Basic Income Penguicon 2020 Transcript

May. 3rd, 2020 10:36 am
nemorathwald: (2017)
[personal profile] nemorathwald

Teleconference Transcript Of "Basic Income And Human Obsolescence"
Virtual Penguicon
Saturday, April 25
11am to 12pm

[This transcript is edited to remove requests for the audience to mute their microphones and dealing with technical issues.]

Supply And Demand

The Middle Class

Q&A

Matt Arnold:

All right, so the session is recording. My name is Matt Arnold, and I've got an outline I'd like to present to you today for the talk about Basic Income, human obsolescence, and the collapse of supply side economics. That's going to be the basic framework with which I hope to present to you the argument, for why Basic Income is needed, why it is that it economically works, and why it needs to start as soon as possible. Ideally, constructing this point A to point Z narrative for that to explain it to you. And with that would have the ability to describe and explain this in lay terms to those who are around you.

And the goal of what you're about to hear (cards on the table) is a call to action for each of you to support Basic Income today.

We've heard a lot about Basic Income in the presidential Democratic primaries which changed the whole tone of my talk from what it was going to be, now that the pandemic has struck. And we've actually initiated a cash transfer that went out to so many people. All of a sudden, it seems as if you can't walk 10 steps without tripping over an editorial about it. It appears that where we are in our pace in history is accelerated by about 10 years from what I had projected when I began writing this talk. If I may borrow from that phrase which was attributed to Gandhi. "First they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they fight you, then you win." It seems as if all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we've launched into the "then they fight you" phase. I've recognized that almost everything I wrote about this is going to now be contextualized in everybody's mind as, "wait a minute, Matt, aren't you talking about coronavirus?" Well, this was not written for that, but I will try to adapt as as best I can.

1. Supply And Demand: Demand is limited by having insufficient money to spend.

Okay, so let's talk about supply and demand. Demand is not caused by supply. Demand is limited by having insufficient money to spend. So, having less money to spend- just as a foundation: "your customers having less money to spend", and "there is less demand" end up in more or less the same place functionally speaking.

2. Supply And Demand: We have practically perfected the process of creating supply.

So, automation and supply. I want you to try to think about automation and supply as practically being the same thing. You saw that the title was Basic Income and Human Obsolescence. When we say we've practically, in the modern era, almost perfected the process of creating supply, we mean more and more of what it is that we needed human labor for is now being automated. And that process is only accelerating right now. So a lot of people have woken up to the idea that pretty soon, not only do we not need- we already hardly needed a lot of people, for human warfighters. And now we hardly need human beings for laborers. And that's only accelerating. It looks like probably 20 years from now, what on earth is there that you're going to be able to do that a system couldn't do better?

3. Supply And Demand: Wealth inequality supercharges supply because capital investments are in automation

Automation is in the process of polishing off the rest of what we have not already perfected in the process of creating supply relative to demand. What we don't have is demand. Supply is outpacing demand. So wealth inequality supercharges supply. Because capital investments are in automating things even more. Okay, so there's a lot of profit and wealth inequality overwhelmingly the businesses owns the robots. And then, shall we say owns the robots and then create even more robots. So, the more we get wealth inequality, the more you have automation, which increases the effectiveness of the supply side relative to demand even more.

4. Supply And Demand: Wealth inequality diminishes demand. (part 1)

And even if there were not a problem with automation oversupplying the economy in relation to the demand, wealth inequality diminishes demand. I'm going to show you this idea of what I'm talking about here. Here's a really, really good video. I'm not going to go through this whole video but wealth inequality in America really shows you where all of the money currently is. So here's all this work that you're doing, and we need to encourage people to do work alright so then you need to be rewarded right you need to be rewarded for your work in order for you as a laborer to continue to provide that work there has to be some reason for you to do it. Right? So there is this idea that you're going to be rewarded for having done the work, but clearly, you're not being rewarded for for doing the work right now.

Describing Wealth Inequality

So you say hey where's this wealth inequality? Well this is what people (and I showed this in my talk last year as well) here's what people think, if you ask them is mostly the ideal amount of wealth inequality. But then if you say in a survey where do you imagine that wealth distribution actually is, is around here. Now where actual distribution is, is actually like this, where- I mean look at that. You can't even fit it on the screen, or you won't even be able to see these columns on the left. And so if we snip it like this, you then stack that, and then you take just that last column in the row. You snip 10 equal segments off of it and you stack it over there. That's where all of the money currently is.

With a brief aside to just say if somebody says "Hey, we don't have enough money to fund Basic Income." Well, there's all kinds of additional ways to just flat out tax the rich. Just an absolute- for example, you could do a lot of things. You could do an absolute wealth tax. If you own wealth above such and such amount of money, like $1 billion dollars, then we're just going to start taxing it at almost confiscatory rates because we need to actually feed people. Here we have a level of unemployment currently that rivals the Great Depression. And we know exactly where the money is to feed them.

When people do labor- Here you see a scenario where, let's say there was a spectacular amount of employment in the United States. The unemployment level was great. Everybody was employed, alright? So they were together contributing to make all of our gross national product. But that gross national product ended up here over here on the right. You can't tell me that this is the accurate amount of wealth that these people on the left and in the middle actually generated. They're not being rewarded for the work that they did. So my concern is the same concern that I have with Soviet communism. Soviet communism collapsed, because it didn't reward people for their labor. There was no reason for them to do a better job because they weren't going to make more money. But here we have the same problem. You can work 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, you've worked two jobs you've worked three jobs, and you're still constantly at risk, and what the fuck is the point. What's the point? Why?

And so then all of a sudden the incentive structure breaks down. So one of the arguments- not the only one but one argument for Basic Income is, once people have a solid floor under them, then they know that any other additional work that they do is going towards whatever additional things they want in life other than the basic necessities.

Defining Basic Income

I realized I didn't cover- for those who might not know- the idea behind Basic Income, in a nutshell. And Andrew Yang in his presidential democratic campaign spelled this out for people over and over, but for those who don't know, I'll tell you it is an unconditional cash transfer. So you would have a cash transfer, let's say for example, if the Federal Reserve or the IRS or somebody just set up every single person gets a bank account period, you get a bank account. We will deposit your tax refund into it oh but also, you just get a dividend. It's just a flat amount. Andrew Yang set it at $1,000 a month for every person.

You just get it unconditionally. You can be Donald Trump. You'd still get it. You could be Jeff Bezos who owns a trillion dollars and you'd still get it. Nobody actually spends a expensive- nobody actually pays a bureaucratic structure to find out whether you need it. You don't have to get paid to do all this complicated expensive measurement of whether or not people need it, and only then give it to them. So if somebody is making so much money that they really don't need it, they're getting taxed under such a plan at a high enough rate that is really a net negative for them anyway. But the simplicity of the system is that the amount is equal for 100% of everybody.

It also doesn't try to detect whether you deserve it. So nobody cares whether you deserve it, because it would actually cost us so much money doing testing, to find out whether or not you deserve it and whether or not you need it, that we could save massive amounts of money, just flat out not caring about any of that, and saying you always get this amount. It's this amount. It doesn't matter who you are, you just get it.

Now in Alaska they have something a little bit similar. It's called the Alaskan permanent fund. All of the oil wealth has a certain percentage, which is then distributed to all Alaskans annually. It's a dividend, so the state has made a bunch of money, and because of this they're gonna pay it back as a dividend to everybody who lives there. And it's a similar concept.

Now that one actually is pegged where the amount that you get is based on oil revenue. Whereas this could be pegged on a variety of things. A Basic Income could be pegged on, let's say, whatever GDP is. That's one thing you could say. The consumer price index is something that you could peg Basic Income to. You could also peg it to whatever is determined to be the poverty line. Frankly the poverty line is often determined by the consumer price index anyway.

4. Supply And Demand: Wealth inequality diminishes demand. (part 2)

But going back to the talk, so wealth inequality diminishes demand because nobody's getting paid wages and in supply and demand- wealth inequality diminishes demand because of wage suppression. So like I said, on that chart, clearly people are doing a lot more work than they're actually getting paid for. Their wage is radically too low, like ridiculously too low, they're not being rewarded. And so they don't have as much money to spend, going back to this point, they don't have as much money to spend. Demand is limited by having insufficient money to spend. Like I would love to go out and get two toothbrushes, but I'm just going to use my existing toothbrush, even though it's kind of out of date, I'm going to replace my toothbrush less often. All right, well I just hurt the toothbrush company. The toothbrush company's success as part of our economic engine relies on people having enough money so they're not constantly postponing replacing their toothbrush, because they don't have enough money. If you only have this much money to spend it caps your demand artificially. So that's why I say wealth inequality diminishes demand.

5. Supply And Demand: As a result, markets no longer serve their function.

Now as a result of wealth inequality: supercharging automation- so we don't actually need to give you back your job after coronavirus. You're just gone forever because we just automated your job while you were gone. Yeah, those are not coming back. Let's just be super clear. Those jobs are not coming back. Markets no longer serve that function. So we automated your job away. So we don't need to pay you anything. You're not buying goods and services. And so, companies are collapsing because they needed you to actually go out and buy their toothbrush. Right? My brother in law's pizzeria collapsed. Not enough people had money to go out and buy pizzas.

So the economy collapses as businesses are failing all over the place. Now they're laying people off. You get into a negative spiral-- that we're already in. We've been in it for a while. Markets are no longer serving the function that markets serve, as an informational gathering tool. We need them to correct the prices of labor, the prices of goods, the prices of services to reflect their actual value. But the market is supposed to be individual consumers, making their spending choices. That no longer judges the competitiveness of goods and services to meet consumer desires. What they're supposed to measure is "how much is this matching consumer desire." This company made it way better so I'm gonna vote with my dollars, I'm gonna vote with my wallet, I vote for that company, they match my desires better, so I'm going to get that. Right? That's how the idea of competitiveness is supposed to work. That's exactly how it's supposed to work. That's why we need markets. You set the price- because they have to make sure that they compete, and they make sure that they set their price correctly, otherwise you're gonna vote with your dollars.

6. Supply And Demand: Such failing markets have a distorting rather than correcting effect on setting  the values for goods, services, and labor.

If you barely have any dollars, it's tough for you to do that anymore. So as a consumer, the choices of which goods and services to buy are forced by a variety of different factors. Like all the small businesses went out of business and now, if there's almost nobody except for, let's say, Amazon, almost nobody except for Amazon, it's like you're voting in an election where there's only one candidate.

And also, you are struggling in scarcity. Now all sudden you've been plunged into scarcity and your choices are extremely constrained. To say that you're making consumer choices is like the equivalent of somebody coming up and saying, "Hey, I'm robbing you at gunpoint on the street, I'm just mugging you, give me your money, your money or your life," and you're like, "oh I think I'll make a rational choice as a consumer, hmm, I'm weighing the value of my life, I'm weighing the value of this money." Are you really? You're not.

You have to have health care, all your money went to that. You have to have health care to stay alive. You don't have choices functionally. You desperately need to hold down whatever job you can. If you managed to get one, and hardly pays you anything and you need to get there, you need to figure out whatever you are forced to do to get there in transportation choices. On the way, you just have to grab something from fast food restaurant. Don't tell me that in that kind of state that you somehow have the mental and emotional and physical energy with which you can make breakfast every morning. That's obvious bullshit. If you've ever lived through that- which I have- you're gonna grab whatever you can, as fast food or a 711 or whatever you can grab. Your choices are this, or nothing.

Markets are no longer serving their function. We needed all of the consumers to act as this vast worldwide computer that tells us what the price needs to be because they're making that choice. But they're not making choices anymore. They don't have a choice. It's like an election that has only one candidate.

So, what we need is to give everybody a choice by saying here's the floor of how much money you have under you, always. You always get this many dollar-votes. Dollars are votes. You always get this many votes, always. So now you have a little bit of freedom, a little bit of flexibility, a little bit of breathing room to come up for air in the constant struggle against- daily struggling against destitution. Now you can start making choices based on whether or not it actually works for you, instead of choices based on, can I even survive and avoid dying of pneumonia in a cardboard box under a bridge. If every moment you're thinking how do I make my choice in this moment to avoid dying of pneumonia under a bridge, you're not participating in making real choices about your preferences. So the market as a tool of figuring out "okay what are people's preferences and which companies are best serve in those preferences with their goods and services" is gone out the window. You don't even have to give anybody something better than your competitors. You just have to keep them from starving and their families starving today. So with Basic Income, we can go back, so that consumers and employees are once again making voluntary choices again.

Employees! I didn't mention that either! You are supposed to be ideally choosing the employer you want to work for. You're not anymore. It's this call center or nothing. It's this prostitution, or nothing. You suck this guy's dick in the back of his Chevy at 1am in a park or nothing. That's the economy we live in today, even though many of us have sufficient advantages that we simply don't see that park at one in the morning because we're not there to see that Chevy. But that's where people are. That's America right now. That's not voluntary choice.

So we want the economy to successfully function. In order for the economy to successfully function, it has to function for maximizing how we satisfy consumer preferences. It's not happening at all. Now if we say, Okay, everybody has UBI, you always get X amount of money every single month, all of a sudden they can start making voluntary choices again that are in fact actually voluntary.

You Can't Convince Everyone And Don't Need To.

I hope that this is making sense. I know that I'm certainly not going to convince everyone, and it's not entirely possible to convince everybody, and that's fine. But this idea that emerged during the late 20th century, that the solution is to just increase automation and increase the supply side and that will improve- then demand will just expand to catch up with it has failed for 40 years. It's overwhelmingly failed for 40 years, it's already started to catastrophically fail. The breakdown is occurring all around us. I mean, COVID-19 has just accelerated that. So, those who can be convinced will be convinced. And you know what? We don't necessarily need to convince everybody. We didn't convince everybody that we needed to abolish slavery and that still ended up working out okay.

7. The Middle Class: A strong middle class strengthens the economy.

So, I want to talk about the middle class. There is this idea that the middle class strengthens the economy. Do you ever think about why that is? It's true, it does strengthen the economy. Why? Why does it strengthen the economy? Let's look at this chart again.

So, my brother in law's pizzeria cannot have Jeff Bezos call him up and say "I would like 1 trillion pizzas. I'm a trillionaire, I would like 1 trillion pizzas, please."" Jeff Bezos actually does not need to eat 1 trillion pizzas. And if he's making the decisions about, let's say "I'm gonna- my employees can't actually afford to eat, so I'm just going to feed them in the warehouse," he's not going to satisfy their preferences about what they would like to eat, you know? So, my brother in law Gary's pizzeria collapses.

Nick Hanauer makes this point a lot. Nick Hanauer. I strongly recommend that you look up the things that he's been saying. He's very wealthy, and he's going around advocating for this. He uses the metaphor of pants. He says "I only buy so many pairs of pants. We need lots of companies to provide lots of pants, and then they sell those pants to all the people on this graph. All of them! Because all the people on this graph need to buy a few pairs of pants each. I, as a rich guy," Nick Hanauer says, "I don't buy 10 million! I have $10 million dollars. I don't buy 10 million pairs of pants," or a billion, or however much he has. "I don't buy that many pairs of pants."

8. The Middle Class: The reason it does so, is that it drives consumer spending on goods and services.

But because I can support pants companies, we all can, if we have a strong middle class, that's a huge number of people who are at least not in poverty and they have a little bit of wiggle room beyond the desperation of trying to avoid dying of pneumonia in a cardboard box under a bridge. So now they go out and they buy pants, the pants companies succeed, lots of pants companies succeed and they hire people, you get into this virtuous cycle, they hire people, they pay them wages that people can buy more pants or pizza or toothbrushes, whatever it is.

9. The Middle Class: An economy cannot be strong if consumer spending on goods and services is weak.

There is no way you run an entire economy making yachts, or run an entire economy, making bunkers, in which the ultra rich can install machine guns to just machine gun the rest of us when we come swarming there, saying our children are starving.

I'm sorry to speak of it in so much emotional terms. It's really a very rational argument but I don't know how to deny the reality of what faces us in terms of people's real incentives and their motivations, every single day, all over our country. When you realize how many people are simply in a state of desperation, I think you should be as scared as I am. I mean it seems like a pretty good cause to be scared. And I want to live in a world where everybody around me is at least minimally okay. I think we all benefit from that. If we live in a world where everybody is at least minimally okay so they're not panicky. Because panicky people scare me a lot, and I hope panicky people scare you. So we want to make people at least minimally okay. If we can't do that, then we're actually failing for the same reason Soviet Russia failed: because they could not provide for people and there was no incentive to work. And there's increasingly no incentive to work here either, if we don't even need your labor. Then we, you're like what you might call a "surplus". You're just a surplus person. So there is this idea out there that surplus people, once we don't actually need them in the workforce, well the cheapest thing to do is a 10 cent bullet to the back of their head. This is starting to get, I think, genuinely scary, even for people who do not have a proclivity toward panic.

So, the middle class drives consumer spending on goods and services. We need it for the machine to function. This is not a bleeding heart argument. The economy is a machine that needs to rationally function, and the math isn't working out, is what I'm saying.

There is no drive for consumer spending on goods and services, and there's no real- there's very little labor competition. Most people can't even choose anymore where they work. And so the employers don't really have an incentive to actually treat them any better than the other businesses who could hire those employees away from them. So now that's a negative spiral that then depresses wages and it goes down and down and down until the employers will flat out don't need most of us to even be breathing anymore. There's no real incentive there anymore. So, an economy can't be strongest consumer spending on goods and services is weak so I don't know, I don't know how somebody is going to explain to me how consumers spending on goods and services gonna get weaker and weaker and weaker and the successful businesses are mostly the ones that build yachts or other goods that quadrillionaires need. Where does that go? Where do you see that ending, if we don't just say "we're kickstarting this by giving everybody a certain amount of money"?

So this is the this is the basic argument for why it is that the time has already come for Basic Income. Let me show you another part of this real quick. When you don't snip off that final column of the graph, you don't snip it and stack it there, this is what we're talking about. That 1% that's where all the money is. You made it, I made it.

Now I'm not saying this as a bleeding heart plea for sympathy. It's just this is the collapse of the system because it's not feeding money back into itself through wages. You can't tell me, "but capital, that in investing in becoming a stockholder in a company, is where the money all gets fed back into the system." Who is America then? I thought I was America. I thought you were. And you are never gonna meet in your entire life anybody in that right hand column, because that's only a tiny number of people, and they are somewhere in the Hamptons in a country club where there's going to be bouncers. They're not gonna let you in there, you're never going to meet them. That's where all the money is. They didn't earn it. We don't need to further incentivize them. From the perspective of how to set up a rational system of incentives, we definitely do not need to figure out how to get them to contribute more labor by incentivizing them with more rewards. So the whole incentive system is breaking down. 

Q&A: UBI Cost And Offsets

All right. So these were the main points that I wanted to make. I appreciate everybody's patience with the technical difficulties and the slow start but we got off to at first. And I want there to be a opportunity for us to be able to have a group discussion after this. And I'm happy to also continue this discussion on penguicon.social under hashtags, that we can set up on that, our Penguicon mastodon instance. So, if anyone would like to conclude with any questions that you have, please go ahead and click the button in the left hand of your lower left of your screen, which has this little hand button.

Alright, so I see we have a question from- a comment from Gib about Berkeley economists Hilary Hoins and Jesse Rothstein estimated a cost around $3 trillion. For a point of reference the Defense Department asked Congress for 705.4 billion for its 2021 budget. We 100% can afford to increase our budget by $3 trillion. We have $3 trillion, we know exactly where it is. You tax it. And then we decide that we are just going to mandate the ability to not die of pneumonia in a cardboard box under a bridge. The money is 100% there. We have the ability to decide to tax it.

And this also vastly increases revenue. So this is something that is "offset." We talk a lot about offsets in discussions of Universal Basic Income. It's offset by people actually going out and becoming far more economically productive than they were before. It's the ultimate stimulus package, and it is exactly where it is that the stimulus needs to go to improve the economy. Our gross domestic product will skyrocket far past the suppression, that it's experiencing today. Now keep in mind that when you think of how do we need to harness the incredible economic productive potential of all these people in America, more than 320 million people, currently, just going to waste. Doing something that does not use their skills at all, and they're not in that position because they're untalented or lazy. They're in that position because somebody else gets to tell them "hey it doesn't matter whether you could be doing all these incredibly productive things. No, instead we're going to have you work in a call center, or whatever it is that we've just decided you're going to do, we're just going to use your hands in an Amazon shipping warehouse, it's all we're gonna do." That act of taking that away, so that people can actually contribute what it is that they want, they can say "hey I have the ability to live a basic subsistence of kind of a monk like existence, so I can sacrifice to teach myself these skills that I am entirely smart enough to teach myself." And then they start a small business, and they improve their communities' economic output and they themselves economically flourish. So that's where the money would come from for that $3 trillion, that we can easily afford. We already can afford it just by taxing that right hand column of the graph. And then we will unleash an overwhelmingly massive amount of offsets. So now we're finally increasing our revenue to where our revenue really needed to be all along, in which case 3 trillion is nothing.

Now, another form of offsets, and this is something that concerns a lot of people --I do see Kevin is raising his hand-- I see Joy's raising their hand-- I appreciate that. I will get to you-- Another form of offsets is in the ability to for people to not need to rely on social services, anywhere near as much. Now, there will be a great deal of controversy on whether to use Basic Income to then cut Social Services and there's tremendous controversy around that. I know from the people in my life who take advantage of social services that a Basic Income would not substitute for that. They need both. And as people become more healthy, as they become more mentally healthy, as they become more self reliant because of Basic Income, over time they will reduce their reliance on social services, and that is an offset for that $3 trillion that it will cost to provide Basic Income. And it is an overwhelmingly more economically efficient way to provide for them and get them to a place where they're productive and not reliant on social services anymore.

Q & A: The Circular Flow Model

Kevin you raised your hand. You were gonna go before. Sorry Joy, I'm gonna have to call on you next. But go ahead and see if we can hear your audio.

Kevin O'Brien:

I'll just make it fast. I'm an economist, I'm trained at the University of Michigan-- taught economics for a number of years-- and one of the things that I always taught my students was something called the circular flow model. And this is basically a way of talking about how money circulates through the economy. Businesses hire employees to make products, employees take the money they earn and buy products. And at the end of the day, the size of the economy is the point where those two things balance.

Well, if you have massive technological unemployment, where's that balance point going to be? Those companies are not going to continue making the kind of money they've been making if they don't have customers. And so then the question is, how do we deal with that? And I think there's really only two possible solutions. One of them is UBI which I think is the most likely. But as Nick Hanauer has pointed out, there's always the guillotine.

Q&A: How To Convince Others. "Tiger King People", The Public Image of Capital-P "People"

Matt Arnold:

Thanks very much, Kevin. All right, "automatedjoy", you've been waiting so long. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Chris:

Hi, I'm Chris, and that's Joy. I like the idea, and I thought we got this one time thing with coronavirus which introduced the idea to a few other people, and I think well, what's a good next step? What's a good way of convincing others? You've said, yeah, you could increase income taxes or change around wealth distribution by taking that or perhaps not spending so much on the military. It's easy to get the money. Well what I'm wondering, of how to make it happen, is, how do you convince enough people that we should do this? Because I'd really like it. I like the idea and the fact that I'm working and getting paid pretty well for now, I still like the idea of Basic Income. Because there have been times that I've been out of work, and you collect unemployment and you get by, and I think, well, if I didn't have to jump through those hoops, then, yeah, just knowing it's always there would be great. So, um, yeah, my question is, how do we convince enough people to make this happen?

Matt Arnold:

I wonder if the CARES act is just a stepping stone, in that it's amazing how it seems to be- there is a there is a point just like there was with- Let's use another issue. Gay marriage seemed impossible until suddenly it wasn't. And you gradually had a lot of people in their personal lives getting used to it and seeing it and saying oh! No, it's fine. And that actually over decades eventually was what convinced most people. And now all of a sudden, you got COVID-19 CARES act, mo- a lot of people- I did- got $1,250 suddenly appear. And yet, and yet! Your brother, who you were sure would go out and spend it on drugs... Wait a minute. Your brother actually went out and spend it on strengthening himself and actually making himself more constructive and mentally healthy and productive. And the more that happens and you see that happen, the more we will get past this block. If you ask most people as the studies have currently shown that if you ask most people "What do you think you would do with Universal Basic Income?" and they list all these wonderful things. "I'm going to educate myself, I'm going to start a small business, I'm going to be able to get that exercise bike and get healthy." Theyll list all these self constructive things. Responsible things. "What do you think other people will do?" the same poll asked. And everybody was convinced that everybody other than themselves was going to spend it on alcohol and booze and drugs. Even though everybody said that they were going to spend it on responsible things. Which is in fact what we see happen in Kenya, in places in Canada, in Stockton, California, where the payments are already- Universal Basic Income payments from Stockton are already going out right now. All of a sudden as people see whoa, wait a minute, they didn't go out and just squander this stuff. They actually made their lives stronger and better, and that fed into the economy and makes the economy stronger, which then formed a virtuous cycle. As people get used to this, it's gonna happen. That's what's gonna bring it about.

And I think the CARES act stimulus was just the first step toward that. As we see places in Scandinavia and now, Spain is talking about it. It's on everybody's lips. And it's starting to be practiced, not just at federal levels, but at at state or province levels, and at city levels. Chicago is talking about it a lot. They're going to start a program. So once you see little examples of this, people start to get used to it and they no longer believe these myths that everybody else other than them is terribly irresponsible.

There will always be a few highly... let's say, "Tiger King people." There are almost no Tiger King people. Do you know what I mean? We feel like everybody is the... this Netflix series "The Tiger King" shows someone spectacularly unwise, irresponsible, and just not somebody you want to be around, and we get this idea that that quote-unquote "People." We use the word "People." "Oh, People are terrible, People are terrible." No! Only the attention getting outliers are terrible. So the Tiger King is very very attention getting, loves to do lots of spectacle with his tigers and with his drugs and with all the other things, he loves to offend. He loves to get a lot of attention for being terrible. And so everybody in the world looks at that and thinks, "Oh, that must be People. Not me, of course, but that must be People." Not true. Most people are actually fine. But most people don't make the media. So once you get people in your life who have received the $1,250 from CARES and they did not immediately go out and spend it on a drug and alcohol binge, now you're used to it. Now your idea of "What is People? What are People like?", it's no longer driven by the sensationalist media of showing you the absolute worst and most outrageous people in the world and making you think those are "People." "People" are just pretty much normal like you, and can use Universal Basic Income responsibly.

And once they start getting it, the good thing is it's going to turn into an absolute political third rail, where you do not touch it. If a politician touches it, it is electoral suicide. And that will be our salvation.

Q&A: Inflation

Now I see somebody raising his hand, Lou. Yeah, go ahead.

Lou:

Just saying "so long."

I did have a question earlier on, I think you answered, how you would fund a UBI. But I've often heard criticism of it that say, hey we got that 1200 dollar check every month over some period of time. The price of goods and services would raise to a level equivalent to approximately 1200 dollars a month. How would you address that criticism of a Basic Income?

Matt Arnold:

Oh, I wish we had enough time to touch on that. *sigh* I gotta incorporate that into next year's. Kevin might have more of the terminology with which to address this. But the way that inflation has typically worked has been through money creation and money generation. So we're actually getting revenue from taxes and we're giving it to people, and we have to peg that to something. And I think what number we peg it to is going to be important. Like in Alaska, they give the Alaskan permanent fund dividend pegged to oil revenue. And I think if we peg it to the consumer price index, or to the GDP, or we pegged it to something else that is probably going to be an important factor in this. But the degree to which the Federal Reserve will change interest rates actually has a tremendous effect on inflation. So, let's say for instance people are going to increase- all landlords are going to increase rent, if we get Universal Basic Income until it eats up all your rent, that doesn't actually work because there is competition within landlords. All of a sudden me opening up a room in my house for much less than them and undercutting them becomes super, super attractive. You know? So for example, as people say "well rents are going to increase or well the cost of goods and services is going to increase." That actually is dependent on factors other than this, such as the interest rate, the amount of loans, being created. Now I wish there were more time to actually touch on that because that really is one of the super important points. I'm going to make sure to incorporate it in as concise a form as I can in next year's presentation. Thank you so much for bringing that up.

Follow Up Teleconference In May

It is 11:56. We're actually running out of our allotted time. But I want so much to continue this conversation with anyone who is willing and interested in whatever channel they're interested in doing that in. We could create, for example, a mailing list if you're really dedicated to email. I see Murph is raising his hand. We have time for a really quick question. Murph, go ahead.

No? Okay, I'm gonna let everybody know- please leave your contact info in the chat here for me and for each other if you want to continue this conversation year round. And I really want to do it. If you get a free Mastodon account on penguicon.social that's one opportunity. We could form a mailing list. We could talk on whichever social media you like. Please do get in touch. My email is [email address]. Please reach out. One of you did last year and we had a lot of multi hour phone conversations to prepare the panel. And I want to continue that. So, thanks everybody. Please do continue to keep in touch.

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