They tried to call this "universal" until people pointed out it is the opposite of universal. This program is a wild distortion of what UBI is meant to be.
Everyone who would _like_ to be an artist, but can't afford to be one, is disqualified. Meanwhile, the acquaintance of mine who sold his house in London at a large profit and retired to a cottage in Westmeath to live off his gains and noodle around on the guitar a bit is a recipient of funds from this program.
Tellingly there's very little information about how to _become_ an artist with this program.
"""
A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million. In addition, the report estimates that audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences.
"""
And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program. I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being.
I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Ah Jaysus! Ireland’s has been running "basic income schemes" since the 6th century. "Modernity" is just a bit blind to how it worked. What we are seeing now is the secular attempts at institutionalizing it.
What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness.
And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity.
Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
> There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports
Right, the Catholic Church doesn't pay any attention to its finances. It doesn't have regularly financial reports full of numbers that are carefully reviewed by several levels of leadership. It doesn't zealously protect its tax exemptions and press people for donations each week. It just kinda wings it and hopes the checks don't bounce, which they magically don't because the Church does good work in the world?
> And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Growing up, the Catholic church which my family attended, and to which our grade school was attached, held the following masses:
* Wednesday evening mass
* Thursday morning mass (this was attended by the school kids, as well as a collection of retirees)
* Saturday evening mass
* Sunday 7am mass
* Sunday 10am mass
There was also a weekly or maybe biweekly Confession.
That was serving quite a small congregation too, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bigger parishes have more frequent masses (although in my experience larger parishes often have more than one priest).
Also, the job of a Catholic priest is definitely not limited to performing Mass. They're essentially on call for Last Rites 24/7, but apart from that there's also just various parish events they'll be involved with.
So anyway, I don't want that job, I want the one where you give out vaguely mystical advice and listen to problems once a week, and then during the rest of the week you're like a cool side character at the local pub.
I spoke to a priest doing this when a family member passed. He'd perform the early Sunday service in town, then drive 1.5h to the next valley over and do a service there, then drive 45m to a third church before returning to the first for meetings and elderly care visits. Worse, each of these churches had different sermon schedules so he was preparing sermons customized to each on top of his other duties.
> They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.
Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..
You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..
I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
Probably depends on the region. In my country, the church i attended to had three masses during the week and i think 6 (back to back all day) during Sundays. This was only one of three churches within a walking distance, and the (mid-small) city probably had around 10-15.
Which is expected, since every adult was expected to go to church every Sunday, and many people, especially elderly, went during the week. Also there were four or five priests, and only Sunday masses has more than one attending at once, so the load probably wasn't that large as I make it sound.
I think the church has a few other things going for it. Guilt, redemption, fear of rejection from community, ya know things of that sort. I'm sure you're glad to see corporations taking up such tactics with climate-shaming and such. As long as it's not money.
I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate.
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
How is it checked that you're eligible? Asking because the system in the Netherlands could be defrauded, people registering to be living in the country, registering X amount of children, then going back to live in a cheaper country. Not sure if their children were actually real either.
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together).
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
Yes, sorry I mis-explained the 16-year thing. I think one highlight of that is that the benefit shifts to being paid by the CSN (Sweden board of student finance, they are the ones who provide subsidized student loans as well) and it is tied to you being a student. So if you drop out of high school you stop getting this benefit.
It saves a lot of work and therefore money. But there’s another layer to consider for many people. Someone getting benefits who doesn’t deserve it is less important than someone who needs help not getting it. You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
People getting money who need it generally have other problems and so you need to get them in touch with the other help they need. Stopping scams of the system is a bonus, but the real value is (or should be!) evaluating everyone getting help to ensure they are getting the other care they need. Many people who need money are unable to handle money and so we still need programs to find them and ensure they are not getting scammed, or wasting their money (that is not saving enough to eat at the end of the month despite getting enough)
If your only concern is people who are scamming the system, UBI ensures they are not scamming by definition. (we can debate if that is a good solution or not - a very different topic). However the main concern should be people who need help, and a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
> [for] a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
This is true, but there is plenty of evidence in the disability sphere that it's more cost-effective to give people with disabilities money up front because they can spend it on their own needs better than government programmes.
Think of it like a business that wants to make sure WFH is comfortable for its employees. Many companies now just give a grant up front for monitors, chairs, etc.
If they don't do that they need someone to admin/spreadsheet what monitor is best value for the company, what chairs, and investigate perhaps all the accessibility needs that might need to become a matter of policy for the firm. Updates to employee contracts. List goes on. And at the end, people will still complain because they think the company chose the wrong chair for them.
Which disability? There are number where they cannot manage their own life and so need intervention. So we need to examine everyone anyway to ensure those who can't get management done for them. Those who are more able of course don't need us to do it - but they are also borderline able to support themselves without help.
We spend $850B on defense, and nobody ever asks where the money to do it comes from. It's only once you start talking about feeding people that everybody is concerned with the economics.
Exactly this! National defense is a sovereign need but it should not be above scrutiny for how the money is spent.
Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.
This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
Far from above scrutiny, the military budget has been the go-to talking point and area for real actual cuts my entire adult life. While it's share of the national budget has gone down, spending has only increased in other areas to more than compensate for it. I can't really say the increased spending on social services has resulted in great gains for societal health, education outcomes, or really anything.
Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.
It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
Not only that, but ensuring that someone else did not claim the money owed to another. Look at how rampant income tax return fraud is in the US, and that's just bad actors claiming tax refunds on the behalf of others.
There is always enough money to build bombs, but never enough money to feed and house everyone. It’s almost like governments can just create money out of nowhere to do whatever they want.
Yes I agree and right now the system seems like the opposite: better ten deserving people go without than one undeserving person gets an extra penny, even if we have to pay way more in bureaucracy costs adjudicate everything.
A big part of why UBI isn't really viewed as a great option by actual socialists. I'd rather see us literally just give people food, housing and medicine without money being involved, but for some reason that's a tough sell to most people.
Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.
In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
I firmly believe that removing the administrative spend to run the current bureaucratic nightmare that is welfare would free up enough money to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing. I don't have the expertise to come up with a specific number, but I'd wager that getting half the admin costs back would be the absolute best case. I still support simplifying means testing for benefits programs, but not because it's going to magically free up a consequential amount of money.
> Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud.
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
UBI isn’t “getting paid to do nothing”, it is “removing rapid clawback from means-tested welfare so that there isn’t a significant range in the working poor to middle income range where additional outside income as reduced impact because it is offset by welfare clawbacks.”
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
> Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
Negative income tax is probably a more straightforward to implement this.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
A large number for sure, and completely agree likely too much.
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Feelings are uncorrelated with accuracy. Last year, the US revenue was $4.7 billion [1]. The US population is estimated to be 342 million [2]. If we had no government, we could UBI everyone $13,742/year. This is the maximum we could UBI, and it is not enough to live on. But if you want roads, enforcement of food and drug safety, some sort of law enforcement system, national parks, at least enough military to prevent Canada or Mexico from waltzing in and annexing us, support for research grants, etc. then it's going to be substantially less than that.
I never even thought to think of it that way. I know that for a lot of readers that $13742 doesn't seem like much. And, cutting it down to (say) 25% of that —
$3250 seems like a pittance. But, I'd wager a lot of people reading here haven't been really desperately poor. I lived on <$8000 for a few years, and <$20000 for twice that. $3000 a year would have been LIFE CHANGING. That'd be things like preventative maintenance for my car; regular food in my house; guaranteed electricity; no fear of eviction; the ability to go to the urgent care clinic when I sick (vaccines for the flu!). Y'know ... BASICS. There's a lot of predatory stuff out there when you're scraping by. An extra 250$/month would've been pretty amazing.
Don't forget all the private sector jobs associated with means testing.
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.
Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.
Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.
Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.
Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.
Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
> the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
Why do both parties cater heavily to the poor people vote? Why does Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security dominate government expenditures? Those programs don't benefit rich people.
> to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
It's actually easy to prove that this isn't true. Not even close.
What do you define as a "true UBI"? Take that annual number and multiply it by the population of the United States. That's how much a "true UBI" program would have to spend annually.
If we took a poverty-level wage of $15.5K annually and gave it to every person, that would require $5.4 Trillion, excluding any overhead of sending out the money.
That's more than all of the federal tax revenue combined. Even if we took every dollar paid in federal taxes and gave it to every person in the United States with 100% efficiency, divided evenly, it would still be below what's considered poverty-level wages.
I think a lot of people have "feel it in my bones" beliefs about UBI that they haven't stopped to check with some simple math. Actually giving everyone a lot of money is extremely expensive.
> So to do true UBI, you’d also have to raise taxes quite a bit.
That's correct.
You'd have to raise taxes across the board. There is a lingering assumption that we can tax billionaires and get UBI, but more simple math shows that won't work either. Even if you seized 100% of the net worth (not just cash in the bank) of all US billionaires, you couldn't provide poverty-level wages to everyone for very long.
In practice, this means that a UBI program would turn into a tax rate program. You might "receive" $15K in UBI, but your middle-class taxes would go up by $20K per year. So you're technically getting UBI, but your taxes have gone up to pay for it to go to people in lower tax brackets.
Which is precisely while UBI will never happen - it takes power away from the government. Replacing the vast majority of welfare with NIT/UBI just makes too much sense. It's too efficient. Less government jobs, less government power. So it will never happen.
The fundamental problem with UBI is that if it is enough to live on (even if it's a crummy life), then who is going to pick the strawberries? The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay.
If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
The stats don’t agree that government jobs only ever increase. In 1990 there were 1 million more federal workers for a population 100 million smaller. I assume it’s a popular belief because the oligarchs gain power as the federal government loses it, and they have better PR.
Another benefit over most welfare programs is that there is no welfare cliff. You'll never have less incentive (or negative in some programs) to start a job because you'd lose the benefit (other than relative marginal value of the next marginal dollar being inherently lower).
This program is an insignificant spec of spending compared to UBI though. UBI in most countries would be 50% of all government spending and welfare related spend is just nowhere close to that.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
This is a very America-centric idea. Most of Europe works on a 'human dignity is inalienable' principle that gives everyone, even immigrants, access to public welfare if the circumstances necessitate it.
My experience as an immigrant to Europe (Ireland, specifically) was that I had no recourse to public funds, and when I first arrived, needed to pay for my own private health insurance. In addition, while you _can_ avail of public welfare (if you're on stamp 4, which you can get after 2 years of employment on a critical skills employment permit), doing so will negatively impact any application for naturalisation or permanent residency.
You have also made a comment in this thread that the Irish policy of building in the countryside is xenophobic, which considering the major changes to the demography of Ireland in recent times feels quite ungracious.
This isn't correct though; in the Netherlands, you cannot get a residence permit unless you have a sponsor, income, family, or whatever. If you have a residence permit, you can lose it if you apply for welfare [0]. I do believe you're entitled to child benefits, but that's about it.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
>If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Restaurant licensing and "health inspections" always seemed so absurd to me. If somebody makes shitty food or their place is gross people just won't go there. We don't need daddy government saying which places are safe.
Economies of scale are huge here, so no government is going to win in any reasonably functioning government.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
You’re describing an inferior product (cold PB and J, apples, unhealthy chips ? drink) that also has higher costs due to packaging to get to those lunch ladies and more packaging to families as you can’t use lunch trays.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
Why must we presuppose all these health and safety regulations that make it too difficult for a charity to just deliver a big batch of healthy meals at the school can't be eliminated, but somehow we can suppose we can increase taxes enough (apparently, in areas impoverished enough that free school lunches have this massive economy of scale you reference) to cover government or corporation supplied school lunches? This is just a rigged game.
In terms of economies of scale Schools can prepare any food using public logistical networks (grocery store etc) a hypothetical donator can do, but they just get more options and easier distribution. A friend ran a nursery school with ~25 kids and even at that scale she could provide snacks cheaper than individual parents. This was a for profit school and parents were themselves paying for the food in both cases, school wins even without considering the cost of ‘free’ labor.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
> It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches.
Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this.
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
It's impossible because actually removing precarity from people's existence would mean that they wouldn't need to to toil so existing capital owners could capture the value they create in return for being permitted to have a home. The implicit threat of ruin is a feature, not a bug. It's why housing must always be kept scarce.
That's why I defined the term. Any practical implementations end up looking exactly like welfare with another name because UBI is impossible. This also informs on how long we should spend discussing it...
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
It's impossible in any case, but if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all (well, as long as that money is worth something, as pointed out) then the whole society would collapse...
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. It depends on luxuries being valued enough by some people that they're willing to overcome the tax and bothering to produce and there being enough of that to cover everyone's necessities.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
Government expenditures are ~30% of GDP in US. Theoretically you could just distribute ~30% of the gdp/capita (about $28,000) to every person in the USA, make them buy all government services on the private market (government now gone except to collect and distribute the single UBI), and you'd not have much tax effect on productive enterprise (or alternatively, distribute ~20% or almost $20,000 and return to pre-1913 non-wartime government services).
> make them buy all government services on the private market
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
The national drinking age? Really that's just an outgrowth of how dysfunctional the US is, especially along the Federal split. Not really an issue in Ireland or the UK, neither of which is federated.
Don’t forget about giving the government almost all of your bio data, such as your fingerprints and eye-scans. All in the name of “keeping the system fair / keeping the s scammers away” or some other similar bs.
> I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment.
Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.
There is no such thing as "the absence of eligibility testing." Otherwise, I'd be signing up for UBI for my 100 imaginary friends. Too much administrative overhead has always been a concern troll argument against welfare anyways. Even the most bureaucratic welfare programs have a administrative burden of less than 10%. With a fraction of that, you could easily screen out the top 10% of income earners from basic income.
My wife has won multiple prestigious awards for her writing (novels, memoir). She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. She got paid about $100k for her last novel, which took maybe 5 years to complete. It works out to less than $20k/year, after paying her literary agent. The publisher encourages her to spend her own money on PR (~$20k).
Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point.
So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
I earned about $10 for the last quarter for the second edition of a technical book I wrote--which actually earned out royalties. With rare exceptions, writing a book makes basically no sense unless you're on the clock for a company anyway and the book comes with lots of other benefits.
> She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of.
Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time.
Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
So effectively what you're saying is that institutions are willing to reward her with attention, but people are not willing to pay for her art after all?
Sure, but you could say the same thing for teachers, foodservice workers, nurses, etc.... yet they are unable to avail of this program, for reasons I don't understand.
These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself).
Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
Sure, but in practically every other non-essential situation (i.e. food, medicine, housing) that gap would be considered supply in excess of demand and allowed to work itself out.
This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.
This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.
If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
Then don't count that money in a fake economic justification. Just say "the bureaucracy would like to assign people your tax money based on vague criteria" and leave it at that.
I think you need to solve the gap the other way, by bringing down the "amount people need to live", ideally to zero, and not by directly paying people.
There is no numerical value of UBI that makes any sense in Canada. Rent is expensive and toys are cheap.
You need universal basic services with income being a thing you use for toys and vices. So this hypothetical artist should instead get paid what other people are willing to pay but need $0 in pay for basic food, water, healthcare, and housing.
> It is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
It's possible. It's possible that there can be a similar gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount I need to live on while I pursue my career in snail sniffing". So what? That's why my snail sniffing is purely a hobby.
Most artists don't make enough, though? Isn't that famously well known? Picasso was never rolling in it, burned his paintings to stay warm, and had trouble even eating.
Worse still, you're perpetuating a debunked myth of a starving artist. 99% of the artists you've heard of were able to support themselves with their craft - those that weren't stopped producing and that's why you've never heard of them (a prime example of survivorship bias). Van Gogh is an extreme outlier.
Could be interesting to try negative tax on works from small artists up to a certain value. So when you buy a painting from some person of little name recognition the goverment pays like 20 percent extra up to 2,000 Euro, 10 percent up to 5,000 Euro, and over 10,000 Euro taxes are paid as normal for luxury goods.
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Seems like it could be an "infinite money glitch" if the artist and customer are in cahoots. Churn out alot of cheap artworks, even just fake ones, then split the profits. The bureaucracy capable of preventing this would be so onerous, would anyone still be interested in the dole for it?
There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not.
It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
> It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?
> If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
UBI (which I consider not feasible) is not meant to make it easier for freeloading companies. If they want delivery personnel, they should pay them sufficiently. The "gig economy" is a large step back, right to the 19th century/ It is not the goal of UBI.
Right - the idea is that with a UBI a deliveroo rider would have more ability to decide they don't _have_ to be a deliveroo rider (unless they want to be of course).
It seems perfectly reasonable for a state to want to fund its own cultural legacy and production (in ways outside of the market system), and not just everyone writ large.
This kind of thing is much more common in continental Europe, but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Any not to any artists, but only to those the government bureaucrats recognize as being artists. I doubt they'll be paying anybody to write computer programs with artistic merit.
That's obviously going to depend on the specific organization doing the funding. But I'd imagine you'd need to make some effort in contextualizing your work to the "art world" in such a way that makes coherent sense.
If it's just some private art fund that has their own arbitrary view of what art has merit, then who cares? But if it's the government taxing me, an artist, so they can give my money to some other artist, then the standard for what counts matters quite a bit more. The "art world" is highly nepotistic and is basically a playground for the rich to piss away their lives while feeling good about themselves. Art is something anyone can and should do, but being recognized as an artist isn't meritocratic, and I doubt getting government bureaucrats involved helps that at all.
Maybe understand it as a conceptual question instead of a question about Ireland. Only the Irish have a right to care about where Irish taxes go, we're discussing the concept.
So, who would you fund as an artist? Who would you tell "no, you're not an artist, you don't qualify." Can you acknowledge that this is a difficult question without calling people argumentative?
Wouldn't your reasoning just apply to basically every situation, until you arrive at the most "virtuous" people receiving money?
I don't interpret this action by the government as bestowing virtue upon artists. It's just a way to fund something considered important culturally. It's not supposed to be fair or just, it's just a way to ensure that culturally-valued things are maintained without having to rely on the market to fund them.
Well, I think it only follows if the reason the artists are getting money is because they are virtuous. Which they aren't. Just because someone is getting funding doesn't imply that the reason is because they are deemed more virtuous than someone else. Usually it just implies that they are doing a specific thing that someone wants done.
> My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Why do people remember fairness and frugality only when money are spent to directly help those in need?
I didn't see anyone complaining when money are funnelled to industries (e.g. Big Ag) instead of individuals.
We don't know each other but big ag and programs that literally pay farmers to destroy wildlife habitat and turn plants in to meat (a highly ecologically destructive practice) are bad, and we should not do them. The CAP is horrendous policy from the EU.
It wasn't personal (sorry if that was not clear), and Big Ag was just an example.
My point is that somehow it is always some modest direct relief initiative that will spark endless discussions, while multi-million (or shall I say billion?) subsidies directed to already filthy-rich corporations go with zero public discussion and scrutiny.
Culture is subjective. Art is entertainment. Maybe the English-speaking world wishes our governments would solve infrastructure problems instead of distracting us with pretty things to look at.
This is a ridiculous argument. You can fund artistic endeavors without coating it in the language of UBI.
UBI is a way to manage a social security system. It is not a way to manage cultural heritage. Giving artists free money is also not a way to manage cultural heritage. If you want to do that you should pay artists for their works, hire them, commission from them, buy their artwork, all of that is more effective then just giving them money, which, again, is not the point of UBI.
My problem with it is that state art is propaganda. State art is state culture, and funds elite tastes.
If you want taxes to fund art, chop off 5% of everyone's taxes and tell them it's mandatory that they have to donate it to an artist. It's still bad, because people will have to register as artists and the state will have to say "yes, you are an artist" and "no, you are not an artist." But at least the state won't be saying "we've chosen you to be an artist!"
The state should not be intervening in or restricting art or journalism (i.e. expression in general.) Or any other form of expression. It should not be licensing artists, or licensing journalists. You're Zimbabwe when you start doing that.
edit: note that this is separate from intervening in trade and sales. You can still enforce antitrust, restrictions on content (e.g. copyright), or rules around fraud and deception on commercial art or journalism. One of the main purposes of government is to regulate trade, that's why they print the money, and why you get to go to court when a trade goes bad.
France has a long standing program for artists and entertainment technicians and while the niceties can get complex the big idea is that the State guarantees a minimum level of income if you work a minimum amount of hours per year for artistic purposes (507 I think), including teaching and rehearsals.
Psychological wellbeing contributes some amount of money though in systems that pay for healthcare (especially when that includes psychiatry). It's also to a degree one of the key things government spending is hoping to produce so if it is actually producing that it's a good use of funds.
I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.
If you look at the World Happiness Report, Ireland's scores have plummeted year over year since 2020. I'm going to go ahead and hypothesize that this program wont make a dent in that.
Universal Income isn't universal until everybody gets it.
The bottom line is that in most countries all the basics are taken care off one way or another. Nobody really starves. There's shelter and housing of some sorts for anyone. Healthcare is taken care off as well. And if you grow old and needy you typically don't end up on the streets either. That of course costs money and is in practice fully funded mostly.
True to some extent in most countries. The US is notably a bit harsh on this. And people do end up on the streets there. But by and large even there people are taken care off.
My view is that society could be a lot fairer if we just formalized the status quo of all that a bit and just guaranteed it. It doesn't have to be super comfortable or amazing. But just provide some basic promise to people that, no matter what, starvation is not something you need to worry about. We'll keep you warm, sheltered, healthy, educated, protected, etc. If you want to have nicer versions of that, go and work for it and earn those things. Most people that can do that of course already do that anyway. This is not a massive change in many countries. We already have these guarantees. It's just all super complicated, wrapped in stigma, and hopelessly bureaucratic.
So bureaucratic in fact that many countries actively dis-incentivize work. Work literally doesn't pay if you are on benefits. You could go out and work for a few hours but you'd just get cut on your social security and lose your benefits. When accepting work becomes risky like that, something is wrong.
Germany has a great name for their social welfare benefits: "Bürgergeld". Literally citizen money. It's what you get if you are not entitled to anything else. It comes with lots of restrictions and caveats. But it's a great name. If you are a citizen, that's what you can fall back to if you have nothing else.
UBI would be taking that notion and just giving it to everyone while reducing their other income by the same amount. It would add up to about the same cost. It's a bookkeeping trick. The fear of course is that people would stop working. But the positive effects would be a reduction in cost of labor for employers and a vast reduction in bureacracy needed to police the whole thing. Germany spends almost as much on unemployment bureaucracy and programs as it does on the actual benefits.
UBI simplifies social security, taxation, unemployment insurances, pensions, etc. You never go all the way to zero. You might still want to insure something extra of course. But that's your choice. What we have right now is the opposite: a lot of cost and no choice. But you are taken care off either way.
> A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million
> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things
There are a LOT of problems with this programme, but personally, I think associating a costed economic benefit with "psycholigical wellbeing" seems good. It may make a pretty good precedence argument for other beneficial-to-society programme pilots to point to when selling their merits. The idea of a government programme appearing to prioritise psychological wellbeing seems net positive.
Psychological wellbeing is great! But this report was much ballyhooed in Irish media to claim that the program paid for itself when it absolutely did not.
Making Tuesday free ice cream day would also improve psychological well-being, but that doesn't help pay for the program.
My taxes pay for the programme. That is why I pay them. If the programme benefits psychological wellbeing, then it is worthwhile for me to pay for it.
Whether you choose to quantify this in terms of monetary net contrib to the economy as a broad concern, or as direct public benefit, is splitting econ hairs.
The UBI I support comes from a land value tax. Basically every citizen has an equal share of the land of the country, and rents it out to people who want to use it. If you use more than your fair share you pay in, if you use less you get paid.
Ireland has a stunningly regressive tax regime with respect to property - property taxes are a rounding error away from zero. In effect, renters pay (through income taxes) for local infrastructure and amenity improvements that benefit homeowners and increase home values, and none of that resultant increase in home value is captured in taxes.
Well, the property tax that I pay on the house that I own in Dublin is decidedly not "a rounding error away from zero". It has also recently increased, in line with the increased value of properties in the locality.
Regarding your second assertion, the construction of local amenities is in fact often paid for by the property tax. And in any case, what has actually driven the strong increase in the prices of houses nationwide is their relative scarcity now that the population has swelled so dramatically.
This sounds very interesting and fair. How does it address the needs of the people who create value. For example some one who might invent a transistor equivalent ? or even someone who wants to work on something that might eventually produce a social good like a new antibiotic. And how do we evaluate the resources going into that vs lets say build a Eiffel tower
Yes. It's also straightforward to extend to things which are also about use of a common resource, such as taxes related to pollution (airline seat taxes, etc.) Non-transferable shared ownership is useful and right for many things.
Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again.
Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
> the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy
I don't like how these reports speak with such certainty. How do you measure "total benefits"? For one, it includes income of the artist. Yes, giving money to people generally increases their income, so it would be weird if any amount given would not be break even to the expense, unless that person decides to do less of some other activity, which I guess is possible but unlikely at least for these amounts.
Then the study counts public facing artistic activity. Kind of hard to measure the value of that. I guess you could by saying "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
Then satisfaction and well being. I would certainly be happy with more money.
I personally don't think we have a lack of culture and art. If Ireland is at all like the US, they have more art majors (as a proxy for art creation). All artistic majors have grown considerably over the last few decades:
> A new analysis from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators finds that bachelor’s degree conferrals in the arts have remained substantially above average for the past 30 years. The data also show recent growth in the number of arts degrees conferred to traditionally under-represented racial/ethnic groups. As of 2015, departments and programs in the fine arts and performing arts awarded 80,360 bachelor’s degrees, with another 7,087 awarded for the “humanistic” study of the arts (subfields such as art history, musicology, and film studies, which the Indicators tabulate along with the humanities). This figure is down slightly from the historic peak of 82,778 degrees awarded in 2013 (or 90,543, when humanities subjects are included), and above the annual figure recorded at any point before 2011.
So the question is, what problem is this program trying to solve? Give rich kids that can afford to do art more money to support their lifestyle?
> "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
I also doubt that's what they're getting at, because if they were, there's a fairly straightforward way to, you know, pay the artist who created the art.
Did "they" actually try to call it universal? I could (easily!) be wrong, but I don't recall the scheme ever actually being labelled UBI by the government, only by the media and commenters on social media.
To conflate this with UBI very much misses the point. This isn't some experiment in post-capitalist utopia, it is basically a subsidy for the arts. Societies often subsidise things they want more of and that the market, for one reason or another, cannot or will not provide. As someone who paid taxes in Ireland for many years I never had any issue with subsidies for the arts. I would be happy for the government to subsidise FOSS development, too, for what it's worth (and in fact the EU does this to an extent).
It’s just more fraud and abuse in various forms and degrees. Not to mention what art is deemed as worthy of receiving this money and who has the power to squander other people’s money by becoming something akin to lords that rule over people’s lives through an incentive to please them in exchange for favorite status?
If it’s not only open to indigenous people engaged in art of the indigenous cultures, i.e., in this case Irish doing indigenous Irish cultural things whatever those may be, you could have some perverse injustices where, e.g., some Asian engaged in hentai pornography, living off the taxes taken from some old indigenous Irish lady who gets €500/month in old age support.
But since “discriminating” in favor of survival by preserving your own culture and insisting on your own people’s survival in the west anymore, things are going to get extremely perverted, in the sense of grotesque distortion and corruption, even more than already exists.
Unfortunately, it seems that all European ethnic groups all around the world have seemingly lost any and all ability to project actions into future effects or evaluate their outcomes, and seemingly have also been totally brainwashed into simply facilitating their own eradication and lost any survival instinct or will to live.
This kind of wedge of using other people’s money in a system where you are not allowed to discriminate in favor of your own survival, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the civilized world, i.e., civilization itself.
It’s the problem of the fat smoker, the ironic inability of the civilized world to see the inevitable long term outcomes of their self-harming behaviors… so they keep killing … only this time themself … and only slowly.
>> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program.
Surely it's an €80m saving in something like health care costs or productivity?
Edit:
You've really ignored a lot in that RTE article.
>> measurable decline in reliance on social protection, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average
>> Participants were also 38 percentage points less likely to be receiving Jobseeker’s payments
>> income from arts-related work increase by over €500. At the same time, their earnings from non-arts employment fell by approximately €280
Finally, your complaint that there's no information on how to join the program - it's a pilot. People were selected, the pilot was run, and these are the results of it. Either they'll continue with the pilot to gather data, end the scheme altogether, or open it widely based on the data they've gathered.
That's addressed, but it seems like it doesn't change the fact that it's a net loss
"""
The original cost of the pilot was €105 million, but after accounting for tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, the net fiscal cost dropped to just under €72 million.
"""
The values you cite just seem like really small amounts overall compared to the cost of the program.
Again, though, my core issue here is that I _want_ UBI, and what this gives us is empty tokenism (if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists?) at the same time the government has managed to produce a catastrophically bad housing crisis and a collapsing health system.
Oh I would love UBI too. That would be great. But I don't feel like that's what they're trying to sell this as. It's "Basic Income for the Arts". To me it's equivalent to various tax breaks/credits. People get 'free' money just because they've had children. Various industries get large subsidies. This seems equivalent.
>> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists
It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget.
Budget sensitivities are exactly why it's frustrating when this program is presented as a net financial gain. If it were, budgeting for it would be a lot easier.
> I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Weird line. The point of UBI is that it goes to everyone. Which allows people to choose to be a Deliveroo worker for some extra cash, an artist if that fancies them or work a traditional job for that extra moolah.
We agree - I think it would be great for artists, deliveroo riders (but who are we kidding, Ireland needs an underclass of poor immigrants living a precarious existence), and teachers to all benefit from UBI.
This is a regular fellowship. Nothing wrong with those, they can be government (assuming people are OK with this way to spend their taxes) or private. Those are pretty common. I was funded by a private fellowship for a year of my PhD; don't remember the details.
But as others have said, this has nothing to do with the UBI, as this is not universal. The main thing that makes this fellowship unusual, and not in a good way, is the fact that the selection criteria are shrouded in mystery.
The eligibility criteria was clear for the pilot[1] and has not been announced yet for the scheme from 2026 onwards. They selected 2,000 for the pilot which was due to end in June 2025 and was extended to early 2026 and in the 2026 budget was changed to reflect TFA.
As an Irish musician, I’ll note Irish culture has an outsized footprint globally. It’s probably top 3 most successful folk styles, these tunes are played throughout the globe. And counting Irish poets and writers amongst some of the best, I’d say Ireland has historically done well culturally. Whatever the merits of this specific program, there’s a lot of potential cultural value to be kindled.
And pubs! I'm not Irish, but it's very comforting going half-way across the world to somewhere like Florence or Hamburg, and going to an Irish pub where everyting feels familiar.
I guess even superstars like Evan You of Vue fame, or Andrew Kelley who made Zig, could get paid more with a well-paying (but not exceptionally so) position using their technologies.
Since you got plenty of cheeky responses, I'll attempt a more serious one:
You are clearly employable - while not as amazing as it used to be, there is a clear market for software developers. Your job is not at risk of disappearing.
Musicians, though, have it tough - "we" as a society [1] accept that we want to have art but its economic value has been plummeting for a while. And while no one shed a tear when (for instance) stables had to close due to the scarcity of city horses, we do want to try and keep local artists around. And it's not like it's a waste either - if the program costed "€72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits for the Irish economy", that's not even a bad deal.
There's of course an argument of "I bet software developers could generate more benefits than artists", which is probably true, but I'd argue artists need it more right now. And nothing stops the program from expanding eventually.
I think this accidentally raises an interesting side-point. It's not very easy to define art. It's much easier to define free software. But I am not much closer to understanding how to solve the question "who is writing free software?" than the question "who is making art?"
Let's say its fine now, and in 5-10 years also. But in a sense, it is a lifetime commitment to a payment that can sustain people's basic living needs with no output from them.
Because if suddenly you cannot afford this, what do you do? You tell people, after assuring them they can live their life free from fear of hunger death, that suddenly they have to fend for themselves.
We kind of have "universal income" for old people in Europe - it's called pensions. And it's a massive ticking time bomb in exactly this way. They are increasingly unaffordable in the aging society, and chances are sooner or later governments will start curtailing these benefits.
That's bad, but what makes it tragic is you first assured people they are safe and can rely on this.
You mention pensions already. In my country the profoundly disabled are also provided payments and housing. (Not much and not enough but it's there.) Your argument applies equally to that. We're promising to support them for the rest of their lives. But maybe one day we won't be able to.
I think I see what you're arguing but I am not following the logic. It would seem to be a general argument that can apply to any form of assistance to anyone in need. Don't provide it, because one day you might be bankrupt, and not be able to provide it anymore, but now they'll be dependent on you and so they'll suffer more than they would have otherwise if they'd never been dependent on you.
But one factor I think you maybe haven't considered: poverty often diminishes capacity to function, and to earn income. I realize this is well into just speculative economic philosophy but my own intuition seems to be the exact opposite of yours: assistance of this kind probably improves capacity to be independent, should it one day be withdrawn.
Pensions and disability payments are by definition targeting a small proportion of the society. It is one thing to make a promise to 10% of the society, and another to 100% of it. And indeed, pensions are becoming tougher as the fraction goes upwards. My point isn't that it is somehow bad that we have these benefits but that they are already quite expensive and look increasingly unsustainable. So with this knowledge, we should be very careful about making much bigger committments.
Further, people on retirement or disability benefits typically don't have much choice. Due to age or circumstances, they cannot really earn a living, or a sufficient one. It's not a choice. We're not promising them an alternative to a productive lifetime. UI is different. If it is to be worth anything, it is surely a promise that you can take economically unsound or risky choices, and if they don't work out, the state has your back. If it doesn't, it's just pocket money. It is actively encouraging people to outsource the financial responsibility for their lives to the state, even as governments globally are struggling to make ends meet.
What is even trickier is that pensions and disability benefits go to people who are generally not very economically active. Extending universal income to everyone kind of expands this to everyone else, i.e. the very people who need to work to make the society work.
We have seen in many places in Europe structural decline of industries, and in various cases, the people affected were given long term unemployment benefits, a little bit like UI. It was probably the right approach - certainly the decent thing to do - but the areas where it happened tended to decrease in productivity and creativity, rather than the other way round. The ones that bounced typically got extensive investment rather than just relied on the improved creativity and industriusness of the people on unemployment benefits.
> The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy.
Good start, but it should expand to everyone without conditions.
Imagine how easy it would be to start businesses, startups non-profit projects if you had UBI. Bunch of guys come together and everyone knows $1,500 per month each "funding secured forever." Many people people dealing with burnout, mental or physical problems, could ease up and work part time.
Every problem in Anglo societies comes back to housing prices. Most of that 1500 will go to rent, then you're just using public money to pay asset owners. Housing benefit in the UK has these exact flaws.
If you think this is relevant, then solution is obvious: Increase taxes on small wages until people can't effort rent and rents will decrease. Hint: it's not relevant.
Housing benefits must be spent on housing. People can use UBI any way they want. With UBI, people can more easily move from expensive cities if housing is not affordable, and then rents and prices must adjust.
The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand. Every urban economist agrees that the solution is to build more housing. Rent controls don't increase the number of housing units; only building more increases the housing supply. It does not have to be affordable housing; just build more housing units and all price points eventually get an affordable house.
Japan is an island like the UK, but they built the infrastructure and enough housing. At the height of its asset price bubble around 1990, the value of real estate in Japan was higher than that of the entire United States. But they built enough to match the demand. Now their population is in decline, and there are empty houses at the edge of the cities.
One fun thing about Ireland is that building homes in the countryside is nearly illegal, unless you have "local needs" (aka your parents are from there). It's a de-facto xenophobic "Irish people only" building rule, and the EU has ruled it illegal, yet it remains, because the Irish planning system is a reasonable contender for the worst possible way to plan your cities and towns.
The planning system here certainly has lots of problematic aspects, but making it difficult to build one-off homes in the countryside isn't one of them. As a housing solution, it's hugely inefficient and worse, it spoils the landscape. When the practice went unchecked in earlier decades, it lead to what was dubbed "bungalow blight".
Indeed, the problem is that Ireland makes it damn near impossible to build anything anywhere, still imposes parking minimums, still uses _their own_ failure to build infrastructure as a reason to deny people homes, still has many, many planners who almost seem personally insulted by the idea that you might want a house with "eaves" or literally anything different from what already exists (ironically they're hellbent on making sure nothing is as interesting as e.g. Eyeries village), and still despises anything that isn't sitting on a giant carbon-intensive blob of concrete.
The _excellent_ IrishVernacular.com had a great website showing how to build a modern, comfortable house for 25k (make it 50k now with inflation), but when I talked to planners in Offaly (yech) about the idea of a pier foundation or a metal roof they got visibly angry. (The site is gone but archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210216212333/https://www.irish... ) Interestingly, metal roofs are cheaper and last longer (and can look perfectly nice, I'm not talking about tin roofs here). But planners are threatened by anything that makes housing more affordable.
As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago. If you're curious, the book "Whittled Away" is a really good examination of this, and how ecologically barren Ireland really is - https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/. And rural homes don't need to be car-dependent monstrosities, I made a video about how we could improve active transport in rural areas at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew (of course, even the greens think bikes are only toys outside the city, and my cllrs from FF/FG/SF practically laughed at me when I suggested bike infrastructure where we lived in the midlands).
Of course, the real galling bit is that Ireland has peak "rules for thee and not for me" energy, by saying you can opt out of all that so long as you're a true native son and have parents from the area (the EU has rightly pointed out that this is discriminatory, but Ireland just... breaks the law. And nothing happens) - https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/locals-only-planning-r... . So apparently one-off houses are great, but only for culchies.
> As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago.
Love this comment so much. And it's true!
I grew up in Ireland and was immersed in the "everything in Ireland is the best" mentality. I think it was when I started regularly visiting the Hudson Valley in New York, which is mostly still wooded, that I really realized the "countryside" in Ireland is just manmade. It's not natural. The whole island was trees.
My understanding is that you've left Ireland; hope you're making your peace with the problems of the country now that you don't have to deal with them as much!
I live in the Netherlands, which has plenty of issues in its own right, but it's been a better place to raise kids. Finding a place to live here was easier, which is kind of insane considering how bad the housing crisis is in NL, and my kids can bike to school safely.
I really like Ireland. I think it's an amazing place. But it's really, really, really badly run. And it seems like most policymaking (like this, or rent control, or help to buy, etc) was built on vibes instead of logic.
It is almost impossible to receive housing benefit in Ireland. Legally all landlords must accept it, practically few to none in major cities do.
> The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand.
About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds, another huge (difficult to specify) percentage are bought to rent by small to medium sized landlords. The Irish state Land Development Agency build around 3.5k homes per year, meanwhile Davies estimate the state needs around 93k new homes per year. Investing in any kind of investment fund or ETFs is taxed at 41% under the exit tax in Ireland. In addition, the “deemed disposal” rule means investments are taxed as though sold every eight years, even if they haven't been.
These are all artificial extreme pressures on housing in Ireland specifically, that mean that this is not a simple 'supply and demand' problem. It's a supply and demand of people who need housing vs entities who require profit - and have concomitant class affiliations and monies to spend on political influence problem.
> About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds,
It does not matter who owns them. If there is enough housing, investments funds will lower rents to match the demand. Investment funds can do excessive rent seeking only if the supply is limited.
It's good if foreigners invest in housing, because hoses can't be moved overseas.
Anyone disagreeing, argue against this statement:
Exess rent seeking is possible only when there is scarcity.
When people don't have choises, they must pay what is asked.
If you have 100 people needing a house and 101 houses available, prices will decline. Maintaining empty house is a running loss and house prices and rents will decline to prevent that.
While this is all true, the reason housing in Ireland is an attractive investment is because it is incredibly scarce, and homeowners have the ability to preserve this scarcity.
Everything Ireland has done to try to make housing more affordable has been a bizarre scheme to do so while increasing prices. Help To Buy was, to be blunt, incredibly dumb, but it did help increase home prices while giving some people (first time buyers) a little bit of money.
No, crashing the property market would be economically and socially catastrophic. We know this for a fact, because it happened 16 years ago and we're still feeling the effects.
What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.
Hard disagree. I lived through the last recession (here in Dublin Ireland), and life was better for most people across most dimensions. Whether it would have been sustainably so is a broader argument. But cheap buildings led to a massive cultural renaissance that was effectively killed (by council and government dictat) five years later.
The only place in the developed world where housing prices have declined (or even remained stagnant) over the long term is Japan, a country in long term recession.
That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.
Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?
The issue is as much a legacy of lack of investment as growth, as for a number of decades the state built no houses at all, forcing a generation into rental poverty.
A few years ago the figure was 50,000 per year. They have been failing to build enough homes for almost 2 decades now, and have a lot of catching up to do.
and I wonder how much of Europe's problems is caused by AirBnB enabling wealthy people to extract riches from rental units, while causing suffering to normal renters...
7.2 million Irish multiplied by $18,000 a year is about $130 billion. In 2024 the government revenue was $148.3 billion. The government revenue would need to essentially double to make this program universal.
Baby steps. This is a very polarizing issue - a lot of people will complain that the receivers do nothing useful for society.
There's also the matter of funding it, but I agree with you. Making it universal and consolidating other programs into it would create some savings as well.
I feel like artists may have been a poor choice to the subjective value of the outcome of their work, who knows.. maybe they figured this was destined to fail.
> Many people people dealing with burnout, mental or physical problems, could ease up and work part time.
This is precisely why UBI (also known as socialism) is unsustainable. Most people don't want to work. If you disincentivize them from working, many of them will stop. And then there will not be enough taxpayers to support the government handouts anymore.
Even easier in places with a sane social safety net, where there aren't work requirements on benefits. You can take some time to train on certain skills, if needed.
I really like the idea of UBI but the math just doesn't add up. Even where I live, France, our entire welfare expenditures (that is supposed to be quite high relative to our neighbors) wouldn't be nearly enough to give each citizen 1,000€/month, which would be barely enough to scrape by on the country side. And that would require sacrificing our socialized healthcare system, our public education, etc.
It requires tax increases, and the average earner's UBI will typically balance out the tax increase, meaning they don't directly profit.
UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
> It requires tax increases, and the average earner's UBI will typically balance out the tax increase, meaning they don't directly profit.
A good portion of my salary is already taken by Tax and the government wastes it. I've seen the waste first hand when contracting for both Local, Nation Government. I was so disgusted by this, I have made every effort to avoid working with them.
I've also seen this waste happen in large charities and ossified corporations. The former also disgusting me as I know they would simply piss away a few thousand on complete BS, that took a whole village to collect and for it not to go towards the stated purpose of the charity. As a result I don't donate to any charities that aren't local.
Every-time someone suggests a tax increase, I know for a fact they haven't seen the waste happen first hand.
> UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
Giving everyone a safety net will require giving people money that is taken from others. To the people that benefit it is seen as "free" and will become "expected" and won't be treated as a safety net.
Being a responsible adult is about reducing the amount of risk you are taking, not increasing it.
So what you will be doing it teaching people to essentially gamble and people did similar during COVID. Some people took their cheques and put it into crypto, meme stocks or whatever. Some won big, most didn't.
I've met people in my local area that have lost huge amounts of money on risky investments, everything from property developments, to bitcoin. Creating an incentive for risk taking without the consequences is actually reckless, a massive moral hazard and will simply create perverse incentives.
> The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
You will be taxing those people more and they will have less to invest. The reason why many people invest is because they have disposable income that they can afford to risk.
By taxing people more (which you admit would have to happen), they will have less disposable income and will be inclined to invest less as a result.
Hard to know if it adds up or not, unless some country is brave enough to try it. I'd imagine it'll have an enormous effect on the cost of various types of crimes that would sharply drop, as just as one example. But exactly what the effects and how large they'd be is short of impossible to know.
This won’t happen until the immigration issue is resolved one way or another. The moment you introduce an unconditional $1,500 per citizen, the question of who qualifies as a citizen will become even more divisive than it already is.
EDIT: I’d genuinely appreciate it if you could explain why you disagree, instead of just mindlessly downvoting as though I’d said something offensive or inappropriate.
How is the argument much different than any current arguments? You can already get significant benefits from the state as a citizen (in European countries, at least).
The difference is magnitude, the benefits that European countries provide has made them a very attractive destination for immigration, so it stands to reason that something like UBI would make them even more so. No matter which side of that debate you're on theres a point where the math breaks down and some difficult choices need to be made, either you provide these generous benefits to your citizens or you have a generous immigration policy, but both of them together may prove unsustainable
> The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy. The report also found that recipients’ arts-related income increased by more than €500 per month on average, income from non-arts work decreased by around €280, and reliance on other social programs declined, with participants receiving €100 less per month on average.
So, overall a neutral-to-good outcome, from a financial point of view. I think we can debate about whether it’s necessary for the government of Ireland to fulfill this funding role, but I’m not sure this is the most wasteful thing that a government can do.
I'd bet the 72M cost was in actual euros that could be spent on other things, while other people have noted that the 80M in benefit was not in euros, but in happiness, which is notable for being difficult to spend on different things.
Some people might speculate that the arbitrary multiplier on happiness-to-euros for the second half was chosen to make it look like a slightly profitable endeavour on superficial examination.
> generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy
Approximately 75% of the “benefits” is by the WELLBY framework, which considers each “wellbeing point” to be equivalent to €13,000 a year additional income.
This could be a valid metric, but it feels a bit iffy, and without this evaluation it would be a significant cost to the Irish economy, so I do not think this UBI can be considered truly a positive return to the economy
Art and culture is extremely valuable, but is often not profitable / sustainable. Banking is important to society too, but it's already well compensated!
Some things need funding despite being unprofitable. Not everyone will agree, but I believe art/culture (including often unprofitable forms thereof) are worthwhile, and should thus receive public funding (to some degree). I believe the same about justice, policing, education, research etc.
None of this rules allowing a freeish market to operate where doing so "delivers the goods".
You have to make an argument on _why_ market forces don't compensate artists fairly. The standard argument is that art is a public good with a free rider problem– a mural might produce value to everyone who looks at it but there is no way to force them to pay for it. That argument fails for many of the things this program is funding: theater, opera and film. All examples of art that is easily excludable.
i do not feel that we have a shortage of art and in fact we have much more art than in past years where everyone was forced to do agricultural labor.
art is relatively low on my list of positive externality activities to subsidize, after stuff like ensuring everyone has food to eat, home, etc. at least in the US, we are already running a deficit so we do not even have the money to do this - let alone some broad UBI for artists.
and how do we agree on what jobs are undercompensated? every person will have their own hobbyhorse
I think there's a danger in removing art from any kind of market mechanisms because it can lead to some very navel-gazing output that appeals to very few. In the long term, this kind of art would lead to making this kind of UBI unpopular and would undermine the whole thing. Not a lot of taxpayers are going to be on board with paying someone to can their own feces[1] or submerge religious icons in piss[2] for example.
> In October, the government released the results of a public survey on the scheme, which found that 97 percent of respondents support the program. However, 47 percent of the 17,000 respondents said artists should be selected based on economic need, while 37.5 percent favored selection by merit. Only 14 percent preferred random selection.
People generally won't prefer the fairest method of selection, but that doesn't mean it's not the best.
Most surveys can't even get 97% of respondents to agree that terrorism is wrong.
The government is just blatantly lying about these results. There is simply no way 97% of the population (most of whom pay into this system yet receive nothing from it) supports this.
Without delving into the specifics Ireland already has a defacto UBI. This is subject to you having an address and a social security number. There is a notion of a minimum income you need to make and the State compensates the rest if you do not earn it. It depends on many factors and there are various edge cases. What is more, if you are in the receivership of such provisions you can stand in the line to get subsidised place to live (which is difficult to get mind you).
Some people hate it some abuse it and some do not qualify despite living in the street. But if you know how to navigate the system the income is guaranteed.
It is a bit sad though that some clerks like to abuse the receivers of such payments though, e.g. by inspecting your bank statements and questioning your expenses (true story). So making this whole thing closer to dejure is welcome as it avoids possible abuse.
> selected artists receive a weekly payment of approximately $375, or about $1,500 per month. There are 2,000 spots available, with applications set to open in September 2026; eligibility criteria have not yet been announced
I would love to see a list of the artists with links to their work, some of which, presumable, would be for sale.
The eligibility criteria of the pilot scheme is bonkers. For example a Costume Designer is eligible, but a Jewellery Designer is not. A Make-Up Designer is eligible but a Make-Up Artist is not.
I manage a large art gallery that exhibits a large number of artists, selected from our database of over 4,000 artists, most of which are in the local area.
NONE of them can make a living solely off their art.
Personally, if I wanted to subsidize someone who could bootstrap their talent and efforts into self-sufficiency, I'd never pick an artist.
not arguing against you but maybe one takes the view that artists should not need to be self-sufficient purely from market forces and selling art? Maybe society should just subsidize them to an extent (this is obviously already happening but I'm saying as a matter of principle)
99.99% of artists definitely CAN'T make a living off only their art, but most can survive anyway by some form of other employment. Even though some small degree of government subsidies will always be around to help artists, and perhaps that's a noble principle, I'd just rather see my tax dollars go to health care or trade schools or food banks or child care or disaster relief or Meals On Wheels or medical research or similar efforts to help those in desperate need, instead of to artists choosing to be artists. There's always someone worse off than an artist, through no fault of their own.
Worth contrasting this to the long-running Irish "Aosdána"[0] programme established in the early '80s, which is effectively the same thing, just a LOT more exclusive: a basic income for life is awarded to a tiny number of new artists every 2 years: it has up to a maximum of 250 concurrent recipients (so new artists are only selected when old artists die).
This new initiative has had a lot of critics, but 2,000 spots annually is at least a bit of an improvement over the weird clique that admits 5 new people every 2 years.
(Aosdána is being retained alongside this new programme)
All paid for by virtue of Ireland being the tax haven and compliance haven for US big tech, hilariously the same group who trained their models on all of these artists' output without paying them a dime.
All they need is some friendly policy thinktank to come up with some hand wavy numbers about economic activity before the program starts and then no one will pay attention to it again. It will just be another tax line item like hundreds of other experimental social spending programs.
All UBI programs funded by the theft of wages are corrupt and bankrupt from the start, as demonstrated. I expect a lot of “No true Scotsman” [ironic] arguments inbound.
it is theft, the government should not be involved in charity.
taxes, are a burden, and should be minimal, and if individuals want to be charitable with there own money after taxation, great, that's their choice
The whole of Europe is becoming more based around exploiting black markets and benefit payments than actually being able to innovate in a free market.
Like in Sweden you pay 60-80% taxes as a sole trader - you're better off just trying to find some way to claim a disability benefit or subsidies like this.
That paper seems interesting. Why are you implying it’s pointless? What is your expertise in Mammalian or evolutionary biology? How do you know this won’t contribute or lead to something useful in veterinary or human medicine, or bioengineering, or anything else?
Have you heard of the Golden Goose Awards? The first paragraph on their history page (https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history) can be applied directly to your comment:
“From 1975 to 1988, Senator William Proxmire issued monthly “Golden Fleece Awards,” which targeted federal spending Proxmire considered wasteful. Unfortunately, the awards often targeted federally-funded scientific research for ridicule. Science that sounded odd or obscure was easily singled out, but the awards reflected fundamental misunderstanding of how science works, and how such research can turn out to be extremely important regardless of whether it makes sense to non-scientists. Indeed, such research can have a major impact on society. The nature of scientific research is that its impact is hard to predict.”
Hey I appreciate your comment, but you were doing a fine job! In case it comes up later, here are another couple of resources to defend science funding:
I don’t know why trying to ridicule funny sounding science papers is still such a popular thing to attempt, when the Golden Goose awards exist, and when people who do it have been shown repeatedly for many decades to fail to understand either science or money, yet here we are. Luckily science won’t stop, even with our current administration’s chaos.
> to publicly identify or publish private information about someone especially as form of punishment or revenge
This person literally uses his own name as HN username. Very imaginative use of the word tho.
EDIT: Even though I think that point of view is idiotic, I now worry that if you think like that, other people will too. Would you please report that comment so that a mod can edit it/delete it (I can no longer edit it).
You’re demonstrating the fundamental misunderstanding of science the Golden Goose page refers to. It’s expected - and a necessary part of science - that not all papers succeed.
The funny thing about this is that, unlike UBI or whatever, the societal returns on investment in science research are huge and indisputable. Nothing else in human history has improved our condition or knowledge or quality of life as much or as fast. You’re typing your opinions into a box that came out of large numbers of papers, some of which were criticized for their pointlessness. You’re absolutely barking up the wrong tree.
Again, what makes you certain that this paper or any other won’t suddenly get citations and importance in the future?
You simply don’t know that. It’s not even relevant whether your uninformed prediction turns out to be correct later, that would be random luck. You cannot tell what will happen in the future.
And why don’t you understand that having research and papers in the system that don’t lead to anything is actually a good thing, both expected and necessary?
Read a little more about the Golden Goose awards, about research that was ridiculed and languished until it didn’t. There are lots of papers that seemed like a dead end until long after they were published. The entire field of Neural Networks is now combing prematurely presumed dead end research from 40+ years ago.
Maybe you can fix it, but you do seem to be completely missing the point of what science is. Investment in science, and the associated research and experiments, aim to increase knowledge. Science doesn’t necessarily aim for utility, and doing science is always taking a risk that the knowledge gained might not be useful. You can’t actually do science without taking that risk, and we can’t have papers that make huge progress without papers that make no progress.
You can’t tell what investments will pay off until they do. You can only be sure the technology in your computer wasn’t pointless because it already worked out, despite lots of naive people like you claiming it was pointless at the time.
The good news is that our investments in science are paying off big time, and those investments include all the dead end papers ever written. The sum total, even with all uncited papers in the world, is that we are much better off having spent the money on science than not.
A) For the most part, scientists do research because they are curious and enjoy it, not because they plan on making money out of it. Getting a salarys allows them to do what they like, they don't it do for the salary.
B) If there's a little slippage due to lazy, misaligned, or fraudlent people, it might still be worth it. Consider two proposals: "I'll give you money every month if you're a scientist and just hang around studying whatever you like" vs "I'll give you money every month if you hit research metrics XYZ as a scientist" - the former will allow you to pay way less and sciensists will still be happy. It's just getting them for cheap.
C) I'm skeptical that you personally can tell whether the paper linked is pointless or not. Many ideas seem pointless when they first appear. Some are, and some contribute a tiny bit to the progress of understanding.
Well, there are papers that prove people use warmer clothes in winter than in summer. If you want to argue there's a deeper meaning behind such science, then who am I to change your mind.
Are there? Multiple papers? Citations please. Even if true, I have to assume there’s a high probability that you’re leaving out important context, misunderstanding the results, or just plain exaggerating.
In Luxembourg smth similar exists but it's called "social help" for artists.
It's rather easily available if you make art for a living and it's enough to survive (paying social security & living costs)
I can't really make out what this all means. It seems like people cannot live in the world anymore because of expensive housing and taxation.
Across the ocean, Peter Thiel recently did a private lecture on the anti-christ and how that is connected to how hard to hide your money and "escape from global taxation if you're a U.S. citizen." He has dual citizenship in New Zealand. And, the following article conjectures that "prophesies about a society where an individual's ability to engage in commerce is contingent upon brandishing the mark of the beast on one's body."
Is this a criticism of swag? I love free t-shirts at tech conferences, is he calling me out for taking them?
It’s always interesting to see that consumption tax is pretty much levied on all purchases at all levels. But consumption is rarely considered as a criteria for decision making on benefits.
Great art isn't necessarily about popularity / wide appeal, though. In fact, the art that isn't of wide, general appeal, is what stands to benefit the most from this kind of benefit.
I mean, if you want to be an artist, you really can. I've lived off a van for almost a year... just for adventure. Traveled close to beach where I could shower. I spent literally close to nothing day-to-day. I could remake my weekly expenses just working at a few restaurants in the weekend, and enjoy the beach the rest of the week surfing.
Now that I'm back to my normal office coding job, I feel like I'm actually saving less money because I have rent, and general city life to spend money on. It's all about the comforts one is used to.
The story of artists not having enough money is probably about people that are used to too many comforts. I've seen people complain they didn't have money to go by, whilst living in an apartment close to a densely populated city and having a car... get rid of those comforts if you want to make it!
The most basic premise of UBI is the universal part. None of the arguments for it function at all, if it is handed out selectively.
The arguments for UBI are that it effectively requires no bureaucracy and can not be gamed, while providing basic needs for all people. If you are doing needs based analysis, you are just back to a regular social system, which requires bureaucracy and will be gamed.
If some government decides to do UBI, than it actually has to do UBI and not just add another layer of social spending on top of an already sprawling social system.
A lot of shadow artists in this thread seem upset that a relatively tiny bit of money is supporting some people that chose a difficult life producing art over a stable career.
If I had a choice between some of my tax money supporting artists versus lighting my money on fire to pay an army of bureaucrats doing not much of anything, I'll always choose the artists. I've seen contracts for more money that do a lot less for society.
That's not the choice though. The bureaucrats are getting paid either way.
The choice is whether or not you want your taxes raised by a small amount so that other people can live their dreams while you sit in a cubicle for 40 years.
I agree, it'd be nice to cut the bullshit jobs, but you're right that that's not going to happen.
But I still am down with paying a little more to support people that are providing to our overall culture. I'm friends with many artists here in NYC, and in most cases everyone is broke. You'll see profiles written about them in the NYT, or see them on panels at major cultural institutions, but that's just the outward appearance. In reality, they're struggling to pay rent. Sometimes they're sleeping in cars when out on tour doing work because they can't afford a motel.
Many of us don't have the courage to do what they do. It's not like they're sitting around, flush with cash, day dreaming all day. They're doing extremely difficult work (personal, spiritual, cultural), and we all benefit from it. I'm down with supporting it. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in taxes every year, an extra $40 isn't a big deal.
These stories get up voted on HN because we all dream of getting something for nothing. But the problem is that if we all get something for nothing, no one is left to make anything and we all end up with nothing. Resist the siren appeal of easy outs and work hard and build what you want.
The problem with every basic income program is in the long term. Eventually, generations of people are receiving basic income and relying on it and
1) will never vote against it (and politicians will use it as a weapon against anyone that suggests it).
2) It's ever expanding and will become unaffordable and unsustainable
3) inflation will destroy its value over time
I also believe that if universal income becomes common, you forfeit your right to vote while accepting it.
Any pseudo-UBI that is not actually universal will create a distorting perverse incentive for people to fake qualifications for it. There will suddenly be a lot of “artists” who don’t do much, debasing the definition of artist.
Just do UBI. Politicians just can’t help hanging conditions on it and making it complicated.
“But some people will sit around and do nothing!” Yes and they already do, including at bullshit jobs pretending to work. The punishment for a life sitting around doing nothing is a life wasted doing nothing.
This will become to poster child for left wing elitism in the future.
What an utter, totally disconnected from reality measure.
Tax payers need to go to work everyday to support more and more unproductive members of society and have the state take by force more than half their income.
If it's impossible to measure art's value then there can't be any cutoff point at which we stop funding ever more art. Anyone who attempts to put a number on its value is treated as an overly rational boor but we obviously can't just devote the entirety of society's resources to creating more of it.
Some art produced today is good, some bad. Subjectivity will mean people disagree. It has ever been so.
But the idea that art / artists don't require money isn't my read of history.
When you go to an art museum in, say, London, you'll find lots of fantastic paintings depicting religious themes. Were artists of the time fixated only on the religious aspects of life? No doubt religion was more important, but the real consideration was that patronage came once from the Church.
Nothing against patronage, but this is none of it.
Patronage chooses the best artists available to produce art for the patron. This measures grant money to self-proclaimed artists and are not based on merit.
I get where you're coming from. I would be a bit annoyed if, for instance, taxpayer money went to artists painting white-paint-on-white-canvas non-paintings or recording silence as a form of music. The trouble is that it's hard to measure / assess "merit" beyond extreme cases like I've listed. To illustrate: there are plenty of movies that were panned by critics of their time only to later become "cult classics".
Yeah the qualification criteria are undefined, and some criteria are easily gamed, so this ultimately their criteria is going to probably be some combination of:
- Those who have connections
- Those who have an immutable trait that puts them in a minority (after all, there's not enough money / slots for a majority to qualify)
Which makes this a highly political program no matter how you look at it.
I realise that it’s most improper to read the article on this here orange website, but it produced an economic benefit greater than the cost, which was fairly minimal. There are worse things for governments to spend money on.
The idea that the average artist in Ireland is in any way an ally of the FF/FG coalition is also pretty farcical.
The program was championed by the greens, who would be generally well-liked by artists (and myself, even though I dislike this policy personally).
Though they're somewhat less-liked since going in to coalition with FF/FG.
The benefit was greater than the cost if you consider the psychological well-being aspect of it, but it was not self-supporting economically (i.e. it's difficult to see how this is scalable).
Some of them may be politically disconnected or apathetic, but I can almost guarantee that not a single recipient of this funding is a political ally of the current Irish administration.
Ultimately this is a fairly low cost programme, a very tiny % of revenue expenditure, & looks good to an electorate that are generally in favour of supporting Irish cultural assets. I would expect to hear unpopular aging conservative politicians bring this up a lot in the next election cycle while attempting to appeal to the younger vote.
I think you're assessing this with a North American point of view. I have local knowledge, and I can tell you that the money is being given to people who will not under any circumstances vote for the centrist politicians who are handing it out.
I don't know, an income with no strings attached sounds better than putting them all on a few media corporations' payrolls, that are controlled by, like, three guys.
It's the sign they are leaving capitalism. That could be in a positive or negative direction. People very advocate of capitalism tend to present it as always a bad thing.
Not necessarily leaving capitalism. It could be considered a way of art patronage or sponsoring as people/entities have been doing for artists et cetera for pretty much forever. This time it’s the state itself. It’s different but I don’t think it’s a net negative. We have, even in capitalism, jobs/trades that doesn’t pay much, definitely not in the beginning and even later only to a rare few, but that trade is needed and not just those rare few.
I’d rather look at from this perspective — their output and quality could be much better if they don’t have to worry about shelter, food, and health while doing that monetarily thankless work.
I have a huge disdain for artists who do not bleed and sweat like the rest of us doing jobs we don’t necessarily enjoy. Especially in this age of opulence. Welcome to life. Art should capture truth, the essence of things, and how can you do so without your feet planted firmly on the ground? Perhaps I could make exceptions for those on whom skill is truly refined in a dedicated way (think YoYo Ma practicing 10 hours a day), but I suspect your avg artist spends more time navel gazing than putting in the work. (And I say this as a huge supporter and fan of the arts)
Why would you disdain someone who finds enjoyment in their work?
But don't worry, making art is not always a joyride, it can be hard work. For me pesonally, writing software is a breeze compared to writing an orchestra score or the last days of a theatre production.
Also, the idea of the poor and suffering artist is a cliché. Many famous artists actually came from wealthy families or had generous financial support from friends or patreons. It doesn't make them lesser artists.
> I have a huge disdain for artists who do not bleed and sweat like the rest of us doing jobs we don’t necessarily enjoy.
I don't necessarily want the artists to bleed and sweat. But when they do, their art is so much better! Giving artists universal income seems counterproductive, if your stated goal is good art...
They tried to call this "universal" until people pointed out it is the opposite of universal. This program is a wild distortion of what UBI is meant to be.
Everyone who would _like_ to be an artist, but can't afford to be one, is disqualified. Meanwhile, the acquaintance of mine who sold his house in London at a large profit and retired to a cottage in Westmeath to live off his gains and noodle around on the guitar a bit is a recipient of funds from this program.
Tellingly there's very little information about how to _become_ an artist with this program.
Edit/addendum: Worth noting they've produced some _very_ dubious numbers to claim this program is a net gain economically. https://www.rte.ie/culture/2025/0923/1534768-basic-income-fo...
""" A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million. In addition, the report estimates that audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences. """
And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program. I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being.
I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Ah Jaysus! Ireland’s has been running "basic income schemes" since the 6th century. "Modernity" is just a bit blind to how it worked. What we are seeing now is the secular attempts at institutionalizing it.
What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness.
And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity.
Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
> There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports
Right, the Catholic Church doesn't pay any attention to its finances. It doesn't have regularly financial reports full of numbers that are carefully reviewed by several levels of leadership. It doesn't zealously protect its tax exemptions and press people for donations each week. It just kinda wings it and hopes the checks don't bounce, which they magically don't because the Church does good work in the world?
> And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Good lord, how do I get that job?
Seminary, then becoming ordained as a priest, at the very least.
Priests usually have to perform multiple masses a day, every day of the week.
They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Growing up, the Catholic church which my family attended, and to which our grade school was attached, held the following masses:
* Wednesday evening mass
* Thursday morning mass (this was attended by the school kids, as well as a collection of retirees)
* Saturday evening mass
* Sunday 7am mass
* Sunday 10am mass
There was also a weekly or maybe biweekly Confession.
That was serving quite a small congregation too, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bigger parishes have more frequent masses (although in my experience larger parishes often have more than one priest).
Also, the job of a Catholic priest is definitely not limited to performing Mass. They're essentially on call for Last Rites 24/7, but apart from that there's also just various parish events they'll be involved with.
So anyway, I don't want that job, I want the one where you give out vaguely mystical advice and listen to problems once a week, and then during the rest of the week you're like a cool side character at the local pub.
In some areas, with declining attendance and a reluctance to close any churches, many priests perform mass at multiple churches.
This is especially true in rural areas, where the density of churches was established in the pre-car era.
How does that work? "Sorry this church is closed on Sunday, we hold mass on Monday instead because our priest is shared with a bigger church."?
I spoke to a priest doing this when a family member passed. He'd perform the early Sunday service in town, then drive 1.5h to the next valley over and do a service there, then drive 45m to a third church before returning to the first for meetings and elderly care visits. Worse, each of these churches had different sermon schedules so he was preparing sermons customized to each on top of his other duties.
Could also do a 9AM mass at one church, a (9AM + mass duration + travel time + 30 minutes) mass at another, and so on
> They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.
Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..
You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..
I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
Probably depends on the region. In my country, the church i attended to had three masses during the week and i think 6 (back to back all day) during Sundays. This was only one of three churches within a walking distance, and the (mid-small) city probably had around 10-15.
Which is expected, since every adult was expected to go to church every Sunday, and many people, especially elderly, went during the week. Also there were four or five priests, and only Sunday masses has more than one attending at once, so the load probably wasn't that large as I make it sound.
There are also regions where due to diversity of congregations, masses are held in multiple languages at the same church.
Probably depends on the area. Where I am in North Carolina, the local Catholic Church has daily masses.
The church would probably classify this program as marketing costs.
I think the church has a few other things going for it. Guilt, redemption, fear of rejection from community, ya know things of that sort. I'm sure you're glad to see corporations taking up such tactics with climate-shaming and such. As long as it's not money.
I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate.
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
We have a similar system in the UK [1]. Its about £100/month for a first child, less for subsequent children. As a parent I found it very useful.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit
How is it checked that you're eligible? Asking because the system in the Netherlands could be defrauded, people registering to be living in the country, registering X amount of children, then going back to live in a cheaper country. Not sure if their children were actually real either.
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
Sweden is a high trust society which is unfortunately exploited by foreigners.
There is little control.
Everyone gets it or everyone with a childs?
Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together).
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
The US has something similar, but of course badly done and confusing, with the "child tax credit" https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-tax... against your income tax later, instead of a monthly check.
Does that mean that people who don't pay tax, don't get it? (unemployed/retired/...)
The Child Tax Credit is mostly refundable.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/refundabl...
Yes, sorry I mis-explained the 16-year thing. I think one highlight of that is that the benefit shifts to being paid by the CSN (Sweden board of student finance, they are the ones who provide subsidized student loans as well) and it is tied to you being a student. So if you drop out of high school you stop getting this benefit.
It saves a lot of work and therefore money. But there’s another layer to consider for many people. Someone getting benefits who doesn’t deserve it is less important than someone who needs help not getting it. You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
> You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
One obvious scam in this case would be to convince the system you are more than one person.
I think you underestimate people's greed and inventiveness.
People getting money who need it generally have other problems and so you need to get them in touch with the other help they need. Stopping scams of the system is a bonus, but the real value is (or should be!) evaluating everyone getting help to ensure they are getting the other care they need. Many people who need money are unable to handle money and so we still need programs to find them and ensure they are not getting scammed, or wasting their money (that is not saving enough to eat at the end of the month despite getting enough)
If your only concern is people who are scamming the system, UBI ensures they are not scamming by definition. (we can debate if that is a good solution or not - a very different topic). However the main concern should be people who need help, and a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
> [for] a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
This is true, but there is plenty of evidence in the disability sphere that it's more cost-effective to give people with disabilities money up front because they can spend it on their own needs better than government programmes.
Think of it like a business that wants to make sure WFH is comfortable for its employees. Many companies now just give a grant up front for monitors, chairs, etc.
If they don't do that they need someone to admin/spreadsheet what monitor is best value for the company, what chairs, and investigate perhaps all the accessibility needs that might need to become a matter of policy for the firm. Updates to employee contracts. List goes on. And at the end, people will still complain because they think the company chose the wrong chair for them.
Which disability? There are number where they cannot manage their own life and so need intervention. So we need to examine everyone anyway to ensure those who can't get management done for them. Those who are more able of course don't need us to do it - but they are also borderline able to support themselves without help.
Sure, just handing out money to everyone is easy. The hard part is finding enough money to do it.
We spend $850B on defense, and nobody ever asks where the money to do it comes from. It's only once you start talking about feeding people that everybody is concerned with the economics.
Exactly this! National defense is a sovereign need but it should not be above scrutiny for how the money is spent.
Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.
This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
Far from above scrutiny, the military budget has been the go-to talking point and area for real actual cuts my entire adult life. While it's share of the national budget has gone down, spending has only increased in other areas to more than compensate for it. I can't really say the increased spending on social services has resulted in great gains for societal health, education outcomes, or really anything.
Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.
It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
Not only that, but ensuring that someone else did not claim the money owed to another. Look at how rampant income tax return fraud is in the US, and that's just bad actors claiming tax refunds on the behalf of others.
There is always enough money to build bombs, but never enough money to feed and house everyone. It’s almost like governments can just create money out of nowhere to do whatever they want.
Yes I agree and right now the system seems like the opposite: better ten deserving people go without than one undeserving person gets an extra penny, even if we have to pay way more in bureaucracy costs adjudicate everything.
> You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the scam of collecting benefits via fake or stolen identities?
A big part of why UBI isn't really viewed as a great option by actual socialists. I'd rather see us literally just give people food, housing and medicine without money being involved, but for some reason that's a tough sell to most people.
> I'd rather see us literally just give...
Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.
In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
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I firmly believe that removing the administrative spend to run the current bureaucratic nightmare that is welfare would free up enough money to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
Well, the US publishes numbers for a lot of its programs so we can see exactly how much is spent on the bureaucratic nightmare.
Medicaid
FY 2023 Budget: $900.3b ($620b federal, $280b state) [1]
FY 2023 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): 5% ($45b) [2]
SNAP
FY 2024 Budget: $100.3b [3]
FY 2024 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): $6.5b [3]
TANF
FY2024 Budget: $31.5b ($16.5b federal, $15b state) [4]
FY2023 Budget spent on program overhead: %10.1 ($3.2b) [5]
Total Admin Spending $54.7b -> $169 per person in the US
So not totally negligible but also not exactly a basic income
[1] (https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending)
[2] (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640) See figure 4
[3] (https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...)
[4] (https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf)
[5] (https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tan...)
Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing. I don't have the expertise to come up with a specific number, but I'd wager that getting half the admin costs back would be the absolute best case. I still support simplifying means testing for benefits programs, but not because it's going to magically free up a consequential amount of money.
> Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud.
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
>Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead
Public or private? I've never seen "the left" criticize admin overhead in public services.
McKinsey estimates healthcare profit pools will reach $819 billion in 2027.
They don't criticize it, but believe UBI will "almost pay for itself" by not requiring aa much overhead. Which it won't, not even remotely close.
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
UBI isn’t “getting paid to do nothing”, it is “removing rapid clawback from means-tested welfare so that there isn’t a significant range in the working poor to middle income range where additional outside income as reduced impact because it is offset by welfare clawbacks.”
It really depends on who you ask.
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
> Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
It's only a problem insomuch that I don't trust government to properly implement and maintain UBI&taxes in unison.
Politicians need to win elections every 2-6 years, and honestly most of them aren't that bright.
There's a much easier way to solve that problem than UBI. Just adjust the numbers
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
Negative income tax is probably a more straightforward to implement this.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
A large number for sure, and completely agree likely too much.
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Feelings are uncorrelated with accuracy. Last year, the US revenue was $4.7 billion [1]. The US population is estimated to be 342 million [2]. If we had no government, we could UBI everyone $13,742/year. This is the maximum we could UBI, and it is not enough to live on. But if you want roads, enforcement of food and drug safety, some sort of law enforcement system, national parks, at least enough military to prevent Canada or Mexico from waltzing in and annexing us, support for research grants, etc. then it's going to be substantially less than that.
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
[2] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Nitpick: Your math is correct, but you have the US revenue in billions rather than trillions.
I never even thought to think of it that way. I know that for a lot of readers that $13742 doesn't seem like much. And, cutting it down to (say) 25% of that — $3250 seems like a pittance. But, I'd wager a lot of people reading here haven't been really desperately poor. I lived on <$8000 for a few years, and <$20000 for twice that. $3000 a year would have been LIFE CHANGING. That'd be things like preventative maintenance for my car; regular food in my house; guaranteed electricity; no fear of eviction; the ability to go to the urgent care clinic when I sick (vaccines for the flu!). Y'know ... BASICS. There's a lot of predatory stuff out there when you're scraping by. An extra 250$/month would've been pretty amazing.
Don't forget all the private sector jobs associated with means testing.
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.
Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.
Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.
Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.
Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.
Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
> the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
People spending more on failed presidential bids in no way undermines my argument.
The Clintons writing books and giving lectures is also irrelevant.
Why do both parties cater heavily to the poor people vote? Why does Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security dominate government expenditures? Those programs don't benefit rich people.
And now we see corporations all falling over themselves to capitulate to the current admin. Money isn’t power; power is power.
They also fell all over themselves to capitulate to the Obama/Biden administrations.
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind? Because that’s how these companies must feel regarding their principles.
Corporations must conform to the winds of the government. Not the other way around.
Idiots control our government now. They just happen to also be rich, which is worse than being controlled by smart rich people.
> to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
It's actually easy to prove that this isn't true. Not even close.
What do you define as a "true UBI"? Take that annual number and multiply it by the population of the United States. That's how much a "true UBI" program would have to spend annually.
If we took a poverty-level wage of $15.5K annually and gave it to every person, that would require $5.4 Trillion, excluding any overhead of sending out the money.
That's more than all of the federal tax revenue combined. Even if we took every dollar paid in federal taxes and gave it to every person in the United States with 100% efficiency, divided evenly, it would still be below what's considered poverty-level wages.
I think a lot of people have "feel it in my bones" beliefs about UBI that they haven't stopped to check with some simple math. Actually giving everyone a lot of money is extremely expensive.
So to do true UBI, you’d also have to raise taxes quite a bit.
If US GDP is ~30 trillion, the program would have to capture ~20% of that to achieve your target.
Do check my math, I’m not sure I’ve got this right.
> So to do true UBI, you’d also have to raise taxes quite a bit.
That's correct.
You'd have to raise taxes across the board. There is a lingering assumption that we can tax billionaires and get UBI, but more simple math shows that won't work either. Even if you seized 100% of the net worth (not just cash in the bank) of all US billionaires, you couldn't provide poverty-level wages to everyone for very long.
In practice, this means that a UBI program would turn into a tax rate program. You might "receive" $15K in UBI, but your middle-class taxes would go up by $20K per year. So you're technically getting UBI, but your taxes have gone up to pay for it to go to people in lower tax brackets.
Which is precisely while UBI will never happen - it takes power away from the government. Replacing the vast majority of welfare with NIT/UBI just makes too much sense. It's too efficient. Less government jobs, less government power. So it will never happen.
In what way does it take power from the government, when everyone's dependent on the state?
The fundamental problem with UBI is that if it is enough to live on (even if it's a crummy life), then who is going to pick the strawberries? The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay.
If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
I'll bet with a UBI we will learn real quick which jobs are actually essential to society functioning and which are busy work.
> The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay.
Perhaps you could try paying them more?
Don't forget your competition is people in third world countries who have access to effectively slave labor, but do have higher shipping costs.
The stats don’t agree that government jobs only ever increase. In 1990 there were 1 million more federal workers for a population 100 million smaller. I assume it’s a popular belief because the oligarchs gain power as the federal government loses it, and they have better PR.
Another benefit over most welfare programs is that there is no welfare cliff. You'll never have less incentive (or negative in some programs) to start a job because you'd lose the benefit (other than relative marginal value of the next marginal dollar being inherently lower).
That's about the only thing I like about it as well... that said, I'd only support it for natural/born citizens.
I assume this is a joke?
Why would you think it is a joke?
This program is an insignificant spec of spending compared to UBI though. UBI in most countries would be 50% of all government spending and welfare related spend is just nowhere close to that.
It requires an application. How is that not eligibility testing? Did you read the article?
The article is not describing a universal basic income.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
My apologies.
There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
> vetting immigration
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
This is a very America-centric idea. Most of Europe works on a 'human dignity is inalienable' principle that gives everyone, even immigrants, access to public welfare if the circumstances necessitate it.
My experience as an immigrant to Europe (Ireland, specifically) was that I had no recourse to public funds, and when I first arrived, needed to pay for my own private health insurance. In addition, while you _can_ avail of public welfare (if you're on stamp 4, which you can get after 2 years of employment on a critical skills employment permit), doing so will negatively impact any application for naturalisation or permanent residency.
If I decided to move to another country, I would feel it the height of bad manners to expect anything from a state I had paid nothing in to.
I agree, I just wanted to clear a misconception.
You have also made a comment in this thread that the Irish policy of building in the countryside is xenophobic, which considering the major changes to the demography of Ireland in recent times feels quite ungracious.
This isn't correct though; in the Netherlands, you cannot get a residence permit unless you have a sponsor, income, family, or whatever. If you have a residence permit, you can lose it if you apply for welfare [0]. I do believe you're entitled to child benefits, but that's about it.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
[0] https://ind.nl/en/benefits-from-public-funds
This is really not true, with one exception: asylum seekers awaiting evaluation.
> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
>If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Source: happened in a city near me.
Restaurant licensing and "health inspections" always seemed so absurd to me. If somebody makes shitty food or their place is gross people just won't go there. We don't need daddy government saying which places are safe.
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Schools aren’t going to accept lunches from some random person for hopefully obvious reasons.
That said, the random person buying grocery is paying a corp here.
My kid's school will let kids bring their own lunch, if you hand it to the parent they can accept it.
Handing families food isn’t specifically going to result in that food being taken to school.
Dollar for dollar it probably results in more food being taken to school than paying more taxes to have an N-step government process do it.
Economies of scale are huge here, so no government is going to win in any reasonably functioning government.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
You’re describing an inferior product (cold PB and J, apples, unhealthy chips ? drink) that also has higher costs due to packaging to get to those lunch ladies and more packaging to families as you can’t use lunch trays.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
Why must we presuppose all these health and safety regulations that make it too difficult for a charity to just deliver a big batch of healthy meals at the school can't be eliminated, but somehow we can suppose we can increase taxes enough (apparently, in areas impoverished enough that free school lunches have this massive economy of scale you reference) to cover government or corporation supplied school lunches? This is just a rigged game.
In terms of economies of scale Schools can prepare any food using public logistical networks (grocery store etc) a hypothetical donator can do, but they just get more options and easier distribution. A friend ran a nursery school with ~25 kids and even at that scale she could provide snacks cheaper than individual parents. This was a for profit school and parents were themselves paying for the food in both cases, school wins even without considering the cost of ‘free’ labor.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
> It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches.
Jesus, talk about a strawman
Then its just welfare not UBI.
Who says UBI won't be welfare (as defined by you) in the end?
Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this.
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
We can redefine the "universal" part to mean "universal to those who need it ('need' by some arbitrary regularly changing criterion)". :-)
Because the U in UBI means "universal". Saying this as someone that isn't strongly in favor of UBI.
Yes, because UBI as in "giving an amount of money sufficient to live to everyone" is impossible.
How is it impossible? As long as productivity remains high then it's just a matter of allocating resources (via taxes and subsidies).
It's impossible because actually removing precarity from people's existence would mean that they wouldn't need to to toil so existing capital owners could capture the value they create in return for being permitted to have a home. The implicit threat of ruin is a feature, not a bug. It's why housing must always be kept scarce.
"As long as they is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all will be fine".
Who are you quoting?
The possibility has no bearing on the semantics of the term.
That's why I defined the term. Any practical implementations end up looking exactly like welfare with another name because UBI is impossible. This also informs on how long we should spend discussing it...
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
How come?
UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
As opposed to the current situation? Landlords are always going to try to squeeze the tenants, that's the nature of being middlemen.
Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
It's impossible in any case, but if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all (well, as long as that money is worth something, as pointed out) then the whole society would collapse...
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. It depends on luxuries being valued enough by some people that they're willing to overcome the tax and bothering to produce and there being enough of that to cover everyone's necessities.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
You're not reading what I wrote...
No I am.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
> if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all
Human nature dictates that, while there may be "many", they would never even get close to being a majority. Hardly anyone wants to "just scrape by".
You underestimate the administrative spend in the welfare system. That's where the money would come from, and there would be plenty.
In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
They never paid that, and those ~90% brackets were basically political theater for the plebs
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
The money comes from taxation.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
Government expenditures are ~30% of GDP in US. Theoretically you could just distribute ~30% of the gdp/capita (about $28,000) to every person in the USA, make them buy all government services on the private market (government now gone except to collect and distribute the single UBI), and you'd not have much tax effect on productive enterprise (or alternatively, distribute ~20% or almost $20,000 and return to pre-1913 non-wartime government services).
> make them buy all government services on the private market
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
Nice conflation of a bunch of unrelated things.
The only one of those that's justifiable for UBI is some sort of ID requirement to prevent double-claiming.
Nobody ever envisioned federal transit funds being used to coerce states into adopting particular social policies yet here we are.
The national drinking age? Really that's just an outgrowth of how dysfunctional the US is, especially along the Federal split. Not really an issue in Ireland or the UK, neither of which is federated.
The point is that money will always be used as a hook for coercion.
Don’t forget about giving the government almost all of your bio data, such as your fingerprints and eye-scans. All in the name of “keeping the system fair / keeping the s scammers away” or some other similar bs.
> I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment.
Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.
isn't "spreading the profits around equally" just universal income that's indexed to some sort of return?
It also would have taxing 100% of profits as a step 0. That's so fraud with issues that should be obvious
No, because it involves forcefully taking what would've been owned by somebody.
It's a universal income, but not a universal basic income.
There is no such thing as "the absence of eligibility testing." Otherwise, I'd be signing up for UBI for my 100 imaginary friends. Too much administrative overhead has always been a concern troll argument against welfare anyways. Even the most bureaucratic welfare programs have a administrative burden of less than 10%. With a fraction of that, you could easily screen out the top 10% of income earners from basic income.
> audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences.
If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
My wife has won multiple prestigious awards for her writing (novels, memoir). She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. She got paid about $100k for her last novel, which took maybe 5 years to complete. It works out to less than $20k/year, after paying her literary agent. The publisher encourages her to spend her own money on PR (~$20k).
Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point.
So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
This tracks with what publishers reported on the economics of books.
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
I earned about $10 for the last quarter for the second edition of a technical book I wrote--which actually earned out royalties. With rare exceptions, writing a book makes basically no sense unless you're on the clock for a company anyway and the book comes with lots of other benefits.
> She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of.
Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time.
Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
So effectively what you're saying is that institutions are willing to reward her with attention, but people are not willing to pay for her art after all?
It is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
Sure, but you could say the same thing for teachers, foodservice workers, nurses, etc.... yet they are unable to avail of this program, for reasons I don't understand.
Ireland started by not leving tax on income from writing on writers for specific cultural reasons -- to support and encourage writers.
It's a cultural norm. Extending it to other generally penniless artists is too.
When universities in other countries start running courses on Irish food service workers we can reasonably expect them to be included.
Perhaps valuing artists over nurses is why so many Irish nurses are in Australia.
> teachers, foodservice workers, nurses
These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself).
Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
I’m hypothetically a self employed Twitch streamer who has 0.5 viewers.
How is that different than being an “artist” whose art isn’t consumed by anyone willing to pay for it.
I kind of see the reasoning to some extent but then also e.g. “full time gardeners” if their yards are visible from the sidewalk should be paid.
Sure, but in practically every other non-essential situation (i.e. food, medicine, housing) that gap would be considered supply in excess of demand and allowed to work itself out.
This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.
This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.
If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
Then don't count that money in a fake economic justification. Just say "the bureaucracy would like to assign people your tax money based on vague criteria" and leave it at that.
I think you need to solve the gap the other way, by bringing down the "amount people need to live", ideally to zero, and not by directly paying people.
There is no numerical value of UBI that makes any sense in Canada. Rent is expensive and toys are cheap.
You need universal basic services with income being a thing you use for toys and vices. So this hypothetical artist should instead get paid what other people are willing to pay but need $0 in pay for basic food, water, healthcare, and housing.
> It is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
It's possible. It's possible that there can be a similar gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount I need to live on while I pursue my career in snail sniffing". So what? That's why my snail sniffing is purely a hobby.
Most artists don't make enough, though? Isn't that famously well known? Picasso was never rolling in it, burned his paintings to stay warm, and had trouble even eating.
I think you meant Van Gogh instead of Picasso.
I have forgotten the face of my father, please forgive me.
Worse still, you're perpetuating a debunked myth of a starving artist. 99% of the artists you've heard of were able to support themselves with their craft - those that weren't stopped producing and that's why you've never heard of them (a prime example of survivorship bias). Van Gogh is an extreme outlier.
Picasso was worth $240 million at the time of his death, and that's in 1976 dollars.
Plenty of artists become very, very wealthy.
"Plenty" is kind of vague. How many in total are we talking? 100? 1000? 10k?
Art is highly valued it's just a winner takes most market just like sports. A tiny minority make all the money and the rest get nothing.
Well, how many artists are there in total?
Hundreds of millions. Up to a billion maybe? If you mean people that actually make a living at it, not many.
Last week I also had to burn a Picasso to stay warm.
Could be interesting to try negative tax on works from small artists up to a certain value. So when you buy a painting from some person of little name recognition the goverment pays like 20 percent extra up to 2,000 Euro, 10 percent up to 5,000 Euro, and over 10,000 Euro taxes are paid as normal for luxury goods.
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Seems like it could be an "infinite money glitch" if the artist and customer are in cahoots. Churn out alot of cheap artworks, even just fake ones, then split the profits. The bureaucracy capable of preventing this would be so onerous, would anyone still be interested in the dole for it?
There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not.
It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
> It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?
> If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
> basic income for Deliveroo riders
UBI (which I consider not feasible) is not meant to make it easier for freeloading companies. If they want delivery personnel, they should pay them sufficiently. The "gig economy" is a large step back, right to the 19th century/ It is not the goal of UBI.
Right - the idea is that with a UBI a deliveroo rider would have more ability to decide they don't _have_ to be a deliveroo rider (unless they want to be of course).
It seems perfectly reasonable for a state to want to fund its own cultural legacy and production (in ways outside of the market system), and not just everyone writ large.
This kind of thing is much more common in continental Europe, but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Any not to any artists, but only to those the government bureaucrats recognize as being artists. I doubt they'll be paying anybody to write computer programs with artistic merit.
Plenty of EU arts program fund digital artists...
Who qualifies? The guy writing bash quines? Minecraft artists?
That's obviously going to depend on the specific organization doing the funding. But I'd imagine you'd need to make some effort in contextualizing your work to the "art world" in such a way that makes coherent sense.
If it's just some private art fund that has their own arbitrary view of what art has merit, then who cares? But if it's the government taxing me, an artist, so they can give my money to some other artist, then the standard for what counts matters quite a bit more. The "art world" is highly nepotistic and is basically a playground for the rich to piss away their lives while feeling good about themselves. Art is something anyone can and should do, but being recognized as an artist isn't meritocratic, and I doubt getting government bureaucrats involved helps that at all.
Look it up instead of being argumentative.
Maybe understand it as a conceptual question instead of a question about Ireland. Only the Irish have a right to care about where Irish taxes go, we're discussing the concept.
So, who would you fund as an artist? Who would you tell "no, you're not an artist, you don't qualify." Can you acknowledge that this is a difficult question without calling people argumentative?
Wouldn't your reasoning just apply to basically every situation, until you arrive at the most "virtuous" people receiving money?
I don't interpret this action by the government as bestowing virtue upon artists. It's just a way to fund something considered important culturally. It's not supposed to be fair or just, it's just a way to ensure that culturally-valued things are maintained without having to rely on the market to fund them.
I hope that taking my reasoning to its logical conclusion results in everyone receiving money (actual UBI)
Well, I think it only follows if the reason the artists are getting money is because they are virtuous. Which they aren't. Just because someone is getting funding doesn't imply that the reason is because they are deemed more virtuous than someone else. Usually it just implies that they are doing a specific thing that someone wants done.
> My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Why do people remember fairness and frugality only when money are spent to directly help those in need?
I didn't see anyone complaining when money are funnelled to industries (e.g. Big Ag) instead of individuals.
We don't know each other but big ag and programs that literally pay farmers to destroy wildlife habitat and turn plants in to meat (a highly ecologically destructive practice) are bad, and we should not do them. The CAP is horrendous policy from the EU.
It wasn't personal (sorry if that was not clear), and Big Ag was just an example.
My point is that somehow it is always some modest direct relief initiative that will spark endless discussions, while multi-million (or shall I say billion?) subsidies directed to already filthy-rich corporations go with zero public discussion and scrutiny.
> but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
Unless it's sports or films, naturally; those can get essentially unlimited money.
Culture is subjective. Art is entertainment. Maybe the English-speaking world wishes our governments would solve infrastructure problems instead of distracting us with pretty things to look at.
This is a ridiculous argument. You can fund artistic endeavors without coating it in the language of UBI.
UBI is a way to manage a social security system. It is not a way to manage cultural heritage. Giving artists free money is also not a way to manage cultural heritage. If you want to do that you should pay artists for their works, hire them, commission from them, buy their artwork, all of that is more effective then just giving them money, which, again, is not the point of UBI.
My problem with it is that state art is propaganda. State art is state culture, and funds elite tastes.
If you want taxes to fund art, chop off 5% of everyone's taxes and tell them it's mandatory that they have to donate it to an artist. It's still bad, because people will have to register as artists and the state will have to say "yes, you are an artist" and "no, you are not an artist." But at least the state won't be saying "we've chosen you to be an artist!"
The state should not be intervening in or restricting art or journalism (i.e. expression in general.) Or any other form of expression. It should not be licensing artists, or licensing journalists. You're Zimbabwe when you start doing that.
edit: note that this is separate from intervening in trade and sales. You can still enforce antitrust, restrictions on content (e.g. copyright), or rules around fraud and deception on commercial art or journalism. One of the main purposes of government is to regulate trade, that's why they print the money, and why you get to go to court when a trade goes bad.
France has a long standing program for artists and entertainment technicians and while the niceties can get complex the big idea is that the State guarantees a minimum level of income if you work a minimum amount of hours per year for artistic purposes (507 I think), including teaching and rehearsals.
> I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being.
I'm not so sure. There's an element of pride in working to support oneself, rather than indolence.
Psychological wellbeing contributes some amount of money though in systems that pay for healthcare (especially when that includes psychiatry). It's also to a degree one of the key things government spending is hoping to produce so if it is actually producing that it's a good use of funds.
I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.
If you look at the World Happiness Report, Ireland's scores have plummeted year over year since 2020. I'm going to go ahead and hypothesize that this program wont make a dent in that.
Universal Income isn't universal until everybody gets it.
The bottom line is that in most countries all the basics are taken care off one way or another. Nobody really starves. There's shelter and housing of some sorts for anyone. Healthcare is taken care off as well. And if you grow old and needy you typically don't end up on the streets either. That of course costs money and is in practice fully funded mostly.
True to some extent in most countries. The US is notably a bit harsh on this. And people do end up on the streets there. But by and large even there people are taken care off.
My view is that society could be a lot fairer if we just formalized the status quo of all that a bit and just guaranteed it. It doesn't have to be super comfortable or amazing. But just provide some basic promise to people that, no matter what, starvation is not something you need to worry about. We'll keep you warm, sheltered, healthy, educated, protected, etc. If you want to have nicer versions of that, go and work for it and earn those things. Most people that can do that of course already do that anyway. This is not a massive change in many countries. We already have these guarantees. It's just all super complicated, wrapped in stigma, and hopelessly bureaucratic.
So bureaucratic in fact that many countries actively dis-incentivize work. Work literally doesn't pay if you are on benefits. You could go out and work for a few hours but you'd just get cut on your social security and lose your benefits. When accepting work becomes risky like that, something is wrong.
Germany has a great name for their social welfare benefits: "Bürgergeld". Literally citizen money. It's what you get if you are not entitled to anything else. It comes with lots of restrictions and caveats. But it's a great name. If you are a citizen, that's what you can fall back to if you have nothing else.
UBI would be taking that notion and just giving it to everyone while reducing their other income by the same amount. It would add up to about the same cost. It's a bookkeeping trick. The fear of course is that people would stop working. But the positive effects would be a reduction in cost of labor for employers and a vast reduction in bureacracy needed to police the whole thing. Germany spends almost as much on unemployment bureaucracy and programs as it does on the actual benefits.
UBI simplifies social security, taxation, unemployment insurances, pensions, etc. You never go all the way to zero. You might still want to insure something extra of course. But that's your choice. What we have right now is the opposite: a lot of cost and no choice. But you are taken care off either way.
> A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million
> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things
There are a LOT of problems with this programme, but personally, I think associating a costed economic benefit with "psycholigical wellbeing" seems good. It may make a pretty good precedence argument for other beneficial-to-society programme pilots to point to when selling their merits. The idea of a government programme appearing to prioritise psychological wellbeing seems net positive.
Psychological wellbeing is great! But this report was much ballyhooed in Irish media to claim that the program paid for itself when it absolutely did not.
Making Tuesday free ice cream day would also improve psychological well-being, but that doesn't help pay for the program.
> that doesn't help pay for the program
My taxes pay for the programme. That is why I pay them. If the programme benefits psychological wellbeing, then it is worthwhile for me to pay for it.
Whether you choose to quantify this in terms of monetary net contrib to the economy as a broad concern, or as direct public benefit, is splitting econ hairs.
The UBI I support comes from a land value tax. Basically every citizen has an equal share of the land of the country, and rents it out to people who want to use it. If you use more than your fair share you pay in, if you use less you get paid.
Ireland has a stunningly regressive tax regime with respect to property - property taxes are a rounding error away from zero. In effect, renters pay (through income taxes) for local infrastructure and amenity improvements that benefit homeowners and increase home values, and none of that resultant increase in home value is captured in taxes.
Well, the property tax that I pay on the house that I own in Dublin is decidedly not "a rounding error away from zero". It has also recently increased, in line with the increased value of properties in the locality.
Regarding your second assertion, the construction of local amenities is in fact often paid for by the property tax. And in any case, what has actually driven the strong increase in the prices of houses nationwide is their relative scarcity now that the population has swelled so dramatically.
A €700,000 home has annual LPT around €618, depending on the council. https://www.revenue.ie/en/property/local-property-tax/valuin...
To me, a tax of under 0.1% is pretty close to 0. If only ETF's enjoyed the same treatment, it might be easier to save up for a deposit!
We agree that scarcity is what makes houses more expensive.
Edit: I can't reply to below but ETF's suffer from deemed disposal, where even unrealized gains are taxed at 41% after holding them for 8 years. https://irishfinancial.ie/how-you-calculate-deemed-disposal/
> If only ETF's enjoyed the same treatment
Isn't the annual property/wealth tax on an ETF €0?
(For some reason I thought I couldn't reply)
ETF's suffer from deemed disposal, where even unrealized gains are taxed at 41% after holding them for 8 years. https://irishfinancial.ie/how-you-calculate-deemed-disposal/
Weirdly, individual stocks are not affected by this, which encourages riskier behaviour on the part of investors. I really don't understand it.
Interesting idea. What are your thoughts on the following questions:
- Who decides who gets the valuable land (high rent value) and who gets the land no one wants to use?
- What happens when the population changes due to birth/death/immigration? Do you rebalance every 10 years? Can children inherit their parents' land?
- If we rebalance regularly, how do we protect people who built a business on land they had been renting but which is no longer available?
This sounds very interesting and fair. How does it address the needs of the people who create value. For example some one who might invent a transistor equivalent ? or even someone who wants to work on something that might eventually produce a social good like a new antibiotic. And how do we evaluate the resources going into that vs lets say build a Eiffel tower
Yes. It's also straightforward to extend to things which are also about use of a common resource, such as taxes related to pollution (airline seat taxes, etc.) Non-transferable shared ownership is useful and right for many things.
Would you consider skilled labor to be a common resource? If so, how would you suggest taxing it?
Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again.
Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
If someone is born does that mean my share of land decreases?
> the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy
I don't like how these reports speak with such certainty. How do you measure "total benefits"? For one, it includes income of the artist. Yes, giving money to people generally increases their income, so it would be weird if any amount given would not be break even to the expense, unless that person decides to do less of some other activity, which I guess is possible but unlikely at least for these amounts.
Then the study counts public facing artistic activity. Kind of hard to measure the value of that. I guess you could by saying "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
Then satisfaction and well being. I would certainly be happy with more money.
I personally don't think we have a lack of culture and art. If Ireland is at all like the US, they have more art majors (as a proxy for art creation). All artistic majors have grown considerably over the last few decades:
> A new analysis from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators finds that bachelor’s degree conferrals in the arts have remained substantially above average for the past 30 years. The data also show recent growth in the number of arts degrees conferred to traditionally under-represented racial/ethnic groups. As of 2015, departments and programs in the fine arts and performing arts awarded 80,360 bachelor’s degrees, with another 7,087 awarded for the “humanistic” study of the arts (subfields such as art history, musicology, and film studies, which the Indicators tabulate along with the humanities). This figure is down slightly from the historic peak of 82,778 degrees awarded in 2013 (or 90,543, when humanities subjects are included), and above the annual figure recorded at any point before 2011.
So the question is, what problem is this program trying to solve? Give rich kids that can afford to do art more money to support their lifestyle?
https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2017/taking-note-how-about...
> "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
I also doubt that's what they're getting at, because if they were, there's a fairly straightforward way to, you know, pay the artist who created the art.
Did "they" actually try to call it universal? I could (easily!) be wrong, but I don't recall the scheme ever actually being labelled UBI by the government, only by the media and commenters on social media.
To conflate this with UBI very much misses the point. This isn't some experiment in post-capitalist utopia, it is basically a subsidy for the arts. Societies often subsidise things they want more of and that the market, for one reason or another, cannot or will not provide. As someone who paid taxes in Ireland for many years I never had any issue with subsidies for the arts. I would be happy for the government to subsidise FOSS development, too, for what it's worth (and in fact the EU does this to an extent).
It’s just more fraud and abuse in various forms and degrees. Not to mention what art is deemed as worthy of receiving this money and who has the power to squander other people’s money by becoming something akin to lords that rule over people’s lives through an incentive to please them in exchange for favorite status?
If it’s not only open to indigenous people engaged in art of the indigenous cultures, i.e., in this case Irish doing indigenous Irish cultural things whatever those may be, you could have some perverse injustices where, e.g., some Asian engaged in hentai pornography, living off the taxes taken from some old indigenous Irish lady who gets €500/month in old age support.
But since “discriminating” in favor of survival by preserving your own culture and insisting on your own people’s survival in the west anymore, things are going to get extremely perverted, in the sense of grotesque distortion and corruption, even more than already exists.
Unfortunately, it seems that all European ethnic groups all around the world have seemingly lost any and all ability to project actions into future effects or evaluate their outcomes, and seemingly have also been totally brainwashed into simply facilitating their own eradication and lost any survival instinct or will to live.
This kind of wedge of using other people’s money in a system where you are not allowed to discriminate in favor of your own survival, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the civilized world, i.e., civilization itself.
It’s the problem of the fat smoker, the ironic inability of the civilized world to see the inevitable long term outcomes of their self-harming behaviors… so they keep killing … only this time themself … and only slowly.
>> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program.
Surely it's an €80m saving in something like health care costs or productivity?
Edit:
You've really ignored a lot in that RTE article.
>> measurable decline in reliance on social protection, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average
>> Participants were also 38 percentage points less likely to be receiving Jobseeker’s payments
>> income from arts-related work increase by over €500. At the same time, their earnings from non-arts employment fell by approximately €280
Finally, your complaint that there's no information on how to join the program - it's a pilot. People were selected, the pilot was run, and these are the results of it. Either they'll continue with the pilot to gather data, end the scheme altogether, or open it widely based on the data they've gathered.
That's addressed, but it seems like it doesn't change the fact that it's a net loss
""" The original cost of the pilot was €105 million, but after accounting for tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, the net fiscal cost dropped to just under €72 million. """
The values you cite just seem like really small amounts overall compared to the cost of the program.
Again, though, my core issue here is that I _want_ UBI, and what this gives us is empty tokenism (if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists?) at the same time the government has managed to produce a catastrophically bad housing crisis and a collapsing health system.
Oh I would love UBI too. That would be great. But I don't feel like that's what they're trying to sell this as. It's "Basic Income for the Arts". To me it's equivalent to various tax breaks/credits. People get 'free' money just because they've had children. Various industries get large subsidies. This seems equivalent.
>> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists
It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
Budget sensitivities are exactly why it's frustrating when this program is presented as a net financial gain. If it were, budgeting for it would be a lot easier.
> I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Weird line. The point of UBI is that it goes to everyone. Which allows people to choose to be a Deliveroo worker for some extra cash, an artist if that fancies them or work a traditional job for that extra moolah.
We agree - I think it would be great for artists, deliveroo riders (but who are we kidding, Ireland needs an underclass of poor immigrants living a precarious existence), and teachers to all benefit from UBI.
[dead]
This is a regular fellowship. Nothing wrong with those, they can be government (assuming people are OK with this way to spend their taxes) or private. Those are pretty common. I was funded by a private fellowship for a year of my PhD; don't remember the details.
But as others have said, this has nothing to do with the UBI, as this is not universal. The main thing that makes this fellowship unusual, and not in a good way, is the fact that the selection criteria are shrouded in mystery.
"select artists", "2,000 spots", "eligibility criteria have not yet been announced". I have a hunch about how fair this will be...
The eligibility criteria was clear for the pilot[1] and has not been announced yet for the scheme from 2026 onwards. They selected 2,000 for the pilot which was due to end in June 2025 and was extended to early 2026 and in the 2026 budget was changed to reflect TFA.
[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
As an Irish musician, I’ll note Irish culture has an outsized footprint globally. It’s probably top 3 most successful folk styles, these tunes are played throughout the globe. And counting Irish poets and writers amongst some of the best, I’d say Ireland has historically done well culturally. Whatever the merits of this specific program, there’s a lot of potential cultural value to be kindled.
And pubs! I'm not Irish, but it's very comforting going half-way across the world to somewhere like Florence or Hamburg, and going to an Irish pub where everyting feels familiar.
Even the prices will be similar to Dublin, regardless of whether the beer usually costa 2€
It's just so fun to play :) I'm a bluegrasser and probably half of every session is annexed by reels.
who is the other one of the three? Mexico?
I create state-of-the-art FOSS libraries, why I can't qualify? Why clowns and vloggers can but I can't?
You create things of concrete and tangible value. In the eyes of the many, that makes you unworthy of generosity.
including the people who actually get paid for using your libraries
Yeah, I made around $100 in donations over last 8 years.
I guess even superstars like Evan You of Vue fame, or Andrew Kelley who made Zig, could get paid more with a well-paying (but not exceptionally so) position using their technologies.
Lol me too.
Since you got plenty of cheeky responses, I'll attempt a more serious one:
You are clearly employable - while not as amazing as it used to be, there is a clear market for software developers. Your job is not at risk of disappearing.
Musicians, though, have it tough - "we" as a society [1] accept that we want to have art but its economic value has been plummeting for a while. And while no one shed a tear when (for instance) stables had to close due to the scarcity of city horses, we do want to try and keep local artists around. And it's not like it's a waste either - if the program costed "€72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits for the Irish economy", that's not even a bad deal.
There's of course an argument of "I bet software developers could generate more benefits than artists", which is probably true, but I'd argue artists need it more right now. And nothing stops the program from expanding eventually.
[1] Well, "they" - I'm not Irish.
> Your job is not at risk of disappearing.
But what about the vloggers, are we so short on them? Same for clowns, I sorta feel we are in a huge surplus.
> I create state-of-the-art FOSS libraries, why I can't qualify?
Because this competes with existing companies.
Not on iOS or other locked systems.
And artists compete with nobody?!
With which influential industry do artists compete?
I think this accidentally raises an interesting side-point. It's not very easy to define art. It's much easier to define free software. But I am not much closer to understanding how to solve the question "who is writing free software?" than the question "who is making art?"
Not enough connections to the bureaucracy…
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O-teI4Qr35o
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Have you tried creating portraits of famous irish movie stars rendered in macaroni salad?
Or ASCII characters
Universal income carries enormous moral hazard.
Let's say its fine now, and in 5-10 years also. But in a sense, it is a lifetime commitment to a payment that can sustain people's basic living needs with no output from them.
Because if suddenly you cannot afford this, what do you do? You tell people, after assuring them they can live their life free from fear of hunger death, that suddenly they have to fend for themselves.
We kind of have "universal income" for old people in Europe - it's called pensions. And it's a massive ticking time bomb in exactly this way. They are increasingly unaffordable in the aging society, and chances are sooner or later governments will start curtailing these benefits.
That's bad, but what makes it tragic is you first assured people they are safe and can rely on this.
You mention pensions already. In my country the profoundly disabled are also provided payments and housing. (Not much and not enough but it's there.) Your argument applies equally to that. We're promising to support them for the rest of their lives. But maybe one day we won't be able to.
I think I see what you're arguing but I am not following the logic. It would seem to be a general argument that can apply to any form of assistance to anyone in need. Don't provide it, because one day you might be bankrupt, and not be able to provide it anymore, but now they'll be dependent on you and so they'll suffer more than they would have otherwise if they'd never been dependent on you.
But one factor I think you maybe haven't considered: poverty often diminishes capacity to function, and to earn income. I realize this is well into just speculative economic philosophy but my own intuition seems to be the exact opposite of yours: assistance of this kind probably improves capacity to be independent, should it one day be withdrawn.
Pensions and disability payments are by definition targeting a small proportion of the society. It is one thing to make a promise to 10% of the society, and another to 100% of it. And indeed, pensions are becoming tougher as the fraction goes upwards. My point isn't that it is somehow bad that we have these benefits but that they are already quite expensive and look increasingly unsustainable. So with this knowledge, we should be very careful about making much bigger committments.
Further, people on retirement or disability benefits typically don't have much choice. Due to age or circumstances, they cannot really earn a living, or a sufficient one. It's not a choice. We're not promising them an alternative to a productive lifetime. UI is different. If it is to be worth anything, it is surely a promise that you can take economically unsound or risky choices, and if they don't work out, the state has your back. If it doesn't, it's just pocket money. It is actively encouraging people to outsource the financial responsibility for their lives to the state, even as governments globally are struggling to make ends meet.
What is even trickier is that pensions and disability benefits go to people who are generally not very economically active. Extending universal income to everyone kind of expands this to everyone else, i.e. the very people who need to work to make the society work.
We have seen in many places in Europe structural decline of industries, and in various cases, the people affected were given long term unemployment benefits, a little bit like UI. It was probably the right approach - certainly the decent thing to do - but the areas where it happened tended to decrease in productivity and creativity, rather than the other way round. The ones that bounced typically got extensive investment rather than just relied on the improved creativity and industriusness of the people on unemployment benefits.
> The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy.
I feel like this is not a good rate of return. For example, in the USA, 1 dollar spent on SNAP generates 1.52 dollars of economic benefit: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...
Good start, but it should expand to everyone without conditions.
Imagine how easy it would be to start businesses, startups non-profit projects if you had UBI. Bunch of guys come together and everyone knows $1,500 per month each "funding secured forever." Many people people dealing with burnout, mental or physical problems, could ease up and work part time.
Every problem in Anglo societies comes back to housing prices. Most of that 1500 will go to rent, then you're just using public money to pay asset owners. Housing benefit in the UK has these exact flaws.
If you think this is relevant, then solution is obvious: Increase taxes on small wages until people can't effort rent and rents will decrease. Hint: it's not relevant.
Housing benefits must be spent on housing. People can use UBI any way they want. With UBI, people can more easily move from expensive cities if housing is not affordable, and then rents and prices must adjust.
The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand. Every urban economist agrees that the solution is to build more housing. Rent controls don't increase the number of housing units; only building more increases the housing supply. It does not have to be affordable housing; just build more housing units and all price points eventually get an affordable house.
Japan is an island like the UK, but they built the infrastructure and enough housing. At the height of its asset price bubble around 1990, the value of real estate in Japan was higher than that of the entire United States. But they built enough to match the demand. Now their population is in decline, and there are empty houses at the edge of the cities.
One fun thing about Ireland is that building homes in the countryside is nearly illegal, unless you have "local needs" (aka your parents are from there). It's a de-facto xenophobic "Irish people only" building rule, and the EU has ruled it illegal, yet it remains, because the Irish planning system is a reasonable contender for the worst possible way to plan your cities and towns.
The planning system here certainly has lots of problematic aspects, but making it difficult to build one-off homes in the countryside isn't one of them. As a housing solution, it's hugely inefficient and worse, it spoils the landscape. When the practice went unchecked in earlier decades, it lead to what was dubbed "bungalow blight".
Housing is more important than aesthetics.
Indeed, the problem is that Ireland makes it damn near impossible to build anything anywhere, still imposes parking minimums, still uses _their own_ failure to build infrastructure as a reason to deny people homes, still has many, many planners who almost seem personally insulted by the idea that you might want a house with "eaves" or literally anything different from what already exists (ironically they're hellbent on making sure nothing is as interesting as e.g. Eyeries village), and still despises anything that isn't sitting on a giant carbon-intensive blob of concrete.
The _excellent_ IrishVernacular.com had a great website showing how to build a modern, comfortable house for 25k (make it 50k now with inflation), but when I talked to planners in Offaly (yech) about the idea of a pier foundation or a metal roof they got visibly angry. (The site is gone but archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20210216212333/https://www.irish... ) Interestingly, metal roofs are cheaper and last longer (and can look perfectly nice, I'm not talking about tin roofs here). But planners are threatened by anything that makes housing more affordable.
As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago. If you're curious, the book "Whittled Away" is a really good examination of this, and how ecologically barren Ireland really is - https://iwt.ie/product/whittled-away/. And rural homes don't need to be car-dependent monstrosities, I made a video about how we could improve active transport in rural areas at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew (of course, even the greens think bikes are only toys outside the city, and my cllrs from FF/FG/SF practically laughed at me when I suggested bike infrastructure where we lived in the midlands).
Of course, the real galling bit is that Ireland has peak "rules for thee and not for me" energy, by saying you can opt out of all that so long as you're a true native son and have parents from the area (the EU has rightly pointed out that this is discriminatory, but Ireland just... breaks the law. And nothing happens) - https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/locals-only-planning-r... . So apparently one-off houses are great, but only for culchies.
> As far as the "landscape" - the whole country is a giant meat factory swimming in cattle feces; the landscape was ruined centuries ago.
Love this comment so much. And it's true!
I grew up in Ireland and was immersed in the "everything in Ireland is the best" mentality. I think it was when I started regularly visiting the Hudson Valley in New York, which is mostly still wooded, that I really realized the "countryside" in Ireland is just manmade. It's not natural. The whole island was trees.
My understanding is that you've left Ireland; hope you're making your peace with the problems of the country now that you don't have to deal with them as much!
I live in the Netherlands, which has plenty of issues in its own right, but it's been a better place to raise kids. Finding a place to live here was easier, which is kind of insane considering how bad the housing crisis is in NL, and my kids can bike to school safely.
I really like Ireland. I think it's an amazing place. But it's really, really, really badly run. And it seems like most policymaking (like this, or rent control, or help to buy, etc) was built on vibes instead of logic.
> Housing benefits must be spent on housing.
It is almost impossible to receive housing benefit in Ireland. Legally all landlords must accept it, practically few to none in major cities do.
> The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand.
About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds, another huge (difficult to specify) percentage are bought to rent by small to medium sized landlords. The Irish state Land Development Agency build around 3.5k homes per year, meanwhile Davies estimate the state needs around 93k new homes per year. Investing in any kind of investment fund or ETFs is taxed at 41% under the exit tax in Ireland. In addition, the “deemed disposal” rule means investments are taxed as though sold every eight years, even if they haven't been.
These are all artificial extreme pressures on housing in Ireland specifically, that mean that this is not a simple 'supply and demand' problem. It's a supply and demand of people who need housing vs entities who require profit - and have concomitant class affiliations and monies to spend on political influence problem.
> About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds,
It does not matter who owns them. If there is enough housing, investments funds will lower rents to match the demand. Investment funds can do excessive rent seeking only if the supply is limited. It's good if foreigners invest in housing, because hoses can't be moved overseas.
Anyone disagreeing, argue against this statement:
Exess rent seeking is possible only when there is scarcity.
When people don't have choises, they must pay what is asked. If you have 100 people needing a house and 101 houses available, prices will decline. Maintaining empty house is a running loss and house prices and rents will decline to prevent that.
While this is all true, the reason housing in Ireland is an attractive investment is because it is incredibly scarce, and homeowners have the ability to preserve this scarcity.
Absolutely. Which is why it's economically and socially essentially - while being politically impossible, to crash the price of housing.
Everything Ireland has done to try to make housing more affordable has been a bizarre scheme to do so while increasing prices. Help To Buy was, to be blunt, incredibly dumb, but it did help increase home prices while giving some people (first time buyers) a little bit of money.
No, crashing the property market would be economically and socially catastrophic. We know this for a fact, because it happened 16 years ago and we're still feeling the effects.
What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.
Hard disagree. I lived through the last recession (here in Dublin Ireland), and life was better for most people across most dimensions. Whether it would have been sustainably so is a broader argument. But cheap buildings led to a massive cultural renaissance that was effectively killed (by council and government dictat) five years later.
The only place in the developed world where housing prices have declined (or even remained stagnant) over the long term is Japan, a country in long term recession.
I wrote about this in detail here - https://garethstack.com/2015/10/28/by-believing-passionately...
93,000 new homes per year?
That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.
Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?
It certainly is, here's the news article where I sourced the figure
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/02/05/republic-need...
The issue is as much a legacy of lack of investment as growth, as for a number of decades the state built no houses at all, forcing a generation into rental poverty.
A few years ago the figure was 50,000 per year. They have been failing to build enough homes for almost 2 decades now, and have a lot of catching up to do.
I saw the headline of this article today https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/15/eu-executive-s...
and I wonder how much of Europe's problems is caused by AirBnB enabling wealthy people to extract riches from rental units, while causing suffering to normal renters...
AirBnB is a symptom. Even if there was no AirBnB, owners of surplus real estate would never sell, they'd rather let the property rot into ruins.
7.2 million Irish multiplied by $18,000 a year is about $130 billion. In 2024 the government revenue was $148.3 billion. The government revenue would need to essentially double to make this program universal.
The Republic of Ireland has a population of ~5.4 million people.
Money goes in circle, your counterargument should include multiple steps. The net effect will not be UBI on top of wages.
For the economy as whole nothing is added. The money just flows different route that gives people more power.
This is much closer than I was expecting somehow.
Not quite. A huge chunk of those 148 billion are pensions and welfare benefits, which UBI replaces.
Baby steps. This is a very polarizing issue - a lot of people will complain that the receivers do nothing useful for society.
There's also the matter of funding it, but I agree with you. Making it universal and consolidating other programs into it would create some savings as well.
I feel like artists may have been a poor choice to the subjective value of the outcome of their work, who knows.. maybe they figured this was destined to fail.
Output value being impossible to measure can be an advantage if the goal is to later expand the program. I wonder what indicators will me monitored.
Thats a great point, I'd go as far as to say that it may be possible to see the 'side affects' further than first imagined with the artist group.
I look forward to the results.
> Many people people dealing with burnout, mental or physical problems, could ease up and work part time.
This is precisely why UBI (also known as socialism) is unsustainable. Most people don't want to work. If you disincentivize them from working, many of them will stop. And then there will not be enough taxpayers to support the government handouts anymore.
1500 isn't much, I believe it is below UK minimum wage.
That said the point of UBI is to supplement, get a part time easy going job and with UBI you can chill.
Probably the solution for when AI takes over. So 2075.
Ireland isn't in the UK. Minimum wage for full time in Ireland is about 2281,50 €.
Even easier in places with a sane social safety net, where there aren't work requirements on benefits. You can take some time to train on certain skills, if needed.
Nah, we would stop working. Idealistic view of the world.
This reminds me of when I was a child and thought you could just write checks for infinite free money. The money has to come from somewhere.
Hopefully someone who is about to go bankrupt in the US will write a 3 trillion dollar cheque/check to their government.
I really like the idea of UBI but the math just doesn't add up. Even where I live, France, our entire welfare expenditures (that is supposed to be quite high relative to our neighbors) wouldn't be nearly enough to give each citizen 1,000€/month, which would be barely enough to scrape by on the country side. And that would require sacrificing our socialized healthcare system, our public education, etc.
It requires tax increases, and the average earner's UBI will typically balance out the tax increase, meaning they don't directly profit.
UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
> It requires tax increases, and the average earner's UBI will typically balance out the tax increase, meaning they don't directly profit.
A good portion of my salary is already taken by Tax and the government wastes it. I've seen the waste first hand when contracting for both Local, Nation Government. I was so disgusted by this, I have made every effort to avoid working with them.
I've also seen this waste happen in large charities and ossified corporations. The former also disgusting me as I know they would simply piss away a few thousand on complete BS, that took a whole village to collect and for it not to go towards the stated purpose of the charity. As a result I don't donate to any charities that aren't local.
Every-time someone suggests a tax increase, I know for a fact they haven't seen the waste happen first hand.
> UBI isn't about giving everyone free money. It's about giving everyone a safety net, so that they can take bigger economic risks and aren't pushed into crime or bullshit work.
Giving everyone a safety net will require giving people money that is taken from others. To the people that benefit it is seen as "free" and will become "expected" and won't be treated as a safety net.
Being a responsible adult is about reducing the amount of risk you are taking, not increasing it.
So what you will be doing it teaching people to essentially gamble and people did similar during COVID. Some people took their cheques and put it into crypto, meme stocks or whatever. Some won big, most didn't.
I've met people in my local area that have lost huge amounts of money on risky investments, everything from property developments, to bitcoin. Creating an incentive for risk taking without the consequences is actually reckless, a massive moral hazard and will simply create perverse incentives.
> The upper half of society will only see the indirect benefits, like having greater employment/investment choices due to more entrepreneurialism.
You will be taxing those people more and they will have less to invest. The reason why many people invest is because they have disposable income that they can afford to risk.
By taxing people more (which you admit would have to happen), they will have less disposable income and will be inclined to invest less as a result.
Hard to know if it adds up or not, unless some country is brave enough to try it. I'd imagine it'll have an enormous effect on the cost of various types of crimes that would sharply drop, as just as one example. But exactly what the effects and how large they'd be is short of impossible to know.
When can I expect your money transfer? I take Paypal or Bitcoin.
It either should be for everyone or no one. 2000 slots is no different from another pilot.
This won’t happen until the immigration issue is resolved one way or another. The moment you introduce an unconditional $1,500 per citizen, the question of who qualifies as a citizen will become even more divisive than it already is.
EDIT: I’d genuinely appreciate it if you could explain why you disagree, instead of just mindlessly downvoting as though I’d said something offensive or inappropriate.
"citizen" is pretty well defined in every country i've ever been in.
They downvote because it makes sense and they can't refute it
How is the argument much different than any current arguments? You can already get significant benefits from the state as a citizen (in European countries, at least).
The difference is magnitude, the benefits that European countries provide has made them a very attractive destination for immigration, so it stands to reason that something like UBI would make them even more so. No matter which side of that debate you're on theres a point where the math breaks down and some difficult choices need to be made, either you provide these generous benefits to your citizens or you have a generous immigration policy, but both of them together may prove unsustainable
> The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy. The report also found that recipients’ arts-related income increased by more than €500 per month on average, income from non-arts work decreased by around €280, and reliance on other social programs declined, with participants receiving €100 less per month on average.
So, overall a neutral-to-good outcome, from a financial point of view. I think we can debate about whether it’s necessary for the government of Ireland to fulfill this funding role, but I’m not sure this is the most wasteful thing that a government can do.
I'd bet the 72M cost was in actual euros that could be spent on other things, while other people have noted that the 80M in benefit was not in euros, but in happiness, which is notable for being difficult to spend on different things.
Some people might speculate that the arbitrary multiplier on happiness-to-euros for the second half was chosen to make it look like a slightly profitable endeavour on superficial examination.
> generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy
Approximately 75% of the “benefits” is by the WELLBY framework, which considers each “wellbeing point” to be equivalent to €13,000 a year additional income. This could be a valid metric, but it feels a bit iffy, and without this evaluation it would be a significant cost to the Irish economy, so I do not think this UBI can be considered truly a positive return to the economy
[1] https://assets.gov.ie/static/documents/b87d2659/20250929_BIA... - goto ‘Results’
I only found out about the WELLBY due to this report. I don't have the time or expertise to evaluate it, so I'm interested in why you find it "iffy"?
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I don't see why artist should be a special category deserving of its own UBI. Its no more important than any other job.
Art and culture is extremely valuable, but is often not profitable / sustainable. Banking is important to society too, but it's already well compensated!
Being an EMT is incredibly important to society but poorly compensated, why not them?
Both are important, both are unprofitable, both (in my opinion) deserve public funding.
let’s decide the proper compensation for all jobs based on how much ordinary people feel it is noble/valuable and then pay people accordingly.
food commodity trading? idk sounds speculative and ignoble to me, probably don’t need it - more money for the artists!
Strawman.
Some things need funding despite being unprofitable. Not everyone will agree, but I believe art/culture (including often unprofitable forms thereof) are worthwhile, and should thus receive public funding (to some degree). I believe the same about justice, policing, education, research etc.
None of this rules allowing a freeish market to operate where doing so "delivers the goods".
You have to make an argument on _why_ market forces don't compensate artists fairly. The standard argument is that art is a public good with a free rider problem– a mural might produce value to everyone who looks at it but there is no way to force them to pay for it. That argument fails for many of the things this program is funding: theater, opera and film. All examples of art that is easily excludable.
i do not feel that we have a shortage of art and in fact we have much more art than in past years where everyone was forced to do agricultural labor.
art is relatively low on my list of positive externality activities to subsidize, after stuff like ensuring everyone has food to eat, home, etc. at least in the US, we are already running a deficit so we do not even have the money to do this - let alone some broad UBI for artists.
and how do we agree on what jobs are undercompensated? every person will have their own hobbyhorse
I think there's a danger in removing art from any kind of market mechanisms because it can lead to some very navel-gazing output that appeals to very few. In the long term, this kind of art would lead to making this kind of UBI unpopular and would undermine the whole thing. Not a lot of taxpayers are going to be on board with paying someone to can their own feces[1] or submerge religious icons in piss[2] for example.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
Yes it is. Culture is important for national identity and international standing.
2000 spots open with selection criteria unknown. Why don't you call them "State" artists like some countries do and call it a day.
The left loves framing their state media to appear independent.
> In October, the government released the results of a public survey on the scheme, which found that 97 percent of respondents support the program. However, 47 percent of the 17,000 respondents said artists should be selected based on economic need, while 37.5 percent favored selection by merit. Only 14 percent preferred random selection.
People generally won't prefer the fairest method of selection, but that doesn't mean it's not the best.
> In October, the government released the results of a public survey on the scheme, which found that 97 percent of respondents support the program.
Very, very hard for me to believe this.
Most surveys can't even get 97% of respondents to agree that terrorism is wrong.
The government is just blatantly lying about these results. There is simply no way 97% of the population (most of whom pay into this system yet receive nothing from it) supports this.
Without delving into the specifics Ireland already has a defacto UBI. This is subject to you having an address and a social security number. There is a notion of a minimum income you need to make and the State compensates the rest if you do not earn it. It depends on many factors and there are various edge cases. What is more, if you are in the receivership of such provisions you can stand in the line to get subsidised place to live (which is difficult to get mind you).
Some people hate it some abuse it and some do not qualify despite living in the street. But if you know how to navigate the system the income is guaranteed.
It is a bit sad though that some clerks like to abuse the receivers of such payments though, e.g. by inspecting your bank statements and questioning your expenses (true story). So making this whole thing closer to dejure is welcome as it avoids possible abuse.
> selected artists receive a weekly payment of approximately $375, or about $1,500 per month. There are 2,000 spots available, with applications set to open in September 2026; eligibility criteria have not yet been announced
I would love to see a list of the artists with links to their work, some of which, presumable, would be for sale.
The eligibility criteria of the pilot scheme is bonkers. For example a Costume Designer is eligible, but a Jewellery Designer is not. A Make-Up Designer is eligible but a Make-Up Artist is not.
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
I manage a large art gallery that exhibits a large number of artists, selected from our database of over 4,000 artists, most of which are in the local area.
NONE of them can make a living solely off their art.
Personally, if I wanted to subsidize someone who could bootstrap their talent and efforts into self-sufficiency, I'd never pick an artist.
not arguing against you but maybe one takes the view that artists should not need to be self-sufficient purely from market forces and selling art? Maybe society should just subsidize them to an extent (this is obviously already happening but I'm saying as a matter of principle)
99.99% of artists definitely CAN'T make a living off only their art, but most can survive anyway by some form of other employment. Even though some small degree of government subsidies will always be around to help artists, and perhaps that's a noble principle, I'd just rather see my tax dollars go to health care or trade schools or food banks or child care or disaster relief or Meals On Wheels or medical research or similar efforts to help those in desperate need, instead of to artists choosing to be artists. There's always someone worse off than an artist, through no fault of their own.
Worth contrasting this to the long-running Irish "Aosdána"[0] programme established in the early '80s, which is effectively the same thing, just a LOT more exclusive: a basic income for life is awarded to a tiny number of new artists every 2 years: it has up to a maximum of 250 concurrent recipients (so new artists are only selected when old artists die).
This new initiative has had a lot of critics, but 2,000 spots annually is at least a bit of an improvement over the weird clique that admits 5 new people every 2 years.
(Aosdána is being retained alongside this new programme)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aosd%C3%A1na
All paid for by virtue of Ireland being the tax haven and compliance haven for US big tech, hilariously the same group who trained their models on all of these artists' output without paying them a dime.
Doesn't get much more two-faced than this.
They trained them on my reddit comments too without paying me, we're all in the same boat brother
We're not being paid hush money by their biggest supporters though.
Joke's on them, the art will be AI generated soon.
They will stil get their income, you think Ireland is going to vet that their art is actually valuable and sought after?!
All they need is some friendly policy thinktank to come up with some hand wavy numbers about economic activity before the program starts and then no one will pay attention to it again. It will just be another tax line item like hundreds of other experimental social spending programs.
All UBI programs funded by the theft of wages are corrupt and bankrupt from the start, as demonstrated. I expect a lot of “No true Scotsman” [ironic] arguments inbound.
it is theft, the government should not be involved in charity. taxes, are a burden, and should be minimal, and if individuals want to be charitable with there own money after taxation, great, that's their choice
That's just what we need, artists as wards of the state. Things are beginning to feel rather Soviet these days.
The whole of Europe is becoming more based around exploiting black markets and benefit payments than actually being able to innovate in a free market.
Like in Sweden you pay 60-80% taxes as a sole trader - you're better off just trying to find some way to claim a disability benefit or subsidies like this.
It's either people don't understand perverse incentives, or, they want to gain from them and just keep quiet about it, I'm not sure we'll ever know.
Basic Income for Scientists.
That's ok, you can have this idea for free.
That’d be https://research.ie/
Government research grants isn’t exactly a terribly innovative idea.
Research grants aren't basic income.
Well, I mean, nor is the thing mentioned in the article.
Your blog is dead. It looks sloppy on your profile.
That's ok, you can have this consulting for free as well.
... I mean, I think I'll survive, thanks. Sloppiness of hn profile feels like about the least important thing I can think of.
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Then scientists would waste their time doing pointless research.
Oh wait... https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3737
That paper seems interesting. Why are you implying it’s pointless? What is your expertise in Mammalian or evolutionary biology? How do you know this won’t contribute or lead to something useful in veterinary or human medicine, or bioengineering, or anything else?
Have you heard of the Golden Goose Awards? The first paragraph on their history page (https://www.goldengooseaward.org/history) can be applied directly to your comment:
“From 1975 to 1988, Senator William Proxmire issued monthly “Golden Fleece Awards,” which targeted federal spending Proxmire considered wasteful. Unfortunately, the awards often targeted federally-funded scientific research for ridicule. Science that sounded odd or obscure was easily singled out, but the awards reflected fundamental misunderstanding of how science works, and how such research can turn out to be extremely important regardless of whether it makes sense to non-scientists. Indeed, such research can have a major impact on society. The nature of scientific research is that its impact is hard to predict.”
Don’t be a Proxmire.
I envy how much better than me you defended my position, thank you.
Hey I appreciate your comment, but you were doing a fine job! In case it comes up later, here are another couple of resources to defend science funding:
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/new-report-shows-nasas-75-...
https://www.sciencecoalition.org/2025/04/29/sparking-america...
https://sciencetechaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/The...
I don’t know why trying to ridicule funny sounding science papers is still such a popular thing to attempt, when the Golden Goose awards exist, and when people who do it have been shown repeatedly for many decades to fail to understand either science or money, yet here we are. Luckily science won’t stop, even with our current administration’s chaos.
Your position is the most important thing, right? You even doxxed another HN user in another thread to have your vengeance. I saw it.
> to publicly identify or publish private information about someone especially as form of punishment or revenge
This person literally uses his own name as HN username. Very imaginative use of the word tho.
EDIT: Even though I think that point of view is idiotic, I now worry that if you think like that, other people will too. Would you please report that comment so that a mod can edit it/delete it (I can no longer edit it).
> How do you know this won’t contribute or lead to something useful in veterinary or human medicine, or bioengineering, or anything else?
Because it was written 11 years ago and has 2 citations, both from papers which have no citations at all.
That proves… absolutely nothing?
You’re demonstrating the fundamental misunderstanding of science the Golden Goose page refers to. It’s expected - and a necessary part of science - that not all papers succeed.
The funny thing about this is that, unlike UBI or whatever, the societal returns on investment in science research are huge and indisputable. Nothing else in human history has improved our condition or knowledge or quality of life as much or as fast. You’re typing your opinions into a box that came out of large numbers of papers, some of which were criticized for their pointlessness. You’re absolutely barking up the wrong tree.
I'm sure the box wasn't invented by a pointless research and the technology it uses wasn't published in a pointless paper.
You might interpret an uncited dead end as a substantial contribution to evolution of science, but I see it as it is; a dead end.
Let's end this thread because I don't see any chance of finding any agreement.
Again, what makes you certain that this paper or any other won’t suddenly get citations and importance in the future?
You simply don’t know that. It’s not even relevant whether your uninformed prediction turns out to be correct later, that would be random luck. You cannot tell what will happen in the future.
And why don’t you understand that having research and papers in the system that don’t lead to anything is actually a good thing, both expected and necessary?
Read a little more about the Golden Goose awards, about research that was ridiculed and languished until it didn’t. There are lots of papers that seemed like a dead end until long after they were published. The entire field of Neural Networks is now combing prematurely presumed dead end research from 40+ years ago.
Maybe you can fix it, but you do seem to be completely missing the point of what science is. Investment in science, and the associated research and experiments, aim to increase knowledge. Science doesn’t necessarily aim for utility, and doing science is always taking a risk that the knowledge gained might not be useful. You can’t actually do science without taking that risk, and we can’t have papers that make huge progress without papers that make no progress.
You can’t tell what investments will pay off until they do. You can only be sure the technology in your computer wasn’t pointless because it already worked out, despite lots of naive people like you claiming it was pointless at the time.
The good news is that our investments in science are paying off big time, and those investments include all the dead end papers ever written. The sum total, even with all uncited papers in the world, is that we are much better off having spent the money on science than not.
Several points here:
A) For the most part, scientists do research because they are curious and enjoy it, not because they plan on making money out of it. Getting a salarys allows them to do what they like, they don't it do for the salary.
B) If there's a little slippage due to lazy, misaligned, or fraudlent people, it might still be worth it. Consider two proposals: "I'll give you money every month if you're a scientist and just hang around studying whatever you like" vs "I'll give you money every month if you hit research metrics XYZ as a scientist" - the former will allow you to pay way less and sciensists will still be happy. It's just getting them for cheap.
C) I'm skeptical that you personally can tell whether the paper linked is pointless or not. Many ideas seem pointless when they first appear. Some are, and some contribute a tiny bit to the progress of understanding.
Well, there are papers that prove people use warmer clothes in winter than in summer. If you want to argue there's a deeper meaning behind such science, then who am I to change your mind.
Are there? Multiple papers? Citations please. Even if true, I have to assume there’s a high probability that you’re leaving out important context, misunderstanding the results, or just plain exaggerating.
In Luxembourg smth similar exists but it's called "social help" for artists. It's rather easily available if you make art for a living and it's enough to survive (paying social security & living costs)
I'd have spent my twenties writing free software if I could count on $1500/month.
It would have been so great.
Excellent method to make artists dependent and obey to state.
Why artists? And how "universal" it is actually?
Picking winners and losers. What could possibly go wrong?
I can't really make out what this all means. It seems like people cannot live in the world anymore because of expensive housing and taxation.
Across the ocean, Peter Thiel recently did a private lecture on the anti-christ and how that is connected to how hard to hide your money and "escape from global taxation if you're a U.S. citizen." He has dual citizenship in New Zealand. And, the following article conjectures that "prophesies about a society where an individual's ability to engage in commerce is contingent upon brandishing the mark of the beast on one's body."
Is this a criticism of swag? I love free t-shirts at tech conferences, is he calling me out for taking them?
https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-...
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/peter-thiel-antichrist-san...
After squinting at it, this Irish action feels like paying off a few court jesters, nothing more.
Pseudo-religious bullshit to push his libertarian nihilism.
It’s always interesting to see that consumption tax is pretty much levied on all purchases at all levels. But consumption is rarely considered as a criteria for decision making on benefits.
I wonder what Bono thinks of this, or John Sheahan from The Dubliners.
Does the public have claim on all of these artists' art?
They all are now involuntary patreons.
People should vote on art and if you hit a threshold, you get the income.
Great art isn't necessarily about popularity / wide appeal, though. In fact, the art that isn't of wide, general appeal, is what stands to benefit the most from this kind of benefit.
Why would taxpayers fund art that is not appealing or somehow beneficial to them?
This sounds more like a stipend for established artists, not basic income.
I mean, if you want to be an artist, you really can. I've lived off a van for almost a year... just for adventure. Traveled close to beach where I could shower. I spent literally close to nothing day-to-day. I could remake my weekly expenses just working at a few restaurants in the weekend, and enjoy the beach the rest of the week surfing.
Now that I'm back to my normal office coding job, I feel like I'm actually saving less money because I have rent, and general city life to spend money on. It's all about the comforts one is used to.
The story of artists not having enough money is probably about people that are used to too many comforts. I've seen people complain they didn't have money to go by, whilst living in an apartment close to a densely populated city and having a car... get rid of those comforts if you want to make it!
This would be a great program if there wasn't already an over-abundance of artists producing things nobody but their parents could appreciate
The most basic premise of UBI is the universal part. None of the arguments for it function at all, if it is handed out selectively.
The arguments for UBI are that it effectively requires no bureaucracy and can not be gamed, while providing basic needs for all people. If you are doing needs based analysis, you are just back to a regular social system, which requires bureaucracy and will be gamed.
If some government decides to do UBI, than it actually has to do UBI and not just add another layer of social spending on top of an already sprawling social system.
A lot of shadow artists in this thread seem upset that a relatively tiny bit of money is supporting some people that chose a difficult life producing art over a stable career.
If I had a choice between some of my tax money supporting artists versus lighting my money on fire to pay an army of bureaucrats doing not much of anything, I'll always choose the artists. I've seen contracts for more money that do a lot less for society.
That's not the choice though. The bureaucrats are getting paid either way.
The choice is whether or not you want your taxes raised by a small amount so that other people can live their dreams while you sit in a cubicle for 40 years.
I agree, it'd be nice to cut the bullshit jobs, but you're right that that's not going to happen.
But I still am down with paying a little more to support people that are providing to our overall culture. I'm friends with many artists here in NYC, and in most cases everyone is broke. You'll see profiles written about them in the NYT, or see them on panels at major cultural institutions, but that's just the outward appearance. In reality, they're struggling to pay rent. Sometimes they're sleeping in cars when out on tour doing work because they can't afford a motel.
Many of us don't have the courage to do what they do. It's not like they're sitting around, flush with cash, day dreaming all day. They're doing extremely difficult work (personal, spiritual, cultural), and we all benefit from it. I'm down with supporting it. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I pay in taxes every year, an extra $40 isn't a big deal.
these are your rights! with GUITAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EKCAE1vDzY
These stories get up voted on HN because we all dream of getting something for nothing. But the problem is that if we all get something for nothing, no one is left to make anything and we all end up with nothing. Resist the siren appeal of easy outs and work hard and build what you want.
The problem with every basic income program is in the long term. Eventually, generations of people are receiving basic income and relying on it and
1) will never vote against it (and politicians will use it as a weapon against anyone that suggests it). 2) It's ever expanding and will become unaffordable and unsustainable 3) inflation will destroy its value over time
I also believe that if universal income becomes common, you forfeit your right to vote while accepting it.
Any pseudo-UBI that is not actually universal will create a distorting perverse incentive for people to fake qualifications for it. There will suddenly be a lot of “artists” who don’t do much, debasing the definition of artist.
Just do UBI. Politicians just can’t help hanging conditions on it and making it complicated.
“But some people will sit around and do nothing!” Yes and they already do, including at bullshit jobs pretending to work. The punishment for a life sitting around doing nothing is a life wasted doing nothing.
This will become to poster child for left wing elitism in the future.
What an utter, totally disconnected from reality measure.
Tax payers need to go to work everyday to support more and more unproductive members of society and have the state take by force more than half their income.
Art and culture may be "unproductive" from a utilitarian point of view, but it's valuable and enriching in ways hard to measure on a spreadsheet.
If it's impossible to measure art's value then there can't be any cutoff point at which we stop funding ever more art. Anyone who attempts to put a number on its value is treated as an overly rational boor but we obviously can't just devote the entirety of society's resources to creating more of it.
Art and culture have always existed - and one may very well argue, it existed in much richer forms than most of the dubious "art" produced today.
Society never needed to hand out money to every self-proclaimed artist for art to thrive.
Some art produced today is good, some bad. Subjectivity will mean people disagree. It has ever been so.
But the idea that art / artists don't require money isn't my read of history.
When you go to an art museum in, say, London, you'll find lots of fantastic paintings depicting religious themes. Were artists of the time fixated only on the religious aspects of life? No doubt religion was more important, but the real consideration was that patronage came once from the Church.
Nothing against patronage, but this is none of it.
Patronage chooses the best artists available to produce art for the patron. This measures grant money to self-proclaimed artists and are not based on merit.
I get where you're coming from. I would be a bit annoyed if, for instance, taxpayer money went to artists painting white-paint-on-white-canvas non-paintings or recording silence as a form of music. The trouble is that it's hard to measure / assess "merit" beyond extreme cases like I've listed. To illustrate: there are plenty of movies that were panned by critics of their time only to later become "cult classics".
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Much better system for everyone, really.
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Yeah the qualification criteria are undefined, and some criteria are easily gamed, so this ultimately their criteria is going to probably be some combination of:
- Those who have connections
- Those who have an immutable trait that puts them in a minority (after all, there's not enough money / slots for a majority to qualify)
Which makes this a highly political program no matter how you look at it.
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There's 1 day a year in the US where everyone is Irish. It's off the hook.
We're probably more Irish than a lot of the "new Irish" people rorting their system in schemes like this
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I realise that it’s most improper to read the article on this here orange website, but it produced an economic benefit greater than the cost, which was fairly minimal. There are worse things for governments to spend money on.
The idea that the average artist in Ireland is in any way an ally of the FF/FG coalition is also pretty farcical.
The program was championed by the greens, who would be generally well-liked by artists (and myself, even though I dislike this policy personally).
Though they're somewhat less-liked since going in to coalition with FF/FG.
The benefit was greater than the cost if you consider the psychological well-being aspect of it, but it was not self-supporting economically (i.e. it's difficult to see how this is scalable).
The Greens are gone; the current government, which is extending the programme, is Green-free.
Right, but the greens were around for its implementation.
Some of them may be politically disconnected or apathetic, but I can almost guarantee that not a single recipient of this funding is a political ally of the current Irish administration.
Ultimately this is a fairly low cost programme, a very tiny % of revenue expenditure, & looks good to an electorate that are generally in favour of supporting Irish cultural assets. I would expect to hear unpopular aging conservative politicians bring this up a lot in the next election cycle while attempting to appeal to the younger vote.
I think you're assessing this with a North American point of view. I have local knowledge, and I can tell you that the money is being given to people who will not under any circumstances vote for the centrist politicians who are handing it out.
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I think Ireland has been a banana republic for some years now, it can't become one.
Oh look, an ignorant begrudger. I don't know many banana republics with a well-educated workforce let lone the best educated workforce in the world.
Perhaps you'd like to compare Ireland's position in the Human Development Index with that of its neighbours?
Venezuela, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Cuba.
I don't know, an income with no strings attached sounds better than putting them all on a few media corporations' payrolls, that are controlled by, like, three guys.
It's the sign they are leaving capitalism. That could be in a positive or negative direction. People very advocate of capitalism tend to present it as always a bad thing.
Not necessarily leaving capitalism. It could be considered a way of art patronage or sponsoring as people/entities have been doing for artists et cetera for pretty much forever. This time it’s the state itself. It’s different but I don’t think it’s a net negative. We have, even in capitalism, jobs/trades that doesn’t pay much, definitely not in the beginning and even later only to a rare few, but that trade is needed and not just those rare few.
I’d rather look at from this perspective — their output and quality could be much better if they don’t have to worry about shelter, food, and health while doing that monetarily thankless work.
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I have a huge disdain for artists who do not bleed and sweat like the rest of us doing jobs we don’t necessarily enjoy. Especially in this age of opulence. Welcome to life. Art should capture truth, the essence of things, and how can you do so without your feet planted firmly on the ground? Perhaps I could make exceptions for those on whom skill is truly refined in a dedicated way (think YoYo Ma practicing 10 hours a day), but I suspect your avg artist spends more time navel gazing than putting in the work. (And I say this as a huge supporter and fan of the arts)
Why would you disdain someone who finds enjoyment in their work?
But don't worry, making art is not always a joyride, it can be hard work. For me pesonally, writing software is a breeze compared to writing an orchestra score or the last days of a theatre production.
Also, the idea of the poor and suffering artist is a cliché. Many famous artists actually came from wealthy families or had generous financial support from friends or patreons. It doesn't make them lesser artists.
> I have a huge disdain for artists who do not bleed and sweat like the rest of us doing jobs we don’t necessarily enjoy.
I don't necessarily want the artists to bleed and sweat. But when they do, their art is so much better! Giving artists universal income seems counterproductive, if your stated goal is good art...
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Based. Going to get one of them rubber boats and become a clown. Sweet sweet Irish tax money. I can taste it now.