Universal Basic Income

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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Steve James on Sun Jul 21, 2019 3:42 pm

That would be nice, but of course things don't work that way. The profit generation for the stipend in Alaska does not originate with the state, but with some oil companies. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's just how it is.


Oh, the stipend comes from the government. Palin suspended the payments, and they haven't gotten them in several years. The current governor wants to make it up by giving all of them S3K. The problem is that it means cutting the State's budget, and funds that go to infrastructure and education.

From 2014: "Today, Oct. 2, almost every permanent resident of Alaska — even babies — will get paid $1,884 as a dividend from the state’s Alaska Permanent Fund, a government fund that invests proceeds generated from the state’s oil reserves to ensure future wealth for the state."

Iow, the government stopped distributing dividends and was using them for the benefit of the state. But, my point was only that if the country is a business, the citizens are the shareholders. I don't think of it that way, but that was the argument made for putting a businessman in office and making changes to benefit businesses.

You can argue that it wouldn't work, but is this working? If so, why are people complaining? Is it because people want a change? What kind of change? All I hear is what isn't working and what can't work, and it's always someone's fault.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Michael on Sun Jul 21, 2019 4:15 pm

windwalker wrote:
The United States (and most of the world) has a monetary system that generates profits by using the tool of money to steal value from labor, ie. it is usurious and therefore immoral.


Profits?

How do those countries fund the cost of maintaining the conditions that allow those in business
and others who provide the labor for business to do so in an environment that allows for it?

I didn't mean profits in that sense. The profits from a business that does labor are a positive and moral creation without indebtedness and obligation that leads to debt slavery.

The overall point I am making is that profit should come from the value created by labor, but as things work now profits primarily come from using money to steal value from labor: "Wall Street eating Main Street."

For example, the essentially unlimited ability of Wall Street to create profit from money that is leveraged in order to create more money through elaborate and exotic financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations—that have almost no regulatory limitation or regulatory accounting—is immoral and was partly based on the real value of people's homes, which were forfeited when the scheme collapsed in 2008. The theft of value from money creating money resulted in people losing their homes.

The monetary system in the USA from the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is a system where money is generated from thin air, as debt from its very inception so that its creation generates profits through interest for central banks. These profits are not based on labor and come at the expense of the nation that pays that interest on the creation of that money. Income tax is just the cash flow mechanism to keep the scheme liquid. On top of this, debt money is multiplied through the use of fractional reserve banking (at a rate of at least 9:1) in order to benefit the banker without value being created by labor. All three of these mechanisms are immoral and completely unnecessary, and they did not exist in the USA before 1913, or in Canada for a much longer time afterward.

By some coincidence, the Middle Eastern countries we have bombed to smithereens in the past 20 years do not want to participate in this system, and neither do China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. Is that what makes them part of the Axis of Evil?

These could be changed and wealth retained by the laborers who create value that is now stolen by an immoral system.


stolen, immoral system )
Feel free to point to another system as an example
or suggest ways to address the immorality, and refund what was stolen[/quote]

I am saying money should be created from thin air directly by a government without attaching an interest-bearing debt to it from its inception.

One suggestion is for the government to create money and spend it into existence in order to fund infrastructure projects. This is similar to what actually happened in the USA during the Great Depression with the WPA and TVA where jobs and projects were funded directly by the government, but the government could have less involvement by just creating the money and spending it through private firms to build bridges, roads, hospitals, schools, etc., instead of borrowing it from The Fed.

Controlling the balance of the money supply with the value of labor in the economy (preventing too much inflation or deflation) is always susceptible to the temptation of theft and concentration of wealth and power, but if the government were in control of that it could be 100% transparent and influenced more by elected officials than private, international, central bankers.

Central banking and income tax are planks of the communist manifesto. Capitalism without morality is usury and debt slavery. We should have a system that achieves balance, and such a moral system would develop enough wealth for everyone to be independent, but that is contrary to the ideology of debt slavery that is the greatest overall influence in society.
Last edited by Michael on Sun Jul 21, 2019 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby windwalker on Sun Jul 21, 2019 4:20 pm

You ever run a business?

do you understand what the profit margin is for some of the big businesses that people talk about?

Not much.

You understand what happens to many small businesses when suddenly they're forced to pay a minimum wage that can support?
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Michael on Sun Jul 21, 2019 4:32 pm

I'm not talking about minimum wage and profit margins. What I'm talking about is at a different level of the economy, the level where money is created and distributed.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA&t=21s

If we had a monetary system that was moral, and if usury (making money from money) were illegal again, it would be fucking raining so much money for everyone that we would scarecely know what to do with it.

Usury used to be illegal for Christians. Anti-usury would not prohibit monetary investment, but it would outlaw the apparatus of predatory capitalism.

With a moral monetary system, anyone with half a brain and 10 cents of ambition would be completely financially independent and never pay compound interest again. In fact, most interest-bearing loans would be illegal and money would be distributed without creating debt slavery.
Last edited by Michael on Sun Jul 21, 2019 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby everything on Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:41 pm

I think an interesting example (maybe the most interesting?) of what you're talking about is the financial crisis of 2008 and TARP (here's one link: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tr ... m-tarp.asp)

so in a nutshell:
0. mortgage interest rates were super low
1. banks made loans to people who really shouldn't have gotten loans (subprime mortgage crisis)
2. then created new "asset backed securities" - other cash flow instruments presumably backed by mortgages backed by actual real estate
3. people borrowed more than they should and started to default.
4. investors tried to "unwind" from the ABS
5. banks went into a crisis.
6. the government came up with TARP to bail out the banks
7. the government (led by ex Goldman Sachs man turned Treasury Secretary) actually made money on TARP.
8. banks got a big bailout.
9. the Auto Industry then got a big bailout by TARP funds.
10. taxpayers didn't have to pay for TARP (because it made a profit), but individuals who defaulted on loans they shouldn't have taken or been allowed to take obviously suffered from it all.

Now we could say "stupid people made stupid decisions" but at the same time we could say "fat cats/sharks who know way better took advantage of stupid people, got rewarded by government bailout for their bad behavior, the fat cats made money, the government (btw Goldman Sachs gives you a "bonus" when you are an alumnus going into "government service") made money, and so on." see https://www.investopedia.com/articles/0 ... -blame.asp for a clearer discussion. Plenty of people to blame: lenders, borrowers, credit agencies, hedge funds, but clearly Big Money and Big Govt ended up doing rather well despite it all.

Is that good or bad? You be the judge, but it smacks of the haves fixing shit for themselves and the have nots getting screwed over, unwittingly. But that still doesn't really mean anyone should have universal basic income. The only argument that would realistically give rise to this is one based on "enlightened self interest" where the wealth/power elite see it's helpful in some way. Other than needing consumers to buy shit, I'm not sure what the other reasons are.
Last edited by everything on Mon Jul 22, 2019 6:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Steve James on Mon Jul 22, 2019 7:34 pm

Ah, "enlightened self-interest," it was intended to mean something like "when I do well, everyone benefits," but it is really just an idealistic name for greed and "I'm in this for me. Devil take the hindmost." It's like the self-interest of crabs in a barrel. They could probably join claws and make a ladder. Instead, they simply pull each other down in their individual attempts to get out. Yeah, they're just crabs and can't know better. But, ya can't argue that they've got plenty of self-interest. It's just not enlightened.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Michael on Mon Jul 22, 2019 9:22 pm

10. taxpayers didn't have to pay for TARP (because it made a profit), but individuals who defaulted on loans they shouldn't have taken or been allowed to take obviously suffered from it all.

The most powerful tool in society is money and under our system it is used immorally in order to create money from money, ie. profit, by stealing the value of labor. Wall Street eating Main Street.

The initial TARP was $700 BILLION. Because of the way the monetary system is setup and because it is based on usury, money is initially created from thin air as debt, and then it is both multiplied to create profit, as well as generating compound interest. To say that taxpayers did not have to pay because the banksters made a profit is very misleading as their "profit" creates little or no value through economic stimulus and merely sucks value out, like a shylock extracting vigarice.

The basic principles at play are the interest rate charged to the banks, which was 0%, the time value of the free money while they had it, and how many times they could multiply it by a combination of fractional reserve banking and fraudulent derivatives that created the problem in the first place. There were some reports that CDO's and other derivatives were going through a fractional reserve process of 20-30:1, whereas the normal Federal Reserve rate of fraudulence is only 9:1.

When you give someone $700 BILLION interest free cash flow that they can multiply it by creating profit from stealing value from labor (because from where else can value come?), then actually the tax payers do pay because they are the only true laborers.

The same happened for the total $29 TRILLION the banksters were given that they later "paid back." Of course anyone can use exotic check kiting schemes to generate "profit" when you give them BILLIONS or TRILLIONS of dollars of free money and years to return it. They essentially just debase the currency and return tin instead of gold. Debt paid, lol.
Last edited by Michael on Mon Jul 22, 2019 9:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby everything on Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:52 am

Well I like your rant because someone has to help the little guy and the "elites" shouldn't get away with whatever they want.

For debt in general, the opposite of debt is credit.
If used well (or morally as you put it), it's very good because adding borrowing (such as with a mortgage you actually do qualify for) means you can go ahead and spend something more. That spending is essentially someone else's income (like the homebuilders), so if this all goes well, it helps everyone (the economy can expand faster/more).

If some kind of bubble happens, it hurts everyone because the economy can suddenly contract.

In this subprime crisis, essentially (my layperson understanding) credit was extended when it should NOT have been, leading to the house of cards so to speak falling down.

Those who knew way better (the lenders, agencies, govt) and set up this system are largely to blame, but some borrowers are certainly to blame, and maybe they were speculating like with Dutch tulips so they could try to flip houses.

An incredibly great video on credit/debt is "how the economic machine works" by Ray Dalio:
https://www.bridgewater.com/research-li ... ine-works/
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Steve James on Tue Jul 23, 2019 8:45 am

People are still flipping houses. I remember when interest on loans was 10% and higher (the 70s), but home prices were much lower. The 80s and 90s saw the beginnings of the tech revolution, and an economic boom. In the 2000s, real estate prices started to skyrocket. Banks encouraged buying by cutting interest rates down dramatically. It became lucrative to buy homes, improve them, and resell them. The banks loved it. Ah, but what exactly happened between 2006 and 2008 that made the market crash? Why? The banks lost money. Can't have that happen, so the government began helping out ... oops, there went the stock market.

Image
https://www.thebalance.com/thmb/dW1GY4Q ... ormat(webp)/stock-market-crash-of-2008-3305535-v4-5b61eb93c9e77c004fa0a4ad.png

https://www.thebalance.com/stock-market ... 08-3305535
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby windwalker on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:03 am

The crash was due impart to policies established under presidents Clinton's term of office
January 20, 1993 – January 20, 2001

basically the government thought it was a good idea that everybody should own a house and encouraged the banks to make it so.

President Bush came into office and had mentioned that the stock market wasn't as good as people thought it was. It should be mentioned that before this time some of the rules for banks changed so that they could monetize their loans and investments which they did.

January 20, 2001 – January 20, 2009.

Whether one agrees with the actions taken at the time or tries to input motivations for doing so, the bottom line is that we will never know what would have happened had they had not.

We do know the economy seems to have recovered and is on track in its usual haphazard way based on what voters feel when they go to the ballet box.

In 2020 the voters will have another chance to determine what policies they feel should be put in place or remain in place by either keeping the present Administration or electing a new one.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby Steve James on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:20 am

The crash was due impart to policies established under presidents Clinton's term of office
January 20, 1993 – January 20, 2001


:) Because of policies enacted during his administration, there was a budgetary surplus. In fact, during the Clinton administration the federal budget was balanced and the federal deficit was erased. Bush cut taxes and regulations because the economy was doing well. Bush was, however, also saddled with the effects of an ongoing post 9/11 American economy.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-b ... r-clinton/

Of course, we know the state of the economy, the budget, the deficit, and the end of 2008. However, I'm not going to blame Bush for our upcoming trillion dollar deficit.

Image
https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles ... ficits.jpg

And, yes, the American ideal has always been property and home ownership. It is a good idea.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby windwalker on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:29 am

. Because of policies enacted during his administration, there was a budgetary surplus. In fact, during the Clinton administration the federal budget was balanced and the federal deficit was erased.


What some might call inconvenient facts.

. Other readers have noted a USA Today story stating that, under an alternative type of accounting, the final four years of the Clinton administration taken together would have shown a deficit. This is based on an annual document called the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," which reports what the governments books would look like if kept on an accrual basis like those of most corporations, rather than the cash basis that the government has always used.



Followed by a crash I wonder what those policies were
That provided the surplus and what the surplus was based on.



I believe it's 22 trillion dollars, that's the tipping point.
U.S. is now at could be wrong 20 or 21 trillion dollars.

A trend that's kind of hard to reverse without first having a functioning economy, along with a functioning government. Hopefully after the 2020 election the government part will be addressed.
Last edited by windwalker on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:33 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby everything on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:33 am

Getting way off on another tangent now,
I was watching Rich Dad Poor Dad.

His basic comments were:
if you are rich, you need to reduce your main expense line, which is taxes.
One good way to do that is borrow money (that you don't need) and buy real estate.

You can deduct rental expenses, including mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance premiums, fees paid to property managers, utility bills, and 50% of any depreciation on the property.
Rent helps cover your loan, you deduct various items from taxes, while building wealth.
He argues that taking a giant student loan, then getting a good job, then taking a giant mortgage and a car loan just locks you into something and is a really bad idea.
He has some good points here for people who can do that.
We could maybe argue that it's a good idea for many people who can afford it and are savvy about homes.
It can also generate some "passive income" although I'd argue it's not really so passive.
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby everything on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:34 am

as far as enlightened self interest there are things like ESPPs (employee stock purchase plans).

probably gives the company tax benefits.

helps align employees' interests with whatever will raise the stock price of the company.

Starbucks provides college tuition assistance for its employees including some level of part-time employees. I'm actually not sure why that is enlightened self-interest (what do they gain? Loyalty?).
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Re: Universal Basic Income

Postby windwalker on Tue Jul 23, 2019 9:47 am

. the law mandating lending to increase homeownership allowed both Fannie and Freddie "to fall short of meeting housing goals that were `infeasible` or that would affect the companies' safety and soundness", and that the GSE's availed themselves of that loophole when they felt the need to; and that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governm ... age_crisis


The history of what happened how it happened and why it's quite interesting reading. The government encouraged home ownership, indirectly mandated the banks to provide it and change the rules so they could, which they did.
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