Share Ideas has published a new video about Basic Income.
A Basic Income is an unconditional income paid to every individual. It’s as simple as that. It has a number of different names: Citizen’s Income, Basic Income, Citizen’s Basic Income, Universal Basic Income. They all mean exactly the same: an unconditional income paid to every individual. The amount you received would not depend on your income, your wealth, your household structure or your employment status. It would not depend on anything else, every individual of the same age would receive exactly the same: the same amount, every week or every month, automatically. —–
Written: Dr Malcolm Torry; Narration: Kelly Condron; Music: Lawrence English; Typeface: Raymond Larabie; Film Footage: Pexels, Pixabay, Videoblocks, Videvo; Edited: Digifish
The issue is how to pay:
1. Redistributing bureaucrat pay and benefits (ie. tax)
2. Creating government money to pay UBI (inflation is a tax on savings and wages)
3. Using the new money created by banks for loans, as well as financing charges (this is about $1,000 per month for everyone. Do we let it keep accruing to banks for nothing but bookkeeping, or distribute it to the people?)
Dear BIEN,
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the
new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid
symptoms appear.
–Antonio Gramsci
BIEN may be the unborn “new,” but what stands in its way? Gaining acceptance for BIEN will require seeing robots as “workers” and workers as owners.
Barry Brooks
Whence Wealth?
Dignity is very important, but it plays a destructive role in economics. We do not “earn” the wealth we just harvest… with or without robots. Non-suicidal economics will require us to have enough humility to be thankful for what we have been given.
Dignity, purpose, meaning, love, and survival must not be based on one’s personal economic utility. We could base dignity on being kind, on caring for others, service to the community, having forgiveness, and on not being incredible. Even workers might see that we are all really PARASITES on the planet. We should produce/take just enough; even though full employment requires us to produce too much and find ways to consume it fast. Ending our “need” for suicidal hyper-consumption will require us to stop basing our dignity on our utility as workers and to accept capitalist unearned income.
Be more? Be more what? Let’s try to “be more” thankful and drop the narcissism. Economically being more destructive would be hard. While squandering more and more of what we have been given, humans pretend that by harvesting scarce wealth we are really creating wealth. We calculate that any resources not consumed as fast as possible are wasted, but those resources could be saved for real needs. The real waste lies in the unnecessary resource consumption needed to keep all the machines, and all the workers, busy full time, as if our productive capacity could not possibly be excessive. The goals of being more and producing more are leading us to our downfall. Unlike more, enough and less will require humility, but we have a pandemic of narcissism.
Maybe someday, robots will be given dignity and the title they deserve, “worker.”
In the US, we could pay for a UBI with what we send already.
From the “safety-net” we could take $0.9T (of $2.0T) plus $1.2T for ALL tax deductions. This would almost pay for at $2.4T Federal Poverty Level UBI.
The poor would see no additional benefits, but it would not be “means-tested” creating disincentives, and it would be in much more useful cash.
The middle class would see slight improvement.
The wealthy would pay more, BUT they would see significantly more income from an improved tax code. [2% additional growth, is my estimate]
States could be more liberal with redistribution, if they are willing to pay for it.
I am not a native speaker of English nor familiar with a particular brand or intonation of it.
This may explain why I can’t really appreciate the new video.
From a technical point of view I don’t understand the use or need of its ambiguity. By offering a written text by means of a voice-over and a series of quickly changing images at the same time one easily overshoots the mark.
In this case I’d prefer a good storyteller on a stage, leaving the supporting images – if needed – to my personal imagination.