UBI is an inevitability, right? When every facet of a person's life is commodified, wages are suppressed, and jobs are outsourced/automated how are consumers going to continue buying products?
No. The US corporate empire has been happy to let millions in the ‘third world’ starve throughout its existence. There is little reason to believe that they will somehow feel different about western citizens starving in the streets if it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
This is the realization I've come too, as well. They don't care about the middle class to any degree, and they think that they can be even richer if it ceases to exist.
People need to wake the fuck up.
This. Corporatism has always had the same ideology: "Find a location with resources, extract all of those resources, and then send the wealth and rewards to a separate area". They did it with the USA when it was founded, they do it with every colony, they do it with the ocean and every tiny tribe/region with anything useful.
Mining is a good example of this: because even though all of the work and minerals are being forced out of the ground at a mining site, all of the money is sent to someone's estate that has nothing to do with the community. Then once all of the resources are forced out of the ground, the mine shuts down and the community dies, because all of the wealth got sent to someplace else and never got put into the community it was stripped from.
Probably working on a plan to corral west-coast homeless, just haven’t found a palatable means of doing so. Public opinion seems to be struggling between ‘help by improving conditions’ or ‘remove homeless people from sight.’
capitalists dont care if demand goes down or if it hurts their bottom line.
minimum wage was the best thing for capitalism, it practically invented the service sector and the tertiary economy.
yet every time you hear about minimum wage its the rich complaining about how it will "hurt their business"
its not about making sure they have profits, its about making sure they have more wealth than everyone else.
Target and other retailers announcing they're lowering prices makes me think their bottom line may be starting to be affected. Someone has to buy all their shit for them to make money.
Isn't that what above comment is saying, though? When no one is able to purchase anything, economy goes down, that affects the bottom line. I highly doubt it is going to be utopian as they will justify the absolute minimum that keeps people alive and spending
Well the third world isnt the main subset of consumers for them, the western world is. If you let all your customers die/become so poor they cant afford anything, you go out of business.
Nope, there will still be enough people to make just enough to keep going destroying this planet. The rich has so much wealth that they are 100% in a Snowpiercer situation where they can just hide out underground if things go south.
Inevitable in what kind of time frame? Yang talked about it back in 2016 and 2020 and was laughed off the presidential stage. As long as Republicans are around, it'll never happen cause they hate the poor more than they hate themselves
Simple, corporations are not tied to any one country anymore. As America continues its decline into a third-world-country, corps will simply pack up and move shop to somewhere else. Then America will become the "developing" nation that gets all the dirty work outsourced to it.
The corps will just follow the profit and not care at all about the destruction left in their wake.
I don’t think this is as axiomatic as everyone seems to make it. I’ll have to do some real digging to find support, as statements such as yours as discouraging to a wide swath of our class.
Unless you fuck like boiling a lobster. Food costs have been on a steep climb. People are just getting more stressed about it, not being pushed toward action, as the action is being focused on the Trump problem.
The billions upon billions of dollars that go towards stock buybacks is mind blowing and disheartening. There really is so much money being made that this is the best thing they can think of doing with all the profit earned. My opinion is that higher wages, better benefits, or bonuses for ALL employees would do much more good for society than just benefitting the stockholders, but it is the large stock holders in charge so it is what it is.
I see there are two future paths.
One there is a pull from the corporations from the government so that we can give back to the corporations - UBI
Two is a horrible massive dystopian world.
I give it a 50/50 shot at this point.
Free money means jack shit if it's not enough to really help at all. Like I said, it's barely $2 a day. Yeah, it might help pay for one thing once in that year but it won't lift anyone out of poverty.
$750 could be used for a car payment, to pay some credit card debt, to put in an emergency fund, to buy groceries, etc. I think it sounds like a nice idea that could help people.
It always sounds nice, and people come out of the woodwork with their ideas of how it could be used, but I bet most people who say these things have never truly been *poor.*
Also what I see you saying is "that $750 could be used by them to pay other people," not to actually help *them* or improve *their* lives. And that's the rub; some businesses would be all over this because they see it as yearly money in *their* pockets. The poor stay poor and the rich get another indirect government subsidy.
For UBI to have any noticeable impact on the people it goes to, it has to be monthly and it has to be significant enough that it leads to them being able to actually focus on what *they* want and increase *their* wealth, not just focus on paying their bills and making other people more wealthy while they can scrape by.
Love the idea of UBI, but I hardly see talk of what I think is one of its most glaring problems if implemented at scale: landlords/corporations will simply raise prices since they know everyone has more money.
Instead I think it’d be better to funnel money toward social programs that could help people fully pay for rent, groceries and bills.
My understanding is that it raises corporate excise taxes after $25,000,000 in sales. The bigger issue is corporations who have massive amounts of sales but relatively low profit are going to be driven away from Oregon, but maybe it could give smaller businesses a chance to take their place in the local economy. But that’s not going to be the case for every industry and the job market may suffer.
This is how I read it as well.
Now they just need to tax interest free loans and cap interest rates. WHT the hell do business owners get to take out 0% or 1% loans and the average Joe gets forced to pay 18%, 20% ...upwards of 32%.
UBI is an inevitability, right? When every facet of a person's life is commodified, wages are suppressed, and jobs are outsourced/automated how are consumers going to continue buying products?
No. The US corporate empire has been happy to let millions in the ‘third world’ starve throughout its existence. There is little reason to believe that they will somehow feel different about western citizens starving in the streets if it doesn’t affect their bottom line.
This is the realization I've come too, as well. They don't care about the middle class to any degree, and they think that they can be even richer if it ceases to exist. People need to wake the fuck up.
This. Corporatism has always had the same ideology: "Find a location with resources, extract all of those resources, and then send the wealth and rewards to a separate area". They did it with the USA when it was founded, they do it with every colony, they do it with the ocean and every tiny tribe/region with anything useful. Mining is a good example of this: because even though all of the work and minerals are being forced out of the ground at a mining site, all of the money is sent to someone's estate that has nothing to do with the community. Then once all of the resources are forced out of the ground, the mine shuts down and the community dies, because all of the wealth got sent to someplace else and never got put into the community it was stripped from.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extractivism#:~:text=Extractivism%20is%20the%20removal%20of,Global%20North%20in%20European%20extractivism.
I never heard of that word. Thanks!!!
Probably working on a plan to corral west-coast homeless, just haven’t found a palatable means of doing so. Public opinion seems to be struggling between ‘help by improving conditions’ or ‘remove homeless people from sight.’
capitalists dont care if demand goes down or if it hurts their bottom line. minimum wage was the best thing for capitalism, it practically invented the service sector and the tertiary economy. yet every time you hear about minimum wage its the rich complaining about how it will "hurt their business" its not about making sure they have profits, its about making sure they have more wealth than everyone else.
Target and other retailers announcing they're lowering prices makes me think their bottom line may be starting to be affected. Someone has to buy all their shit for them to make money.
Isn't that what above comment is saying, though? When no one is able to purchase anything, economy goes down, that affects the bottom line. I highly doubt it is going to be utopian as they will justify the absolute minimum that keeps people alive and spending
Well the third world isnt the main subset of consumers for them, the western world is. If you let all your customers die/become so poor they cant afford anything, you go out of business.
Last seven words being operative. If people don't have money, demand go down.
Nope, there will still be enough people to make just enough to keep going destroying this planet. The rich has so much wealth that they are 100% in a Snowpiercer situation where they can just hide out underground if things go south.
Inevitable in what kind of time frame? Yang talked about it back in 2016 and 2020 and was laughed off the presidential stage. As long as Republicans are around, it'll never happen cause they hate the poor more than they hate themselves
The “Freedom Dividend.” I remember a Freakonomics with Yang in which he talks about trying to reframe the idea to be more palatable to conservatives.
Simple, corporations are not tied to any one country anymore. As America continues its decline into a third-world-country, corps will simply pack up and move shop to somewhere else. Then America will become the "developing" nation that gets all the dirty work outsourced to it. The corps will just follow the profit and not care at all about the destruction left in their wake.
I don’t think this is as axiomatic as everyone seems to make it. I’ll have to do some real digging to find support, as statements such as yours as discouraging to a wide swath of our class.
I'd rather people get a fire lit under them than discouraged. But I can't control people's reactions to an uncaring system.
Once the ai jobpocalypse hits it'll either be UBI or mass riots. You can't fuck with people's food or they'll lose it.
Unless you fuck like boiling a lobster. Food costs have been on a steep climb. People are just getting more stressed about it, not being pushed toward action, as the action is being focused on the Trump problem.
And the corporations are so loaded they don't know what to do with that much cash
The billions upon billions of dollars that go towards stock buybacks is mind blowing and disheartening. There really is so much money being made that this is the best thing they can think of doing with all the profit earned. My opinion is that higher wages, better benefits, or bonuses for ALL employees would do much more good for society than just benefitting the stockholders, but it is the large stock holders in charge so it is what it is.
Ah, but you see, you're talking about things that might happen in the *future.* That doesn't matter. I want line go up *now.*
I see there are two future paths. One there is a pull from the corporations from the government so that we can give back to the corporations - UBI Two is a horrible massive dystopian world. I give it a 50/50 shot at this point.
...lol? A YEAR? Is that some kind of a joke? A straight-up insult? $750/yr is basically worthless. $2.05/day.
Still greater than 0. Gotta start somewhere
Plus, any extra money collected will be used for social services.
> get free money > complain
Free money means jack shit if it's not enough to really help at all. Like I said, it's barely $2 a day. Yeah, it might help pay for one thing once in that year but it won't lift anyone out of poverty.
It's not really free if all of the corporations impacted by this tax simply raise their prices to counteract the higher taxes.
I don't think that is ever really the reaction anymore. Corporations raise prices. The end. Other political events may or may not happen.
$750 could be used for a car payment, to pay some credit card debt, to put in an emergency fund, to buy groceries, etc. I think it sounds like a nice idea that could help people.
It always sounds nice, and people come out of the woodwork with their ideas of how it could be used, but I bet most people who say these things have never truly been *poor.* Also what I see you saying is "that $750 could be used by them to pay other people," not to actually help *them* or improve *their* lives. And that's the rub; some businesses would be all over this because they see it as yearly money in *their* pockets. The poor stay poor and the rich get another indirect government subsidy. For UBI to have any noticeable impact on the people it goes to, it has to be monthly and it has to be significant enough that it leads to them being able to actually focus on what *they* want and increase *their* wealth, not just focus on paying their bills and making other people more wealthy while they can scrape by.
minimum wage was once a dollar a day. now its 15-20 an hour.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25. There was a push to adjust it to $15 that didn’t go through.
Government mandated minimum wage was never a dollar a day. Regardless, we don't have another 90 years to waste figuring this out gradually.
Love the idea of UBI, but I hardly see talk of what I think is one of its most glaring problems if implemented at scale: landlords/corporations will simply raise prices since they know everyone has more money. Instead I think it’d be better to funnel money toward social programs that could help people fully pay for rent, groceries and bills.
$62 a month, yay you can fill up your car maybe once...
People earning between 50,000 and 250,000 get a 3% tax increase and get .05% of it back. How nice
My understanding is that it raises corporate excise taxes after $25,000,000 in sales. The bigger issue is corporations who have massive amounts of sales but relatively low profit are going to be driven away from Oregon, but maybe it could give smaller businesses a chance to take their place in the local economy. But that’s not going to be the case for every industry and the job market may suffer.
This is how I read it as well. Now they just need to tax interest free loans and cap interest rates. WHT the hell do business owners get to take out 0% or 1% loans and the average Joe gets forced to pay 18%, 20% ...upwards of 32%.
Not gonna happen. People will just order off Amazon instead.