11-04-2019, 12:09 AM
(11-03-2019, 02:09 PM)Marypoza Wrote:(10-22-2019, 03:25 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-22-2019, 10:50 AM)Marypoza Wrote: -- that's why l like Yang's idea of a basic monthly income. to help supplement crappy low rent jobs. what's Yang's score anyhow?
Yang is advocating for policies at least a decade in the future, because the universal income meme has no play right now … except among people like us. If, as I suspect, job destruction outpaces job creation over a long enough period to prove, to the average member of the not-well-informed, that is something drastic or starvation, then it will get pushed to the front and fast. Killing all the truck-driving jobs may be enough, but a huge infrastructure build-out may paper over that loss for a while. We'll have to see how it plays. We do need the infrastructure badly.
-- the problem is implementation. Maybe Yang has talked about this & l missed it. The $ has 2 come from somewhere. Taxation is superfluous- why tax ppl only 2 distribute it as universal monthly income. Better to simply lower taxes X amount & start making parasites like Bezos pony up. AK has- or @ least they had- a universal monthly income. They distributed oil profits 2 their citizenry. So the Government would either have to nationalize something or invest in something. Cannabis & renewables come 2 mind. The Government could invest in solar start ups, wind farms, & what have yous & distribute the profits as universal monthly income. As 4 cannabis it's the country's #1 cash crop. If the Government is so concerned about it then fine, legalize it, nationalize it, regulate it like alcohol, it distribute the profits as universal monthly income
...or we could call it "universal profit sharing", and it would be necessity if we are stuck with monopoly. Maybe we get it as gift cards depending on where we live. Where I live, a $500 gift card from Meijer (a retail chain out of Grand Rapids, Michigan) would be very useful, and one from Safeway would not be useful where I live. Maybe the media giants give me cards useful for getting a little high-quality entertainment on HBO that I am priced out of.
It could be great for our culture. Lots of people would be richer in indescribable ways if they read some great books while listening to some Haydn string quartets...
We would have more mobility, we would find our lives richer, and we would get smarter.
Maybe the real power in the economy has gone from controlling production to controlling consumption.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.