Basic Income sounds nice all around.
If it was enacted in the United States (where I live), do you think it would work?
The United States is already in heavy debt (as the whole world knows) and i feel like the money would have to come from somewhere.
Taxing the rich would be difficult, they are already fucked up the U.S. economy, and they'd shoot down any law or program that would cost them any pocket change.
While middle class, people in their mid to late twenties (like me), have bachelor degrees working multiple retail jobs with high school kids and still having trouble paying bills and feeding themselves.
When I go on job interviews for full time work, even though I'm a graduate, they refuse to hire me because I lack work related experience.
I'd be thankful to hear your take or opinion on this.
Anyway,
The argument your trying to make is clear and concise and full of convincing facts and real-life situations.
This video is a good length without being too long.
The character designs are simple but are appropriate.
It might surprise you to learn that the US came very close to passing a basic income in the 60s. Nixon was actually strongly in favor of eliminating poverty until he encountered political resistance within his administration.
Loved the animation, and the examples used were constructed well. I think the audio could have used some fine-tuning though as it sounded a little rough and quiet.
And where is all that money going to come from? Taxing the people who have jobs, right? That would basically be making charity mandatory and shifting the stress from those who don't work to those who do. Resources are limited, and for one person to have more, someone else must have less. A LOT less, if you're talking about feeding/clothing/supporting every homeless. You can't just pull money from the air and give it to the poor. The problem, at heart, is that there are far too many people. Resources are scarce as it is, and the need for employed individuals is getting smaller. A campaign to educate people on the problems of overpopulation and to GREATLY reduce the rate of procreation is the only thing that will provide any kind of relief to the species.
(While the politics of this video is beyond sophomoric, I'm under the assumption that we're meant to rate based on the quality of the animation and video itself, which is why I'm giving 4 stars. It was very well done and professionally executed, even if it did lack a lot of spice and character.)
You don't have to tax working people to finance this. Just tax capital. Taxes on the rich are now half of what they were in the 40s. We have income inequality at the same levels as just before the Great Depression.
Homeless people cost cities a lot of money. A few cities have started just giving them homes, and it saves taxpayers money because all of the associated costs with homelessness go away.
Studies also show that when people have money and security, people tend to get educated and birth rates drop.
Doctors are not gonna be replaced. Lawyers are not gonna be replaced. Writers are not gonna be replaced. And neither are animators gonna be replaced. The reason is, that no matter how good your machine, your machine learning algorithm, your vector machines, your evolutionary programming or your whatever is: When it comes down to creative input (even in the most abstract form, as it is the case with lawyers) a machine will always be limited by its programming. Of course it can outdo people in a lot of ways, but machines always have to comply with certain models of functionality, which limits their behaviour. Which is not just a technological limitation but a necessity for the deterministic completion of work.
Now as a supplementary tool, machine learning is going to help these creative jobs. But that's it. As for the purely mechanical jobs - yes, there will be less of those in the future. But this is - and that is unfortunately the entire explanation - how progress goes down. And has been going down throughout the entirety of history. Electric lights made the candlemaker obsolete. And the automobile the horseshoer.
Now believing that the - admittedly large scale - automatization of jobs is a proper premise to argue for the additional taxation of the general public - in order to pay for those who lost their jobs - is a fallacy. As is arguing that you are just taking jobs out of the market via digitalization.
With the electric lights came the elictrician. With the automobile the mechanic. And it doesn't look much different in the digitalization age. With the medical recommender system comes the medical data researcher. With the self-driving car the office for regular software checks and updates.
And so on, and so on.
You can argue for programs that help people who lost their jobs to get into a new field. Hold that under my nose and I'll sign it. But as a premise for extra taxation/basic unconditional income? No.
I've actually seen a similar concept in action over here. I've held conversations with people who received this sort of income. As for the studies you quoted: Not the totally poor are the problem. Those guys are always happy to improve their situation and the results of those studies are no surprise to me at all.
The problem is the guy that's like "You know what? I worked enough for the last 3 years. Time to take a year off. I get 900 bucks a month. With what I've saved that's enough." I've in fact known a guy like this in person, who did exactly that with unemployment allowance. He drove a dodge. In europe those are expensive cars. And then the taxpayer pays for that? Without any condition?
That's not justice in my eyes. That's not even feasible.
Fancy animation though.
P.S.: Funny sidenote: The guy with the dodge actually migrated to canada.
I appreciate the response, and I will try to explain more where I'm coming from.
The automation I see coming for the 'creative' jobs doesn't need to completely eliminate professions to cause a problem, just reduce the number of people required. As a Netflix animator, I've watched as the software we use gets better to the point of doing many things for us. My job used to be done by about six people, so a smaller workforce is required. I can imagine a day when software automatically poses character rigs to storyboards, and then uses machine learning to generate keyframes. Then animators would just check that they look okay, adding details where necessary, and hitting a button to build extremes and then inbetweens. The inbetween stage, which smooths out the animation, is almost entirely automated now.
Lawyers will still be around, but they'll need far fewer people to do all the research. Doctors can double check a machine-generated diagnosis and so see more people. Writers have already been replaced in generating business and sports articles. There will always be writers doing more creative things, but the more formulaic stuff will be computer-generated.
It should be a great that we can do more. (Newgrounds is certainly a better place for it.) My view is that those gains should benefit society, instead of just whoever happens to own the machines doing the work. There was a break between productivity and wages in the 1970s. I think we're all overdue for a raise... even the people that have been put out of a job.
Jobs are of course being created by technology, but an order of magnitude more are being taken away. I don't see how retraining is going to fix the problem. Maybe those displaced can be retrained to find something new, but it's the speed of change that will cause a lot of damage. Maybe you've seen how few people Netflix employs, and how many jobs were done away with when Blockbuster disappeared.
I'm guessing you live in the States. You might look at the low unemployment rate and think things are fine, but it's only the service sector expanding. This means that all other jobs are shrinking and people are forced to do more fast food jobs or things like driving for Uber. Automation tends to go for the highest paying jobs first... it's why there are giant robots in car manufacturing, while low-paid Chinese workers still put together our phones. As machines become cheaper than people, a lot of people are going to suffer.
In your view, and a lot of others, there is a nobility to work that enables us to become deserving members of society. If one does not work, they are freeloaders and deserve nothing, etc, like the person with the truck you mention. This puritan work ethic runs into problems once there aren't enough jobs for everyone. So the response is usually denial and saying that there will always be jobs, you can create your own job, etc. I found it interesting to read accounts from the Great Depression about how conservatives with such views came to accept government handouts as 'just the way things are now,' once they found they weren't able to get work.
I think that we have certain axioms about work and justice that we form in our teens, which lead to our overall political view. These things are deeply rooted and almost impossible to change. Whatever evidence we see in the rest of our lives, we tend to pick and choose to fit our worldview. It takes a long-term, conscious effort in order to expand our ideologies.
So maybe nothing I can say will change your view. But I hope you can keep an open mind and try to see where others are coming from.
