…By virtue of their antipathy to Trump, making Democrats into vocal deficit hawks and free traders so that even if they win back Congress or the Whitehouse, it would be hard to change their tune.
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Politics and Economics
“When inequality loses its association with hope and instead becomes interpreted as a signal of a rigged society, higher inequality relates to lower well-being” (Buttrick, N. R., S. J. Heintzelman, et al., 2017).
... Averaged across the above groups, 24% of Republicans surveyed by Pew considered economic inequality to be a "very big" problem, compared to 62% of the Democrats surveyed.
...ideologues tend to exaggerate societal problems, the better to justify their Big Solution. Big Solutions need to be justified when they require painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn), as they often do. That pain had better be worth it. Hence: Big Solutions need Big Problems.
Point is, no one has an emotional reaction to inequality without a sense of what it speaks to. Inequality is a concept for God's sake. It's not at the same level of concreteness as, say, a snake slithering in the grass.
The above game is an example of what I call an "Act of God" study design, in which researchers (playing God) randomly dole out good and bad fortune to study participants, typically in the form of monetary payments.
For the most part, these are longstanding Republican complaints against the Democratic Party. What's changed over the years is the intensity of feeling that accompanies the complaints...
Is it any wonder that a lot of Republicans soured on the environmental movement or came to doubt the "consensus" on climate change? Sure, as members of a pro-business/limited government party, it's not surprising that Republicans would be a bit less gung-ho about environmental regulation than Democrats. But that doesn't explain the change in Republican opinion over the last decade or so.
Some government programs have already been shown to reduce chronic and transient poverty. One multi-year study found that the following government benefits combined reduced the chronic US poverty rate from 10.8% to 2.1%...What more can be done? Lots! Just a few ideas...
At the debate, UBI advocates dismissed these predictions as overly speculative, maintaining that possible risks could be managed. Their main argument was that a generous UBI was called for because Americans are suffering and their situation will keep getting worse without a major overhaul of the social contract. More specifically: poverty, income volatility, job instability and stalled social mobility are a plague upon the country and the only cure is a universal basic income. ...So let's look at these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
According to every recent survey I've read, Trump supporters are well aware of the President's character defects and many don't agree with all his policies, yet they continue to support this vile man because they trust his overall policy instincts, don't mind or even enjoy the show he puts on, and/or really, really hate the Democrats.
But wait! Won’t robots and AI free us from the need for labor? So can't we just ignore all the evidence re work disincentives and labor market participation?
Today's topic is: Why Many People don’t Return to Work after Not Working for a Period of Time
In Europe, high unemployment has been associated with the following: “generous unemployment benefits that are allowed to run on indefinitely, combined with little or no pressure on the unemployed to obtain work and low levels of active intervention to increase the ability and willingness of the unemployed to work" …What is it about work, and looking for work, that so many people would prefer not to?
UBI advocates often argue that government benefits only disincentivize work when they’re means-tested or stopped if the recipient gets a job. They argue that if you eliminated this “work-penalty”, there’d be no work disincentive. For proof, they point to Alaska...
With the proposed UBI, how many US citizens and residents would be tempted to stop working, reduce their work hours, take longer job breaks, or plan gap years from work? Consider, for instance, the results of a recent survey of older workers...
A whopping 57% of households in the bottom income quintile are single individuals. This is not so surprising, given that 44% of bottom quintile households are headed by individuals younger than 25 or older than 64. We're talking young people and seniors.
Per previous posts, this UBI scheme would cost about $4.1 trillion a year in new taxes. Let’s have the business community pay $500 billion of that. That leaves a $3.6 trillion tax tab for US households.
...to fund this UBI proposal with a stable source of tax revenue, we will need a broad-based tax base, like that of the Scandinavian Counties. For instance, like in Denmark, where “plumbers pay the same 50 percent income tax as hedge fund managers.”
Motion Summary: Basic income recipients would include children and adults; the employed and unemployed; and citizens, permanent residents, and all other residents who could prove a residency duration of at least three years. The amount given would start at $1,000 per person per month and be pegged to GDP growth going forward. No programs in the existing social safety would be replaced by this policy...This begins a series of posts laying out my case against the above UBI proposal.