Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? A true dreamer would think that the Dems would approve any plan that cuts ANY of the Fed "handout, help-out" programs.
They would vote for sending a check, sure.
But the cuts? The only thing they ever want to cut is the military.
UBI is a dream, until the Dems vote with Republicans to cut aaaall of our "help" programs. Most Repubs would afraid to do that. All of the Dems would eagerly fight any effort to cut any of them.
If both of them vote that to pay for the UBI the way Yang says - all the cash comes from aaaaall of the many "handout, helpout" programs we have.
That includes education and medical, too.
"Aaaall" includes Social Security, Medicair, and Medicaid.
When you spell that out, it becomes a political impossibility to anyone who looks at with that in mind.
This guy with the southern accent in the video either doesnt understand this - or doesnt care. Yang is clearly smart, but may not realize that the Dems will not cancel the "help" programs to pay UBI.
A good thing about this is, that the idea may get a strong enough push that it may work the way a long-ago Dem Presidential candidate tried to do it.
He was a huge long shot and was trying lots of new ideas. He just wanted it add his version to everything else, and to hell with the cost of anything.
His name? George McGovern:
"...McGovern united welfare reform and tax reform by proposing a “Demogrant” of $1,000 per year for every adult, regardless of income, as an alternative to Nixon’s complicated means-tested welfare overhaul plan."
He called his version a "Demogrant." If Yangs idea stays in play, the Dems would revive that name or come up with something new.
I hope it catches on, myself. I want the idea to be debated in full.
I want to see a real choice laid out. To have what Wang is describing, which is very close to the Charles Murray version - to have that be compared to what's politically much, much more likely.
Something like old McGoverns' "Demogrant." Just one more "here's some money from the Dems" idea. Their idea of not trying to use the current program money at all - "just add s'more!"
Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? 1000 a month is nice, and if we multiply 1200 per year by say 323 million people = 387 billion. Like the Finnish study reported, it made be a bit more cheerful, but didn't really reduce poverty or unemployment.
Would the money be much better spent fighting disease and funding clean energy???
Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? Dave Chapelle did a skit related to this idea when his show was on Comedy Central.
It was focused on Black people only, based on the idea of what would be the result if the Feds decided to pay Blacks a really big reparations check:
The reality part of that is the same life lesson that is sometimes told on the news - some lottery winner is now living under a bridge, or some former big star is living under a culvert.
You can give the same car or money to 100,000 random people. Like the parable of several servant left with money while the master is away tells us - it will be handled with various degrees of wisdom. Some folks are on the far left of that sliding scale of degrees.
Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? This is going to be inevitable. When machines and corporations begin to create almost unfathomable capital creation, and they barely need humans to do it.
The accounts of humans will simply be credited a minimal living wage. Humans will continue to seek employment to ‘contribute’. There is nothing to stop this.
Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? That may be optimistic too early! I mean this has been the path of our lives till now. Will AI emerge to drive economies and technologies, of vast efficacy???
I want to say yes yes yes. But the last 20 years have made me skeptical. I still believe, never the less...
Re: Hey, Do You Want $1,000 A Month? There have been several novels and maybe an opinion book with the theme "the AI wars."
One will be when we come up with an AI that we think can really manage the whole world and give eeeeeeverybody a good dose of stuff that peeps in a given area of the world want.
The AI war when that fine day comes will be between those who have enough power to try to seize control of the AI.
We are definitely not there yet, of course.
Top folks have thought we might be since at least the '50's, and thought of using it in with something like UBI.
Idealistic Socialists thought a given Socialist autocrat human would be up to it as far back as the '20's.
