Logan's Zim?
25 Apr 2023
1.0K
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Logan’s Limp.
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Compulsory death at 65. You are no longer economically viable. Goodbye!
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UBI makes way too much sense for everyone except politicians.
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Mostly Tories, because they want the money for their mates.... and their mates (in the press, the think tanks, and the global clusters of large piles of cash) will conspire to make sure it doesn't happen.
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UBI makes sense for corporations on one level, because it improves spending power. It also frees people from being wage slaves, which on one level is not what corporations want but it does create an interesting balance between the desire for better slaves or better consumers.
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Closer to Soylent Green
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The ones that pay shit wages and/or treat employees like shit.. because they have the force of the state and its punitive welfare system behind them.. will have to sort their shit out. And, knocking on from that, some of the services we enjoy, that are delivered by those underpaid/mistreated workers, will get more expensive. This is fine. Australia has quite good wage laws around stuff like retail and hospitality, but it also has a horrific welfare system that forces people to do those jobs.. thus the money is decent, but the conditions are atrocious.
S’funny how it’s those who ‘believe in free markets’ who are most opposed to workers having any kind of power to say ‘yeah, fuck off, I don’t need this shit’ if an employer isn’t making work worthwhile.
If you have a UBI you can legitimately ease off on some employment protection. I wouldn’t want big backwards steps or anything but, for example, I’d be pretty chill about gig work and zero-hours contracts in a UBI world. A flexible workforce is a good thing for various reasons, and UBI covers off many of the downsides. The romantic tech-bro notion of gig-work empowering people to pick and choose how they work is a bit less bullshit when those people aren’t choosing between Uber and starvation.
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Probably not. If they are publicly owned, and the opportunistic profit layers are taken out.
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It would be good if everybody in the country was made to read this piece about immigration.
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I realise this is a megamong question but I'm not in the position to change the habit of a lifetime:
Who funds this utopia?
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You made me Google. I thought this was cool :
citizen-network.org/library/how-to-fund-a-universal-basic-income.html
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Funding for UBI comes from a number of sources: massively reduced government overhead (conservatives tend to like this), reduced cost of labour (they tend to like that as well), and tax revenues generated by greater consumption as a result of improved spending power (if they stop to actually think about it and don't just "huurrrrr taxes" they like this too).
What they tend to not be so keen on is the increased volatility of labour (because if I don't have to work for you to keep a roof over my head and food on my table I'm more likely to quit if you're a dick employer), but this is actually a net positive for well run companies as they will find it easier to attract good talent.
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In principle, right wingers tend to like volatility of labour. Mostly from the perspective of making it easier for employers to fire people but making it easier for people to walk is the other side of the same coin.
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What standard of living does UBI allow?
Are strikes more likely? Take train drivers here, they strike regularly and lose income. Presume they would strike more if had UBI. Noone gives a fuck about passengers, so don't they just end up getting shafted even more?
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Where does the big Government saving come from? You've replaced stingy welfare with moon on a stick welfare. It sounds like the time Homer Simpson became sanitation commissioner, made a load of crazy promises, blew his budget in a month and had to whore Springfield out as waste dump. If the country had mineral wealth it might be more viable or maybe a high skill/tech/wealth base economy but most people here work for Tesco or Amazon and would fuck it off at the drop of hat.
