Ask Lemmy

It depends on society not turning itself inside out.

If we could just pluck along where we were in the early 10's, everywhere that has socialized healthcare will eventally slowly install UBI and all the like things that come with it.

But, looking at the trends in society, wars, weather, oligarchs, and population decline, we might only have a few generations left.

In a few places, maybe, but there's a lot of the world where governments barely function in the first place. Roads aren't even a solved problem globally. UBI for even middle income countries wouldn't happen before climate change caused such damage as to undo any progress that might maybe make UBI possible.

UBI is 100% populist idea. It replaces targeted welfare directed at people who need it with universal one - which is a massive waste of money, and extremly unfair to the working class as it has to be financed with massive taxation.

Funny how Marxists love talking about working class being exploited just to nonchalantly drop UBI around.

IMO Universal Basic Income the second worst idea after so called "Modern Monetary Theory"

Nope it's not.

Look, most of the taxes are paid by the people, do you think the billionaires are gonna spare a dime? Where UBI is needed, there's most likely an entire population of working class that's not generating any tax revenue, and is a net negative for the government. And tax money isn't just meant to be distributed to the people, it's for also maintaining infrastructure and building new ones. You realise how much of burden would UBI be on the government? Do you think they can still maintain roads and fund libraries/universities if most of their treasury is being spent on paying people an income?

I don't think UBI is practical at all. Ground reality is, even governments have finite resources. We genuinely need better plans than just relying on UBI as solution.

No. Wealthy people don't feel like they're winning unless poor people are losing.

Yes. As long as scarcity exists for a given commodity/service, markets are the best way to get an accurate assessment of concerned opportunity costs.

Needless to say, the presence of markets ≠ capitalism.

Hence, yes, I do believe that that UBI is the obvious way to go forward as humans move towards labor post scarcity.

We have to kill or tax all billionaires out of existence first. Their choice. And I don't mean that with any sentiment of hyperbole.

Taxing (or burying at sea, or grilling on a spit, or force feeding them like foie gras to consume their livers) billionaires out of existence isn't an issue of generating enough tax revenue. You can consider it a part of why such a thing is important, but it should not be considered the primary point.

The primary point is to reduce the distance between the wealthiest among us and the least wealthy among us. For all it matters, the money re-possessed could be burned. Its utilization is secondary to reducing the disparity.

If being a billionaire was an illegal act punishable by immediate execution, the need for UBI would be dramatically reduced. It would also be dramatically easier to implement.

No way the entire world gets on board, and in a reasonable way. Human psychology stands in the way of that.

Whether it gets experimented and implemented more in some countries - possible - but I don't see as particularly likely or unlikely.

It's one solution to resolving the tensions of capitalism and social capitalism and the degradation of social capitalism. Whether it will be UBI or something else, and where - we will see.

It's that or we all die of heat death.

I in my heart of hearts see UBI as unworkable and inflationary, as universal basic income doesn't set universal basic buying power which is very hard to do without a socialist system guaranteeing housing, food, etc. I also don't believe people are ok with a disconnection between work and financial value. Money is one of the few ways to quantify the value of work and humans in general have a need to feel what they do is valued, particularly if it takes up so much of human identity and what they do on a day to day.

The rich will probably just try to kill us all before that happens. We should get rid of the wealthy

UBI isn't a panacea, but it seems to me that we are going to need creative solutions. It's not going to solve the issues we face that are fundamentally because there is too big a gap between the wealthy people and poor people. But capitalism is failing us and the center cannot hold.

With the advancements of AI, I believe UBI will eventually be needed just to keep the economy rolling. More and more tasks will get automated whether we like it or not. That’s the general direction everything is heading.

People would rather not have UBI. Give outs, without some effort, will just lead people to rot. People need the fulfillment that a good days work provides so maybe it'll be tagged to something, but if it is private -- such as your a peon, then we're just serfs of a fiefdom.

The "New Deal" that FDR enacted included work, public works projects, that got people to work; this granted them skills, which helped them enter into work for businesses. If you've ever been to a CCC project, like at some State/National Parks, then that's a demonstration of its effects. They did good work, though they did trample on indigenous nations. Of course, then we went to war in WW2, which brought home GIs ready to setup a life.

UBI is a concession to capitalists. It pacifies the working class while maintaining the system that oppresses us. At best, it's a band aid. We need full blown socialism. Not "Democratic socialism", real socialism, in which the workers own and control the means of production. That is the only path to working class liberation.

I want to believe that progress is inevitable. The living conditions for the working class are better now than they were 100 years ago. Hopefully, by the time another 100 years have passed they will have drastically improved some more.

Unfortunately, the reasons they have improved in the last 100 years are due to constant fighting against the lazy non-working class. Not some evolved sense of society.

Zionazi, Corporate, Oligarch fascim will put up a good fight. UBI is more power redistribution than any wealth redistribution. It becomes easier for everyone to make a lot of money and get richer. The objection is about reducing fascist totalitarian establishment power.

Do I think that it is a possibility? Sure.

Do I think that it is likely in the near to medium term future? No.

It's way too complex for me to boil down to a simple slogan, and ain't nobody got time to read what I'd need to write to sufficiently explain and I ain't got time to explain it. Closest I can come is that UBI is "equality" in a system would currently benefit more from "equity", at least from a US-centric stand point. I am not anti-UBI by any means, just more inclined to say that a strong, need-based social safety net would be more efficient and beneficial than a thin, wide-cast net like UBI.

Contemporary unemployment rates aren't a great metric to consider for the necessity/utility of UBI. The current unemployment situation in a lot of the world is a symptom of inefficiency and instability in the system (hand wavy gesture). UBI doesn't address the underlying factors, not that it has to. But at the same time, status quo and inertia are massive forces to overcome, and "different but the same outcome" isn't the push that's needed to get over that hump. So, I just don't think we're anywhere close to getting over that barrier.