Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Curious (Score 1) 328

How thick are people here???

The idea with UBI is you CAN get a job. Getting the job does not mean you lose your UBI, which is a serious problem with welfare (which this idiot compared UBI to). This means the job can pay a lot less and still be worth taking. It also means people will gravitate more towards interesting jobs.

There are problems with UBI but you are not identifying them. As I see it there will be vast numbers of job openings, limited only by regulations needed to prevent scammers from fooling people into doing work for no or negative reward.

Comment Re:That's not a welfare problem (Score 1) 328

I'm not sure about that. The republican trick is to make sure everything is "means tested". This allows them to complain about cheating, and they completely ignore the bureaucracy needed to prevent cheating probably costs more than the payments. It also means the average person never actually gets one of these payments, since they would easily learn how exaggerated the "cheating" stories are. Yes you can buy lobster using EBT, but so few you will starve, and direct knowledge of this would defeat all the stories.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 328

No that obviously won't work. If getting a job means you lose the UBI, then the job would have to offer substantially more than UBI. If UBI is enough to live on that is going to effectively mean minimum wage is huge, more than twice the rent for a single person.

Generally with UBI people can get a job and that income is in addition to UBI. The tests have shown that people do this quite willingly. It is possible the minimum wage can go way down (probably not to zero to avoid scammers fooling people into doing work for nothing) and this is kind of difficult to test (ie minimum wage was removed for people in a test, the local McDonalds would immediately lay every body off and hire exclusively the testing subjects).

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 328

These tests have to be means tested, since most of the questions are about the effect on lower-income people. But this is just used to select the subset of the population to test, the behavior is not "means tested" in that changes to job or income do not effect the UBI payments. IMHO this is perfectly reasonable testing criteria.

Your other criticisms of tests do apply, though the impracticality of testing the taxing effect is also a reason any accurate test has to be only of poor people. A problem I also see is that the tests tend not to remove existing payments (ie food stamps, welfare, etc) that are intended to be replaced with UBI.

Comment Re:Taxes are backward (Score 1) 192

The incentive to declare income that the government does not know about and can't find out about is zero. So if the government has any hint that there is some other income other than the main one being withheld, they can just send instead of the simple form a "We are sorry but we believe your income is too complex for the simple checkbox form, please file normally".
It would still mean that 90% of the people in America would be able to get their refund by checking a box on a website, rather than pay $160 to TurboTax.

Slashdot Top Deals

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.

Working...