Well luckily it turned out that they were all ne'er-do-wells so it's all good.

Just like when the US used drones on Iraqi convoys and amazingly they were all Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

This is what most people miss when they criticise UBI - for most people, it will be immediately spent, taxed, and put back into the economy. As long as the velocity is there, it's not an entirely bad idea as long as inflation can be kept under control.

> as long as inflation can be kept under control.

Nice trick if you can pull it off.

So for the 1GBP you print, you recoup up to 20p in VAT, or less for foodstuffs.

And more money chasing the same goods and services means…?

Are you suggesting that UBI should be paid out of freshly printed money?

I don't think that's how people commonly understand how UBI should be financed.

I can only speak for the UK. But given the fiscal headroom for the foreseeable, I don’t see where else it would come from? If they don’t have it, they either borrow or print it?

For any meaningful scheme, you would be talking about hundreds of billions.

That's were things such as wealth tax kicks in.

The money that just sits untaxed on the vaults of the extremely wealthy should be taxed to finance this.

This is trickle down economics done right. Remove money from the wealthy and redistribute it to benefit society.

No one has money "sitting in vaults"

They keep money in bonds (lending money to people, corps, govs that need it), stocks (raise the value of companies that are valuable thus letting them borrow more etc) or they consume which pays for all the poor peoples salaries

The immaturity of people when it comes to economics is a problem

You're broadly correct.

Don't let the uneducated messenger distract from UBI itself though. Proposed seriously, it's about reducing asset values and high incomes to redistribute that value to everyone who isn't losing more value than the UBI. The real argument is that it would mean short-term economic costs to build a more robust system with a bigger pool of people with the safety net and risk appetite to start/join companies.

The interesting question about UBI is how to finance it. It's far from a settled question what would be the best or even just a good way to do so.

You seem to have something very specific in mind?

I don't really. You're right, ofc. The details about what taxes pay for UBI and who pays them are obviously of key importance.

I don't claim to have the answers. My point is just that there are interesting benefits that are worth weighing against those costs.

Btw, land value taxes (or as a second best, property taxes) are worth looking into.

In the UK, council taxes also roughly have the right structure. Though the discount you get for unoccupied property is crazy. It's exactly the opposite of what you'd want to encourage.

> They keep money in bonds (lending money to people, corps, govs that need it), stocks (raise the value of companies that are valuable thus letting them borrow more etc)

That's wealth that should be taxed.

> The immaturity of people when it comes to economics is a problem

I agree. Just not in the way you imagine.

> That's wealth that should be taxed.

Wealth taxes are fairly controversial, and not very common around the world.

But they have been implemented in a few places, and we can look at what real world effects have been observed.

> The money that just sits untaxed on the vaults of the extremely wealthy should be taxed to finance this.

Approximately no one has vaults of gold like Scrooge McDuck. The richest people largely hold their wealth in company shares.

So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?

> Approximately no one has vaults of gold like Scrooge McDuck

Yeah, I also like to be pedantically literal when I don't have good counter arguments. I feel your pain, brother.

You can replace my "vaults of gold" analogy for propety, yachts, real estate, company shares, etc. Whatever someone holds in their own name that constitutes wealth above a certain threshold should be taxed.

> So you are suggesting to raise the cost of capital for companies?

Corporations also should contribute to society, as they also benefit from the common infrastructure.

There's this pervasive idea that "if we tax the rich they will stop investing in companies and us filthy peasants will be out of jobs" which is the bullshit of the ages. If there is demand for goods and services, there will be those that supply them.

But the company whose shares we are talking about is out there in the real world and doing stuff with its capital. It's not idle.

I am talking about the individual holding the shares.

Are you just being obtuse to deflect from the actual argument?

Tax incidence is a non-trivial topic. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

Basically, the people a tax is nominally levied upon don't necessarily bear the economic burden, and vice versa.

A silly example: do you think it makes a difference if your employer transfers your whole gross income into your account and you pay income taxes, or whether your employer pays the income tax first, and then transfers you the net amount?

I would imagine the extremely wealthy have passports, global homes, and the vaults you mention might well be in Switzerland.

The extremely wealthy will also have an army of lawyers and accountants to mitigate against this, not to mention trusts and holding companies.

It’s a nice idea, but the implementation is tricky.

I’m not arguing for them, just being realistic.

What they actually have is an inordinate power to lobby governments.

No army of lawyers would save them from actually effective regulation.

Voting with your feet will save you from that.

Of course, if you want to do business in country X, you are subject to the laws of that country X.

But otherwise, you can leave that country and settle down elsewhere and do your business there. No matter how 'actually effective' that regulation is. (Unless you do an 'East Germany' and don't allow people to leave.)

> Voting with your feet will save you from that.

When relevant countries act in tandem, it would work.

I would really like to see a billionaire vote with their feet to protect their wealth by moving ro Somalia or something like that.

A country can also limit their ability to operate from abroad when they move.

In real life, value producing is inherently tied to the society which allows value to be produced.

As you've figured out, you can't sustainably raise a lot of money via printing. At least not in real terms when adjusted for inflation. (Of course, in nominal terms you can raise arbitrary amounts by printing.)

Now how to finance a UBI is a good question.

A land value tax would be an interesting choice. Especially since a UBI will probably lead to higher rents.

If you have an inflation targeting central bank, velocity of money doesn't really matter.

If velocity speeds up and inflation goes up, the central bank will remove money from circulation to hit their target. If velocity goes down, the central bank will inject money into circulation.

The fiscal multiplier is zero.

(Or rather, any deviation of the fiscal multiplier from zero is evidence of an incompetent central bank.)

also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email' rotating around a globe.

I am 100% convinced that the baby weight thing is because grandparents love to compare newborns with their own experiences, and they were on the cusp of the metric conversion in the 60s. In a decade or two, this will vanish.

Imperial height is because 6 feet is the generic height of a "tall person" - we get so much of our sporting news from overseas and no one bothers to convert it.

That's only a post-9/11 requirement, so it's not really part of the 'traditional' banking system.

Following your logic there never will be and there never was a traditional banking system because rules and regulation around banking keep getting changed.

The thing I liked the most about XHTML was how it enforced strict notation.

Elements had to be used in their pure form, and CSS was for all visual presentation.

It really helped me understand and be better at web development - getting the tick from the XHTML validator was always an achievement for complicated webpages.

I worked with a guy called 'Com' which is a reserved word in Active Directory. It causes chaos so apparently his AD name is always modified to be less offensive to the Microsoft gods.

Is Prn and Nul also reserved? That goes back to DOS device names.

At one point, you could leave an open <script> tag at the end of the HTML with the language attribute set to "javascript9.9" or something non-existent, and the JavaScript banner ads wouldn't load.

Good times, those were.

To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers became more efficient and sell their products at the world price, which is quite often overseas.

Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.

Not sure why you say 'more accurate'. What you state is what I implied. I hope this was clear.

What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.

However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.

Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.

Does it pencil out though? You go from more farmers making less profit and getting subsidy to smooth things over and then they go ahead and spend most of that back in the economy running the business presumably.

And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.

That's only true if you ignore that the government can spend that money on something else. And the successful farmers are actually net tax payers.

Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.

To:

No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.

> take what little profit there is

Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.

> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people

If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.

Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.

This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.

This becomes a race to the bottom quickly. Why should the government invest any money at all in new york or california if that same dollar goes so much further doing literally anything at all in omaha or detroit? Its cheaper after all no?

In NZ, it was had maybe 2 low-quality moments, but never froze and was in high-definition for the rest of the time.