First, there is already unemployment, so there are already people not filling jobs.
If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.
* Also, your counter suggestion is based on the assumption that the government can redistribute jobs instead of tax money*
I didn't propose redistributing jobs. I suggest using people on the Basic Job for all low skill government labor, and creating additional (make-work if necessary) jobs if necessary. Make every park sparkling clean, no litter on any road ever, etc.
FDR got creative when he did this and we got a lot of great infrastructure out of it.
> If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.
How? One of the problems with qualification-based benefit programs is that they reduce the marginal benefit of work (both unemployment and welfare benefits go down with work, which reduces the marginal benefit of any given nominal wage level, which makes people more likely to seek to avoid work at any given nominal wage level -- which also makes the benefit programs more expensive to administer, since they then need mechanism to try to catch people avoiding work to maintain the benefits.)
If you have unconditional basic income, you assure that work always has a higher marginal benefit for the same nominal wage than it would have in a traditional system of means-tested benefits, which reduces the incidence of people rejecting work at any given nominal wage.
I was wrong, and you are correct. Replacing unemployment with a basic income could go either way, depending on the marginal taxation rates of reducing benefits and the rates of diminishing marginal utility.
However, a Basic Job guarantee can only go one way. You never get to avoid the disutility of labor (X in my formulation).
But I'll dispute one point: you assure that work always has a higher marginal benefit
BI assures that work has a higher marginal income. It does not assure that work has a higher marginal utility, which is what matters.
If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.
Sorry, how is that? Under the current scheme, if I increase my wages (from $0 to $10k or from $8k to $14k or whatever), I lose my benefits. Under Basic Income, I do not lose my benefits; I only gain by increasing my wages.
If you believe the Keynesians or the Monetarists, it's because they refuse to work at a lower nominal wage than before. Unemployment/welfare/etc makes this an appealing prospect, and Basic Income only makes the problem worse.
* Also, your counter suggestion is based on the assumption that the government can redistribute jobs instead of tax money*
I didn't propose redistributing jobs. I suggest using people on the Basic Job for all low skill government labor, and creating additional (make-work if necessary) jobs if necessary. Make every park sparkling clean, no litter on any road ever, etc.
FDR got creative when he did this and we got a lot of great infrastructure out of it.