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.
A moral emotion wants something to happen. What if the things it wants to happen are in a zero-sum relationship with each other? More of this means less of that and both this and that are Moral Goods. But you can’t have the optimal amount of both. You gotta choose! (And keep choosing, because time doesn't stop and stuff keeps happening).
...you insist on seeing things as binaries rather than continua. Either this or that, e.g., save the environment or help business; serve the rich or help the poor.
Wealth is not the same as money. For the wealthy, it's mostly equity in businesses and financial assets, e.g., value of equipment, shares, stocks, and retirement accounts. These are assets that do work: build businesses, provide funds for capital investments, grow the economy, etc.
Specific classes are where you spend part of your life. Class is a range on a distribution, not a static group, except for some people. The trajectory is usually up with age, then plateau in one's 50s, then decline. But reaching the middle class is important, because if it lasts more than a few years, that means you can buy a house, accumulate equity, and have more options later on.
...feminism helped some women advance to positions supervising men, which in the bad ol' days was rarely tolerated, whether at fast food restaurants or accounting firms.
Moderates are often considered weak versions of the Real Thing - people who lack strong convictions, who don't want to rock the boat.
The opposite was supposed to happen. Since more people would be insured under Obamacare, fewer would delay timely medical care. More would get regular check-ups. Medical conditions would be caught and treated before they got out of hand, necessitating a visit to the ER. That was the theory anyway.
...they’re better at constructing elaborate ideologies around their dumb ideas and more likely to achieve positions of power, allowing them to impose these dumb ideas on others. See, for instance...
Unfortunately, in this era of media fragmentation we see the exact opposite with groups collecting themselves into silos while simultaneously insulting anyone who doesn’t hew to their exact world-view. A Chemist in Langley Posted on April 29, 2017
That just about all personality traits show significant and substantial genetic influence is the stuff of college textbooks, e,g, Behavioral Genetics, now in its 7th edition.
My initial enthusiasm for writing this blog was to figure out what I found so annoying about the mindfulness movement. Something is wrong here, my emotions said. No, no, no!
To help me figure out if it was just me or if those feelings were on to something, I decided to study the matter further and read a canonical work, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (2013).
...they describe cleaning chemicals as "unnecessary" and propose that microfiber cloths and water are "enough for most purposes". The lead author, Oistein Svanes, summed up the take-home message of the study: "in the long run cleaning chemicals very likely cause rather substantial damage to your lungs".
Of course, we must remain vigilant! But measured optimism is not the enemy.
It's not all that hard or time-consuming to check the actual study behind a headline. If the article doesn't provide a link to the academic paper being cited, judge the publication (shame on them!) and then Google Scholar the paper...
...all this contributes to segregation along class lines, as families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors form increasingly homogeneous clusters of people with similar education, income, and norms. For many individuals, less class mixing means less first-hand exposure to success stories, which in turn undermines the confidence, motivation, and perseverance needed to get ahead in the world.