#social policy

[racefortheironthrone]

On the subject of UBI, I always ask about the MCU UBI: Tony is a billionaire who lives a life of luxury, Bruce has a serious chronic illness that requires expensive medical care, and Trevor just wants to sit round all day drinking and doing drugs. I take the UBI guys more seriously if they can say what each man gets from a UBI.

That's a somewhat odd choice of characters to think about how a UBI would function in the MCU.

So yes, Tony Stark would get a UBI. Relative to his private income, his UBI check would be totally inconsequential - and given the level of taxation needed to support a UBI, it's pretty much guaranteed that Tony would be paying far more in taxes than he would be getting back in UBI payments.

This is not an accident or a mistake or a flaw in the system; this is how a healthy social policy should function. When Social Security was established in 1936, FDR made a big deal of the fact that even John D. Rockefeller would get a Social Security check - because it hammered home the point that everyone contributes, and everyone benefits. Reciprocal solidarity would short-circuit the divisive politics of distribution and redistribution and cement a permanent majority coalition in support of a universal welfare state.

Bruce Banner would also get a UBI check. Now, his financial situation is a little unclear - originally, Banner was a top research scientist at Culver University with U.S military contracts, so he would probably have been in the top 10% of incomes (affluent but not wealthy). After his transformation into the Hulk, however, Bruce was a wanted fugitive with no way of earning income.

After that, Bruce was an Avenger - and this is where things get odd. As established in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Avengers in the MCU don't get a salary: Tony gave them free housing and paid their Avengers-related expenses, but Sam Wilson notably relied on his veteran's pension and government contracts for his living (thus why his banker could justify turning him down for a small business loan rather than admitting to structural racial discrimination) and Steve Rogers even with his veteran's benefits, Social Security, and SHIELD salary couldn't afford a place in Brooklyn. This means that, while Bruce doesn't need to worry about money for his research and can save on rent, he does actually need the UBI for everything else.

This is very different from in the comics, where Avengers get quite decent salaries:

$4k a month in 1983 dollars works out to around $150k a year (on top of free housing at the Avengers Mansion), putting them solidly in the top 13% of U.S personal incomes.

As for Trevor Slattery, I feel like your description is unfairly characterizing a working actor. Slattery was not a major success in Hollywood - hence why he took Aldrich Killian up on his job offer and became part of a criminal conspiracy - and he does have some serious substance abuse issues, but what he does in his private life is his own business. Hell, even when he was abducted by the Ten Rings, he kept working as an actor. That being said, Trevor is going to have a hard time getting UBI, both because he's a wanted fugitive and convicted felon (which would end his eligibility in the U.S) and because he's now living in a rural village in another dimension.

#mcu #marvel #marvel meta #universal basic income #ubi #policy history #social policy

[heterorealism]

#boomers #feminism #gender #men aint shit #divorce him #childfree #gender inequality #heteropessimism #heterorealism #childcare #social policy #policy #politics #student lunch debt #child poverty

[smiletolerantly]

I'm in that "If I had a Death Note, I could absolutely change society for the better" mood 💕

#alternatively a radicalized group of armed friends (in Minecraft) #death note #light yagami #politics #climate change #social policy #wealth gap #eat the rich

[theidealistphilosophy]

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell, Source Unlisted.

#philosophy tumblr #philoblr #philosopher #thinker #american authors #writrblr #thomas sowell #economics #politics #governance #social policy #ideology #nationalism #dark academia #life quotes

[robotorgy]

#debt #abolish debt #cancel student loan debt #student loan debt #social policy #college debt #student lunch debt #general strike #debt abolition

[dbunicorn]

Can you explain to a stupid, mentally ill crazy house wife why the fuck for billions of dollars if I ask Google or whomever to never show me a site again it still does? Are you fucking morons?

I don't want to know WTF the Kardashian family is doing. How many decades can I say it asshole?

You pollute everything. Even the minds of children.

Narcissistic useless assholes.

This is why people say tech bro with disgust.

Sincerely can I fucking go home to place where none of you incompetent cowards live ?

That can't be too hard to manage.

#internet #social policy #mind fuck #corruption #men are idiots #big tech #tech bros

[gravalicious]

The clearest and undisputed area of policy  which has a massive impact on gender relations and power is housing and welfare policy. No doubt about it or argument. Women enjoy more welfare both directly and indirectly, even if working, than men and the consequences are very important. Housing policy shapes a community and community power. If you grant one group easier access to housing, you change the balance of power, especially when those women cannot obtain those houses in the open market. Study social housing and it is pure women predominantly. Over fifty percent of Black women in this country, [their] salaries are topped up by income support. Welfare economists will tell you precisely what welfare means in real money terms. So if you are a woman you prefer to be in Britain than Africa or the Caribbean, where you work or drop or be fortunate to have a wealthy and kind man. I am finishing some work on new African immigrants and family and social problems, and one of the things you will find within ALL IMMIGRANT GROUPS, which corresponds with exactly  the same experience of older African and African-Caribbean communities, is that within a very...short period of time of being in this country, blam, man and woman problems start. All the men whether they are Nigerians, Ghanaians, from Uganda, Ethiopia [or] Somalia, all say the same thing. That this society and its ability for women to get work, even low paid work combined with [the] welfare system radically changes the family dynamic in a very short period of time. How can people who have only been here such a short time say exactly the same things as Black men who were here as early as the 1950s?

Fred Black (circa 2003)

#black britain #immigrants #social policy #housing #welfare #gender relations #african-caribbean #african

[bothpartiesarebad]

(via (81) Pinterest)

#leftist memes #socialist memes #eat the rich #fuck billionaires #social policy

[crippleprophet]

The Special Rapporteur takes note of the concerns of various stakeholders, particularly within the medical communities, regarding the absolute ban on all forms of non-consensual measures. He acknowledges that their radical reduction and eventual elimination is a challenging process that will take time. However, there is shared agreement about the unacceptably high prevalence of human rights violations within mental health settings and that change is necessary. Instead of using legal or ethical arguments to justify the status quo, concerted efforts are needed to abandon it. Failure to take immediate measures towards such a change is no longer acceptable and the Special Rapporteur proposes five deliberate, targeted, and concrete actions as follows:

(a) Mainstream alternatives to coercion in policy with a view to legal reform;

(b) Develop a well-stocked basket of non-coercive alternatives in practice;

(c) Develop a road map to radically reduce coercive medical practices, with a view to their elimination, with the participation of diverse stakeholders, including rights holders;

(d) Establish an exchange of good practices between and within countries;

(e) Scale up research investment and quantitative and qualitative data collection to monitor progress towards these goals.

United Nations General Assembly Human Rights Council thirty-fifth session: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health (2017, emphasis added)

#disability studies #mental illness #mental health #public policy #social policy #united nations #sociolegal studies #quotes #mac.txt

[morayofsunshine]

i do feel like we should have some accessible no-judgment learning workshops for adults, not just for trades and practical skills but for academics as well, because some adults still don't have the skills that are necessary to fully participate in society and were expected to be taught to them in school. and not because they all were just drawing pictures of eyes, either.

there are a number of adults the education system utterly fucking failed, because conservatives gutted their curriculum of factual history and diverse literary arts or because their schools didn't teach material in a way that worked with their learning style or because they weren't given the option to go to public school in the first place or because their home life was too unstable for them to concentrate on their education. so they should have the option to get that education back after they age out of the public school system.

a person shouldn't be dismissed as having missed their chance to learn critical thinking or literary analysis or history or science forever just because they didn't learn it during the time they had the least amount of control over their life. that hurts them and their chances to improve their own life. it continues a cycle of inequity, as kids from poorer families often receive worse education due to going to schools with less resources, having less time to study, and being unable to access supplemental programs. and it hurts our society as a whole as well, because a less educated population is more likely to fall for unfactual persuasive rhetoric and vote for policies that will hurt them.

#education #social policy

[racefortheironthrone]

Any thoughts/opinions on the idea of Universal Basic Income?

So I come out of MMT-adjacent circles that tend to focus on Job Guarantees over Universal Basic Income(s).

There is a certain amount of rivalry and bad blood between these two camps, as they see their projects as competing for the same policy "space" as solutions to poverty and unemployment. For example, back when I was on twitter I got into quite a few arguments with Matt Bruenig, who is a UBI advocate and quite hostile to Job Guarantees, and I was not the only MMTer/job guarantee advocate who mixed it up with Bruening and his supporters.

For my own part, I am not opposed to incomes policies in general. Certainly, I think we saw from COVID-era initiatives around Unemployment Insurance and the Child Tax Credit that incomes policies can be tremendously effective in stabilizing consumer demand, preventing eviction and homelessness, and especially in cutting poverty rates. Likewise, I think there is now pretty solid empirical evidence that the concerns about employment effects that were the bane of UBIs and Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposals from the 1970s onwards are baseless.

That being said, I think there are other critiques of UBI from the left that were raised by Hyman Minsky in the late 1960s and 1970s that (instead of focusing on employment effects and the ideological question of "dependency") center on the fiscal capacity of the state, the problem of inflation, and the inability of UBIs to solve the problem of lost labor-time, which remain open questions.

This is why I am skeptical of the more Georgist approach to UBI as panacea. To my mind, incomes policies are a partial solution to some socioeconomic problems that have some side effects; they need to be buttressed by complementary policies (including job guarantees) that can do things UBIs can't, while also dealing with UBI's side effects. In some sense, it shouldn't be very surprising that a belt-and-braces strategy is best, because that was the intended vision for a comprehensive New Deal order proposed by the National Resources Planning Board in 1942.

#public policy #economic policy #social policy #universal basic income #negative income tax #job guarantee #job guarantees #my day job #mmt #political economy #ubi #people must live by work #policy history

[the-funtime-autocrat]

While there are legitimate concerns that UBI could exacerbate problems, such as social atomization, the issue is not so much that everyone must be employed but rather that society is set up around work, so being unemployed basically makes one a non-person. While I understand the case for a jobs guarantee, in reality make-work jobs only benefit select groups of people, the jobs guarantee would just further entrench bureaucracy and institutional control, and America is too politically polarized for any kind of national service. Besides economics, restructuring society for UBI would have to address psych-social issues, including, helping people find status, meaning, and purpose in life, a role in society that suits their strengths, as well as community and family formation. While I am extremely pessimistic about anything positive coming from top down social engineering, I see trends like enclavism, neo-tribalism, and parallel institutions and economies forming as a reaction to mass automation and declining trust in institutions.

Robert Stark, “UBI Reconsidered For ‘23″ (February 3rd 2023).

#Universal Basic Income #political polarization #American Politics #American Civilization #Social Policy #Current State of Affairs

[englishclubmalaysia]

#pervezhoodbhoy #pakistan #education #educationreform #education system #socialchange #activism #social policy #educationpolicy #educationforall #globaleducation #changemakers #scholarship2024 #empowerment #progressive education #critical thinking #learningforall #youthempowerment #teaching #learning #educationrevolution #Youtube

[bopinion]

Personal travel bans

Russia - because I can't keep my mouth shut about Putin. And that wouldn't sit well with me over there.

Afghanistan - because I couldn't overlook the discrimination against women. And I didn't want to.

Saudi Arabia - because I despise their system. Even if it is against Iran.

Iran - because I despise their system. Even if it is against Saudi Arabia.

North Corea - because I couldn't get in. And even if I could, I couldn't get out afterwards.

Nigeria - because it's way too dangerous. But I wouldn't actually want to travel to the country.

Syria - ditto. Although I would really like to travel to the country.

China - because my attitude towards those in power would not earn me enough "social points" to be able to move around freely.

United Arab Emirates - because it's all fake.

Antarctica - because I like it warm and cozy.

#thoughts #aperçu #funny #travel #travel ban #personal #view #russia #vladimir putin #afghanistan #taliban #women rights #Saudi Arabia #iran #regime #north corea #getting out #getting in #nigeria #syria #country #china #social policy #united arab emirates #fake #antarctica #warm #cozy

[knowledgevariabledarcy]

#social order #social psychology #social phobia #social problems #social path #social policy #Youtube

[dbunicorn]

Some fucking prick asked me recently 'if I REALLY' wanted to do this. I've been wanting to do this since 2014 but all my life and I suspect millions have died wanting to do this so I'll try and speak on their behalf as well.

I'm even wearing my leg warmers and feeling feisty. 😘

#fuck off #corruption #social policy #compulsive lying