Basic Income. Thoughts?

Been suspicious of GAI since Barry Goldwater proposed it in a 1960s election, back in the days of great economic growth. Nothing Steve has done in the past eight months reassures me about "The State" assuming direct responsibility in the next little while. And the figures about affordability would be hard tr social democrats to sell on the brink of depression. No need to explain why it would be "good." But I thiink you would need a command economy and a world ready to accept such singular economic sovereignty.

I said this well over a year ago:

http://rabble.ca/comment/1197766

Universal basic income fails to address:

1) Structural and cyclical unemployment
2) Desire to work and avoid the stigma of not doing something
3) Inevitable downward pressure on wages as a result of implementation
4) Privatization of the social wage (welfare being substituted)
5) Class origins of political advocacy and beneficiaries (working-class vs. lumpen)

I would think that any basic income proposal could, at best, be advanced only when you've got a social-democratic condition combining Scandinavia on welfare, Germany on co-determination, France on labour laws, and Minsky's program.

Re. Minsky: Basically, instead of "working for your dole," compulsory "workfare," and means-testing, there's a huge voluntary ELR program on the order of $500-800 billion (based on the US economy here) where in anybody can go in and do childcare, clean streets, etc. plus the usual stunts for public works for a living wage.  This goes beyond slogans for "public works" because of the service job component.

There is debate right now as to whether the living wage would be universal or whether there would be different levels above (i.e., riskier jobs in ELR would get paid more).

As well as setting an effective minimum wage, ELR can also set an effective maximum workweek.

Jacob, the income effect would reduce the willingness of marginalized workers to supply labour. I see a GAI raising wages, not lowering them. A GAI is, among other things, an atomistic strike fund.

And of course a GAI fails to address structural unemployment. That's the idea, to make productivity the focus instead of an even distribution of work hours similar to those in an era when productivity was about one-third of what it is today. We can afford a bit of creative destruction if a layoff doesn't mean penury.

People who desire to work will still be able to work, but a modern late-industrial economy is a war against scarcity, and that war creates casualties, people who are unable to work for reasons other than the paternalistic ones we allow. Look at the trans unemployment rate for example. There are no intergenerational-mobility issues, no incabability to work, but discrimination is subtle and often unprovable in any instance but aggregate. Our current welfare system, for that matter any welfare system based on cultural values instead of entitlements, will only compound that discrimination.

As to the Social Wage? I'm an economist. I view the world in terms of utility. If some company fires all of us and gives us a quarter of its profits, we're better off. We can take our intellect and our ability to create and form our own businesses and economic relationships. What this does is fundamentally change the balance of power between capital and everyone else, ensuring they can only offer mutally beneficial employment freely entered into instead of dysfunctional survival relationships where fear is the motivator of decisions, and thus employees are obligated to accept boilerplate conditions.

As to rewarding good revolutionaries versus the lumpenproletariat? Sorry, as I said above, I oppose paternalism in income support, even if it's progressive and Marxian paternalism. You don't want to subsidize the lumpenproletariat. The right doesn't want to support concientious objectors. Hell, if Michelle Landsberg were the one deciding, I wouldn't be surprised if the incomes were withdrawn from those who transitioned, or in her words, self-mutilated. The crux of a guaranteed income is that we refuse to designate someone as a parasite class, that we say that basic human rights include a sufficient income if it's within the ability of a nation to provide that income. Yes, this means that money will go to people you don't like. So sorry.

Your proposed ELR also politicizes this basic right. I'm sorry, but the whole point of a basic income is that it's classist at best to say that there are people who deserve a basic standard of living and people who don't, just as we do with most medicial care.

I'm talking about an entitlement, for those of you who've forgotten what the word means, because nobody gets rich on their own, and nobody gets poor on their own, even in whatever you may view as your own personal utopia.

And I hate to triple-post but this, from Wikipedia... apparently Huey Newton agreed with me when it comes to productivity and employability:

In the late 1960s, Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party came to believe that the lumpenproletariat could have a progressive role. Newton argued that the economic and social system of his time was fundamentally different from that which Marx based his analysis on, saying, "As the ruling circle continue to build their technocracy, more and more of the proletariat will become unemployable, become lumpen, until they have become the popular class, the revolutionary class."[5] This is the class the Black Panther Party sought to organize, he said. Some disregard Newton's interpretation, saying he applied the term to, and sought to organize, the temporarily unemployed, rather than the true lumpen. However, a careful reading of his writings reveals repeated references to the "unemployed" and "unemployable" as those with revolutionary potential.

Bad idea. Don't go there.

PS: I am not an economist.

 

I am wondering if anyone has done the math on a 1000$ per month x some millions of people, depending on the starting age of the recipients. I figure it doubles federal expenditures at a minimum, assuming revenues would be double to accomodate it the top marginal tax rates, varying by province would range from 70 percent to 116 percent of gross income. I hope my math is wrong, I did it in my head.

We've discussed this to death over years. But let me give you a quick answer, without even trying to refute some of your claims such as the one contained in the above paragraph where you seem to suggest that employment is nearing extinction:

Here's what you said:

A GAI would be nothing but a legislated guaranteed poverty level for a sizeable segment of society, and it would become a neocon pretext to do exactly what you've just suggested: get rid of every single social program we've fought hard to win, and are still fighting to win.

Who needs pensions, OAS, EI, disability insurance? You've got GAI! Choose your own spending priorities!! Freedom!!!

Who needs $7/day child care (sorry, that's only in Québec for now), pharmacare, denticare, home care, lower or free post-secondary tuition, increased minimum wage... you've got GAI! Fill your boots!!

Remember when Harper campaigned for $100 per month per child, instead of public child care? Same idea - only applied to absolutely everything. One payment per month (at sub-poverty level) - and freedom!!!!

Sorry if that's not written in academic language.

GAI is worse than welfare. It's welfare PLUS a ready-made pretext for dismantling the much-hated nanny state.

As I said: Bad idea. Don't go there.

I never mentioned the child tax credit. I'm talking about Harper's "Universal Child Care Benefit". It pays $100 per month to parents for each child under the age of 6. It is treated as taxable income. It does not have to be spent on child care. And it does not magically create child care facilities where demand exceeds supply. In fact, it has nothing to do with child care, despite its title.

No, my stated complaints stem from the fear (as confirmed in RTTG's posts and many other sources) that a GAI would be used as an excuse to eliminate programs paid collectively (like EI, CPP/QPP, etc.) or by the state directly (health care).

How much would say the GAI should be in order to replace all the programs (existing and needed) that I mentioned? If you want to make everyone wealthy enough to pay for those essentials of life should they need them, that would be great. I just don't think everyone needs enough of a guaranteed income to pay for home care, dental implants, disability pension, employment insurance, tuition, child care... I think it makes more sense to provide all those needs for free (or very affordably) when and where people need them.

Ok, I know I said GAI is "worse than welfare", but I didn't mean to say that it would be less money. Of course social welfare is ridiculously inadequate and needs to be improved dramatically. But my real point was earlier in the post, when I said that GAI would be "a legislated guaranteed poverty level for a sizeable segment of society" - and the real further point being that it is a pretext to cut social programs.

That's a very egalitarian viewpoint. Why not go further and say that the working and the unemployed should be entitled to the same "unconditional" income? And that all workers should get the same salary, namely, GAI? I don't think we need to go to such extremes to address the problems of poverty and of progressively socializing the necessities of life.

I'd rather give them what they need - free, unconditionally - rather than give them money. That's just the way I am.

Ok Boze... I think we're looking for different things from government, which is why perhaps our approaches are different. I understand yours better now.

 

εἴ τις οὐ θέλει ἐργάζεσθαι μηδὲ ἐσθιέτω

[Paul, in his second epistle to the Thessalonians]

 

And I am looking for people to redistribute government.

The problem of poverty is freedom - economic, social, political.

 

 

You do realize that those things are all money that people can spend on whatever they want? They just get them by being considered deserving recipients. Most workers would get a top-up from GAI, as well, though yes, it would be smaller.

And if you had read what I'd written, I did say that some of the money can be dedicated towards essentials (produce credits, housing credits, etc.) or given in cash at a small discount, five-or-ten percent. And yes, a GAI, one linked to production, one that rises over time, is redistributive, DOES increase economic freedom. What you're talking about is skilled-prole/petit-bourgeois freedom, the freedom to earn a little bit more in a job that already earns the national average and to have your daycare subsidized at the same time. (who said school shouldn't be a 9-5 exercise? or for that matter match the schedules of the parents? We do that just fine with university.)

Boze, as to higher education funding, I'd addressed that earlier: The first 4-5 years of a child's life, they'd have their GAI placed into an account, say, alongside CPP contributions, and that money could be used for higher education, and would be about as generous as what's paid now, or could be used as seed money for purchasing a home, or whatever.

Also, if we wanted to make higher education more affordable, we'd regulate the institutions and make sure that a relatively inexpensive degree like those in the humanities wasn't susbidizing a capital and materials intensive degree... say 10% of tuition can cover public facilities, 10% can cover scholarships and other programs, and the rest has to go into program-dedicated facilities, as well as staff and maintenance.

This would end the charade of particle physics and philosophy being considered nearly equally expensive to teach. That fiction makes liberal arts education seem like a frivolity.

 

Yes, Unionist, the problem of poverty is freedom. Freedom from the social disdain for people of lower-than-average productivity. Freedom from the ability of the political class to campaign on who deserves a basic standard of living. And freedom from the economic warfare of threatened poverty, (and $1065 a month may be low-income, but it isn't poverty. You just get a roommate) where a principled refusal to be exploited can threaten your life.

I want government to be redistributive as well, but the best way to maintain a policial consensus in favour of that distribution is guaranteeing anyone access when it becomes necessary.

I think schools already struggle to find enough meaningful content to fill six hours a day and end up boring the pants off most of their students, who don't want to be there and whose time would probably be better spent doing just about anything else - with some exceptions of course.  I can't imagine what they'd do for eight hours, unless the purpose is to train children to endure eight hours a day of boredom, in which case it seems like a jolly good preparation for working life!  Their primary functions seem, to me, to be babysitting (so their parents can work in the economy), obedience training (for when the kids eventually work in the economy) and keeping kids out of the labour market (again, to keep adults employed in the economy)...but, that seems to be a separate thread. ;)

edit: and I think the reason schools struggle to find meaningful content to fill six hours a day for most students is that what constitutes "meaningful" is going to vary from student to student, and nobody needs or makes use of everything they're taught, but they all make use of some of it, so we just say teach it all to everybody - whether the students retain any of it or not!

 

That's correct. And other countries have shown that giving money directly to poor people is one of the most effective ways of eliminating poverty.

and in Russian,

Kto He Rabotayet, Tot He Ect

 

If any one can, I'd love to see the discussion in dollars rather than percentages of GDP, which is gross not net, domestic product and is a variable. I'm presuming an annual guarenteed income wouldn't vary significantly otherwise it would make individual planning quite difficult.

[Posted September 1, 2006 by Unionist. Note my guess of $1000 per month, in 2006 dollars, is strikingly close to today's estimates in this thread...]

 

I'm just for the better proposal of realizing zero unemployment structurally and cyclically by means of expanding public services to fully include employment of last resort for consumer services (Minsky) and even to fully socialize the labour market as the sole de jure employer of all workers in society, contracting out all labour services to the private sector on the basis of comprehensive worker protections.  This directly empowers labour, its wages and salaries concerns, etc. instead of going through the consumer demand side.

You're a marginalist.  I take my stuff from non-marginalists and anti-marginalists.  However, given what you've said, that mouthful paragraph above is, hopefully, something for you to think about.

Who said that the Minsky plan was a low-wage plan?  The effective minimum wage would be much higher than it is now.  Also, why did you unnecessarily mention children?  The program is mainly for welfare recipients and their paltry benefits:

http://www.thenation.com/article/161249/job-guarantee-government-plan-fu...

You're referring to frictional unemployment, but both you and Wray in the article above used the wrong term in the first place.  I didn't use the flimsy term "full employment."  I used the term "zero unemployment structurally and cyclically."

And that's the problem.  Most economists care only about capital or consumption (in your case, consumption).  Very few realize that the road to better consumption starts with labour.

That sounds good, but the public option is too timid in some sectors.  The whole banking system, including credit unions, should be nationalized if society wants more effective management of its money supply.

From Post #2
"But I thiink you would need a command economy and a world ready to accept such singular economic sovereignty."

Would really love for you to light on that observation for just a moment, RTTG.You do tackle this with the Weltanschauung of an economics class discussing the privalization of parks.

I'll tell you if you tell me first, do you believe that people who are working should earn the same as (able-bodied non-retired) people who are not?

Deal?

 

 

You still resist explaining, RTTG, how you bring off this revolution in distribution without modifying the globalized banking/finance system on which it would depend for sustenance. Shouldn't you propose at least a Tobin tax to begin winning back sovereignty in that area - before engaging in the creation of a weirdly bifurcated society of investors and lumpen that will function somewhere in space?

Or is that to come in the next chapter of this neat economic model, entirely dependent on mathematics and bereft of sociological imagination, while laying on assumptions about "the appropriate goals of an industrial age?" Appropriate to the models created in the Chicago School?

As to how?!

How do we currently process EI and CPP and OAS and AISH and any other payment from governments to an individual? It seems like those programs, adding up to about 6% of GDP work just fine, and with the acquiescence of the chartered banks.

The great thing about capitalism is you can always find someone willing to sell you the rope with which to hang the system they profit from. They'll take those cheques, just to be able to loan out the money for a single day on average, as long as that day rotates evenly throughout the year, and the nature of banking is that it does. Banks borrow short and lend long, be they public or private.

There is no festering wound from which the tree rots, it is a series of minor ailments, life-threatening in total, so that should we examine one element, we can blame it on the decay of the whole tree.

It is the perfidity of bankers, it is the working of religion into public life, it is the use of animals, it is the use of chemicals... and on, and on, and on. I suppose it's nothing to get worked up over, I see it in every brand of politics and why should the rights of the consumer and the marginal worker be any different?

quote: "I swear, if we'd had this debate in 1960, you'd be opposing medicare because it doesn't fix the leech-like system of private medicine, but rather, socializes the costs. Sometimes there's a bigger fight."

I was politically active in 1960, and joined the emergy NDP as soon as I got back from Quebec in 1961.

One of our banner struggles was the promotion of Tommy's medicare. Back then, social democracy was only planning to create the welfare state, it had dropped CCF plans for ownership of the means of production. Couldn't be sold to people increasingly happy with their lot. And as Tommy showed, it was a near-run thing to achieve something like Britain's condition. We knew that the U.S. was not an example to be followed.

You come late to asking the question "As to how?! We who have been in the game of fighting the lies of a better-funded propaganda machine for the votes of the Great Misled for more than a half century tend put that question first, before creating formulae for the betterment of humankind. A war solved the political-economic challenges facing our parents and grandparents generation. And I don't know how the even greater question of keeping production/consumption to sustainable carbon limits can be avoided, along with plans for a command economy and mobilization as for war against our consumption habits.

As Charles Taylor said in a paper, back in 1975, living conditions on Earth may worsen to the point where we have to row together - he used the example of Dunkirk - for survival. But that level of concern was appreciated more by those of us in political economy at U of T, even as we watched the Chicago School coming to dominate all thought.

Steady increase in market power of employers and the removal of broadly-based income supports.

Gaian, I don't know whence you have imputed some love or fealty to the Chicago School to me, but I can't stand freshwater economists. They have far too limited a view of what government can do without harming utility to begin with.

Boze: Yes, that's my analysis too. (Though that first KFC worker won't get a raise the size of GAI, since their taxes will go up a little... using the full-time minimum wage worker Unionist gave us:

Gross Earnings: $1,777 - Federal tax deduction 101.68 Provincial tax deduction 51.42 CPP deductions 73.52 EI deductions 32.52 For net pay of $1517.86

Then under a GAI at 25% of per capita GDP: (based on the 2011 numbers)

Gross Earnings: $1,777 - Federal tax deduction 533.10 Provincial tax deduction 51.42 CPP deductions 73.52 = $1118.96 + GAI of $1066.74 = $2185.7 Or a raise of more than $665 a month

No Unionist, income stability for those earning less than an average income. Ideally the program should approach revenue neutral for someone earning at the 60th percentile. But hey, I do like your characterization of the program. Lets me know what I should expect from the Harperite, welfare-bashing, 'common sense revolutionaries,' out there.

You realize that given the increase in education grants for minors, we could simply make a daycare program single-payer, right? Instead of letting private companies that underpay childcare professionals lap up subsidies and raise rates accordingly, we put daycares in schools?

Again, it's your confusion of 'withdrawn from the labour force' with 'parasite' that gets me. Sure under your plan we subsidize daycare but then all we've done is ensure that a single-parent works a 70-hour week to enjoy the same utility as a single person working 30 hours, and we've made it harder for parents to get off the two-income treadmill, made it harder for families that want to concentrate on one full-time job: Keeping a home and raising children.

Is there something so terrible about saying to someone earning $1777 a month, Maybe a system where you spend half your pay ensuring that you can earn the other half is little more than workfare dressed up as progressivism? Maybe you should have the option of spending those years before your kids are in school concentrating on taking care of them and perhaps upgrading education and thus earning capacity? Because subsidized daycare alone does none of that. Subsidized daycare subsidizes labour for those who already have time in short supply.

I don't care who the state pays to raise children, honestly, just so long as children are taken care of.

Well let's talk about what seven dollar a day daycare means (Never mind that the spots are limited) for a working poor single parent of two, earning that Ontarian minimum wage, grossing 1777 a month and taking home $1517.86.

The national median for daycare per month is a little less than $600. That means savings of $450 per month, per child... so now we have disposable income remaining of $1217.86 on which to raise a family of three.

Or we could have a GAI with single-payer daycare ($420 based on a 60% participation rate http://publications.gc.ca/Collection/Statcan/89-599-MIE/89-599-MIE200600...)and food subsidies of $100 deducted from the proportion of remaining GAI that would go into the equivalent of an RESP (again managed the same way CPP or the Caise does, ideally in the same fund.) Leaving $6500 per year to go into an RESP for the first five years of a child's life.

So now that same single parent has the equivalent take home pay of $2385.70 (Our earlier 2185.70 for our full-time ontarian + childhood food subsidy) Take away the single-payer daycare (Which there's no need to do) and the respective utilities are roughly the same, except now we have a guarantee that each and every child has enough set aside for a full university education, or money with which to buy an apartment so that she or he can afford to house those children when they're not at daycare.

Child care subsidies alone are workfare, making it economical to work but not economical to be a minimum-wage-earning parent of two who can save for their children's post-secondary and enjoy food security. What it has done for the working poor of quebec is make them seek work, not the dignity we commonly believe it provides.

Is this too simple to be true .

Tax consumption at 50% - not labour . 

This is in german with english sub titles. Tune in to 1 hour 03 minutes for the fiscality .

 

Could this work ? 

 

http://dotsub.com/view/26520150-1acc-4fd0-9acd-169d95c9abe1

 

. 

 

 

Well then that's part of the problem. And yes, I know the female labour force participation stats, but thank you, it's not as though I'd considered that 80% of single parents are mothers and 50% of dual parents are mothers when I did a province by province analysis of the utility that welfare provides for each kind of family grouping and its sexist implication that a family with an adult male in it is less worthy of support, because for some reason men are inherently more capable of being an 80-hour-a-week worker and parent(?).

There's something sort of misogynistic about the idea that domestic work is inherently female, or for that matter a unique form of drudgery, (instead of one of the few implicit forms of income the government doesn't tax) but working as a janitor or running turnodown service, and taking domestic workers from the management of their home to the status of powerless cog is somehow a moral economic end. To some degree we have the alimony law that we have as recognition for the amount of valuable and necessary work, childcare, maintenance, preparation, that's done by a stay at home parent.

And while we can pay someone else to replicate that work, it's interesting that this is the only field in which the cultural left wants work to be done by a private firm instead of a household. Can't say that about food production, for one...

I'm not advocating that, and if you were busy dissecting my plan (single-payer daycare deducted from every under-5's GAI + in-kind childhood produce subsidy) you'd see that I was at no point calling for children to produce cash proceeds, but rather, providing necessary goods and services. A voucher for necessary food for children. A guarantee that any child could go to daycare FOR FREE. (That beats the ass out of your seven dollars, I tend to think.) But didn't have to commit to five years of working simply by putting in for a daycare spot that they then can't afford to give up.

Obviously.

Again, agreed, now will you please stop conflating them with mine? I'm for universal healthcare, pharmacare and dentistry included, (though as an aside I'll note that given the repeated denials of on-demand Exogenous Endocrine Intervention by governments of every stripe, and Quebec, home of Henry Morgentaler, is no prize pig there, requiring a doctor's note for something as simple as a name change, trans people of limited means are better off in most of the western world, the US with its terrible health care system included, when it comes to access to life-saving medicine then they are here. You've continued to declined to engage with me when I mention the cissexist implications of our current system so I'll explicitly ask you to do so here, considering the last time C-389 had a prayer of passing it was tossed overboard so that the NDP could posture on making heating oil 5% cheaper for seniors, considering that the last province to de-list any medicine for trans people was Manitoba. Not Alberta, NDP Manitoba.)

And I'm for a universally guaranteed basic income so that those who don't have the wherewithal (hello marginalized people) or legal right (hello Cynthia Nixon) to challenge their workplace discrimination or constructive dismissal (hello Jonquierre) are guaranteed a source of income. This ends the paternalism of income supports and expands the role of the federal government, not diminishes it. You hate it because, well, apparently because it has a conception of unemployable that doesn't cut neatly alongside the existence of a politically acceptable disability diagnosis. (Again, trans people, despite no diminished capacity, are far less likely to find work and they have a diagnosible condition. Curiously AISH funding has not been forthcoming.)

That my plan is saleable to some of the right wing for political-cultural reasons does not mean that it is an inherent evil. It's a compromise, where we agree to give money that allows a basic standard of living (gee, just like welfare, just like AISH, just like lots of income supports, that's how we administer them) to everyone and tax back the difference. That means that things the left doesn't like, like working-class nuclear families with a stay at home mom, (hell, I disapprove strongly of the nuclear family, and sanction of heterosexual relationships, but I've made my peace with them) get a subsidy, while professional class families, the kind who are rewarded by income splitting, won't, for many reasons, including the elimination of the base deduction. It also means that artists whose work isn't commercial and who would never pass the right-wing sniff test when it comes to political content for $12,500 grants, will now have the exact same utility, but even fewer constraints on how they create. (I'd like to see an endowment set up for space and materials, but that's nibbling around the edges.)

It means that right-wingers won't be able to campaign against welfare cheats (there won't be any, just tax cheats) or invent scenarios in which parents have children for the income support increases.

It's a big truce on all these little culture war issues, and a belief that maybe, just maybe, grown up people who are able to consent are going to be able to make better choices if they have more utility. If they aren't forced with threat of penury into relationships where one party has all the power.

Was that a response to my post ?

 

Actually, I favour the use of GAI as a per-student grant for universal public schooling K-12, and 70% tuition vouchers for those who want to opt out so long as that education adheres to curriculum, and a 30% tuition tax for private schools on top of that. I'm saying we could replace the current funding regime, which is politically vulnerable, with that GAI.

As to post-secondary, you'll find that $60 K will cover a graduate degree, especially when inter-program subsidies are eliminated and education or humanities students are no longer forced to pay tuition fees that fund the MBA program. Though again, that money could also be used to purchase social housing if a person isn't gifted enough to manage a university education, unlike you and I. As to whether we can get to free university? Perhaps, but endowments seem the ideal method so that funding isn't dependent on political pretexts as to what we can afford?



And yet you support the current system, which does just that, refusing people a basic standard of living, and creating an army of desperate low-wage workers, as well as lower tax rates on low-wage work as opposed to medium-wage work.

We can talk about how the base deductible is essential for the working poor under our current system (it very much is) but we can't do that and simultaneously pretend it's not a subsidy for low-wage labour.

Of course, you define what constitutes a social need, right? Does that mean that trans people will get on-demand health care just like cis people? Let's ask our socialist utopia health minister Michelle Landsberg, or even Gary Doer.

My point is that this does an end run around the prejudices that you haven't addressed and that don't disappear just because the left takes power.

Look, I can't appreciate first-hand the pain and discrimination suffered by trans folk, even at the hands of those who consider themselves oh-so-"progressive" on other fronts. I can tell you that our union (and with some of us pushing hard) fully supports Bill C-389, has intervened to ensure trans rights are protected in the workplace, does education and training on trans rights and respect, and we have a long way to go. Just as we bargained same-sex benefits in various sectors many years before same-sex marriage was legalized, and while the cowardly Ontario NDP government was still allowing "free" votes on the issue - sort of like yesterday's cowardly "free" vote on gun control.

So yes, I'm a leftist - but please don't associate me with the scummy remarks and/or actions of Michelle Landsberg and Gary Doer. You seem to have a tendency to create dichotomies to simplify discussion.

In conclusion, let me say this: Discrimination and oppression can only be ended by struggle on the part of mass social movements. That's how the few rights that anyone has have been won. That's how discrimination against trans people will be combated. It will not happen by giving them enough money so that they can individually buy their own drugs and surgical procedures, while society continues to treat them as aberrations. In any event, I don't think that's where the solution lies.

 

After that, I'm going to reiterate: I do really well for myself. I'm bright, I'm thoughtful, I breeze through interviews, and I'm read as cis unless I dispel that impression...

But there's never going to be a movement for people who are crappy at job interviews. There's never going to be a movement for people with annoying laughs. People will continue to roll their eyes at those calling for fat acceptance, despite the fact that their obesity doesn't harm their productivity to a degree commensurate with the reduced wages they receive.

All of these forms of discrimination are irrational, are wrong, and should be combatted, but to some degree they just all become lumpen, the 'losers' that people don't employ with the same frequency, and find themselves in a vicious cycle of reduced opportunity. We will never successfully combat their oppression on a micro level, even when we win legal equality. So let's be a little Rawlsian about this and understand that outcomes are a pretty good predictor of social esteem, and just guarantee that nobody's going to be homeless because they like to dance at their desk while unintelligibly glotterally humming along to the most obscure Weird Al tracks of the mid-1980s, or because they had some traumatic experience with Kafka as a child and now can't fill out forms.

Let's do that, because as cool as your union assuredly is? Not everyone's going to manage to be in it.

Yeah, again, I support primary and secondary education being like medicare: You consume the services, the government gives a grant to the institution providing the services, and sets aside infrastructure grants in proportion to the population.

What I don't support is a sop to the professional class who enjoy a wage premium over those without post-secondary education, when we haven't covered the largest expense of post-secondary education: The fact that while you're a full-time student, you also need your living expenses paid.

A GAI would, on the other hand, be sufficient to cover a student's lifestyle, while the money that's put in trust for a minor would be sufficient to pay their tuition.

This isn't like healthcare where unexpected circumstances (getting cancer, being trans, you name it) arise and out of fairness we decide on a single-payer system. This is a subsidy that doesn't sufficiently cover the poor in the near-zero-sum game of post-secondary education. The Blair government massively increased post-secondary funding and got no improvement in productivity. Paul Krugman's pointed this out too: The IT economy? reduces demand for educated workers:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/falling-demand-for-brains/

I'm proposing that we set aside sufficient pay-as-you-go funding to cover the whole cost of university, which, going by the Alberta government's 30% rule on tuitions, is about $20K a year. (Though we've seen that it's less depending on the program) And for those people for whom university isn't an option? We give them another method of improving their earning potential: Such as money sufficient to buy a starter home, or to start a business.

Not everybody needs or can make use of those extra four years of education, and while they were invaluable to me, I don't ultimately think it's fair that I was given an economic opportunity that others aren't capable of.

I don't oppose free public education at all, I strongly favour universal free public education for anyone of any age on a voluntary basis.  I oppose coercive schools that serve the interests of capital and primarily function to train children to obey orders and show up on time.  From elementary to grade 12, schools view tardiness and absenteeism as disciplinary issues and treat them more seriously than failure to understand the material. You can coast through high school with a c- average and nobody will care, but start skipping classes and you will face swift punishment by the school system, usually in the form of detention, i.e. forfeiture of even more personal time.  The lesson is clear: schools exist to train the proletariat to show up on time every day and not gum up the works.

I want teachers, parents and children to take the lead in building alternatives, and I want them to have the choice of the money allocated for education funding for them going instead to a montessori school, a waldorf school, any kind of democratic school, or whatever they want.  I also want the public school system immediately democratized and voluntarized and forced to make itself relevant to students.

I support almost all of as well, but as for wages I don't care who pays them, I care how much the worker is paid.  Why does it matter whether government forces businesses to pay higher wages, or increases taxes on the wealthy to top up wages?

Because increased taxes should be used to provide social needs to people.

Wages are paid by employers, because they get to keep and use and profit from what the workers produce. They give back a part of that in wages.

Now, let's say some employer refused (or said they "couldn't afford to") pay a decent legislated minimum wage. Well, the government could maybe expropriate that business and run it in accordance with the law. In that case, I would have no objection to the government (as the employer) paying the workers' wages.

 

 

Alright Unionist, write up an exhaustive list of social needs in a post-industrial economy. Don't forget clothing, access to telecommunications, a level of dignity of access commensurate with the myriad uses of those telecommunications, access to fitness to maintain health, shelter, security of personal effects, a basket of food to cover appropriate nutritional needs, transportation, etc.

 Don't you realize there are major problems out there . That most people are having a hard time making ends meet . I come to this board to see whats happening about GAI ( as you call it ) or Revenue Garantie and I get a bunch of intellectuals that seem so full of themselves it hurts to read this thread . 

 All this bla bla bla 50 cent a word rhetoric you all are spewing sounds like you are running the country . Maybe I stumbled upon Role playing club huh . 

 

Un revenue Garantie sounds like a great idea and the video I saw sounds simple and would appeal to the general public . Which IAM a part of . 

sheesh 

Unionist, I think my point is, that if we need to have a majority behind every social need, that definition will perpetually ignore the needs of the minority.

A GAI allows people a reasonable level of self-definition of need for that which is not majority-defined.

You may really really like what your government guarantees, or you may think the list is too small, but the fact remains, without a GAI for services that, even when single-payer, will be market-delivered, the list will never focus on that which delivers greatest utility. It will always carry an air of paternalism. That list of social needs will reflect what the affluent political class thinks necessary and not the working-class or the lumpenproletariat...

I honestly can't comprehend your opposition beyond majoritarian impulses, and as history has shown those are never fair-minded impulses.

Again, I reiterate, a GAI is a political truce, the left lets people homeschool (at seventy cents on the dollar). The right lets people destroy all their belongings at the corner of Hastings and Robinson. The left lets Eisenhour-pastiches of nuclear families exist. The right guarantees that no member of the trans lesbian housing collective I'm a part of is going to not have rent...

We agree that social needs are not 100% uniform so that we can actually have a society instead of Thatcher's vision of an agglomeration of interest groups.

Otherwise, feel free to keep pushing against the wind, because you're never going to get the middle-class or working-class behind avant-garde art as a stand-alone concept... you have to bundle our pet projects with their pet projects, because I'll tell you, there will always be a steady line of people who reject public schools. (And having been sexually assaulted inside a public school and having nobody come to my aid, I'm ever-so-slightly sympathetic to that point of view.)

Now you re talking :+)

 

 

Very true. It will, however make broad-based change possible.

It will, however, make a carbon tax/cap-and-trade which was going to fall disproportionately on those working poor who aren't in a position to hold out for a job with public transit much more palatable and progressive.

As to war, you're right, save for the fact that the political costs of attacking the arms industry will be reduced.

As to democratic control, again, you're right, but a move to more endowment and pay-as-you-go funding of education will put more ownership of capital in public hands. Money set aside during the first five years would be invested in the CPP fund, which, like the Caisse Populaire, increases domestic ownership of capital.

Beyond those unable to function with mental illness in any capacity, it will, and having moved homelessness from a question of neo-Calvinist income supports to the core issue of mental illness, greatly reduce homelessness and the economic stress that remains one of its root causes.

I think also, to relate back to democratic control of capital, you'll see more microentrepreneurialism, but yes, most assuredly, working conditions will improve. I know that I would, on principle, walk away from some of the ridiculous boilerplate employment contracts that had been shoved under my nose.

I quite agree. The effects will be small at first, the ending of economic homelessness, improved food security for the working poor... you'll see the slow dropping of workplace fear, the desperate need to keep a job, and also employment entered on one's own terms... you'll see more artists, more entrepreneurs, more writers, more volunteers... and I think also an improvement in the savings rate, as people start to plan around their core income, knowing, "Well, barring the complete collapse of western civilization, I can count on about 90% of that cheque I currently get." Productivity instead of activity will start to become the focus of popular economic concern, which will inevitably shrink our environmental footprint.

The GAI isn't important merely for what it does but what it makes possible.