[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Mathgod

Sadly, it looks like we've reached the point in the conversation where you have to resort to strawmen and ad hominems in an attempt to undermine my position.

You present very limited facts behind your position. It's all theoretical and based on Utopian beliefs with no basis in reality. You are making systemic assumptions that no one in their right mind is willing to accept as a possibility. You treat everyone's condition as if they are the same, facing the same situations, when they are not. You have to take into consideration the situation of all individuals and find solutions that raise all people, but provide the greatest lift to the least fortunate and most in need of help. What you're doing is shifting the money from programs that help and provide mobility to a lot, weakening those systems, and then providing a system that helps very few. It just does not follow any logic in any shape or form.

The US does not have a government-run health care system. Canada does. Absurdly, you're comparing what I'm proposing with the US health care system. I'm not calling for anything close to that. Just a modest fee each time you access a clinic or hospital, to deter frivolous use of the system.

User fees do not work. You are applying a tax on people who have chronic conditions and require healthcare services more often. You are penalizing people for conditions that are beyond their control. If those individuals are from a situation where they rely on welfare or government assistance, and you remove that assistance and replace it with a substandard form of income, those people are the ones who are hurt the most. This is a failure of the system.

The notion of "living wage" sounds nice in principle, but it implies a rather generously comfortable lifestyle. Don't try to tell me that a person can't meet his or her basic needs on $20k/year. If you must, get a roommate and split rent, to make your $20k stretch farther. Basic needs are met. Beyond that, offer your services to the market to attain more money.

A "living wage" implies a generously comfortable lifestyle? Do you have a clue what you're talking about? The "living wage" is defined as the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs (food, housing, and other essential needs such as clothing and hygiene needs). That is not generous, that is basic.

What huge administration costs are you talking about? We're literally just talking about sending out money to each adult citizen... what grandiose bureaucracy do you think needs to be in place to do that?

So this money is just going to magically get sent out? The program is going to self administer? There will be no governance over the program and no needs for people to interface with the department responsible for UBI? Again, do you have a clue what you are talking about? Do you have any idea how government or governmental programs operate?

Ad hominem attempt - not taking the bait. I could just as easily ask about your personal situation, and look for potential sources of bias impacting your viewpoint...

It's not an ad hominem, its an attempt to understand where you're knowledge base is coming from and what experience you have to make such claims. For example, if you're still living with mom and dad, and haven't had the responsibility of many of the things we're talking about, then it clearly brings into question if you have the experience or knowledge to speak these larger issues. I mean, you're suggesting that $20,000 is enough for someone to live comfortably on, which is below the poverty line pretty much everywhere. So it is very important to have context and understand what your experiences are to be able to make these judgments.

So you know I'm not trying to get you to walk into a bear trap, my experience is I have 28 years in private enterprise, 17 years in government, and almost a decade in the C suite. I've been very fortunate to have seen the insides of both interests that would have to cooperate to make UBI a reality, hence my commentary on the dramatic systematic changes that would have to take place and the incredible level of skepticism that these interests would come together to make the system work. I just don't see this happening in any shape or form.

Prices are determined by supply and demand. I don't buy into this notion that corporations have magical powers to crash everything if they don't get exactly what they want. Politicians have been bribed for far too long into doing the bidding of banks/corporations, and it needs to stop.

You're not acknowledging that the market can be easily manipulated, and is manipulated to a high degree. The fossil fuel industry is the best example, how one interest or a collusion of interests can create a monopoly and artificially inflate or deflate the price of product depending on how they control availability of their product. The stock markets are another perfect example. You're refusing to accept that this is the way the system is and the corporations are not going to change or suddenly grow a conscience, doing the right thing for society. They don't care. The only responsibility corporations have is to generate profit and value for their shareholders. For this to change, the whole system has to crash and burn.

You also fail to acknowledge that government institutions are not likely to change as they have very specific rules they have to follow. They have these annoying things called constitutions and laws they are compelled to follow, and they have a great level of oversight in the services they provide. Politicians cycle through the system, but the system remains pretty stagnant because of the way the institutions are setup to function. That is part and parcel of the operation of government. Because these are public interests there is a great degree of oversight to generate the transparency the public demands in using their tax dollars and sensitive information. Unless the system is burned to the ground and new institutions are defined in new and different ways, the forced transparency is always going to create that bloat you reference. This is the cost of being public interest and being accountable to tax payers. You need to understand this and recognize this as component of government.

"Taxation without representation" is an extremely vague statement, far too vague to have major legal pull. If it did, it could have been used to stop anything from FDR's New Deal to Obama's ACA.

No, its not vague. It is very specific and has been used in arguments against programs where government funds were allocated without proper process.

Fanatical brainwashed people... yes, and they are directly standing in the way of decency and progress. These people are completely enamoured by the psychotic rantings of Ayn Rand (which are directly antithetical to everything I believe in). At some point, you have to pick a side...

Hey, great, we agree Ayn Rand was a shrew. Baby steps.

At this point, it seems like you're trying to obfuscate the conversation. You've posted a bunch of pictures of people living in poverty, then turned around tried to paint UBI as some sort of bogeyman that will make their situation worse.

Because it would make their lives worse. You have stated you would eliminate the vast majority of the social safety net to pay for this UBI. I have been trying to show you that these programs are crucial to people's lives and maintaining a minimal standard of living, if you want to call it living. Giving someone 41% of what they need to survive on, and then eliminating the very means that could lead to some form of economic mobility is not only near sighted but cruel. This is literally pulling the rug out from the most vulnerable in our society to attempt a social experiment. Putting a face on the poverty you have no experience with is a way to show you how dire the situation is, and how UBI would make their lives worse.

If anything, your attempt at arguing this point may actually work against your position. The people in those communities may be collecting benefits from some of the programs you listed, but these conditions have nevertheless occurred. If anything, it shows that the status quo isn't working, and that the current programs that you want to keep in place so badly aren't the saving grace that you see them as being.

So your solution is to eliminate all the support mechanism they have and then give them a nominal amount of money that does not meet their basic needs. Swell of you.

At current, when people work jobs and collect income, benefits get clawed back based on how much money they get from their jobs. UBI, by contrast, gives people a floor from which to build on, so none of the UBI benefit gets clawed back as they bring in more income from their jobs.

You are missing the point. The vast majority of people living in poverty do not have access to good paying jobs, so they aren't seeing anything clawed back. These are people who are living in areas (ghettos or rural areas) where jobs are scarce and there are no services to speak of outside of those provided by the government. Again, I don't think you understand poverty or the challenges these people face. I have a feeling you are insulated from this part of society and can't appreciate the systemic failings that have come to them.

If anything, I think your "solution", of depending upon upward mobility to solve everything, actually contributes to the problem. It only gets people out of poverty on an individual-by-individual basis. We will never eradicate poverty by taking that kind of approach. Individual problems require individual action; collective problems require collective action. Poverty is a collective problem, not an individual one.

UBI does not solve poverty. Giving money to people does not solve poverty. Education and accessibility to the institutions that can provide the capital to make change in communities is what will solve poverty. To solve the problem of poverty you have to solve the problem in the communities where poverty is problematic. You need to elevate the community as a whole, and the only way you do that is through change agents. You need to elevate the people within that community by increasing their ability to provide for themselves. That comes through education. That comes through loans to the individuals who can then work within the system. UBI does not address the systemic changes that have to happen within communities so the economic and social well being of all can be elevated. That only comes with the communities having the support to make change.

As for systemic racism, yes that is a serious problem, but trying to weaponize it as some sort of argument against UBI, is absurd. If anything, if we lived in a society that didn't have a psychotic obsession with "creating jobs" and didn't see foreigners as "stealing our jobs"... maybe, just maybe, there would be less racist attitudes out there...

Sorry, but what??? I'm not even sure where you are going with this. You lost me here.