A Basic Standard of Living.

[WinstonSmith00]

We are born into this world as human beings with certain inalienable rights. Among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Those on the right fight for the right to life but it seems they only care about life while it is in the womb. The day that baby is born poor pull yourself up by your boot straps to bad you were not born to better parents or better life circumstance thus is competition work harder.

Those on the right promote death and war as a normal state of being. Humanity was not meant for war.

The earth could be our garden of eden but we must first accept eachother as equals as brothers and sisters one big family with many ideas and view points but one people one planet one life.

A basic standard of living would help ensure life. What does one need to live, shelter, food, clean water, electricity, health care, and a living wage and or guaranteed income.

Liberty, is forgotten in America. Those on the right believe when you go to work you are there slave you are on their time and you lose your right to free speech free expression and free thinking. This is wrong. No matter where I go i have my right to express myself and my ideas. It is my time and you as the employer are meerly paying me for my time and my production.

Its time the workers started asking for more. The billionaires got their billions off our backs. For it is the workers that truly create the wealth of this nation, but it is the owners that take it all.

We have a shortage of jobs in this country. Of good jobs with guaranteed retirement a good wage and all the perks. We could double the work force if we all work less and get paid more. With automation and robotics and AI its only a matter of time. To work 20 hrs per week but get paid more than you do now. Plus you have a basic standard of living a guaranteed home and all the basic necessities pay wouldnt be as much of an issue.

The pursuit of happiness. Imagine all the great art, music, ideas, creativity, books, engineering, lost in war, poverty, depression, drug use, the basic struggle to survive. We have the means to take away this basic struggle of meerly surviving hand to mouth. We have the capability to allow every life to pursue its happiness. We need to change our mind set. It will never happen in a world of competition violence and war, but removing the basic struggle of being one paycheck away from being homeless, going without food or water, or heat or light or access to basic information and education removing that struggle and guaranteeing every living soul the right to life liberty happiness property education and the pursuit of their dreams would truly lead us to the promise land.

End War! Stop killing eachother and start healing eachother! One love!

[hunter]

1. This thing we call "economic productivity..."

... is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to what's left of the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit. It's not productivity at all.

We ought to be paying people to experiment with lifestyles that have a very low environmental footprint. We ought to be discovering ways we can live happily outside the high energy industrial consumer economy. Everyone ought to have the free time and opportunity to pursue and practice some kind of art.

Sex education and birth control are an essential aspect of any sustainable society. If the human population keeps growing it doesn't matter how lightly any one person is living upon the earth.

I think automation can be good or bad. Automating dangerous and difficult jobs in agriculture is a good thing so long as the workers are not displaced into poverty. Automation in the military is terrifying. Our ability to kill specific people by remote control increases every day.

Sometimes we get lost in the fresh horrors of each day. It's good to step aside and consider what sort of progress we are aiming for. That's why I'm recommending your post.

[WinstonSmith00]

5. We need to be talking of ways to end

Poverty. This system of exploitation and competition is not sustainable. A system of winners and losers only leads to strife. We need a win win and guaranteeing every person in this country a piece of the dream and the basics to life is how we are to succeed as a people.

[Irish_Dem]

2. Yes. There are more than enough resources on this planet to take care of all.

It is only the greed for money and power that stop us from getting our fair
share of the planet's resources.

The resources belong to all of us. Not just a few.

[WinstonSmith00]

6. Exactly

The wealthy are not wealthy because of their hard work. They are wealthy because of the hard work of us. They merely rigged the game so they can take all the spoils.

[Irish_Dem]

11. Yes they are rich because of us. And they learned to rig the game

to their advantage.

[snooper2]

3. LOL- This again

245,000,000 adults in the US-

So what, lets start at 30K a year per person...

That is- 7,350,000,000,000

For those not good with math, the first number seven, you follow that with the word TRILLION. That number is a little less than half our entire annual GDP.

How you paying for this again? Oh, and do adults with kids get more? Go ahead give us your plan LOL. Oh, and nobody is paying any taxes on their "living wage" correct?

[WinstonSmith00]

4. But you wont need 30k a year

First guaranteed debt free payment free homes would erase mortgage and rent payments.

Guaranteed utilities again a big savings.

Guaranteed food another savings.
Guaranteed health care education etc already we are cutting the cost of living down greatly.

So if the basic necessities are already met net dispersment based on need would be very affordable.

Obviously people that are making enough income wont need the basic assistance.

Tax the rich the lucky and the well off. Taking half the GDP in taxes would not be unreasonable.

[snooper2]

7. interesting, so what is enough income where people won't need the basic assistance?

Give some numbers...

Say one makes 60K a year, can afford a decent $125,000 house, in Texas at least. Has enough for one beater car and one car payment. Has two kids and a spouse that doesn't work.
Is that okay?

So what if a person make 26K a year, can't do much with that. Do they get the free house and food and health care and utilities (which I assume includes cable, that is a basic right). They quit the 26K a year job. Who is going to do that job? Are all jobs now having to start at 40K a year, 60K? That is a minimum wage of $20 an hour FYI.


Math works- show us some!


FYI-
First guaranteed debt free payment free homes - LOL

[WinstonSmith00]

8. Well there would be no house payments

Everybody that needs a home is guaranteed a home. Upgrading homes would mean saving not mortgaging.

People will work in jobs they love menial jobs will be going the way of automation anyway.

As far as cars go with the future being driverless cars car ownership will become a thing of the past. It will simply be a free service you request a driverless car it comes pick you up and drop you off.

Truly money itself may even become antiquated.

The possibilities are limitless even we just change from a system of exploitation and greed to a system of unity and meeting the needs of all living souls.

[hunter]

9. I'm curious... how do you think our ancestors survived without money?

I think the present time is an anomaly. We'll either move beyond money as we know it, Star Trek fashion, or the human population will crash and money will become as irrelevant to survival as it was 100,000 years ago.

Some of my economic musings can be found in this thread:

Why the falling cost of light matters

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127108076

[hunter]

15. Our TV is a movie player. That's all it does. No broadcast, cable, or satellite.

All our telecommunications needs are served by a medium speed DSL connection from a local provider.

There are plenty of "free" homes in the world... it's just that most people can't imagine how to live there.

When my wife and I were young and wild we almost bought a house in a major Midwestern city for one dollar. A big house. One dollar, and we qualified.

We settled on an $8,000 house in a slightly better neighborhood, friendlier to people with babies. We had a baby. The one dollar neighborhood made our parents nervous... I'd be nervous if my own kids were exploring similar places...

All of it was far better than previous young adult unmarried me. Left-behind-Hunter, an off-his-meds homeless guy living in his broken car in a church parking lot, eating Taco Bell scraps. Weirdly, I still love Taco Bell scraps.

Nevertheless, mad Hunter was able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, fix his car, and move up in the world, to the garden shed of a mad PTSD Vietnam War veteran... I learned a lot from him and he got me a job working for one of his mad Vietnam War veteran contractor friends and I've never fallen back, which is just crazy luck.

I feel kinship with those who never experience the crazy luck.

They deserve more.

[WillowTree]

12. "Obviously people that are making enough income wont need the basic assistance."

Which wouldn't pass the Constitutionality test.

[WinstonSmith00]

16. Are you saying current assistance programs

Are unconstitutional?

[MichMan]

10. Everything is free!

Last edited Fri Oct 20, 2017, 05:42 PM - Edit history (2)

Free house, free utilities, free food, free transportation,free college and free healthcare. Not only all that but free $$$ on top of it all.

I see a lot of good possibilities here; "Now that you just turned 18, junior, it is time for you to move out and get your own free house. Have you thought abut Miami? It would be great for us to have a winter house when it snows here in Michigan"

How could this not work ?

[hunter]

13. "Work ethics" are destroying the earth's natural environment.

Our high energy industrial consumer economy is not sustainable.

We used to talk about "enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world." As it turns out there are enough natural gas reserves to destroy the world as we know it if we burn them. Climate change and rising oceans make it certain that various populated places in the world will be repeatedly knocked down faster than they can be rebuilt. Houston, we have a problem.

We are already seeing climate change refugees, and that problem is only going to get worse, even within the United States. It might be especially bad in the United States. During the Dust Bowl of the 'thirties, Okie was not a term of endearment here in California.

Success is doing just enough work to be comfortable and *happy* with the smallest environmental footprint possible, and by having *fewer* children overall, enough that the human population is declining to sustainable levels.

It's possible Miami might not be the best destination for your kid after the city has been trashed by a few hurricanes and flooding, but maybe your kid will find a good living situation in another city, a lifestyle with a small environmental footprint that affords them the time and energy to pursue their art. Einstein was a patent clerk. Einstein had the opportunity to daydream about cutting edge physics, a very fine art.

My parents are both artists. They always had day jobs, but they also had time to pursue their art and just enough money to provide for me and my siblings, sometimes at the most basic level, but never below. I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a home entirely disconnected from the U.S.A. consumer lifestyle. We once lived a year without a refrigerator, these mad skills I later found useful living on my own. My wife and I are a two car family, one $900, one $800. I've got mechanical skills 'cause when I was a teen if you wanted to drive a family car you might have to fix it.

[WinstonSmith00]

14. That is how the wealthy live now.

There is no reason we can not all be wealthy for the wealth of this planet truly belongs to us all. Not just a handful few. The future is true equality and the end of crimes of greed or necessity and the end of war.

[WillowTree]

17. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you weren't an Econ major.

Last edited Fri Oct 20, 2017, 11:49 PM - Edit history (1)

[WinstonSmith00]

18. Economics is a farse

Phony theories that are never correct and bloviate so called intellectuals that work for the billionaires.