I proved my sister wasn't doing her fair share because the rarely used large pot kept showing up on my day, as result mom ended both our allowances. We've been hearing since the 50's that robots would eliminate all jobs yet only the elevator operator job has been eliminated but many new jobs have been created. Minimum income is the first step the slavery & the dream of children, because the government give just enough to get by & takes it way to force you to do a job. I spent year stuck in warehouses temp job, & there's no way I'd of worked there if I did not have too. Unemployed includes children, spouses, elderly. Instead try managing debt, as no one buys their house for cash.
Reviews for "Why Basic Income?"
adamanimates responds:
We definitely have been hearing since the 50s that robots will eliminate jobs. But I think it's a mistake to conclude that it's not ever going to happen because it hasn't happened yet.
Maybe in your own life you only see the elevator job getting eliminated, but I see it everywhere. Warehouse jobs like you mentioned being done by machines that organize shelves, self-checkouts, self-driving cars and trucks, accounting software, and even animation. Software has changed things so that one person like me can do the job that would have taken six people 20 years ago. We are much more productive now, but wages have not risen since the 70s.
It is the opinion of many economists, not just "the dream of children," that workers should be entitled to the gains made by rising productivity.
When did Buzzfeed come to Newgrounds?
Welfare is giving money to the less educated and the most lazy, and taking it away from the people who actually work. We have generations of people being raised without parents and a lot of foodstamps.
And another thing, poverty does not cause crime, crime causes poverty.
adamanimates responds:
Your view is common, yet contradicts evidence.
"Using data from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, the Edinburgh university researchers found that poverty is a strong driver of violent offending amongst young people. However, systems of youth and adult justice, far from tackling violence and lifting young people out of poverty, serve instead to entrench poverty, thereby reproducing the very conditions in which violence can flourish."
https://www.criminallawandjustice.co.uk/features/Link-Between-Poverty-and-Crime
Decent animation and nice production quality. Fundamentally flawed premise: If everyone is riding in the wagon, who is going to pull the wagon?
1.You say that automation will destroy jobs, then later claim it will help people be more entrepreneurial. What?
2. Also flawed reasoning: the incentive is stripped from the would-be-entrepreneur. Why work when he can have things handed to him? Also, why bother becoming wealthy when his wealth will be taken from him? You are dooming the creative thinker to a life of mediocrity.
Nothing about nature is "equal"; you can't defy the laws of reality. All redistributive economics either fail (see Venezuela) or are currently riding off the success of capitalist countries (see Iceland).
adamanimates responds:
1. It sounds like a contradiction when put like that, but both things are true. My point is that people aren't lazier when you give them money. You were told that by the rich so they wouldn't have their taxes go up. There still will be jobs for a long time to come, and we need innovation and the basis for people to build on their ideas. One example of what I mean by entrepreneurial is that in the study in India, some people from poor villages were able to buy fishing gear and thus have a way to support themselves when they couldn't before.
Automation is also absolutely destroying jobs at the same time. All the repetitive, systematic stuff is getting automated as fast as it can. Maybe In the super long term, even that fisherman in India won't have a job because some machine catches the fish and sells them cheaper than he can afford to live on. What would you suggest then? I'd say that a portion of the massive gain in productivity should go to keeping people alive. In the case if everyone is riding in the wagon, robots are pulling the wagon. Until we get to that point, most of us pull with increasing help from machines.
2. Would you stop working after earning $12,000 in a year? That's the most common number thrown around for Basic Income. It could start lower than that, as it already does in the current system working in Alaska (about $2000). The work disincentive is a fiction. There's a lot of evidence about this, and it's all in the links up there. Basic Income is designed to avoid the current welfare trap, which is when people earn more by staying home instead of working. Once they start a job, a big chuck of their benefits disappear and it's not worth it. Basic income gradually tapers off the benefits until you make a middle-class salary, so there's no reason to not try and better your situation.
As for your ideas about redistributive economics, they are grounded in ideology and probably can't be changed by anything I type. But hey, I'll give it a shot. I think for Venezuela you have the cause and effect backwards. Venezuela's social programs are mostly funded by oil money, which accounts for 95% of exports. So what happens when oil prices go down? I don't see how it's the fault of the average Venezuelan for what the Saudis are doing with oil prices.
You're using the old arguments against communism, but Basic Income is a pretty capitalist idea. It was supported by who I imagine is one of your heroes, Milton Friedman. He wanted a way to simplify the massive bureaucracy of the welfare system. Turns out Basic Income is a more efficient way to do that. It almost was implemented in the States in 1970, but Democrats blocked it.
I give you 2.5 stars because I appreciate that you at least put some effort into making this, but this is a fundamentally bad idea on so many different levels. You are pushing a narrative in favor of policies that would essentially force the government to subsidize people simply for existing and not actually producing any valuable goods or services, while simultaneously exasperating the problem by reducing the tax base. It's economic cannibalism. The only reason we even have all this infrastructure and quality of life today is thanks to the capitalist system of "earn your keep". You'd be turning the driving force behind hundreds - no, thousands - of years of human progress on its head in the name of collectivism, and this would send society back into a new dark age.
adamanimates responds:
I agree that it goes against what many Americans believe. But it's not an anti-capitalist program. It enhances entrepreneurship and new business start-ups. All of the studies cited have found evidence for this. You need some capital to start things, and it's incredibly risky so many who would try just don't.
Whatever the basic income starts at, it's not going to be much... likely just enough to keep people off the streets. I suspect that both you and I would be motivated to do more than just subsist. The evidence from the studies in the US in the 1970s supports this conclusion as well. Everyone feared people would just stop working, but it didn't happen. The only people that reduced their working hours were new mothers and high school kids.
So if it turns out people keep working, your fears about the tax base shrinking are unjustified.