I have no idea if the maths works, and my initial thought is it won't, but people who've put in the effort say it can.
The opposition have a strongly negative view on normal people, often for selfish and misanthropic reasons. They'd be better off attacking the maths, imho, but making it a meaningful effort.
Certainly a redistribution of wealth to ensure everyone has housing and basic food seems a logical step even if people don't "deserve" it.
It's relevant to everyone. And not an attack on anyone directly.
I am confused. Both Russ and Noodle are proponents of the UBI world.
Russ tells me I don't need to worry about a job.
Which seems to boil Noodle's piss.
Well, for starters, you pulled 20k out of your arse. State pension is about £200 a week (£10k) and jobseekers is less than half that. They are the main reference points for UBI. At worst, that cuts your number in half.
The personal tax allowance is worth 2.5k to most working adults (based on 20% income tax) and you would scrap that if they’re getting 10k UBI. Then you’d update rates and allowances to ensure that working people don’t end up better off (also, as best you can, ensuring they aren’t worse off because of tax credits etc getting bonfired). It wouldn’t be perfect but it’s a rather big part of the plan that you are completely ignoring by acting like it’s just giving a bunch of new money to everyone. It isn’t.
Russ got it bang on.. it’s not about raising welfare.. it’s a radical overhaul of the system. It is a conceptual shift which means a large part is looking at a what already happens and seeing that it is, actually already UBI from a fiscal perspective.. it’s just comes with none of other benefits of an actual UBI.
That’s what actually convinced me that this is something that can work, not some dream of unicorns.. that if you actually lay out the benefits and allowances afforded to working and non-working people.. most of them are already getting UBI-level benefits in some way. The extra cost for those who currently don’t isn’t nothing.. but nor is it £750b.
Can I just stop you there.
Please.
So your argument is that if the only way to get old people’s arses wiped is to take the ‘lowest value’ people capable of working and say ‘if you don’t wipe those arses you and your children will starve’. You will withhold food and shelter from those people, neither of which is fundamentally scarce, unless they wipe arses.. and use the power of the state to enforce that.
It’s not exactly optimal, is it?
No it's not, I agree.
Who wipes the old peoples arses now though?
So is the intention that people who work are no better off, they pay more tax to equalise to where they were before? So effectively it is a raise in welfare payments?
I think that is going to be a hard sell to the electorate until we get to a situation where there is far more unemployment.
10K doesn't cover what you set out to achieve. It wouldn't cover room and board in Rushcliffe.
Edit:
Assuming you are not going for absolute poverty:
£15/pd on food/drink etc = £5475 pa
£600/pm rent = £7200
£1500/pa council tax
£1500/pa energy
£500/pa water
I make that £16k to survive but that wouldn't cover clothes, repairs, transport so if we budget £10p/d for that you get 20K.
People who are willing to do so for whatever wage it takes… who don’t want to live the meagre lifestyle that UBI only would afford. Do we know that arse-wiping is the big barrier to people working in care? Or is it that many of these jobs are shitty in many less literal ways, littered with bad employers who don’t treat staff very well (because they don’t have to) and staff are struggling with permanent underlying levels of stress caused by low wages and insecure work. Maybe doing the actual care work, even when it involves arse wiping, is one of the better parts of the whole thing. And because the current system tends to have massive benefit withdrawal rates for people in low wage jobs, the extra money they earn for each arse-wipe is tiny.. whereas with UBI wiping that away (no pun etc) even with no rise in wages from the employer, the worker is keeping more of that money.
Which does lead to…
Not all workers. You’d want lower paid workers to keep more of what they earn and not immediately have it all pulled back through tax changes. But once you hit median workers you should be at break even. And yes, there is cost to that.
Oh… it’s a near-impossible sell. Because Ingo speaks for the mainstream. But, for that reason, not talking about it as a welfare increase.. talking about it as a fundamental rethink that benefits everyone.. and focussing on the security of a fixed baseline income and how that is good for a clear majority of people.. is the way to go.
Sure it can. Any system potentially can. It's just that other components of the framework that make that viable have to be in place. I would judge that is not the case, and not happening any time soon because the direction of travel is away from that, not towards it.
I would argue that wealth is relative, and subject to assault (nothing personal, just business). I would argue that if you want to distribute shelter and food, then that's what you should do. Not distribute something else that may, or may not, address those needs, and is a blunt and scattergun tool (in the same way that putting up interest rates has been demonstrated not to really directly satisfactorily control housing prices, and definitely impacts a lot of other things - if you want to control housing prices regulate and tax issues surrounding housing purchases, don't fuck with the entire money supply, investment, savings, and everything else).
I can’t tell you what the number has to be, certainly not for the UK. I am pretty confident that pensioners and jobseekers aren’t dying on the streets in vast numbers though, so they are subsisting on what they get. I think housing benefit is on top though, right? So you have to either maintain that, or allow for it, or do the public housing thing I would do.
Down here we periodically get the research pieces that show that there are only six rentals available in Melbourne that a person on unemployment payments could afford. And I mean literally six rentals. Yet vast numbers of unemployed people manage to live here. Fuck knows how.
Your numbers show why even a generous UBI that is 50% higher than the state pension will leave plenty of people ready and willing to wipe arses.
Tricky makes the point that the market would adjust to a UBI world in various ways. I think he’s wrong about the inflationary aspect.. but he’s not wrong. If UBI is there and deemed secure then a market to provide UBI level stuff like housing will arise. The average person won’t pay £600 in rent. Families will cohabit, people will houseshare, and people will build and provide single occupancy units for people who want their own place (and as those people have a secure and steady UBI, the investment proposition for serving that.. public or private.. is far more attractive than today when renting to the unemployed is incredibly risky and priced/served accordingly).
They aren't dying on the street, they are getting by, with all the stress and anxiety you rightly mention above. And now they still need housing benefit, winter fuel payments etc that you sat on the opposite side of the balance sheet. Then after all that they still need to wipe old peoples arses anyway rather than having the choice to opt out of work, unless they live in a UBI rabbit hutch which I'm sure will be plush as fuck.
Pull the other one.
I can imagine in an UBI world that salaries will adjust to the desirability of the job. Nobody has to work really. So if you want me to wipe arses, the pay is going to have to be pretty good. Certainly much higher than the many tedious office jobs. Sitting in an office all day is easy. But it'll pay way less.
High skilled jobs - still require training etc so will be unaffected. Brian the arsewiper isn't going to become a Dr overnight because of UBI.
Low skilled jobs - as Russ mentions will have to pay more to entice people to work, which is massively inflationary.
That, presumably, is about unemployed people. Pensioners only need to wipe their own old arses. Pensioners get by.. but nobody thinks that people relying on the state pension are having it large. UBI is not intended to enable large. The state pension is, in almost every sense, a UBI for people who are old enough. So is it such a stretch to say that it’s a decent pointer to a realistic UBI designed to give the option to live equally non-large to others who can’t or don’t want to work?
I’m not putting anything on ‘balance sheets’. Partly because I know what a balance sheet is. Partly because I put my trust in the very many economists and researchers that say it adds up. There’s only so much effort I’m going to put into rebutting a nonsense total cost that you came up with founded on the notion that whatever level UBI is set at, multiplying it by the total population and saying ‘that’s what this costs’. You’re dragging this into the weeds over the plushness of housing that might be available to the small number of people who choose the lowest-level subsistence conceivable.. when you’re opposed on a much more fundamental level. Why do you give a shit if Billy the aspiring artist decides to take a shit bedsit rather than take on some gig-work so he can afford a slightly less shit bedsit?
You admit that the current system for ‘incentivising’ arse-wipers is bad. As an employer, it kinda benefits you though, right? I’m not a business owner, but I have no shortage of experience of employing people.. and it sure-as-shit benefits me. Is your opposition to changing the system that you don’t think it will work? Or that you’re concerned that it will?
