Not far fetched, sounds like...
Posted on 03/20/2014 2:14:19 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
What if you could receive a guaranteed basic yearly income with no strings attached? Didn’t matter how much money you made now, or in the future. Nobody would ask about your job status or how many kids you have. The check would arrive in the mailbox, no matter what.
Sounds like a far-fetched idea, right? Wrong. All over the world, people are talking guaranteeing basic incomes for citizens as a viable policy.
Half of all Canadians want it. The Swiss have had a referendum on it. The American media is all over it: The New York Times’ Annie Lowrey considered basic income as an answer to an economy that leaves too many people behind, while Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker of theAtlantic wrote about it as a way to reduce poverty.
The idea is not new: In his final book, Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in exchange was a good way for Americans to share in prosperity. In the 1960s and early 1970s, many in the U.S. gave the idea serious consideration. Even Richard Nixon supported a version of it. But by 1980, the political tide shifted to the right and politicians moved their talking points to unfettered markets and individual gain from sharing the wealth and evening the playing field.
Advocates say it’s an idea whose time has finally come. In a world of chronic job insecurity, stagnant wages, boom-and-bust cycles that wipe out ordinary people through no fault of their own, and shredded social safety nets, proponents warn that we have to come up with a way to make sure people can survive regardless of work status or economic conditions. Here are five reasons they give as to why a guaranteed basic income might just be the answer.
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Not far fetched, sounds like...
1) It will create a one-party state 2) It will increase crime
3) It will increase bastardy
4) It will increase poverty
5) It will ensure the final victory of communism
Well, there’s five right there! Didn’t take long, either.
The only thing wrong with your comment is the verb tense.
Actually, Milton Friedman proposed a “negative income tax” to replace all social welfare programs. I suspect that it would be less expensive than current government welfare programs.
But we know that this would end up as just another freebie.
On the other hand, St. Paul said, “if he will not work, neither shall he eat.”
They propose giving $3000 a YEAR to every man woman and child as a way to bring people out of poverty, improve human dignity and quality of life. All that for a mere $3000/ year. What planet are they living on? Unfortunately, ours.
Capitalism does not fail, so the author’s contention that it’s left too many people behind is false from the start. All capitalism promises is an opportunity. Ability, effort, and personal initiative take it from there. Those who want to provide the “reward” without the effort are soul-sucking leeches who want to destroy the spirit of mankind to enhance their own “power”.
What do they plan on doing when there aren’t any folks working to create the things the money goes to and turning it into a pile of green wrapping paper? You can bet every dime you’ve got that the producers of the world are going to notice folks getting a five-figure income for doing nothing and aren’t going to like it.
Blame George Bush
Sorry, I couldn't resist
-— With that said, how soon before MA is broke? -—
Somehow tax revenue was way up this year, so they’ll Conti ue to spend. The state budget must balance according to our state constitution.
High tech, insurance and finance keep MA alive
Aside from Boston, the cities are Detroiting.
If the price of everything tripled or quadrupled you would create poverty because everyone’s accumulated wealth would only be worth 1/3 or 1/4 of what it was.
$10 for a gallon of milk?
Maybe a $10 gold piece but not paper.
The guy producing the milk would have his accumulated wealth wiped out by the increased cost so there wouldn’t be anymore milk for the masses.
People would still work, but not for paper money.
You could get someone to clean your house for example but you would have to pay in food or something else with actual value.
Why stop at a free “basic” income? That’s such a puny concept. Let’s make everyone rich instead by giving a trillion dollar coin to every adult in the U.S. Then we’d all be rich! And no one would ever have to work again! Since we’d ALL be RICH! Myself? The first thing I would buy is a pony. And a jet airplane. Oh, and then I would buy the Mona Lisa. And the Broncos. Gosh, I just LOVE being RICH! And not having to work.
(BTW, the trillion dollar coins could be made from a base metal like nickle, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function perfectly. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet!)
Yep - except for the fact that "house plants" make poor invasion troops. That's why the globalists tunnel directly into the halls of power, rather than attempting to form a beachhead.
5 reasons to consider a no-strings-attached, basic income for all Americans”
1) It will create a one-party state 2) It will increase crime
3) It will increase bastardy
4) It will increase poverty
5) It will ensure the final victory of communism
Well, there’s five right there! Didn’t take long, either.
The only thing wrong with your comment is the verb tense.
**
Right. Change to “already has” — as in, it already HAS done the things on the list through welfare programs in this country, and many others.
These people already HAVE guaranteed income — what is this fool woman talking about??
If they start sending me an unearned check I’m going to start buying silver with it. When it goes to hell, I’ll have something to show for it
That can't be true. MLK is heralded as a Republican who judges people by the content of their character.
One model was proposed by Milton Friedman. In this version, a specified proportion of unused deductions or allowances would be refunded to the taxpayer. If, for a family of four the amount of allowances came out to $10,000, and the subsidy rate was 50% (the rate recommended by Friedman[citation needed]), and the family earned $6,000, the family would receive $2,000, because it left $4,000 of allowances unused, and therefore qualifies for $2,000, half that amount. Friedman feared that subsidy rates any higher would lessenthe incentive to obtain employment. He also warned that the negative income tax, as an addition to the "ragbag" of welfare and assistance programs, would only worsen the problem of bureaucracy and waste. Instead, he argued, the negative income tax should immediately replace all other welfare and assistance programs on the way to a completely laissez-faire society where all welfare is privately administered. The negative income tax has come up in one form or another in Congress, but Friedman eventually opposed it because it came packaged with other undesirable elements antithetical to the efficacy of the negative income tax. Friedman preferred to have no income tax at all, but said he did not think it was politically feasible at that time to eliminate it, so he suggested this as a less harmful income tax scheme.
I suggest his book Free To Choose, or you can find the pbs series he did by the same name on YouTube for more details. It should be required reading in high schools as far as I'm concerned.
When free cellphones are considered a “necessity of life” for the obese poor, it’s already all over but the crying. And even after getting these “free” phones, the criminal element still considers that it deserves a better phone, so goes “apple-picking”-stealing Apple products from the owners in broad daylight.
It tells a revealing story as to what is considered “poor” in America and what is considered poor in most of the rest of the world. Here, poor people are obese, many eat items which the people who paid the taxes for their EBTs can’t afford, their utilities and housing are reduced or free, they get vouchers to live in houses that the taxpayers can’t afford, they sit on their duffs while their children destroy the neighborhoods which the taxpaying sucker worked OT to move to in order to get away from their criminal element, etc.
And now they should all get a “free” basic income. Let’s just all quit work, what the heck, the “gubmint” will pay for everything.
It’s already been tried in the former Soviet Union, in Red China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, and elsewehere, with results history has documented only too well.
Thomas Sowell wisely suggests that we subject all government programs to these three questions:
1 - Compared to what?
2 - At what cost?
3 - What hard evidence do you have?
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