• 7heo@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Personally I have never considered that there would be a risk of the UBI recipients to spend the money unwisely.

    People needing UBI have a very long standing experience of not getting what they need to minimise their losses on a daily basis, so of course they will invest in that first. They all probably have a ranked, itemised list of all that would help. And I’m willing to bet that said list, on average, would be at least 80% correct (the 20% being influenced by personal sensitivities and beliefs, like a vegan person spending more on plastic based clothing, that wears out faster).

    People not needing UBI already have more money than they can find intelligent uses for, and so they already are spending money unwisely.

    Nah, the part that concerns me is that as soon as we all get UBI, and I do mean the very next day, rents are gonna rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, the cost of food will rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, and the cost of all the rest combined will rise by 34% of the amount of the UBI. It will be back to square one, and all we will have achieved will be funnelling our taxes straight into the pockets of for profit, private megacorporations.

    We need to “fix” that megacorporation problem first.

      • 7heo@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        How can you be so thick? If the problem was with profits, we’d have solved it essentially on day one of capitalism.

        No, profits are good, it means you can live from your work.

        The problem here is greed. And you know what? Unlike with finding out that you’re too stupid to get this, finding out where profits stop and greed start is a hard problem. Not individually, because that is about when a business owner starts paying their workforce less and starts buying stupid useless crap to show their status or grow their comfort much beyond the average… No, systematically. Because differences in management style mean that sometimes it makes sense to shrink everyone’s income (including the CEO’s) to be able to address challenges. But you can’t easily tell that apart from greed and dodging taxes.

        • BluesF@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You can live from your work without profit. Wages are a cost, not the result of profit. I would argue it’s very easy to see when greed begins - it’s when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work. Obviously there is an argument that senior managers get paid disproportionately, but a part of that will always be stock for which they will continue to earn money without doing anything at all. At least their wage is paid for doing something.

          The other commenter misses a key point that under the current system to truly compete with megacorps you need investors to build scale. Independent companies can certainly reinvest their earnings rather than claiming them as profits, which is far better than having them siphoned off, but won’t get you anywhere near the kind of cash that you need. And as soon as you have investors, they expect their cut.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            5 months ago

            I would argue it’s very easy to see when greed begins - it’s when people (shareholders) are paid without having done any work.

            So, you want to ban publicly traded companies? That’s usually where ownership and involvement with the company get sharply split, once people can freely buy and sell pieces of the company on the open market.

    • BallsandBayonets@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You mean rents will go up by 100% of the UBI, food will go up by 100% of the UBI, and healthcare will go up by 10,000% because it’s a day ending in the letter Y.