Bernie Sanders

[RichardY]

What I think should be done. What are your 2 or 3?

Repeal  Tax on Income. (inc national insurance and payroll). Institute a Tax on consumption instead. High income avoid, or are relatively unaffected. Middle class has less income to invest. Consumption is poor for the environment.

End accredited Degrees. Encourage replacement with 17th to 18th century style salons for humanities. Business accreditation of STEM fields.

Without massive borrowing/ and or debt slavery. Repealing income tax would crash the economy, as future national debt payments can no longer be as easily deferred. Bad for vested interests. Also possibly bad from a Darwinian POV for some.

Massive changes culturally to accommodate an 17th to 18th Century, cultural education system. In detriment to factory modelled contemporary system. Also bad for vested interests.

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What two or three polices do people hope Bernie Sanders will institute, or has instituted?

[Butters]

This lady Tulsi Gabbard will win 2020. She's very presidential and very sexy, none of which I can say about Bernie. 

[Sea]

Why do American progressives think UBI is a good idea? There have been experimental studies done with it and they've shown it doesn't work, most recently in Finland. I brought this topic up to a hardcore socialist acquaintance of mine (we both live in Europe) expecting an argument but he actually said that he's spoken with various economists and knows from them that it's a bad idea. Imo if the USA somehow manages to make UBI work it'll only be thanks to imperialism or some other kind of exploitation.

It's not that I think people will be "lazy" if there's UBI. People will probably do things they genuinely value, but with no incentive to cater to wider society many people will end up doing things that don't bring enough benefit to anyone else. How many people on this forum would just sit at home meditating and contemplating if they had their basic needs taken care of? And yeah, that's great, but it's kind of exploitative of the people who will work to provide those needs. If the majority of manual jobs get automatized, then we can bring in UBI and have this utopia but at the moment this is nowhere near being the case (also having thousands of robots doing everything would be very energy expensive, we'd need to solve the clean energy problem first). 

Edited February 24, 2019 by Sea

[RichardY]

@Sea Instinct. What's insane however is arguing for it while allowing mass immigration. Unless Democratic governments are willing to go full blown USSR, once they have demographic domination(presumably). In which case I think it's unlikely they'll give a shit. Could last for a 100 years or more given modern technology.

UBI. If there wasn't so many people, land could be granted or homesteaded by people as a form of basic income, to sell or use as they saw fit. The wealthy can afford to buy up land and make people tenants or serfs. Without a homesteading or grant system, end up with a neo-feudalism. So land is either bought up directly like with Scandinavian or various oil Billionaires, or held in large property/Real Estate companies like in the UK and presumably in the USA as well. 

With free trade, most of the worlds population has to move to other areas, to maintain a material standard of living. One of the problems with the eurozone is southern Europe can not easily compete with German efficiency and effectiveness, so their products will tend to be cheaper. So you either have to move learn the language and culture, nigh on impossible for most, or accept a lower living standard.

What ever energy you use there's going to be waste, unless it some form of sci-fi zero point energy generator. Or consciousness.

[montecristo]

@Sea $1000 dollars a month does not nullify the need to make more money, most people will still be working. some people whos jobs are unnecessary and provide no value will likely stop but overall I see it trimming waste in the system surprisingly. How many people go to work everyday knowing what they do makes the world worse but for need to keep bringing in a paycheck?

ive often thought since i was a child that the root of greed and selfishness is that people know they have nothing to go back to and no one to turn to to help them. Why would anyone in their right mind act altruistically under such circumstances? If that Exxon CEO or whoever knew he and his kids/wife would be getting 1k a month he might just be inclined to turn around and invest in environmental solutions perhaps. It's a small amount of money relatively but it could make a huge impact on people psychologically to act in integrity.

 It is not exactly free money when you look at the history, it more or less brings things back to even when you consider that wages adjusted for inflation have actually gone down over the past 40 years under reaganomics and especially when you consider the massive corporate welfare that has been robbing the middle class blind for decades due to lobbying. Has that welfare stopped corporate america from being extremely productive? No, in fact it seems that when people are empowered in that way they tend to thrive and make their best effort in the world unencumbered by crushing hopelessness.

from a high level evolutionary perspective I think anything that brings humanity closer to it's origins is a good thing, the average prehistoric man or native american for example, simply by virtue of being a hunter, was able to generate enough economic value to provide for up to 5 wives and their progeny... think about that and ask yourself have we really gotten richer as a society?

most men these days are hard pressed to provide for even themselves while our society is awash in resources. something is very wrong with this. UBI seems like correcting what is already a gross inequality.

 

[RichardY]

@montecristo There's a lot of BS regulation. Food processing or Energy distribution  for example. There are far fewer separate entities then there were 50 years a go. Just think of all the Confectionery brands owned by Kraft or Nestles. That use to be separate companies. Local distribution and production could fill in given miniaturisation of technology. It would be better probably in terms of transport costs. Instead end up with Mega Corporations and highly centralised processing. Beside major money probably from oil sheiks funding various indoctrination schemes. Nations are often more easily taken with bribes than force. Although sometimes Blood and iron is the way; The Saudis certainly did a good job.

I don't think there is going to be enough resources for the UBI to work. There could have been given modern computing technology, such a scenario was even envisioned in "Human Action" a laisse Faire economics book. But as everything is so fucked up,  with Neo-Liberalism being worse than communism, going to be more drastic. Due for a major war given the pattern of human history.

I remember when I was in Galicia in Spain. Some English woman was saying how terrible that workers in the past didn't get paid enough. I was like well you said your great great Grandfather had 11 kids... try that now without massive handouts. Didn't say anything but mine were Aristocratic and had about 3 to 6 kids on avg looking at Wikipedia.