Giving the poor $1M is the same as taxing the rich more heavily. The richest would just leave, and those with more modest wealth would be less happy, possibly leaving in the future. There have been countries that seized the assets of corporations and the wealthy, and redistributed them; this rarely worked out well.
> there is no doubt your purchasing power will increase
Why is there no doubt? Just because you having more money, you must have more PP? But if everyone* gets more money, it might not.
What you are doing is devaluing currency. Everyone invested in currency loses as their investment loses value. The rich have more "money" so it might seem this proportionally penalises the rich, but it doesn't - a person whose large wealth is invested in things that aren't dollars doesn't really lose a lot, the dollar-amount value of their investments just increases, which cancels out the effect of a lower-value dollar.
> Giving the poor $1M is the same as taxing the rich more heavily. The richest would just leave, and those with more modest wealth would be less happy, possibly leaving in the future. There have been countries that seized the assets of corporations and the wealthy, and redistributed them; this rarely worked out well.
This is a rather nop argument that can be made against any and all taxation. Giving everything to the rich and leaving the poor to starve has rarely worked out well either. It tends to lead to rather violent uprisings and riots. Those also tend to make countries less attractive places to live.
> Why is there no doubt? Just because you having more money, you must have more PP? But if everyone* gets more money, it might not.
My post was stating this from the perspective of poor people. UBI equalises purchasing power. If the amount of products produced remains the same, adding a constant amount of money to everyone's income will increase the purchasing power of the people in the bottom, and decrease it for those in the top.
It is obvious in extreme examples: if Bob makes 1000 per month, and Alice makes 99.000 per month, then Bob has 1% of the total PP, and Alice has 99%. If we then add 1 billion to both of their incomes, both Alice and Bob now have roughly 50% of the total purchasing power.
Only if you assume the wealthy have zero resistance to moving, and would leave for a country with lower taxes at any level of taxation. You're essentially saying nothing can be described as expensive without the same complaint being valid against anything not free.
> It is obvious in extreme examples
That extreme example only applies it to 2 people. Applied to all Americans, and the dollar becomes worth less.
Your PP equalisation has the exact same effect of heavy taxation, although it feels more like revolutionary redistribution. Whatever you feel about that, it's still short of redistributing PP because it only applies to currency, and not other investments.
>Giving everything to the rich and leaving the poor to starve has rarely worked out well either.
Not taxing the rich does not equate to "giving everything to the rich and leaving the poor to starve".
Almost all the decline in poverty over the last 30 years was due to economic development which, according to economists who study development, was massively facilitated by the spread of market institutions like property rights
The solution to poverty isn't for government to take money from the productive and give it to the poor. The actual solution is to increase employment options and the earning power of the poor. Socialist ideologues need to look at the empirical evidence, and the economic literature, and learn that the welfare state works against the solution to poverty. The profit-motivated investment that emerges when people's right to their private property is protected, is the solution to poverty.
This isn't correct. The figures are not founded in reality.
“Over the past decade, the UN, world leaders and pundits have promoted a self-congratulatory message of impending victory over poverty, but almost all of these accounts rely on the World Bank’s international poverty line, which is utterly unfit for the purpose of tracking such progress,”
>>This isn't correct. The figures are not founded in reality.
I don't have time to look at this link right now, but it's a broad set of metrics that have dramatically improved over the last 30 years, including nutrition, infant mortality, wages, percentage of people with running water, percentage of people with permanent dwellings, etc.
This rejection of the established Economics is no less superstitious/anti-scientific than the rejection of the established findings of epidemiologists on the efficacy of vaccine. It has the same layman's fallacies, and conspiracy theories about the scientific discipline bringing out these findings.
"Philip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, upon the release of his final report, which will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council tomorrow by his successor, Olivier De Schutter."
Affiliation with the UN doesn't make someone credible. There were UN human rights officials claiming the George Floyd killing was an indication of widespread "racial violence" in the US, a claim for which zero evidence exists. There is absolutely no evidence that even Floyd's killing was motivated by anti-black bias.
Alston's statement doesn't provide any substantive criticism of the statistics. He points out that the cutoff for extreme poverty used by the UN is extremely low, as if that is in itself a moral failing.
The point of any poverty line is to measure progress, not to imply that the line is a sufficient standard of living.
Alston also points out that the number living with a wage below $5.50 a day has declined very little since 1990, which omits how much smaller this cohort's share of the global population is today than it was in 1990, due to population growth that has occurred since then.
> there is no doubt your purchasing power will increase
Why is there no doubt? Just because you having more money, you must have more PP? But if everyone* gets more money, it might not.
What you are doing is devaluing currency. Everyone invested in currency loses as their investment loses value. The rich have more "money" so it might seem this proportionally penalises the rich, but it doesn't - a person whose large wealth is invested in things that aren't dollars doesn't really lose a lot, the dollar-amount value of their investments just increases, which cancels out the effect of a lower-value dollar.