I bought an airplane. It was a lifelong dream. 6 months later, I'm out. (Reddit post)

[bflynn]

Hmm, you mean no more gold is entering the economy?

No, that isn't what I said.

If everyone got 40k, it would be trivial for everyone because shortly after getting it, 40k would not pay monthly bills.

 

[bflynn]

Try paying your taxes with anything else.

Taxes are calculated, assessed, and paid in USDs.

The USD is a fiat currency, not backed by anything other than government fiat. Dollars would only be pieces of paper without the USG declaring them to be legal tender.

Correct. The USD is not backed by anything, including collected taxes.

 

[TCABM]

Correct. The USD is not backed by anything, including collected taxes.

Eh, it’s a fiat currency not backed by any commodity. The USD is, though, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

 

[Baked Potato]

If anyone wants to know what happens when you print money willy-nilly, just look at what happened in Zimbabwe.

Conversely one could also look at Finland's experiment with universal basic income.

 

[farangutan]

I thought the commodity that backs the dollar is USD-backed oil. Isn't that the main reason why all the US presidents have a set of knee pads packed when they visit Saudi Arabia?

 

[TCABM]

Conversely one could also look at Finland's experiment with universal basic income.

You’re fairly new here, but politics is verboten. Economics? Sure.

The UBI experiment was not conducted in a vacuum; there were other concurrent changes that impacted the experiment resulting in correlation ≠ causation as an outcome.

I would say the measure of success would have been continued adoption and further expansion of the program had there been causal findings. Alas, the experiment ended in 2018.

 

[Shepherd]

Conversely one could also look at Finland's experiment with universal basic income.

You can talk around it all day, and it was still a colossal failure.
The working class people in Finland may never recover from the "experiment".
Essentially, no one got a job, they just sat back and collected the money. Which made them happy. The country almost went bankrupt, and working people are taxed more to make up the deficit.
The supporters are saying you can't use the data collected to define a win or a lose because we say so.
If I missed anything important, let me know.

 

[Half Fast]

Maybe we could first try it on a smaller scale. Like limiting it to 10k or 20k instead of 40k. And instead of giving it to everyone, maybe we could just give to college students who borrowed money to get a degree that doesn’t earn them very much.

Let’s see how well that works before doing a handout to everybody.

 

[TCABM]

Basic income assumes money belongs to the government to distribute. Where you fall on that topic is probably a political discussion and should be avoided.

 

[O2 Birddog]

In cashless, I meant card based, not no money.

Hmm, you mean no more gold is entering the economy?

The point is, the current system disincentivizes working for the poor. They make $40K not working. They get a job making $40K, they lose their non-working pay, so they make the same, but have to work. Or worse, they get a $30K job and make less money by working.

$40K per year to most on this board is not going to change their lives much, when added to what they make. It would be nice. For some, it would be pocket change.

We've been completely off of the gold standard since the Nixon Era. More than a thousand tons of gold is mined every year, the fact it just keeps going up should tell you how much our dollar has been devalued over the same timeframe.

Many of us here are flying planes from forty to eighty years old that are trading in today's market at many times there original sale's price.

Both should tell you a lot about what has happened to the dollar over the last thirty years as the printing presses have run almost non stop.

The only thing propping our currency up today is that foreign countries still see it as the strongest major currency in the world. If they ever lose faith in the dollar we'll be six months or less away from people in cities eating their pets and burning their furniture to keep warm in the winter.

 

[O2 Birddog]

Basic income assumes money belongs to the government to distribute. Where you fall on that topic is probably a political discussion and should be avoided.

Inflation in the first year will equal whatever dollar amount "basic income" is determined to be.

 

[O2 Birddog]

Basic income is vastly easier to manage than 101 different programs to help with housing, food, and so on.
The only issue then becomes do you help people that blow their basic income or let them starve?

Be kind and give them a copy of the Sunday Classified Ads.

 

[O2 Birddog]

That’s what the kids are being told but the trades still exist and there are amazing opportunities for those that bother to look.

They absolutely do but breaking into them with no knowledge, experience or tools means you're going to mostly be a gopher for the first couple of years.

Get some job training beforehand and you accelerate through that curve.