The argument goes that because we currently target money to those in need, by spreading out existing revenue to everyone instead, those currently targeted would necessarily receive less money, and thus would be worse off. Consequently, the end result of basic income could be theoretically regressive in nature by reducing the benefits of the poor and transferring that revenue instead to the middle classes and the rich. Obviously a bad idea, right? …
Basically, this particular argument would only make sense if we in no way altered our tax system to achieve UBI, and if our programs worked as we assume they work because that’s how they should work. The problem is they don’t work that way.
In the United States today, on average, just about one in four families living underneath the federal poverty line receives what most call welfare, which is actually known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. It gets worse. Because states are actually just written checks to give out as they please in the form of “block grants,” there are states where far fewer than one in four impoverished families receive cash assistance. Continue reading
Author Archives: Lin
India, Modi and Trump
Writing after its explosion in 20th-century Europe, Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.” Social and political life in India, America and
Europe was drastically remade by neoliberal economism in recent decades, under, as the legal scholar David Kennedy has argued, the administration of a professional global class of hidden persuaders and status-seekers.One of the first signs of this change in India was a proliferation of American-style think-tanks, sponsored by big business as eager as ever to influence political decision-making and military spending. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economist who claims to be the intellectual father of India’s economic liberalization, argued in 2013 that the poor celebrate inequality, and with the poise of a Marie Antoinette, advised malnourished families in India to consume “more milk and fruits.” Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank,
took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.” …For all his humblebragging, Mr. Modi, like Mr. Trump, illustrated perfectly how money talks, power seduces and success eclipses morality. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States. And conversely. At a charity event in New Jersey last month, Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,” declared, “I am a big fan of Hindu.” “Big, big fan.”
Long before Peter Thiel plumped for Mr. Trump and Mark Zuckerberg defended Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.” Sheryl Sandberg declared that she was changing her Facebook profile in “his honor.” These data-monetizing fans of Hindu may not have known that Mr. Modi, supervising a radical ideological purge at home, had launched Digital India at his residence in New Delhi
with a private reception for some of India’s most vicious trolls. …Such firebrands emerged out of economic and political crises in almost every major European country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, distracting angry citizens with the demonization of minorities, cosmopolitans and liberals. Drawing a cautionary tale from this blood-stained history, Polanyi assumed that the catastrophic triumph of economism over social and political necessities would be reversed. The three decades after World War II proved him right. Social-welfare policies underpinned national reconstruction in war-ravaged Europe, as well as in postcolonial Asia and Africa after decades of imperialism.
In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites. Any attempt to rebuild
democracy must reckon with the deeper reasons for its great and drastic transformation — above all in India, where Hindu supremacism, in its cruelty and callousness, anticipated the big, big American fan of Hindu.
The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/the-incendiary-appeal-of-demagoguery-in-our-time.html
Chinese Cooperative and Basic Income
Finally, all Huaidi citizens have had a basic income of 1500 yuan [US $221] per year since 1995, which is directly transferred to their bank accounts in shares of 125 yuan [US $18.5] per month. For children under 18, this money is kept in parents’ accounts. This amount money was significant in 1995 (Chinese cities’ nominal per capita annual income was about 5000 yuan [US $738] in 1995), but not as much now, due to the rapid rise of GDP in the last 20 years (in 2015, the nominal per capita annual income in Chinese cities was about 50,000 yuan [US $7,379]).
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Depression and Trump
Torsten Bell, director of the Resolution Foundation, provided a useful breakdown of voting patterns in last Tuesday’s presidential election. Taken at face value, the results seem to show that Hillary Clinton did well among those voters on the lowest incomes. She led 53%-41% among those earning less than $30,000 a year and by 51%-42% among those earning between $30,000 and $50,000.
But these statistics are misleading. There was actually a 16-point net swing to the Republicans between the 2012 and 2016 elections among those earning less than $30,000 a year and a 6-point swing among those earning $30,000 to $50,000. By contrast, there was a swing to the Democrats among those on higher incomes, and this was particularly pronounced among those earning more than $100,000 a year. Continue reading
Trump: racism, xenophobia, misogyny and economic policies
There has been to my mind a very silly debate about whether Trump supporters are driven by racism, xenophobia, and misogyny or whether they are driven by economic factors.
I consider this debate silly since both are obviously important in my view. Racism, xenophobia, and misogyny are deeply rooted in society and few of us can claim to be completely devoid of these sentiments. The question is how these hatreds can come to be the defining feature of political life for large numbers of people and here I think the economic policies of the last four decades have played a crucial role.
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Don’t Trump Climate Change
In a paper in the journal Science Advances, they said the actual range could be between 4.78C to 7.36C by 2100, based on one set of calculations.
Some have dismissed the idea that the world would continue to burn fossil fuels despite obvious global warming, but emissions are still increasing despite a 1C rise in average thermometer readings since the 1880s.
And US President-elect Donald Trump has said he will rip up America’s commitments to the fight against climate change.
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How the destruction of industrial Britain casts a shadow over present-day public finances
A new report by Christina Beatty and Steve Fothergill, Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University
- UK manufacturing employment has fallen from 8.9 million to just 2.9 million overthe last fifty years, and 500,000 jobs have disappeared from the coal industry. This has destroyed the economic base of many communities, especially in the North,Scotland and Wales.
- The main effect ofthis job loss has been to divert vast numbers of men and women out ofthe labour market onto incapacity related benefits, these days Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) which accounts for almost 2.5 million adults of workingage. The highest claimant rates – 10per cent or more of all 16-64 year olds – are nearly all in older industrial areas.
- ESA and the additional benefits received by ESAclaimants – Housing Benefit and Disability LivingAllowance for example – are a £30bn-plus annual claim on the Exchequer.
- Low pay in former industrial areas depresses tax revenue and inflates spending on in-work benefits. Spending on Tax Credits, for example, exceeds £850 a year per adult of working age in much of older industrial Britain – double the level in parts of southernEngland.
- The Treasury has misdiagnosed high welfare spending as the result of inadequate work incentives and has too often blamed individuals for their own predicament, whereas in fact a large part ofthe bill is rooted in job destruction extending back decades.
- The welfare reforms implemented since 2010, and strengthened since the 2015 general election, hitthe poorest places hardest. In effect, communities in older industrial Britain are being meted out punishmentin the form of welfare cuts forthe destruction wrought to their industrial base.
- Across most of older industrial Britain the loss arising from welfare reform is expected to exceed £750 a year per working age adult by 2020-21.
- There is an alternative – a genuine rebalancing ofthe economy in favour of industrial production and a revival of regional economic policy.
- Policy makers need to take a long-term perspective, look at the differences between places, and stop thinking in silos.
The key to restore broad economic prosperity is to force big corporations to compete more. And to open their patent vaults.
But what if both camps are right about the effects they observe and wrong about the causes? What begins to make sense of this odd picture is a problem that previous generations of Americans also had to confront—a concentration of economic control that enables a few corporate bosses to manipulate technological advance entirely outside of any open and competitive marketplace. Put another way, what can explain both of these problems is that the masters of America’s biggest technological corporations increasingly enjoy the power to speed the rollout of technologies that favor capital and to slow those that disfavor their own private interests.
Back in the 1930s, America suffered from a similar set of ills, and the government took direct aim. Specifically, starting in the second half of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration combined stepped-up antitrust enforcement with the forced licensing of key patents held by monopolistic enterprises. Today, few people know this history, but the policy laid the groundwork for the long era of prosperity and technological progress that followed, including the birth of Silicon Valley.
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F-35 on fire again
An F-35B Joint Strike Fighter caught fire while in-flight during a training exercise last month, according to a report from Hope Hodge Seck of Military.com.
The incident was listed by the Naval Safety Center as a “Class A Mishap” — the most serious mishap class — which means that there was $2 million or more in damage. Continue reading
Ralph Miliband on ‘Corbyn’
Something like a blueprint for the shift of power in the party was set out in Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, first published in 1961. Miliband’s attack on the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) anticipated the Corbynite strategy with uncanny prescience. Cautioning his comrades on the left who wanted to use Labour as a vehicle for socialism, Miliband wrote in a 1972 postscript to the book:
The kind of political changes at the top which a good many socialists hope to see one day brought about in the Labour Party, and which would signify a major ideological shift to the left, would presumably, given the nature of the political system, have to be engineered from within the ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. But to say this is surely also to indicate how unrealistic that hope is. It is unrealistic because it ignores the perennial weakness of the parliamentary left. That weakness is not accidental but structural . . . There have been some exceptions: a few Labour MPs have, so to speak, slipped through the net. But they have remained isolated and often pathetic figures, bitterly at odds not only with their leaders but with that large and permanent majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party which entirely shares its leader’s orthodox modes of thought.
Racism and Trump
I do not know what kind of America I will wake up to November 9. But I know that the result of the election does not hinge on Election Day. What happens to the U.S. will be the cumulative effect of a campaign that has mainstreamed bigotry and is now mainstreaming – or at least severely playing down – white supremacist violence.
Trump never specified what era he was referring to when he said he would “Make America Great Again.” Many assumed it was the 1950s, when job growth for whites was high and civil rights were denied. But when I visit Lovejoy’s grave across the river, I am reminded of life in St. Louis in the 1830s, of the mob violence that preceded the Civil War, of the way Lovejoy tried to convince people that non-whites were human and white mobs were a dangerous problem, and how he anticipated his own death as a result of these toxic politics. His era was one in which white men could attack non-whites with impunity, and those who defied them faced terrifying consequences. It would have been a great era to be Donald Trump. Continue reading
UN: 3C of warming under current global climate pledges
The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) said that pledges put forward to cut emissions would see temperatures rise by 3C above pre-industrial levels, far above the the 2C of the Paris climate agreement, which comes into force on Friday.
At least a quarter must be cut from emissions by the end of the next decade, compared with current trends, the UN said.
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China’s J-20 Stealth Fighter
The J-20 was developed as a foil to advanced U.S. fighters, including fourth generation F-16 Fighting Falcons and F/A-18 Hornets and, more directly, fifth-generation F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning fighters.
In 2009, a breach of F-35 project resulted in the theft of several terabytes of data. Though the attack was never publicly attributed to China by the U.S. government, visual similarities in the chassis of the J-20 to the F-35 have led commentators to speculate that the stolen F-35 intellectual property helped state-owned Chengdu Aerospace Corporation develop their fighter.
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Petition: Cancel the F-35
A petition to the United States Congress and the governments of Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Japan and South Korea from the world and from the people of Burlington, Vermont, and Fairbanks, Alaska, where the F-35 is to be based. Initiated by Vermont Stop the F35 Coalition, Save Our Skies Vermont, Western Maine Matters, Alaska Peace Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Peace Club, North Star Chapter 146 Veterans For Peace, World Beyond War, RootsAction.org, Code Pink, Ben Cohen.
The petition reads:
The F-35 is a weapon of offensive war, serving no defensive purpose. It is planned to cost the U.S. $1.4 trillion over 50 years. Because starvation on earth could be ended for $30 billion and the lack of clean drinking water for $11 billion per year, it is first and foremost through the wasting of resources that this airplane will kill. Military spending, contrary to popular misconception, also hurts the U.S. economy (see here) and other economies. The F-35 causes negative health impacts and cognitive impairment in children living near its bases. It renders housing near airports unsuitable for residential use. It has a high crash rate and horrible consequences to those living in the area of its crashes. Its emissions are a major environmental polluter.
Wars are endangering the United States and other participating nations rather than protecting them. Nonviolent tools of law, diplomacy, aid, crisis prevention, and verifiable nuclear disarmament should be substituted for continuing counterproductive wars. Therefore, we, the undersigned, call for the immediate cancellation of the F-35 program as a whole, and the immediate cancellation of plans to base any such dangerous and noisy jets near populated areas. We oppose replacing the F-35 with any other weapon or basing the F-35 in any other locations. We further demand redirection of the money for the F-35 back into taxpayers’ pockets, and into environmental and human needs in the U.S., other F-35 customer nations, and around the world, including to fight climate change, pay off student debt, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, and improve education, healthcare, and housing. Continue reading
“In the long run, the Pentagon budget won’t go down.”
Take the current budget. It’s down slightly from its peak in 2011, when it reached the highest level since World War II, but this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is nothing to sneeze at. It comes in at roughly $600 billion—more than the peak year of the massive arms buildup initiated by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. To put this figure in perspective: Despite troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan dropping sharply over the past eight years, the Obama administration has still managed to spend more on the Pentagon than the Bush administration did during its two terms in office. Continue reading
Intellectual Property and Inequality
That’s the displacement story, but suppose that robots are extremely cheap. There is no obvious reason they shouldn’t be cheap. After all, we probably won’t need any rare materials to make robots. And presumably robots could be mostly manufactured by other robots, so the labor involved wouldn’t be expensive. In this case, we should be able to buy a robot at our local hardware store or from our favorite internet retailer for a few hundred dollars.
Once we buy the robot, we can have it clean our house, cook our food, mow our lawn and do all sorts of other tasks that we may not want to do ourselves. We can probably even save on our food budget by having the robot plant and tend a vegetable garden. If robots are doing all this work for us and we no longer need to buy and maintain a car to meet our transportation needs, we should have all have a high standard of living.
But suppose that patents and related protections keep the price of robots high. And instead of technology driving down the cost of transportation with self-driving cars to almost nothing, patent monopolies allow the top executives and shareholders of Uber or its equivalent to get very rich at the expense of the rest of the population. In that scenario, most people may not benefit to any great extent from technology. In that case, robots may take our jobs, but instead of the benefits from productivity growth being passed along in higher wages and lower prices, as was true in past decades, the benefits go to minority of well-situated individuals. Continue reading
We can’t afford to have war with Russia
I don’t think there’s much question about it. Even if they think it’s unlikely, Russia thinks war is possible enough that steps are required.
Citing routine drills, Russia has even moved missiles within striking range of NATO targets, into the Kaliningrad enclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.
And,
Meanwhile, CNN informs us that:
“Moscow abruptly left a nuclear security pact, citing U.S. aggression, and moved nuclear-capable Iskandar missiles to the edge of NATO territory in Europe. Its officials have openly raised the possible use of nuclear weapons.”
Basic Income for India
First, any universal programme is expensive.
For example, if we were to give every adult exactly the amount of income that defines the poverty line, which would ensure that everyone would be brought above the poverty line, calculations suggest the bill would amount to 11% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product). This is just a hypothetical example. One can, of course, offer a lower amount per person that would be more affordable.
However, in this context, a sense of perspective is needed in discussing expenditures on programmes aimed at the poor, who by official estimates, constitute 30% of the population. Calculations suggest that if we take just twice the amounts that define the poverty line, almost 80% of the population lives below that.
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CAAT: UK government works ‘hand in glove’ with arms firms
The British government and the UK arms industry have a “politically intimate and hugely compromising relationship” that sees government officials working “hand in glove” with companies promoting weapons exports, according to campaigners who have tracked thousands of meetings between officials and arms trade representatives.
Officials from the government’s dedicated arms export department, the Defence and Security Organisation (DSO), attended more than 1,000 meetings since the 2010 election – more than a third of all meetings recorded by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), which has published data on contact between the government and the arms industry.
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Immigration and wages
In fact, we might go even further. Restrictions on free movement may actually reduce wages and workers’ standards.
Because we know from history that immigration doesn’t stop when it becomes harder. Just look at Mexico and the United States. If more EU nationals enter the UK undocumented, they will be working outside official channels, labour laws and the official minimum wage.
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Tipping Point North South 