Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[Gavagai]

With cultural maturity in place, no one would even talk about UBI, people would use credit and insurance services to handle irregularities in personal cash-flow.

[Mardoc]

If you're a couple with two children you're getting 2-4 times the UBI. Maybe you can afford more than one room.

Not if you want school for your kids - Bacchus zeroed out the Education budget to pay for his UBI.

This data on unintended pregnancies from the US is absolutely flabbergasting to a European: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default...teup10.pdf Is there a widespread taboo on pill and condoms that's not talked about? Do kids fail biology class on mass?

When in doubt of a number, look at the methodology.

In this case,

All state surveys—PRAMS, PRATS, MIHA and Iowa’s Barriers to Prenatal Care—used a similar question to ascertain pregnancy intention status: “Thinking back to just before you got pregnant, how did you feel about becoming pregnant?” Response categories were “I wanted to be pregnant sooner,” “I wanted to be pregnant later,” “I wanted to be pregnant then” and “ I didn’t want to be pregnant then or at any time in the future.” The first and third re-sponse categories were combined to create an “intended” category; the second and fourth response categories were combined for “unintended.”

'I wanted to be pregnant later' is an incredibly vague statement.  Certainly isn't isomorphic to 'I was willing to incur even the slightest cost in order to delay pregnancy', let alone to 'I was willing to pay for and use birth control or abstain'.  There are lots of things I want, just not badly enough to actually do anything about getting them.

They have a dataset for "No. of unintended pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15–44, 90% uncertainty interval: 2010-2014"

Europe (38-51)
North America (40-53)

That looks like whatever you diagnose for the US, had better also be your diagnosis for Europe, given how slight the difference in confidence intervals is.  Personally I'm going to go with the theory that they defined 'unwanted pregnancy' too broadly, just like if you defined 'serious crime' to be 'murder, rape, and litter'.

[RFS-81]

Relying on an honor system that only needy people apply for UBI seems totally unrealistic to me.

There is no question of relying on it, but the interpretation of policy is no less important than policy itself (something leftish wonks tend to forget). The effects of UBI that is socialized as a right and proper entitlement for everyone are going to be very different from the effects of a UBI that is socialized as a universal backstop that you should seek to get off as soon as possible, and you are kinda a dick if you don't. It's that dependency point ipecac raised -- people shouldn't think that it's OK to live off UBI, because it isn't, you are wasting your life if that's what you do. So yeah, UBI takes a little cultural maturity -- where the state is just seen as an ATM to be milked, the policy would be a disaster, not because it couldn't be afforded, but because it will be disabling and infantilizing, rather than enabling.

If you don't prosecute unnecessary UBI applications, you are relying on it. (Never mind that it wouldn't be universal if you did.) I'm sure most people will want more money than a realistic UBI can provide. And if we're assuming "cultural maturity", maybe they'll want to become a net-contributor for UBI. If you can assume cultural maturity, all sorts of problems go away. I think the UBI-and-tax-increase system is safer. Tax fraud would likely go up, but we already have systems in place to prosecute that.

[Bacchus]

The Europe figure is to a very large extent driven by the former Soviet countries, especially Russia and Ukraine, where abortion is used as a form of contraception. In Western Europe, the rate of unintended pregnancies is 27.

I agree that the "I wanted to get pregnant later" is a very weak and vague statement. It does however seem to suggest something along the lines of "I made no real provision for pregnancy at this moment", which is still pretty striking. It also doesn't seem to me that bringing a child into the world is something you can be on the fence about, it's not having a cup of tea, after all. I mean, in Russia it is, but that's another bizarre way Russia and US are apparently more similar to each other than to the rest of the developed world.

[SevenSpirits]

If you're a couple with two children you're getting 2-4 times the UBI. Maybe you can afford more than one room.

Not if you want school for your kids - Bacchus zeroed out the Education budget to pay for his UBI.

I think you must have misread this. I said 2-4, not 4. Depending on how exactly you're calculating stuff for children.

[scooter]

I agree that the "I wanted to get pregnant later" is a very weak and vague statement. It does however seem to suggest something along the lines of "I made no real provision for pregnancy at this moment", which is still pretty striking. It also doesn't seem to me that bringing a child into the world is something you can be on the fence about, it's not having a cup of tea, after all.

Eh, I don't think this is it at all. You can be prepared for the possibility of a child due to contraception failure or whatever and still prefer to get pregnant later. That doesn't make the pregnancy "unwanted" at all. Seems like worthless data because a ton of people could get categorized as "unwanted" that would disagree with that assessment.

[Bacchus]

Yeah, actually you are right. Wow, and that's an outfit that's basically dedicated to researching nothing but this...

[Mardoc]

The Europe figure is to a very large extent driven by the former Soviet countries, especially Russia and Ukraine, where abortion is used as a form of contraception. In Western Europe, the rate of unintended pregnancies is 27.

In terms of reliability of data from a voluntary survey on a private and sensitive subject, across cultures, phrased in different languages, on a subject of internal state of mind, lumping together several categories, I'd consider 27 to be indistinguishable from 50.  At most, it's suggestive of a difference that might be measurable with more and better research.

[Mardoc]

If you're a couple with two children you're getting 2-4 times the UBI. Maybe you can afford more than one room.

Not if you want school for your kids - Bacchus zeroed out the Education budget to pay for his UBI.

I think you must have misread this. I said 2-4, not 4. Depending on how exactly you're calculating stuff for children.

Didn't misread it, just wasn't being careful with my argument.  I feel suspicious of Bacchus's UBI calculations, because this is the first one I've ever seen that actually looks like it might work arithmetically.  But I haven't thought or researched carefully enough to have much of anything to back up that gut feel, so really I should have resisted the urge to say anything.  I managed to keep quiet on the politics thread for four months, but today I broke my streak .

[Krill]

No one even comments on how UBI could/would cause massive price inflation in imported goods?