Originally posted by @Sunshine V.:
Originally posted by @Rob Duke:
Originally posted by @Sunshine V.:
If you are one of the many asking where the $1000 would come from, listen to the podcast about Andrew Young and interview with him on The Freakanomocs podcast #362. He explains that he would get the money from companies like Amazon and Apple because they will be the major benefactors of all this automation and effectively kill much of the American job market. I believe he said it would be something like a tax on every transaction but it would only be like a penny or a fraction of a penny because of their immense volume.
I think they simply lie when they tell you this. Say there are 350,000,000 people in the US. Now say only 200 million of them get $1,000 per month "Basic Income". That would cost $200 Billion per month. Divide that by $.01 and you get a required 20 Trillion transactions per month. Yea... Amazon North America does how many? I'd be surprised if it is over 10 billion for Amazon & Apple combined.
These are not Economists, they are salesmen for a product which is UBI so question their every word. What they do is slip in bad assumptions to build their otherwise seemingly logical argument upon. And let us not forget all these 'scientific' studies performed using a multitude of false assumptions.
Check out some of the Amazon statistics yourself if you don’t believe me. And before you write this guy off as a politician- listen to the story- I think you may be surprised. Amazon is just one example, you can also parse transactions made on the stock exchanges (digital trading), ebay, any company that uses self-driving cars instead of people to drive (uber, lyft), google (think Pay-per-click), etc. Amazon was just one example. All the industries that have the money to invest in these kinds of technologies that actually destroy entire career paths- they have to realize that by killing jobs they are also eliminating customers’ income. They have a vested interest in people having money to spend. This is just not the kind of thing the little guy (and by that I mean 85% of America) can compete with. Government will have to do something to equalize - because private’s industry won’t have the scale to do it. And this isn’t the first time this kind of thing had been discussed. It’s been studied! In fact, ask the residents of Alaska if they want to give their oil subsidies back to the state, that’s a version of the same thing.
I looked at Amazon statistics, they seem to hide the transaction data pretty well although you can find a lot of other data that they must disclose quarterly. If you have the link for annual transactions I'm sure everyone would like to see it.
I'd much rather see ANY and ALL taxes the government proposes be locked in a box they cannot borrow against or otherwise divert because that is what they do here in California. They propose a tax and then promise the unions huge, unrealistic pensions in a bid to win re-election which has all but bankrupted our state. So anyone in their right mind should be 100% against any taxes of this sort without provisions preventing politicians from getting their thieving hands on them.
I've seen Nobel Prize winning Economists make bold predictions and flat out wrong predictions in the last 5 years. Because there have been studies does not mean anything. People who make studies or more often than not, wrong in the end. To get studies funded, they often have to predict the outcome and work hard to achieving that goal if they want more funding. This is why everyone should question every piece of 'science' that comes out.
Government's role should not be to 'equalize' but to build infrastructure so startups can compete with the big guys. Why did the US Postal Service acquiesce its role in being a shipping hub? These Amazon warehouses should be a model to which our government builds its distribution centers, thus allowing the smaller guys to compete. The problem isn't the mom & pop shops going by the wayside, the problem is the mom & pop shops have no way to compete because of the economies of scale combined with a fast-changing way of doing things.
Listening to Andrew Yang Freakonomics podcast today.
