At Vox Dylan Mathews comes out in opposition to a Universal Basic Income:
Both the OECD and AEI reports suggest that an immediate cashing out of big social programs to fund a UBI would be kind of a mess. It’d create massive disruption with big winners and losers, and given the scale of change required, it probably isn’t the most effective way of alleviating poverty you could imagine. Indeed, many of the models they consider would lead to poverty going up, not down.
[…]
So basic income and cash advocates would do well to pivot away from the kind of big, disruptive plans modeled in the OECD and AEI papers, and toward negative income taxes, child allowances, and carbon dividends, all of which are more politically feasible and likelier to be implemented in a way that doesn’t hurt low-income people or seniors.
The short version: the experimental programs which replace all assistance programs with a guaranteed income haven’t accomplished the results their proponents had thought they would. They’ve mostly just changed who wins and who loses from the present winners and losers.
Even shorter: jobs still remain the best anti-poverty programs.
You are on quite a roll today.
“Even shorter: jobs still remain the best anti-poverty programs.”
And this, of course, is the answer to your next post as well. But the fact remains that some sort of assistance programs must exist, and they will come with flaws. Flaws that can be exploited to argue against change. I’m not nearly as convinced as the authors cited about the magnitude of the disruptions that will occur if we rethink our approach. But then we’ve been change agents for 20 years and observed remarkable adaptability.
Separately, both here and at ZH there have been observations made about continuing wage sluggishness. As an employer I can unequivocally relay that looking at total compensation (read: health care benefits) and not just explicit wage rates explains a lot. But secondly, the going in assumption of full employment is, IMHO, false. There is a large reservoir of labor available on the sidelines, separate and apart from isssues like H1B. The public unemployment rate the past 5-6 years was a political statistic, not a real world statistic.
That all said, this is a smoking jacket, brandy and cigar comment. Politics will drown all sensible discourse. I’m glad I can float above it. I pity those who can’t. Enter DJT………
@Guarneri
And this, of course, […] remarkable adaptability.”
(The paragraph is too long to quote.)
Holy crap! I agree with most of the paragraph, and while the extremists on both sides may be apoplectic (figuratively or literally), it could be a starting point that many could form a consensus around. There would be many disagreements, but for most, the agreements would outweigh them.
I doubt that you will be wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat or making donations to Sen. Bernie Sanders any time soon, but your perspective would be welcome.
(I do not think that many/most of Sanders supporters are socialists, rabid or otherwise. Like Trump supporters, they are tired of being overlooked or dismissed, and I think most Sanders supporters want many of the same type of changes as Trump supporters. Keeping the two apart is a major objective of both sides.)