Even without UBI, I don't see how the US and other governments can continue piling up the debt as it has done over the past several decades and avoid an eventual collapse or some sort of debt crisis. Aside from illegal activities, tax-evasion, and pure gambling / speculation, why else would people own something like bitcoin? Because it can't be easily confiscated and it's highly portable. I see some kind of a wealth tax (beyond property tax which is essentially a wealth tax on property already owned instead of income) coming in our lifetimes. Not sure even IRAs will be safe. With the demographics that we have and the fact that one guy can vote away wealth and earnings from another, I don't see how it can be avoided. As a nation, we're spending way beyond our earnings.
(: This 2020 US President Candidate wants to give everyone $1,000 / month :)
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Even without UBI, I don't see how the US and other governments can continue piling up the debt as it has done over the past several decades and avoid an eventual collapse or some sort of debt crisis. Aside from illegal activities, tax-evasion, and pure gambling / speculation, why else would people own something like bitcoin? Because it can't be easily confiscated and it's highly portable. I see some kind of a wealth tax (beyond property tax which is essentially a wealth tax on property already owned instead of income) coming in our lifetimes. Not sure even IRAs will be safe. With the demographics that we have and the fact that one guy can vote away wealth and earnings from another, I don't see how it can be avoided. As a nation, we're spending way beyond our earnings.
And the government is not "giving away" anything now? Anything that the government is "giving away" now, UBI just does it better.
Hobo Joe would not be looking at Bill Gates as he would be busy trying to get himself off the street and get something to eat. LOL
Too late, it's already started.
What you write seems eminently sensible to we who deal with personal and household finances on a daily basis. We must obtain money -- earn, borrow, or inherit it -- before we can spend it, and we can't create money at will. The U.S. Government, and all other Governments around the world that issue fiat money, do not have these same constraints, nor can they if they are to operate efficiently and wisely for the benefit of their people.
Your government does not have to borrow money via bond sales before it can spend it, nor does it. The headlines in Bloomberg the other day tied new issues of Treasury bonds to big deficits on the way. Naturally one associates bond issuing with borrowing to fund deficits, and in fact that is precisely what is conveyed to the general public. It is no wonder then that the public misunderstands government finances in a world of fiat money. And I daresay some economists, particularly those trained when we were on the Gold Standard, don't understand today's money either. There is a new school of economics emerging that aims to correctly understand fiat money and the interplay between a Central Bank and a Government Treasury in a fiat money world. These economists call themselves MMT economists, where MMT stands for Modern Money Theory. If you want to learn more about this school of economics there are vast amounts of material available via the web. Any number of lectures by MMT Economists are accessible through YouTube.
Without going into detail, I can summarize of few of the tenets of MMT: The government can not go bankrupt, but it can decrease and increase the purchasing power of the money it issues. The Treasury does not have to earn or borrow money before it can spend it. The Treasury spends money into the economy and takes it back out of the economy via taxes and other sources of revenue. The government only accepts the currency it issues in payment for taxes. Thus Taxes give fiat money value. The difference between what the government spends into the economy and takes back out equals the deficit, or surplus, to the penny. Inflation can result from the government spending into the economy far more than it taxes back out. Deficits also result in an increase in saving and investment. If the government taxes out more money than it spends into the economy the result will be surpluses. Consistent surpluses will result in recession. Deficits can be too large, too small, or just right. Small deficits are sustainable indefinitely if population and productivity are increasing. This is the normal course for the U.S. economy at present.
In the U.S., Treasury Bonds serve mainly two purposes. One is as an interest paying alternative to cash, the other is as a tool, in conjunction with other tools, used by the Central Bank for controlling the Fed Funds Rate via control of Reserve account balances. Under normal operation, when the Central bank needs to reduce the aggregate amount of money in reserve accounts because the aggregate balance exceeds the required balance, the Central bank sells bonds from its inventory. This in turn reduces the amount of money in reserve accounts by the amount paid for the bonds. Similarly the Central bank can buy bonds if it needs to increase the aggregate balance in reserve accounts. Raising the aggregate amount in reserve above the requirement rapidly pushes the Fed Funds Rate to zero. This was done intentionally during the Central Bank's response to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. To keep the Fed Funds rate from dropping to zero, the Fed put a floor under interest rates by paying interest on reserve accounts, something it normally did not do.
So while your concerns are typical, and they seem rational to us in terms of our own finances, they are less rational from the point of view of the MMT economists. Our Treasury and Fed are reactive bodies. They have no choice but to react to the economic results of the whims of Congress. They do their best to keep our economy on an even keel. But Congress holds all the most powerful cards. For example, the most powerful tool of all in controlling inflation is not interest rates but tax rates. Raising taxes will deal a death blow to inflation, and lowering them too much or too fast can stoke the fires of rampant inflation. But taxation, which is the main government tool for removing money from the economy, is in the hands of Congress. The Central Bank and the Treasury does not exercise control over the Congress; it is the other way around. The tools of the Central Bank and the Treasury, though powerful indeed, pale in comparison with those of Congress. It is all well and good that we elect to Congress people from the hard knocks of life that understand our everyday struggles to make ends meet , but it's a bad idea for these folks to dominate financial decision making. What we need in Congress are more, smart well educated folks who understand MMT.
In my own studies, what concerns me is not so much the aggregate amount of money but what roles money's distribution plays. I'm thinking economists have not been paying nearly enough attention to this latter factor. Macroeconomics is not a particularly useful tools for shedding light on distributional effects, but on the other hand, better understanding of distributional effects should allow us to improve the usefulness of our standard macroeconomic relationships.
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I discovered there're communist sympathizers in this forum: they're dO8, JSOP, piezoe.
record from wikileak shows piezoe is the General Secretary of the America Communist party. He's also their economic advisor [he thought he'd be too smart to serve as Trump economic advisor. though he still pulls his pants up one leg at a time. When his wife yelled "piezoe! pull up your pants, dinner is ready". he'd obey without any objection.
record from wikileak shows piezoe is the General Secretary of the America Communist party. He's also their economic advisor [he thought he'd be too smart to serve as Trump economic advisor. though he still pulls his pants up one leg at a time. When his wife yelled "piezoe! pull up your pants, dinner is ready". he'd obey without any objection.
So tell me again how someone who's working 12 hours a day at two minimum wage jobs to feed their kids has the time to even look for a better job, let alone take a class or do an apprenticeship? You may have grown up around poverty, but you clearly haven't experienced the kind of grinding poverty that even the smartest, most motivated of us would have difficulty escaping.
Someone working two 12-hour a day jobs to feed their kids probably doesn't have time to take a class or do an apprenticeship. The problem is how did the person get into that situation in the first place? No one should be having kids until they have the resources (beyond just financial) to comfortably care for them. That's just responsibility and common sense. I have an uncle who is a UPS driver with no college degree who was able to care for his wife and two kids without having to work two 12-hour jobs. He had plenty of time for his family. He and his wife have always owned their own house that the kids grew up in. Wife was a stay-at-home mom. Not impossible to do if you're willing to work hard, spend responsibly, and withhold the need for instant gratification a little in the beginning.
Well.... you are 100% right.... but what you have to know is... so many of your tenets of responsibility are learned in the early years of a child's development and their home life.
Its easy to say all these things.... but you have to understand that a child that has not been brought up and taught these things will not know any better. Right or wrong.... thats the way it is. I mean it is.
Good example was a guy I knew in high school. No dad, mom an alcoholic, two younger siblings. Worked 8 hours a day while going to high school, 12 hours in the summer at min wage so his siblings had food on the table and roof over their head. Hard worker, didn't win the genetic lottery for intelligence so had to work hard at school too but he did. Never got out of that trap, and no chance to do so really. Still working his ass off at 45 living in a trailer.
Also easy to judge if you "should" had kids, like the rest of us you were one broken condom and a little bad luck away from it happening to you when you weren't ready. It's pretty shitty to judge those who have the bad luck and man up to take care of their kids even if they didn't plan them. Again, your words come from a position of never having experienced the absolute grind of deep poverty, which is nothing like the lower middle class I grew up with or the upper middle class my kids are experiencing. It's not a matter of delayed gratification or working harder, these men and women are living in absolute shit compared to you and I and working far harder than you and I ever have. And for every lazy layabout there's 10 of these folks. It would be nice to give them some breathing room so they could maybe get 8 hours of sleep so they're not constantly bone tired, maybe could take a class or do an apprenticeship. Nice for them, but selfishly better for society as a whole as well.