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@HistoryBuff
I’ll get a longer reply to both you and RM out, hopefully today, but you are alleging literally millions of crimes going unreported. If propensity to interracial crime was truly equal, and whites commit 83% of interracial crimes between blacks and whites but a large amount go unreported, whites in 2018 would’ve committed 2,622,819 violent crimes against black people of which only 56,000, or 2%, were reported.
You’re gonna need a lot more than one example of a guy who got off easy to prove that.
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Do you like Andrew Yang?
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Recently, there was a national news story about a grade school aged black girl who was held down by three white boys and had her dreadlocks cut. Like many stories of this nature, it quickly came out that it was a lie (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/girl-dreadlocks-lied-classmates-boy-virginia-hairstyle-hoax/), but only after national newspapers had uncritically run the story, and public figures had spoken out about it. In addition it's odd that, even if true, an incident of bullying between a few students warrants national media attention--unless somebody is trying to create a narrative.
And it's obvious that the media is trying to spin a narrative. A narrative about hate crimes in Trump's America and violent white men going around oppressing minorities. But what do the actual facts say? According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime), in 2018 there were 593,598 violent crimes that involved black people and white people. In 537,204 of them, or 90%, white people were the victims. This statistic is even worse than it sounds, because for every black person in the United States, there are around 5 white people. If propensity to interracial crime was equal, white people would be the aggressor in 83% of these crimes, rather than 10%.
My intent here is not to libel all black people as criminals, when the vast majority are not. Nor is it to fear-monger (although 500,000 violent crimes a year is not insignificant even in a country as large as ours), nor am I trying to play up white victimhood. Rather I am honestly curious how progressives reconcile their racial narrative to what the statistics actually say.
My question to progressives is this: how do you reconcile the reality of crime and victimization in the United States with the narrative that white people are oppressing black people? Materially, what is it that white people currently do to black people that outweighs a net 500,000 violent crimes every single year? Please be specific.
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@Vader
this is a weird comment and I’m not sure how to respond
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Bsh says you can’t campaign for HOF but he’s campaiging for me by not allowing me to ask people not to vote for me
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@TheHammer
considering the thread is still up, it looks like the mods (correctly) disagree with you
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@TheHammer
how could this possibly be breaking the rules? I’m simply making a request
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I fully expect to win all three thread slots, the only question is which three installments of the pirate story are the best
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@Snoopy
Trump does lie, a lot—but like you said it’s typically small stuff where the truth hurts his ego (“my inauguration was the biggest in history” “I won one of the biggest landslides in history”)
Past Presidents were a lot more polished so they lied less, but it was often about bigger things. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan”, WMDs in Iraq, “Read my lips: no new taxes!” Etc
I wouldn’t say he is more or less dishonest than past presidents, I think it’s just different. Like for most things about him his behavior is way more obnoxious than your typical politician but ultimately more admirable (in my opinion)—though still bad.
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YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! IT WAS SAID YOU WOULD DESTROY THE POLITICIANS, NOT JOIN THEM! BRING BALANCE TO THE RIGHT WING, NOT LEAVE IT IN DARKNESS!
You were my candidate, Donald. I loved you...
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@Tejretics
Set 1:
Gentrification: Unbalanced. Pro has to establish that gentrification is bad, which is questionable to say the least (in reality almost all changes have winners and losers, so good luck balancing that) and it's impossible to conceive of a plan to stop gentrification that wouldn't have drastic unintended consequences.
NSA: Balanced, seems like it leans Pro but I don't really know anything.
Cinema: Dumb topic
Amazon: Balanced if argued in front of the right audience, but I think in a debate context Con would win most of the time
Truth and reconciliation: Not sure
Payday lending: Balanced
Bride importing: Balanced
Parents: Balanced
China: Balanced, with maybe a bit of a Pro bias
Charities: Unbalanced, I think Con would win this easily
Soldiers: Balanced
Set two:
South Africa: Horrible topic. This is akin to arguing in 1935 that the German government should break up Jewish enclaves.
International law: Balanced
Long termism: Probably leans Con because of the law of unintended consequences
Megacities: Balanced
Syria: Balanced
Privatization: Balanced
WHO: Balanced
Big data/criminal law: Leans Con very strongly
Deposits: Leans Con very strongly. There is a reason that fractional reserve banking exists
Humanity: Leans Con. Would be a good debate for the right audience but seems easy for Con to point out the past 300 years or so and all the fearmongering that happened throughout that period and contrast it with what actually happened
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@Levi
In the US, you can already get a good college degree for a very reasonable amount of money. You get massive debt by wasting $120,000 on a BA or $70,000 on a master's program when there's great ones for much less.I'd stop lending money for these schools. I wouldn't end student loans entirely.Will ending student loans lower costs? I'm skeptical. Is there data supporting that? I know lots of universities waste money on expensive useless shit but why would that change just because you get rid of loans? We already have plenty of affordable colleges that can barely stay open at their current level of funding, and ending loans won't impact their tuition at all. The goal should be to encourage students to weigh costs in their decisions, not to eliminate expensive options altogether.
Well if there wasn’t a nearly infinite line of credit, very few 18 year olds could afford $50k tuition, so the market for incredibly expensive schools would dry up. But it’s kind of a moot point because I think you’ve hinted at a better solution. Maybe don’t cut off certain schools entirely, but cap federal student loans to around the level of the median nationwide tuition. If schools want to charge more than that, they’ll have to rely on normal loans that financial institutions will be reluctant to give because they might eat a loss if the student discharges it in bankruptcy. Normal lending standards would have to be applied.
I can see problems with that as well though. I’m not sure what the perfect solution would be, but all of these things seem better than the status quo. I think there has to be some way to address the fact that college is basically a racket. For the most part these are supposedly non profits. It does not take $50,000 a year to give someone an undergraduate education. Full stop. That is a completely insane amount of money and there are good schools that do it for a fifth of the cost. This is something the government should be involved in. Open a federal investigation to determine what exactly made tuition explode around the 1990s and how to stop it.
As for already-existing debt, I understand paying more taxes to help the disadvantaged. But paying more taxes to forgive the debt of entitled irresponsible folks? I don't think that's right. Let's say we forgive their debt, what's the likelihood these people won't rack up the same debt within a couple years? And why should responsible non-entitled students have to pay for the luxuries of the irresponsible?Yes, it sucks that a bunch of students were misled. But there's also a lot of students who were able to make responsible decisions & they shouldn't be punished. And going forward the priority needs to be changing the culture -- getting kids to weigh costs instead of blindly chasing prestige -- and forgiving loans seems like something that would solidify the current culture instead of promoting change.
ehhhhhh
I get this perspective. I really do. In fact this is the answer I would’ve given a year or so ago. But I think the situation is just a little bit different:
1) The primary culprit who misled those students is the government itself. There is absolutely zero guidance provided for those students about what some reasonable goals and expectations from college are, other than constant propaganda about how terrible of a decision it is not to go to college. The government also completely distorted lending standards to allow this problem to occur. I think it bears a lot of responsibility here.
2) Many people made mistakes (something teenagers are known to do.) and I’m not saying we should simply pay off all student debt. They made irresponsible choices and they should pay for them. But how much? Should their lives be ruined? Because in many of the horror stories, that is exactly what will happen. We give people who rack up massive credit card debt the ability to start from nothing again. Why should students not be given this same opportunity? As irresponsible as their choices, influenced by a lifetime of propaganda, were, they weren’t any more irresponsible than racking up credit card debt online shopping. I think that if a student demonstrates a serious effort to pay off their loan (10% of your income for 10 years is not insignificant) they should at least be given the opportunity, ten years after college, to declare bankruptcy.
By the way, this is FourTrouble from DDO. I just joined the site to see what's going on, and looked for a familiar person to respond to. How are things going around here? Seems fairly dead.
I’m not really sure actually, I don’t check it that much. There are a lot more people from DDO here but many of them changed their names
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@n8nrgmi
I think government should just say “get your prices to the levels they were at in the 1990s or you are no longer eligible for federally subsidized student loans” and it would be amazing how quickly they managed to cut costs
and you raise a good point about students over charging because their debt would be forgiven. I hadn’t thought of that, but I know that it’s basically a blank check that could be used for anything. Something would definitely have to be done about that before promising to forgive debt
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@Mharman
I understand and respect that point of view, but I do think that society/the government bears some responsibility for the situation. Yes, many people made bad choices (something teenagers are known to do) but they were exposed to a lifetime of propaganda that distorted any reasonable expectations about college. In addition the government created a completely perverse system. It’s batshit insane that a jobless 18 year old basically has an unlimited line of credit for education, and it’s just dirty that these loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.
I would never support a student loan jubilee because as you correctly note, it actually isn’t that big of an issue most of the time. Andrew Yang proposes that if someone pays 10% of their income towards the loan for 10 years, the remainder of the debt will be forgiven. The vast majority of people would be able to pay it off by then. If someone can’t they are in a really, really in a bad spot. Those people made a mistake, but I don’t think their life should be ruined over it. The structures that allowed them to make those choices should’ve never existed.
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conservatards btfo, very enlightening analysis, i'm really glad that this thread was made
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Wow check mate, libtards
I can’t believe that people on all sides of the political spectrum have contradictory views about what can and can’t be effectively banned. I am so glad that I read this enlightening analysis
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@Mopac
Wow, great job and great advice. I totally agree. I think Americans take on way too much debt as a general rule. In some cases it can't really be avoided (like buying a house) but I see financing options for things like meat smokers at Home Depot. the amount of credit available to the average American is wild
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@triangle.128k
yea our system really sucks at producing high skilled blue collar work, which is pretty much the only kind of work accessible to ordinary people that isn't totally saturated. "just pick up a trade!!!" is a bad meme that misunderstands how the economy really works for the most part, but for some fields there really is a shortage of people because everyone is going to college instead, even if they aren't academically inclined (which doesn't necessarily mean you are stupid, btw)
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@Greyparrot
At the very least community college should be destigmatized. If you don't have what it takes to get into a truly elite University (few people do), going to a CC on the cheap for two years and then transferring to a four year institution is a great life hack that can cut your costs in half.
and tbh while student debt is a very serious problem, I think it is a bit exaggerated. Students in six figure debt are a minority of borrowers, and students with that much debt for a useless undergrad (as opposed to something like med school or an engineering masters) are a smaller group still. The average borrower owes about $30k, and while it sucks to start out life thirty grand in the hole, it's not the kind of debt that can never be paid back and it certainly isn't worth destroying the economy over (looking at you, Bernie.)
Yang once again has the best idea. Paying 10% of your income for 10 years is a very serious effort, forgiving the remainder of the debt is still a hand out but much more tolerable. And let's face it...if you can't pay it off by then you were probably scammed
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@triangle.128k
Yeah that’s why it would be politically impossible. But structurally, it is the right solution. At the very least, they should be be treated like normal debts and dischargeable upon bankruptcy. Although ultimately the issue goes back to our societies view on education, which desparately needs to change. Probably less than a quarter of jobs actually need that much education, but these days almost every middle income career path requires that you spent four years and tens of thousands of dollars on college. And for what, exactly?
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The Democratic candidates are tripping over each other trying to outbid the others, offering policies that range from perfectly reasonable (Yang’s. policy that if you devote 10% of your income to the debt for 10 years the remainder is forgiven) to the truly insane (Bernie “let’s destroy the stock market” Sanders.)
As someone who has never had any student loan debt I can talk about this objectively. The lack of sympathy from conservatives on this issue really disgusts me. Not only were many students totally misled their entire lives about college, but this is a textbook example of the government messing everything up. No one would ever lend a jobless 18 year old fifty grand if student loans weren’t a special class of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. The totally unlimited supply of credit available to jobless and broke 18 year olds for education is the true reason that tuition has skyrocketed to the extent it has. The real solution to student loan debt is politically toxic: end student loans entirely. Colleges would be forced to lower their prices to the point that the average person can afford to pay for college with cash or by working their way through school.
What do you guys think?
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A 17 year old girl in the Netherlands has been euthanized after being raped repeatedly in her childhood. To me this case utterly destroys the libertarian ethos. It may have been her choice, but it was something the government should've never condoned. If this is the result of unrestrained freedom, count me out. Noa was a physically healthy girl with a long life ahead of her, who needed help, not death.
I don't really have much to say, but felt like posting this because just thinking about it makes me tear up. God rest her soul.
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@n8nrgmi
if you have black name on a resume you are less likely to be called.
I’ve wondered a lot about this. It’s a pretty strange result considering that corporate America is generally on board with the progressive agenda and has been for decades. I wonder if it’s at least partially a class thing. Like we know that Robert Bruce III on a resume beats D’Marcus, but what about BillyBob vs Cletus?
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@triangle.128k
Speaking as someone who would love an agrarian society...it is extremely unlikely to happen. The overwhelming trend for the past century or so has been urbanization. Slowing that down would be difficult enough, let alone reversing it. We should make it easier for people to get into agriculture so that the small family farm can come back, because this is something good and important. But agriculture is never again going to come anywhere close to employing the majority of people in the United States.
Now one thing that should happen is a return to artisanship. Maybe robots can do mass manufacturing better than humans can, but they’ll never be able to make a hand crafted pair of leather shoes from your local shoemaker
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@Fallaneze
yeah this is true. There are a lot of places in this country where $40,000 would go a long way. If we do end up with mass automation related unemployment it’ll be hard to provide for people while also keeping skilled laborers the economy still needs from taking the deal. All in all it’s a really bad situation that I hope doesn’t happen
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@Tejretics
i don’t actually know why I put that. I think I was joking around, after I had seen this image (https://mobile.twitter.com/gritcult/status/1061816811040243712). That said I do think monarchy is cool and if I were building a society from the ground up I would include a monarch that had some formal powers
I don’t really have an ideology any more
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@Tejretics
I have heard of it, but I haven’t read it. I don’t think education is a complete waste of time, I just think it is extremely inefficient. I would like to see more flexibility to allow students to branch out into studying the things they like earlier. I also don’t believe that the format of “sit down at a desk for eight hours a day” is so valuable that it’s worth drugging millions of kids who is doesn’t work for. Overall I think education is extremely important but our system is basically stuck in the 19th century. From what I understand this is pretty close to Caplan’s belief
link to the SSC article?
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I hadn’t REALLY thought about the lost earnings due to college until now. A typical college grad starts out at about $50,000. I am skeptical of that number but let’s just use it for the sake of argument. So four years of that in addition to the cost of college which is typically at least $30,000. It doesn’t take long before the cost of going to college starts to approach a quarter of a million dollars.
Obviously getting that kind of job out of high school, even in a society where college isn’t as valued wouldn’t be realistic...but make it $25,000 to start that would reach $50,000 after four years of experience and good work. Or go to a training program for six months and then get the job. It’s still a lot of money and time you could’ve spent becoming a better worker with experience and connections. Whatever else, there is absolutely no justification for undergrad taking as long as it does. The amount of free time the typical college student has is ridiculous. Allow them to hit the books harder and graduate in a year and a half if they are able.
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Actually the higher education system might be America’s biggest problem. Outside of a handful of professions (eningeers, doctors, scientists, etc) undergrad is completely useless and even for them the majority of classes are of no value. More importantly, the expense is incredible and only a lucky few (like me) are able to have it paid for by their parents.
Great idea to make going $30,000 into debt as an 18 year old a prerequisite for getting a basic job. Solid plan
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Honestly the single bigger problem with America is the lack of discretion. Yes, giving bureaucrats and prosecutors and judges more discretion would lead to many unfair and unjust outcomes, but not nearly as many as our current system where all of these people are beholden to a giant and ever increasing monstrosity of system that seemingly no one has any power over.
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We really need to do something about the lack of access to the legal system for everyone who isn’t in the top 1%. The barrier to entry in the legal system is so incredibly expensive that unless you have serious means, you effectively do not have accesss to it. Not to mention prosecutorial misconduct. I remember reading about how mere WITNESSES in the Mueller probe racked up six figure legal bills. Even if you are entirely innocent, any contact with the legal system is absolutely ruinous. At the bare minimum the state should reimburse the legal bills of anyone found not guilty.
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@spacetime
Maybe just do it through the Social Security system instead of the tax system? Send monthly checks to everyone who qualifies, with the size of the check being determined by a formula. I propose naming it the $ocial $ecurity $tipend (abbreviated to $$$)
I had thought of that, but still since taxes are paid on a year to year basis it would be difficult. It would really mean restructuring the tax system
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Lots of good chatter going on...I should be able to respond to everybody by the end of this weekend
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@ResurgetExFavilla
Nah bro, the dream team is gonna be split up here. Peasants absolutely did sell their labor, they were typically required to either pay up a certain percentage of their crops to the lord or to work a day a week in the lords fields. I don't see a meaningful difference between that and being paid for your labor with cash. Cash was simply hard to come by back then.It's not labor that I'm against or see as unnecessary, it's employment. The state of selling one's labor for a wage. Typically peasants didn't do that; they worked to pay rents and were able to keep a portion of their harvests directly. Laboring is part of being human, and I don't think that most people would stop if the condition of employment ended. Rather, I see the institution of employment as a restriction on human labor because it depends on the exclusive control of the means of production to propagate the power of the ruling class. I think that if we don't start looking at alternative models, we're going to slide into a horrifying, senseless techno-dystopia.
Outside of a Jeffersonian nation of self sufficient farmers and self employed small businessmen there's always going to be a reliance on those with economic power to make a living. It's just the way it is and always has been. Like you said, laboring is just a part of being human and I don't see what is so inherently bad about trading that labor for cash, or what the alternative is supposed to be
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@blamonkey
sorry, i've been really busy the past few weeks
excellent post. I definitely agree with you that a NIT is way better in theory than UBI if we decide that we want/need to go that route. However one thing I still can't wrap my head around is the logistics of it. Right now as you point out we basically have a miniature version of NIT with Earned Income Tax Credit. But taxes are only filed once a year, so incentives like EITC come in one lump sum...and as you point out, even this comes with a ton of issues. If we were to implement NIT, how do we accurately determine throughout the year who gets it? The only realistic way I see is to give it out as a lump sum like EITC based on the previous years taxes, which is a big problem.
Say we decide that we want to guarantee all citizens a minimum income of $20,000 a year. So someone who made only $10,000 in income would get an additional $10,000 from the government, an unemployed person would get $20,000, etc. We know how most Americans spend money. While the average person could (barely) get by on a stipend of $1700 a month, there's no way they are going to make it through the year if you gave them twenty grand cash on January 1st. There's just no way. However this is the only way I could see a NIT put into practice unless we went started assessing taxes on a month to month basis which would be a complete nightmare for so many reasons and would probably cost hundreds of billions in overhead a year.
The more I think about it, UBI might be better even though it does have the issue of cutting Bill Gates a check every month because it is just so simple. This is probably why someone as smart as Andrew Yang is pushing for it over NIT. There has to be a middle ground, but I'm not sure exactly where it would fall
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@ResurgetExFavilla
I mean who honestly thinks that people need work to socialize when most holidays have, historically and presently, been reserved for socializing? If anything, work breeds insularity because it expends a person's social energies on absolutely toxic human contact.
I’m gonna respectfully disagree here. I was just reading in Peasants into Frenchmen about how once mechanized agriculture arrived, the harvest festivals immediately disappeared because the holiday became divorced from the work whose end they used to be celebrating. That’s not to say that modern capitalistic office work or driving a truck are these wonderful things, but people absolutely need to feel like they are contributing to the continuation of their existence...if every day is a holiday, no day is
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Americans entire attitude about debt is wrongheaded. Some things you can’t reasobaly expect to buy with cash (like a house) and it can be necessary to go into debt for a car if you aren’t very privileged (but you should still buy something used.) However if you go to Home Depot you’ll see financing options for things like grills. If you can’t afford a new grill, you can’t afford it! and the interest rates on credit card debt, which Americans have a lot of, can be absolutely ruinous
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Not related to UBI but I am about 75% certain we are in another bad debt crisis. Not nearly as bad as subprime mortgages, but the amount of bad car debt that’s out there is astounding. Go to any bad apartment complex and you will nonetheless see a parking lot filled with nice, new cars. If I had a dollar for every time I see someone drive by in a car that costs more than they make in a year, I would be able to retire by now.
Cheap credit really has made some truly stupid financial decisions technically affordable. There are people who don’t have a mortgage and still pay well over $1000 a month servicing just car notes and student loan debt
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I think automation can be thought of as an increase in American productivity through advantageous tools and effective implementation, rather than necessarily replacing jobs. To the contrary, the blue collar worker may actually provide an increasingly valuable service assuming they are enabled to compete.
Good (and true) perspective. Huge swaths of jobs did not exist fifty years ago, and that will certainly happen again. It might not end up being a bad thing at all.
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@spacetime
Wow, I actually didn't think of it that way before. I'm really insightful and persuasive.Friendship ended with UBI utopia. Now: full employment is my best friend!
Stopping technological advancement is a good way to get curbed stomped in a few decades by countries that don’t. There is no easy solution
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@spacetime
I'm undecided, but I don't support Bsh1's proposal because it would ensure that no one ever works any job that pays less than $40,000. Any viable safety net needs to preserve the incentive to earn additional income. It's also worth noting that the "Bill Gates" criticism of UBI fails to recognize the reality of progressive taxation. Anyone who earns more than $60,000 or so at their job would end up having their entire UBI taxed away, so UBI isn't actually wasteful at all, and it would also end up costing way less than critics are claiming with their rudimentary estimates..
If you structure it extremely poorly, maybe. But not if you make sure that each marginal dollar you work is worth more than what you give up with negative income tax. For example, you only lose one dollar for every two that you earn.
The bigger I see with a negative income tax is that tax law is structured on an annual basis. Say we decide that we want to guarantee everyone $20,000 a year, based on your tax returns. Most people could survive on a $1700/month stipend. But give them 20 grand for the year up front as cash and there’s basically a 0% chance that they make it through the year without being completely broke. It’s just the nature of how the average person is with money...the tax system would have to be totally rebuilt
As for the question of what unemployed people are gonna do with their lives... Spend time with family and friends. Attend religious services. Participate in volunteer-based community projects (e.g. farming, public works). People can come up with socially constructive things to do. I really don't buy into the idea that employment is necessary to find meaning in one's life. Seems like the prevalence of that idea is mostly just a product of societal indoctrination
I totally agree that working sucks, and that it would be a benefit to people if they could do something meaningful with their lives instead of working. But for every out of work, UBI supported person who would do stuff like go on month long backpacking trips, volunteering constantly, and helping fix up his church, how many others would spend 12 hours a day watching television? I just don’t know how it’s going to shake out. Working at McDonalds flipping burgers sucks but it is way better for the mind and spirit than watching 12 hours of television a day.
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@bsh1
That's a harder question to answer. I think that, ultimately, as robots automate more and more, the only things that will not be automatable will be handicrafts, artwork, design, literature, and things of that nature. Things which require creative input. In the short term, WPA is a good idea. Very Bernie Sanders-ish. But, long term, I think the future of work lies in creative fields.
Yeah, I think even Yang understates the issue long term. Some jobs, like an HVAC technician, I don’t see being automated away for an extremely long time...but what people are missing is that the issue isnt just automation. The kind of work my dad does (he’s a technician for some pretty advanced equipment) isn’t something that can realistically be automated for an extremely long time. However the newer stuff is far less mechanical are far more electronic, so there’s a lot less labor in fixing stuff. It’s more about swapping out components that can no longer be fixed. Subsequently it takes a lot less labor so for every two older guys that retire they usually only hire one young guy. I think this is the story in a ton of fields, as things get more advanced there is just less work to go around.
Im hoping that we are just wrong about this (after all 90% of people worked on farms 150 years ago) but it does seem like this time is different. You can already see an extremely stratified economy because of this. And $1000 a month isn’t nearly enough without even mentioning the issue of what people are going to do all day. It might be rough in a few decades
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@bsh1
negative income tax is a lot better. It does provide a bit of a perverse incentive but it would be a lot more affordable and way more politically defensible than giving bill gates ubi checks, as you say
but I wonder what people on these programs are going to do all day. Empty hands being the devils workshop and all that. I’ve thought it might be a good idea to bring back the WPA
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Another idea I’ve been floating around, and I mean all of this unironically:
The ideal education system would be structured like this:
Elementary School mostly unchanged except that recess is two one hour periods a day, and all schools are required to take their students on an annual camping trip and an annual trip to some kind of museum. School lunches are to be healthy. No sweets, no preservatives, nothing our great grandparents wouldn’t recognize. Funding will be increase to allow all school meals to be made from scratch that morning.
Starting in middle school, half the day is devoted to physical activity. A morning run is followed by a breakfast of steak and eggs (with vegetarian options for those who want or need them.) Then mandatory weight lifting. A shower, then hit the books for class. A healthy lunch will be provided and then after class ends students are required to participate in the following sports depending on the season, regardless of interest or skill level: boxing, baseball, and and an elective sport of their choice. In eighth grade one hour out of every week will be devoted to ballroom dancing class, which will culminate in a dance at the end of the year that students are encouraged to take a date to. With the exception of math, no more than one hour of homework per class, per week.
exercises for girls will be slightly different
High School: swimming and or cycling can take the place of the morning run, but other than that the morning excercises and schedules are unchanged. By this point students have begun to be sorted into tracks based on the German model depending on the students grades, scores on IQ tests, and self reported level of academic interest. Every school will have a woodworking shop, an automotive shop, and an ag barn. Students who can’t or don’t want to go to college will be exposed to as many fields and trades as possible and set up for apprenticeships when they graduate.
At this point, all after school sports are elective (but you still must participate in one at all times). The only rule is that all students must participate in one combat sport.
All seniors will take a personal finance course that emphasizes saving and investing.
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this is for me and my pal Spacetime to discuss policy and just throw ideas around. anyone is of course welcome to join. the only rule is that we avoid culture warring. our last convo was about UBI/technological unemployment
my current opinion is that technological unemployment is already here. We can see it everywhere, from the rise of "bullshit jobs" to the "gig economy." The economy actually HAS improved since the recession and people really are being pushed back into work...but it isn't enough. entire fields are in rapid decline, and not enough new positions are coming in to replace them. The unemployment rate might be low, but the underemployment rate is extremely high and rising.
at the same time our system utterly fails at producing the kinds of jobs that are difficult to automate--high skilled blue collar work.
what do we do?
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