
It should be noted that there is some crazy back-of-napkin analysis that suggests we may be able to offer a somewhat generous UBI by having all companies contribute to a national UBI fund.
The % they contribute correlates with how much AI they use.
bsky.app/profile/jooc…