I don't have to read any more of your posts. If you don't understand that cost of living differs from third world countries to Manhattan and San Francisco then your opinions are too ridiculous to listen to.

What part of

1) PPP

2) no single person that wants to live on UBI alone has to live in s. francisco or manhattan

Do you not understand?

An outright ban goes way beyond anything i'm arguing for - the cost to humans would be enormous. Mandating that commercial retailers chill the lobsters into a sleep like state before tossing them in seems like a tenable middle ground and even then i'm not sure whether lobsters are high enough of a life form to warrant any duty of care.

The fact that some governments overreach doesn't prove it's an endless slippery slope to making it illegal to step on ants any more than inhumane treatment of animals leads you on a slippery slope towards ethnic cleansing.

You're just the other side of the coin of the people who're calling you a nazi.

How would UBI work exactly? Is it paid to children/teens too, or only adults? How much money should be paid per year? Is there still going to be universal healthcare? What are the tax rates to pay for this?

The fact that the slope has been run constantly in the same direction everywhere the left won the battle of ideas (which is like , almost everywhere) doesn't suggest a clear trend to you?

Details are important, but i think we have most of the big stuff worked out already (we = people who promote UBI).

So

1) yes universal healthcare would still be a thing
2) yes every single citizen will be an UBI recipient (see later though for household unit $amount correction), this includes bill gates, babies, everyone. See later for what is "citizen" in this definition.
3) Enough money to be over absolute poverty levels in a normal area of the country. See later for details
4) some additional gvmnt revenue will almost certainly be needed, but far less than what most people think, see later as for why.

Regarding recipients:

Minors will get an UBI, but the idea is that poverty levels aren't indipendent of household size. you are poorer with 10k income alone, than is a household of 3 people with 30k income. Because there are economies of scale (mostly about housing, but something also about transportation, food and so on). Preparing a dinner for 4 usually costs a little less than 4x a dinner for one.

So you will have a decreasing multiplier of UBI given household size. Like if ubi is 10k per year, then it's 17-18 for 2, 22-23 for 3, the exact details depend on econometrics.

One of the most contentious parts of implementing an UBI (at least in europe) is about when/if to give it to immigrants. Some political decision has to be taken in order to decide when an immigrant gains access to UBI.

Regarding the UBI amount:

Absolute poverty is the parameter to fix. Definitions can vary slightly but it's about basic survival. And not in manhattan but in "middle america". Definition of the area can change (can be median , or bottom 60% or bottom 75%), still that's the idea. You can go check definitions and numbers for absolute poverty in various areas to get a feeling of the amount.

Regarding how much money the gvmnt needs:

Total UBI expense will be enormous BUT for many (most?) households it will be a wash through increased taxation. But that's not extra taxation.

Ubi will concur to income and we will start taxing the first eur or $ of income that goes on top of UBI. And ofc we will need to add imputed rent as income.

Like, if you have a house you live in, that's income, in the amount of market rent of that house, and you get taxed on that. But that's not extra taxes for most, as you get the ubi that payes for that tax.

Also you are removing all other forms of welfare except healthcare, to pay for the ubi. All those distorsive mean-tested benefit, with their bureaucracies, will be eliminated togheter with ubi implementation.

Remember that you need to check the net cost of UBI, not the gross useless number. Can't say "wait it's 300M people so we need X trillions in extra taxes where X is 300m * UBI amount", because those are offsetting amounts for most households.

So an household with 30k in income today, and a house they live in, will receive , say, 20k more from ubi and pay, say 15-18k "more taxes" but you haven't increased taxes for them.

If you think of an UBI as a negative tax it's even easier.

At the end most estimates are in the 2-3-4% of GDP ballpark, in extra taxes, for the USA, and can be revenue neutral in most of europe (in the "effective tax" sense)

Last time I checked the left has anarchists too. And regulations flow back and forth. Plenty of former European socialist democracies went from high regulation to welfare capitalism. New Zealand went from strong social democracy to a very pure form of state-governed market capitalism, and it was a transition done by a leftist government at the time.

So your historical comment is wrong.

As for lobsters: It has absolutely no effect on quality of the meat if you kill them right before you throw them in the water. It's merely a myth that stems from two things a) lobster meat spoils quickly, so they have to be live for transport b) ways to kill a lobster quickly are relatively new discoveries, so it didn't use to make much of a difference how you went about it. But these days, if you know what you're doing and you have a sharp knife you can end a lobster quickly.

So your gastronomical comment was also wrong.


Perhaps in the future, do some research and don't be ignorant. It's fine to disagree with some political direction, but to just assume whichever reality suits you in order to hold on to your ideals is just stupid.

It suggests that countries whose citizens enjoy a high quality of life are far more inclined to show consideration for animal suffering and in trying to do so will overstep to that end more often than ones that offer zero consideration.

If you value animal suffering though, choosing policies that value it at zero will even more reliably lead to an undesirable result. Because it’s not a bug that you occasionally miss the mark on - it’s an explicit goal of the policy.

Please elaborate on how to kill a lobster preserving flavour before boiling it.

Yes if you are very good with a knife you can spine it , which is messy, certainly far more painful for the lobster, and doesn't preserve flavour because you are opening the shell.

Point me to which countries in the world have less regulations than in 1910, otherwise admit that the trend is clearly , trasparently toward much more regulation than in the past.

Check regulations and taxes and tell me where they decreased since 1910.

They increased immensely in every country.

The point was merely that contrary to your claim, there are many instances of countries pulling back on regulations and this has indeed also happened under "leftist" governments.

Now you are shifting your goalpost completely to widely different claim. That argument is also horribly misguided. In 1910 the world had 1,5 billion people, most countries we now call industrialized were far from having fully developed roads, postal services, electric grids, urbanization was rarer, telecommunications was rare, aviation was in infancy, international relations was completely underdeveloped compared to today and so forth. Heck, the car was still trying to out-compete the horse. Indeed it's a subject you could write books on (and people have), but suffice to say that to point 110 years back in time and go "they had less regulation, therefore we have done something wrong" is just bad.

I mean, if Mongolia is your Utopia, then by all means feel free to dream. But it is a bad yardstick to use for Singapore.

I said "the slope has been running constantly in the same direction". The fact that sometimes some regulations in some areas have been, temporarily, rolled back to the recent past isn't a negation of a secular trend.

They had exceptionally far less regulation, therefore regulation-lovers (=the left) have won the battle of ideas. Completly, utterly destroyed its opponents.

Most rightwing parties nowadays still agree with more regulation than what was asked by the left 100 or 150 years ago. That's how farreaching left victory has been.

My "utopia" is closer to 1903 New York, New York, which wasn't unlivable hell. How did they manage to build skyscrapers in a fraction of the time it takes now, and to survive, without a federal income tax, we can only wonder...

But i mean NY, NY in 1903 was not urban, without electricty, without transportation, without roads, without hospitals, without telecommunication, without a stock market, without a postal service, right?

Point is that if life was not only bearable, but pretty good , in NY NY in 1903, then some doubts about the love for regulation should appear into people mind. And bear in mind that most things that improved since then depend on technology (which doesn't improve faster in the presence of tough regulation, actually it's the opposite). Some depends on politics, but not on regulation (women, minority rights).

You can't even fathom a decent place without leftist uber-regulations can you? but it was the norm in imperial london, in NY in 1900, in paris etc etc. A tiny amount of regulation when absolutely indispensable , and that's it.