Jan 23, 2022·edited Jan 23, 2022Liked by Grow Some Labia
On not self-hating, agreed. What Bill Maher was referring to is real (if restated for comic effect) - white American liberals have a negative in-group preference. Other races in the US, and white conservatives, have a positive in-group preference. It's a sign of bad mental health. (In the US, liberals ranks as having considerably more mental health issues, and I doubt it can all be attributed to something like being more open to therapy).
What I am more interested in, however, it your support for UBI.
There are two main concepts for UBI. In one, the idea is to redirect the funds for most of the social welfare programs into a single payment, from which people can buy their own insurance, housing, food, etc. So they can use their own situation and their own priorities in spending the money, rather than accepting government's decisions about how much goes for which part of their lives and who is qualified for one subsidy or another. It's more about increasing autonomy and self-responsibility, in addition to helping low income people. Another argument is about greatly reducing the government bureaucracy - the UBI could be far more cheaply implemented, at closer to banking service fee rather than half the money going to administration professionals. So the hope is that this approach would be close to funded by the savings of canceling most of the other programs.
The other vision is to continue all or most targeted programs, and add a UBI on top of the other services and subsidies. This vision is of course dramatically more expensive, to be paid for from greatly increased taxes.
I notice that you are advocating for an individually tailored version of the UBI, as opposed to a simple flat rate. In fact, your concept is closer to the Negative Income Tax proposals which used to be bandied about in the US.
In your vision, the system would have fine grained detailed knowledge of your current life circumstances (somehow preserving privacy at the same time), and would tailor the payments accordingly. That's different from most UBI proposals and does add a lot of overhead to verify changing circumstances are honestly reported or tracked. But it also raises a whole raft of subjective judgements - how much money should each disadvantage add to your payment? Once you get into fine grained differences, you invite politics and conflict between groups; and you invite increasingly complex 'incentive' payments (a major reason that tax codes get complex is the incentives that legislators want to bake in to encourage or discourage certain behaviors). A fine grained UBI would invite the same social engineering and complexities. And of course, racial reparation or social justice reparations (eg; to GLBTQIA+ folks) could easily be injected to such a system.
So while I like exploring the idea (of your concept of UBI), I have some reservations. I can see the appeal of a flat (or much flatter) UBI, which doesn't vary according to your disabilities or number of children. It could even be flat across income. Sure the 1% would receive a small boost to their income from their UBI, but the progressives taxes would be adjusted to account for that so that they are paying out even more (to support those who are paying less than they receive). The advantage here is that administration is cheap - you don't have to track and verify income, or deal with unreported income, or changing status, or deception. Everyone just gets X dollars; those with higher incomes are taxed substantially more than that, while those with lower incomes pay little or no taxes. The only fraud on the UBI system would be around collecting income for dead or ficticious people, which is easier to guard against then misreported circumstances.
On the practical level, I also have some doubt that privacy could be preserved in the system you envision, even in theory. It's extremely difficult to preserve privacy while allowing fraud detection and oversight monitoring, by fallible human beings.
On not self-hating, agreed. What Bill Maher was referring to is real (if restated for comic effect) - white American liberals have a negative in-group preference. Other races in the US, and white conservatives, have a positive in-group preference. It's a sign of bad mental health. (In the US, liberals ranks as having considerably more mental health issues, and I doubt it can all be attributed to something like being more open to therapy).
What I am more interested in, however, it your support for UBI.
There are two main concepts for UBI. In one, the idea is to redirect the funds for most of the social welfare programs into a single payment, from which people can buy their own insurance, housing, food, etc. So they can use their own situation and their own priorities in spending the money, rather than accepting government's decisions about how much goes for which part of their lives and who is qualified for one subsidy or another. It's more about increasing autonomy and self-responsibility, in addition to helping low income people. Another argument is about greatly reducing the government bureaucracy - the UBI could be far more cheaply implemented, at closer to banking service fee rather than half the money going to administration professionals. So the hope is that this approach would be close to funded by the savings of canceling most of the other programs.
The other vision is to continue all or most targeted programs, and add a UBI on top of the other services and subsidies. This vision is of course dramatically more expensive, to be paid for from greatly increased taxes.
I notice that you are advocating for an individually tailored version of the UBI, as opposed to a simple flat rate. In fact, your concept is closer to the Negative Income Tax proposals which used to be bandied about in the US.
In your vision, the system would have fine grained detailed knowledge of your current life circumstances (somehow preserving privacy at the same time), and would tailor the payments accordingly. That's different from most UBI proposals and does add a lot of overhead to verify changing circumstances are honestly reported or tracked. But it also raises a whole raft of subjective judgements - how much money should each disadvantage add to your payment? Once you get into fine grained differences, you invite politics and conflict between groups; and you invite increasingly complex 'incentive' payments (a major reason that tax codes get complex is the incentives that legislators want to bake in to encourage or discourage certain behaviors). A fine grained UBI would invite the same social engineering and complexities. And of course, racial reparation or social justice reparations (eg; to GLBTQIA+ folks) could easily be injected to such a system.
So while I like exploring the idea (of your concept of UBI), I have some reservations. I can see the appeal of a flat (or much flatter) UBI, which doesn't vary according to your disabilities or number of children. It could even be flat across income. Sure the 1% would receive a small boost to their income from their UBI, but the progressives taxes would be adjusted to account for that so that they are paying out even more (to support those who are paying less than they receive). The advantage here is that administration is cheap - you don't have to track and verify income, or deal with unreported income, or changing status, or deception. Everyone just gets X dollars; those with higher incomes are taxed substantially more than that, while those with lower incomes pay little or no taxes. The only fraud on the UBI system would be around collecting income for dead or ficticious people, which is easier to guard against then misreported circumstances.
On the practical level, I also have some doubt that privacy could be preserved in the system you envision, even in theory. It's extremely difficult to preserve privacy while allowing fraud detection and oversight monitoring, by fallible human beings.
Excellent! Feeling shame for your colour is absurd no matter what your colour is. Loved the Bill Maher segment.
Also, I have long believed that a lot of racial discrimination is class or income discrimination. A basic income could alleviate a great deal of that.