Politics Thread - Ka-tet of 19

[HoonDing]

Only the ruling classes are allowed the spice melange.

[Guard Dog]

Again you are saying I'm equating vet care with human care. I'm not. You are no one's fool and you know what I'm getting at here so cut the BS.  What I am saying is that is human health care and health insurance was still a competitive industry that would help control the prices. And I'm pointing at vet care as an example of how that works. I am NOT saying the two are the same thing. 

 

Yes I understand animals are property and have an actual value. I f-----g know WHY vets don't have to worry about punitive damages. But with reasonable limits on punitive judgement on doctors would go a long way to reducing their insurance costs wouldn't it? And when their costs go down and there is an element of competition in their market place the consumers costs go down. 

 

And as far as the death panels thing goes I do not recall saying they were a thing. I only commented that that was what a lot of people were afraid of. And that the fear is not entirely unreasonable. Next time you want to reply to one of my posts kindly turn down the 80's new wave, screw the lid back on the scotch bottle and don't deliberately misconstrue what I'm saying. 

[Guard Dog]

Ontario is ending it's universal basic income experiment: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lisa-macleod-announcement-1.4768626

 

Apparently it's economically unsustainable.

 

The people who were getting money for doing nothing are not happy about it. There is a shocker.

[Gfted1]

The second such program to crash and burn this year. If Finland cant pull it off, nobody can. 

[213374U]

Apparently it's economically unsustainable.

 

Or so said the politician who shut it down, without providing any evidence to support her claims. There is a shocker.

 

Where's your healthy distrust for politicians when they say something you are ideologically inclined to believe, I wonder?

 

"fere libenter homines, id quod volunt credunt"

[Guard Dog]

Well, I posted it as an mildly interesting news article. I don't actually care enough about this issue to analyze if they are lying or not. It's Canada and their government is pretty generous with other peoples money. Maybe they are lying, who knows. The idea of UBI has some merit if it's done as a substitution for other benefits. Not in addition to them. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples money.

[Gromnir]

Again you are saying I'm equating vet care with human care. I'm not. You are no one's fool and you know what I'm getting at here so cut the BS.  What I am saying is that is human health care and health insurance was still a competitive industry that would help control the prices. And I'm pointing at vet care as an example of how that works. I am NOT saying the two are the same thing. 

 

Yes I understand animals are property and have an actual value. I f-----g know WHY vets don't have to worry about punitive damages. But with reasonable limits on punitive judgement on doctors would go a long way to reducing their insurance costs wouldn't it? And when their costs go down and there is an element of competition in their market place the consumers costs go down. 

 

And as far as the death panels thing goes I do not recall saying they were a thing. I only commented that that was what a lot of people were afraid of. And that the fear is not entirely unreasonable. Next time you want to reply to one of my posts kindly turn down the 80's new wave, screw the lid back on the scotch bottle and don't deliberately misconstrue what I'm saying. 

 

again, you are equating two things not at all analogous.  sure, the science behind animal care and human care is the same, but for reasons we is repeating at this stage, veterinary services and automotive repair have far more in common than does vetrinary and human health care.

 

and again, reasonable limits on punitive damages is a whole different issue than is pets+ property.  carve out a special niche for doctors and health care is problematic.  law don't like niches and exceptions.  why should incompetent doctors and hospitals be able to avoid consequences which injury to you by your local supermarket or barber or whatever cannot?  veterinary is again not the least bit analogous as all we is speaking to is property loss.  again, not even remote analogous.

 

as to death panels, we included links, one from psychology today, which speaks to the silliness and pervasiveness o' the fear o' something which never was and were never actual suggested as part o' any national health care proposal.  some fears is reasonable. others is just stooped.  not hard to decide which category death panels belong.

 

your analogy sucked. period.  not analogous.  honest.  as soon as people is treated same as cattle from legal and societal perspective, then you got a notion worth discussing.

 

HA! Good Fun!

[smjjames]

 

Apparently it's economically unsustainable.

 

Or so said the politician who shut it down, without providing any evidence to support her claims. There is a shocker.

 

Where's your healthy distrust for politicians when they say something you are ideologically inclined to believe, I wonder?

 

"fere libenter homines, id quod volunt credunt"

 

 

 

Or maybe it only works in a particular way? And yeah, them shutting it down without giving any support for their claims as to why it doesn't work and whether it was shut down for the reason stated is a pretty major red flag.

 

I hear theres at least one universial basic income experiment going on in Africa and at least one of those are pretty dang successful. So, it's worth looking at where it works and why, but only if it's transparent and not used as a political football like I hear it was for Finland and for Ontario.

 

Also, don't you guys usually split off a new topic due to fears of the forum screwing up when the thread gets to a particular length by now? Not trying to distract from the conversation, just an observation.

[Elerond]

Well, I posted it as an mildly interesting news article. I don't actually care enough about this issue to analyze if they are lying or not. It's Canada and their government is pretty generous with other peoples money. Maybe they are lying, who knows. The idea of UBI has some merit if it's done as a substitution for other benefits. Not in addition to them. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples money.

Ontario just elected new governance that is very much against social programs.

 

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

[Raithe]

 

 

Edit:

Justive.gov - 20 Guiding principles of the Task Force

Edited August 1, 2018 by Raithe

[injurai]

UBI will not work the way people want it to, at least not yet. If you are going to pay people's way, it's usually best to limit what that that money gets spent on, like education or any other form of concrete societal investment. It's clear that some people if freed up will do amazing things, spend those resources fixing their corner of the world or investing in themselves in a manner that is productively desired by the rest of their local society. More often then not though, the funds will only work this way for people well off enough to not worry about the basics. It will fund the upper middle class student the most. There is no way to provide a UBI large enough to trigger the idealistic benefits that people theorize it would bring. It will end up just large enough that prices will inflate, then people who would otherwise had been on welfare find themselves getting by on their government stipend.

 

Then what happens if benefits shrink universally? This is why these sorts of things are handled with loans instead, because people have to pay forward. It's not all contingent on what a few mega-corporations are producing in a non-stable economy. Social benefits need to be tied to what the average person can produce when incentivised to be productive.

 

You can't just test UBI out on some small portion of the nations population and claim it's results are the same as rolling it out at large. Purchasing power is still based around a currencies power, and what capitalized institutions are able to pay out to attract skilled labor will price out people that are getting paid at the minimum level. Where it will work is in geographically contiguous areas that don't have massive divisions between productive output, where low end receivers of UBI won't suffer from market pricing as much.

[smjjames]

 

Well, I posted it as an mildly interesting news article. I don't actually care enough about this issue to analyze if they are lying or not. It's Canada and their government is pretty generous with other peoples money. Maybe they are lying, who knows. The idea of UBI has some merit if it's done as a substitution for other benefits. Not in addition to them. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples money.

Ontario just elected new governance that is very much against social programs.

 

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

 

 

Exactly, it's being used as political football (the analogy works whether it's American Football or Soccer). If we tried the same in the US, I'd expect the Republicans to come along and nuke it, unless maybe it becomes popular among Republican voters.

 

I suppose it might be better to try it at a more local scale, like those programs in Africa, but only national scale governments have the resources to pull it off in a large scale.

 

 

UBI will not work the way people want it to, at least not yet. If you are going to pay people's way, it's usually best to limit what that that money gets spent on, like education or any other form of concrete societal investment. It's clear that some people if freed up will do amazing things, spend those resources fixing their corner of the world or investing in themselves in a manner that is productively desired by the rest of their local society. More often then not though, the funds will only work this way for people well off enough to not worry about the basics. It will fund the upper middle class student the most. There is no way to provide a UBI large enough to trigger the idealistic benefits that people theorize it would bring. It will end up just large enough that prices will inflate, then people who would otherwise had been on welfare find themselves getting by on their government stipend.

 

Then what happens if benefits shrink universally? This is why these sorts of things are handled with loans instead, because people have to pay forward. It's not all contingent on what a few mega-corporations are producing in a non-stable economy. Social benefits need to be tied to what the average person can produce when incentivised to be productive.

 

You can't just test UBI out on some small portion of the nations population and claim it's results are the same as rolling it out at large. Purchasing power is still based around a currencies power, and what capitalized institutions are able to pay out to attract skilled labor will price out people that are getting paid at the minimum level. Where it will work is in geographically contiguous areas that don't have massive divisions between productive output, where low end receivers of UBI won't suffer from market pricing as much.

 

True, trying it out in small scale has it's limitations, but it 'only working when the government in power wants it to work' absolutely sucks.

 

The spread of automation is going to force governments hands sooner or later, whether they see it ahead of time or forced by crisis (which is the worst time to experiment, IMO, but in desperate times....)

 

 

 

 

Edit:

Justive.gov - 20 Guiding principles of the Task Force

 

And an eagle. You forgot the eagle on top of the cross/staff, not unlike the Roman banner standard.

[Elerond]

We ready have universal basic income but it is divide in multitude of different social programs. Finland's constitution guarantees basic income to everybody. Finland's UBI experiment was trial to unify existing programs as one and increase income of low income and part time workers.

[213374U]

Well, I posted it as an mildly interesting news article. I don't actually care enough about this issue to analyze if they are lying or not. It's Canada and their government is pretty generous with other peoples money. Maybe they are lying, who knows. The idea of UBI has some merit if it's done as a substitution for other benefits. Not in addition to them. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples money.

 

The program in question wasn't universal either. Only people under a certain earnings threshold were eligible. Which could arguably disincentivize work, and kinda goes against what's at the core of UBI: a departure from labor commodification as *the* driving force of the economy.

 

Ideally we'd do something before machines take over a critical mass of labor and this leads to the collapse of capitalism, and the obsolescence of a majority of humans. That's going to be a tad harder to fix than balancing a budget after "running out of other people's money", especially considering that the value of money is essentially a game of pretend.

[smjjames]

Ideally, yes, we'd do something before a crisis actually happens, but right now, there seems to be a futile fight against more automation than embracing it's inevitability. Sort of like the social crisies of industrialization, we're now entering a second phase as the automization reaches new levels.

[Guard Dog]

OK, Gromnir. Let's come at this a different way. Explain WHY competitive market forces (such as those that exist in vet care, automotive repair, etc) would not reduce costs to human health care consumers? How would elimination of territorial exclusivity for insurance companies allowing any insurance provider to sell health plans anywhere (like vet insurance or automotive extended warranties) not reduce the costs of insurance plans? How could punitive damage reform not reduce the cost of malpractice insurance? 

 

Health care, in the end, is just another product. A widget. A service people buy and sell. There are many reasons why the prices are high. One of those is that there is 0 incentive to lower them. How could allowing the incentive to exist, as is does in other services, not help?

[Gfted1]

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

Wait a second; the program supposedly worked AND saves the government money and they shut it down out of "spite"? C'mon.

[Elerond]

 

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

Wait a second; the program supposedly worked AND saves the government money and they shut it down out of "spite"? C'mon.

To be fair results come in after experiment was ended and replaced with current "activation" model which is program that forces people visit unemployment office several times in year for interview which caused that unemployment offices had to hire thousands new workers in order to do said interviews system has failed actually find work for people except those thousands bureaucrats that were needed in order to run it.

[injurai]

 

 

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

Wait a second; the program supposedly worked AND saves the government money and they shut it down out of "spite"? C'mon.

To be fair results come in after experiment was ended and replaced with current "activation" model which is program that forces people visit unemployment office several times in year for interview which caused that unemployment offices had to hire thousands new workers in order to do said interviews system has failed actually find work for people except those thousands bureaucrats that were needed in order to run it.

 

 

The unemployment offices put people to work though... if your unemployed population on has skills for certain non-physical clerical work and there is no market for them elsewhere putting them to work to help the rest of the unemployed get matched up with work may very well make sense. If you want it to cost less you slowly put those people out of work with automation, and then backfill other low-priority services jobs as you need to re-employ people.

 

"Saving money" can often times be double-speak for paying less people. True UBI supporters usually though want to return the costs savings to people with the argument that "the alternative to not wasting away people's time is to pay them to afford recreational free-time." But then what about he hyper productive people who want more leisure? Typically they earn their leisure and the less productive people get their business by working recreation and amusement. Just recently Disney World raised it's minimum pay for employees, if we got better vacation for people like what Europe has and increase the demand for recreational services and in general that seems like a net gain on levity for society, rather than just setting people free to their own devices for part of the 40 hour work week. Of course this all favors people who have gotten productive enough by sacrificing the early part of their lives to professional development. In the modern age I think people confuse when people take "all their leisure at once" for somehow being far ahead of everyone else. Which isn't true for even the average white-collar working class family. Certainly some recreation can be destructive and overly indulgent, like cruise ships, but I think improving the impact of recreation is a different argument. We could likewise be talking about funding sabbaticals or anything similar.

[injurai]

I'll also just mention that as we automate society more, we have to consider the systems we have in place to maintain, repair, expand, deprecate, replace our automation systems. How do we incentivize people to maintain the modern life-blood of the global supply chain.

 

I know plenty of engineers who are into that stuff almost as a full-time hobby, but plenty more who don't. Especially once they get into real industry or the academy. It seems plenty more of society never considers these industries as places for them to spend their identity pursuing. Can societies maintenance be volunteer based without putting people to work? Call me when Amazon, an advanced publicly traded company figures out how to run itself as such.

[Hurlshort]

Health care, in the end, is just another product. A widget. A service people buy and sell. There are many reasons why the prices are high. One of those is that there is 0 incentive to lower them. How could allowing the incentive to exist, as is does in other services, not help?

Except it isn't really just another product, like a car. You only get the one body. When we monetize health care we are basically saying if you have less money, you shouldn't expect to live as long, or you should get used to being in more pain than wealthy folks.

 

I am not sure if the way we handle vet care is all that better, but at least you can choose not to be a pet owner. Every single person needs good medical care. It isn't a want like a car, it is a basic need.

[Malcador]

Well, I posted it as an mildly interesting news article. I don't actually care enough about this issue to analyze if they are lying or not. It's Canada and their government is pretty generous with other peoples money. Maybe they are lying, who knows. The idea of UBI has some merit if it's done as a substitution for other benefits. Not in addition to them. Sooner or later you run out of other peoples money.

Canada has a view of being a society, I guess. Well outside of Alberta, anyway.

[Elerond]

 

 

 

Results of Finland's UBI experiment were that it was working and it was cheaper than our current social program but our government cancelled it in midway before they got any actual results and replaced it with even more expensive system which they like more because it is designed to punish poorest of the poor.

Wait a second; the program supposedly worked AND saves the government money and they shut it down out of "spite"? C'mon.

To be fair results come in after experiment was ended and replaced with current "activation" model which is program that forces people visit unemployment office several times in year for interview which caused that unemployment offices had to hire thousands new workers in order to do said interviews system has failed actually find work for people except those thousands bureaucrats that were needed in order to run it.

 

 

The unemployment offices put people to work though... if your unemployed population on has skills for certain non-physical clerical work and there is no market for them elsewhere putting them to work to help the rest of the unemployed get matched up with work may very well make sense. If you want it to cost less you slowly put those people out of work with automation, and then backfill other low-priority services jobs as you need to re-employ people.

 

"Saving money" can often times be double-speak for paying less people. True UBI supporters usually though want to return the costs savings to people with the argument that "the alternative to not wasting away people's time is to pay them to afford recreational free-time." But then what about he hyper productive people who want more leisure? Typically they earn their leisure and the less productive people get their business by working recreation and amusement. Just recently Disney World raised it's minimum pay for employees, if we got better vacation for people like what Europe has and increase the demand for recreational services and in general that seems like a net gain on levity for society, rather than just setting people free to their own devices for part of the 40 hour work week. Of course this all favors people who have gotten productive enough by sacrificing the early part of their lives to professional development. In the modern age I think people confuse when people take "all their leisure at once" for somehow being far ahead of everyone else. Which isn't true for even the average white-collar working class family. Certainly some recreation can be destructive and overly indulgent, like cruise ships, but I think improving the impact of recreation is a different argument. We could likewise be talking about funding sabbaticals or anything similar.

 

 

Unemployment offices don't actually put people to work, they only check that people have sought jobs as they should and give advice for how seeking jobs better. Compolsory interviews for half million people five times in year from which half already work part time or participate in schooling and other programs meant to help people find jobs haven't effected anyway on people finding jobs (according to unemployment offices own statistics). UBI would give unemployed people incentive to take even low paying part time jobs because their income then would increase compared to current situation where their unemployment/social benefit is cut down for amount they earn, meaning that taking part time jobs that don't pay more than what their benefit is don't really increase their income compared to them just sitting in home or where ever they prefer to spent their time.

[HoonDing]

So the plan is to turn the native people into Eloi and immigrant invaders into Morlocks?

[Gfted1]

UBI would give unemployed people incentive to take even low paying part time jobs because their income then would increase compared to current situation where their unemployment/social benefit is cut down for amount they earn, meaning that taking part time jobs that don't pay more than what their benefit is don't really increase their income compared to them just sitting in home or where ever they prefer to spent their time.

Interesting that Finnish people still get unemployment insurance payout even when working part time. Its not like that here. As soon as you get any job of any pay of any amount of hours, your unemployment insurance payout stops. I assume this a call back to your earlier statement about UBI already existing in other forms. So, what is the annual UBI amount that Finn's receive? Do you get a check from the government even if you work full time (40+h / week)?