“If you means-test SS, then what distinguishes it from plain ole Welfare? It’s bad enough that dual-earning couples pay double into the system, compared to couples w a SAH spouse.”
I’m fairly supportive of means testing SS, actually, though I know that means we will have paid into it for four decades and end up with nothing. Purely because if we can’t afford these programs, something has got to give.
However, call it what it would be–welfare. Paid for by the people who were high earners, received by the people who weren’t, or didn’t save. It would be a charity tax. I think not everyone would be as anxious to file for it, if that was the program.
Also, since they seem to use the SS money for anything they want, as opposed to purely SS payments, I don’t know how they could actually bring people on board to this (except for those who would receive without paying much in).But I do think that might be the only solution to keep it solvent.
Machines and computers are TOOLS. You still need humans to operate them and input information. Sometimes they’re no help at all.
We sent a fairly large engineering bill recently to a homeowner, who wanted some columns taken out of his existing house and replaced with longer-span beams, to open up spaces. It was a complicated house. We had to figure out roof loads, funnel them down through new framing, and figure out how to support them at the foundation level. We first had to take lots of field measurements and figure out what we had to work with.
The homeowner protested our bill, in so many words claiming we had padded the bill! “I know you have computers to run calculations. I figure it should have taken you about six hours to input the information. Why is the bill so large?” We took a deep breath and wrote a long letter, explaining how complicated his house was and that we did not even USE a computer on his job! We had to run old-fashioned hand calculations. Fortunately, he accepted our explanation and thanked us for the good job we had done. There is no way that machines or computers can do what we do.
Don’t need to means-test SS. Just change the income cutoff. The higher someone’s income is, the smaller percentage they pay toward SS. That can be tweaked quite a bit.
As far as robots taking over, the parallel is the industrial revolution and its aftermath. A hundred years ago, the six day week was common, and so were longer working days, 10 hours or more. These were dialed back (largely through union efforts) and the world did not collapse. In fact, the country thrived.
How about we make a shorter day/week the norm, and see how the chips fall.
Oh and, universal health insurance is another way to go, because then people could self-regulate their work-hours without an insurmountable penalty.
Yes, but far fewer humans are needed to operate the machines.
20 years ago, my engineering industry had a cadre of draftsmen. They’ve all gone the way of the dodo bird.
Driverless trucks & cars are already possible. Who knows, maybe one-pilot cockpits aren’t far off. Cockpits used to have 3 pilots before technology rendered the dedicated flight engineer to be irrelevant.
The world constantly evolves and last time I checked sky net was not a real company. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually “intelligent” without input from humans. We will have to evolve and opportunities will arise we can’t even imagine.
If they invent a robot to do my laundry, mow my yard and fix my appliances I’ll be first in line.
"The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. "
There is NO way they would be able to get rid of all those program to pay for it.
The proposal from the articles is more moving deck chairs than anything else. Some people will win and others will lose. Those who benefit likely will be in favor. Those who lose will object.
One goal should be to encourage people to work and support themselves. If people can make as much or almost as much not working, why work? Phase outs of government benefits should take that into account.
Makes more sense to me to go the government benefit route than artificially increasing wages. The latter approach results in inflation (which negates all/part of the benefit provided with increased wages) and makes in harder to employ lower skilled workers (who are having the toughest time finding jobs). Also creates incentives to automate.
However, many higher income people get a substantial percentage of their income from non-labor sources (tax for Social Security is only collected on labor income).
I support replacing tons of government programs with 1 government program that is a lot simpler. It should have a lot less overhead (shrinking the size of government), resulting in money saved.
People are already incentivized not to work with the welfare cliffs in the U.S., which is a big problem. The program(s) must be restructured so that every dollar earned makes the earner better off.
The earned income tax credit, which has been greatly expanded over the last several decades in the U.S., has attractive features in that it pays low-income workers significant amounts of assistance but typically the recipients need to be working to get it. For low-income workers, the credit is greater than the amount of taxes that they had deducted from their paychecks. This used to be called a negative income tax.
Many government assistance programs are considered insurance programs because they insure against bad, unexpected outcomes (including “living too long” and outlasting your savings in the case of social security.)
How government programs are designed is not related in my mind to the changing labor/capital ratios also mentioned by the OP. Presumably if capital becomes more dominant as a factor of production, there would need to be an increase in taxes on capital income. What the overall tax rates need to be is separate from what type of government services would be offered.
“Is it time to consider Universal Guaranteed Income?” - Are you asking if it is a time to consider communism? Do you have examples of it working anywhere? Do you have experience living in such society? Everybody will have a different prospective based on their own experiences and background. My personal prospective is that there is never time to consider communism. It simply has not shown to be working. But I look at History as a science, not as a collection of dates and names. To me science is always right, just like 2+2 is always 4 and never 10.