Definition: UBI = Unconditional Basic Income
With that understanding, check out BIEN: home, Wikipedia.
You might envision UBI as, in effect, a Social Security for All; but without any prior pay-in measure for pay-out, instead universal and uniform for all. You might keep in mind UN bedrock, i.e., Article 25 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What is entailed by that today, or a half century from now?
Try on your own:
websearch = ubi unconditional basic income
websearch = ubi unconditional basic income youtube
A Davos panel discussion re "A Basic Income for All: Dream or Delusion?"
A Robert Reich video essay, promoting a book and discussing its ideas, rules and such evolving - in a good way - discussed with humor. Do watch this one. FIND THE TIME.
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| Screencapture - from the video |
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Interesting but remote from caucus policy: here, here, here, here (hello, Ms. Whelan, cohorts).
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THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: When the self-driving over the road trucks arrive, Tesla or otherwise, where will the out-of-work truck drivers turn for a paycheck? There will be warehouse automation, those robot trucks will skillfully back up to the loading dock robots, there will be inside sorting and rearranging robots, robotic forklifts, etc. Amazon contemplates delivery to your door by drone. The young face a multitude of automation questions long term, old farts in the transportation-and-distribution-of-goods-trade face automation short term - within years - in a decade if not sooner.
Consider: Robotics and work as we know it, beyond management, beyond robot-servicing, and beyond paper pushing, envisioning "work" and "jobs" and "pay" in say year 2075 as a sensible long term perspective - a thought process to keep in the back of one's mind, while planning to caucus.
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More of the same, but pay attention. If you've at least a half hour's attention span.
That last video is from a conference. This websearch.
FURTHER: Is individual consumption to drive consumer goods production a key to avoiding a narrowing to capital goods production for capitalists' consumption; in effect to avoid the trap of producing things that produce things but nobody has the empowerment [a/k/a money] to be enabled to consume stuff they need, consumer things such as enunciated in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Envision a glut of capital goods machines/robots while the majority of people [a/k/a the peasantry] starve, are craving a place in limited housing pools, are going without healthcare, and are clothed in rags? Science fiction can paint and has painted visions of the directions a rogue, ill-thought-out economy could evolve, visions of apocalyptic disaster and universal human despair.
What do people want, and in an automation/robotic future, how can those needs be met humanely? That seems the long term question to always hold in mind when looking at tomorrow's and next year's politics.
The question and potential is bigger than jobs, jobs, jobs for folks on the Iron Range uber alles.
FURTHER: More Reich. An hour - ten. A theme emerges. With improvisations. Theme and variations.
FURTHER: A proposed caucus resolution to pass on to platform committee consideration:
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| click it to read it |
FURTHER: One more, fifteen minutes.