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Politics of unemployment figures


Lonemathsytoothbrushthief

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To be clear, universal basic income will not happen until corporations need it. Corporations do not predict this until near the turn of the century. It has, however, already begun testing in the US as the US has reduced food assistance amounts but relaxed income verification and fraud investigation. This has caused the number of recipients to soar. At the same time the ability to withdraw literal cash out of your food assistance benefits has increased.  The result is very hungry children and iPhones everywhere in poor areas, and corporations like the results.

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Whore*of*Mensa
4 minutes ago, natsume said:

To be clear, universal basic income will not happen until corporations need it. Corporations do not predict this until near the turn of the century. It has, however, already begun testing in the US as the US has reduced food assistance amounts but relaxed income verification and fraud investigation. This has caused the number of recipients to soar. At the same time the ability to withdraw literal cash out of your food assistance benefits has increased.  The result is very hungry children and iPhones everywhere in poor areas, and corporations like the results.

Oh God that's depressing. But do people really spend money on iPhones rather than food for the kids??

 

It's been trialled in Finland but was declared NOT a success because the whole measure was whether it was more effective at getting people back to work. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47169549 - not whether it made them happier, etc (although it did)

 

The utopian idea is that if people have more time (without pressure to get a job) then maybe they have time to grow their own veg, see their neighbours, swap goods and favours and just generally build the informal economy. But if it just builds dependence on the corporations then of course it won't work.

 

Still, surely it's got to be better than the current system where in the UK, for example, to get benefits you have to apply for a certain amount of jobs per week and both unemployed person and employer waste loads of time going through applications that aren't suited to the job anyway?

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I've learnt of Canada's experiment elsewhere than Wikipedia but I post the link as I find it the easiest to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Project

Now, for same basic economics (refer to Adam Smith's law of supply and demand from Wealth of Nation), a price finds equilibrium, if there are no outside intervention causing shortages or surpluses, where the line of demand and supply meet. Demand is the money available for a good while supply are the units of the same good being produced.

However, as the Wikipedia article reports, when universal income is in place, there are less entrepreneurs, that is people are not as willing to take as many risk as if they had a poorer safety nets. Less entrepreneurs, that is less producers of goods, while demand remains the same, that is demand is kept up by universal basic income, will lead, according to Adam Smith's law of supply and demand, to higher prices. Thankfully the experiment was stopped early and was on a small scale basis.

Ultimately, I would like to see universal basic income set in place. With the experiment I know and what I know about supply and demand, simply making universal basic income available will, on the long term, void itself due to inflation. For it to viable, production issues need to also be addressed.

Simply put, it's not because everyon has lots of money that there is necesserly more goods to be had on the stores' shelves.

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People go to food banks (donated food centers) so they and their kids can have iPhones, PlayStations, etc.  I'm not saying they shouldn't want these things - our economy is built off it. But the system is broken. Corporations took over our governments and people love the corporations too much to realize how  much they're hurting us. Maybe this is the evolution of capitalism. The government controls the means of production at the direction of corporations. We are now told that corporations running the government is capitalism. But when corporations run the government they destroy competition through choosing who the government gives contracts and subsidies to and restrict the growth of new and small businesses. Tesla has had competition fail simply because they couldn't get the same government subsidies that Tesla relies on, as an example.  

You will never convince people that a billionaire isn't looking out for the little guys. They are our superheroes now. (There's a reason Trump won't release his taxes. He could survive shooting someone in the middle of the street, as he said. But he could not survive being exposed as not being a billionaire).

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Lonemathsytoothbrushthief
23 hours ago, natsume said:

People go to food banks (donated food centers) so they and their kids can have iPhones, PlayStations, etc.  I'm not saying they shouldn't want these things - our economy is built off it. But the system is broken. Corporations took over our governments and people love the corporations too much to realize how  much they're hurting us. Maybe this is the evolution of capitalism. The government controls the means of production at the direction of corporations. We are now told that corporations running the government is capitalism. But when corporations run the government they destroy competition through choosing who the government gives contracts and subsidies to and restrict the growth of new and small businesses. Tesla has had competition fail simply because they couldn't get the same government subsidies that Tesla relies on, as an example.  

You will never convince people that a billionaire isn't looking out for the little guys. They are our superheroes now. (There's a reason Trump won't release his taxes. He could survive shooting someone in the middle of the street, as he said. But he could not survive being exposed as not being a billionaire).

I think you're right. The point about Trump is very true.

 

I think capitalism more or less functions similarly to a cross between a victorian english era state and a completely nonexistent prop state supporting billionaires in their exploitation right now, and while it might seem like a new development I think much of it is regression, just with fake technological progression backing them. It's like having the richest people play scientist to convince us we're progressing while defunding any meaningful research. Like if iron man spent his spare time robbing cancer researchers and destroying their labs. It will eventually stop looking all shiny and new, I mean how long can we claim to be technological powerhouses while the actual technology is produced by child labour, slavery and people on food stamps.

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It's ironic that capitalism puts "free market" nations governments in a race with China to use the government to cheat competition to grow their largest corporations. The Chinese stock market is different, but not much else at this point.

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Whore*of*Mensa
On 1/2/2020 at 2:27 PM, Lonemathsytoothbrushthief said:

I believe there should be more of a focus on people reliant on the state for their income than there is, and how they are frequently weaponised against working class workers. Like for example with how the UK's workhouses were transformed with the second poor laws, in which it was declared that living conditions for people inside of workhouses should always be worse than for the poorest worker outside the workhouses, which of course could be posed as a threat to any worker - being told that while workhouses might provide you with food and shelter, life inside would be more miserable than it was for you currently, no matter how bad that was, would be a great incentive for employers to use.

I completely agree with you on this. It reminds me of what BJ said (in the 90s) which was quoted during the election

 

'It must be generally plausible that if having a baby out of wedlock meant sure-fire destitution on a Victorian scale, young girls might indeed think twice about having a baby.' 

I was a single mum, and have claimed benefits a couple of times, during times when single mums have been demonised in the media. I don't think we are all that far from the workhouse days now, and getting closer to them all the time. I agree that people on the left don't address these issues - I know I've related it to my own experience and not disability, but there are similarities, particularly with lacking the ability to work, and these problems aren't 'sexy' for those on the left. They don't really care about them. 

 

On 1/2/2020 at 2:27 PM, Lonemathsytoothbrushthief said:

I think responses to this can often be presented in the form of "shouldn't you be able to have time off work for -" followed by situations relevant to the working people being appealed to, but this doesn't address how many people lack compassion for those people on benefits except for in the very time that they are in that position. I've even known someone who was once homeless criticise me and a friend for offering money to people on the street because "they'll only waste it". I think the impact of how capitalism undervalues people doesn't hit anywhere near as hard to people who have jobs to derive value from than those treated as worthless on benefits.

Again, very true! I think this is more to do with psychology than politics - people who have been in a sticky situation just want to distance themselves from it as much as possible, once they're out of it. Again, in my own experience, of daughter's friends' parents - the most judgy over single mothers was one who had been one herself, then married someone very well-off. Which we always discussed in a sort of 'how does that makes sense?' kind of a way. It's a sort of fear that gets instilled in us, that we might end up being 'othered' as one of those feckless people who are demonised in the media. The ones closest to that situation join in with the demonisation to distract attention from themselves. 

 

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Whore*of*Mensa
On 1/2/2020 at 10:06 PM, natsume said:

People go to food banks (donated food centers) so they and their kids can have iPhones, PlayStations, etc.  I'm not saying they shouldn't want these things - our economy is built off it.

I see. It's not just that the economy is built off them - I guess it's that people can't live on food alone - for a child social inclusion is important, and without these things (a phone particularly) they can become completely excluded. 

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Lonemathsytoothbrushthief
On 1/2/2020 at 8:55 PM, natsume said:

To be clear, universal basic income will not happen until corporations need it. Corporations do not predict this until near the turn of the century. It has, however, already begun testing in the US as the US has reduced food assistance amounts but relaxed income verification and fraud investigation. This has caused the number of recipients to soar. At the same time the ability to withdraw literal cash out of your food assistance benefits has increased.  The result is very hungry children and iPhones everywhere in poor areas, and corporations like the results.

I'm honestly afraid that corporations will never need it. They're too powerful and their exploitation is too well disguised by their products. But regardless, if we don't find more ways to fight the state and win while only a much smaller group of the poorest people in society are dependent on and attacked by it, anything which goes wrong with universal basic income will in my opinion be much harder to fight.

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Well, the future in which corporations predict they need it is when unemployment rates are above 30% due to growing population and growing automation near the end of the century. When unemployment rates get this high it will impact sales and this is when universal basic income will begin, but I suspect it will be paid in vouchers for corporate goods (Apple, Google, etc) instead of cash.

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