Name: Mark Blyth on Basic Income, Tax Havens, Automation and *Why Should We Work?*
Uploaded: 2017-08-10T15:04:25.000Z
Duration: 6 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So I have a question on the technical disruption side.

I live in San Francisco, arguably the center

And technocrats in San Francisco, for the past year or two, have really

gotten into this idea of guaranteed basic income,

or mincome, as a possible solution to this.

And to me, it seems, at best, a band-aid, and at worst, the beginning of the dismantling

And I wondered if you had any of opinions about the feasibility or impact of a

So this is one of these ideas that have been--

Because I've spent the last 18 months in the Bay Area too.

And at least the kind of community, the intellectual community around Stanford,

has this thing of "this is really great that we actually

We should just take 10% off of the top 1%, distribute it,

and everybody gets to do whatever they want with their time."

It's not a terrible solution, if you could actually

If it's going to be a sharing economy, if everybody's

I'm really curious about this question and what you think about that.

Because it's radical and it's anti-capitalist, but it could work.

I totally agree, but the problem's getting your hands on the cash, right?

like to give in talks where I bump into Republican audiences,

which is usually when I talk to financial conferences

and things, is to say, "so how many of you

And I don't mean this as a partisan thing.

What was Mitt Romney's effective tax rate?

Because he only pays capital gains at 15%.

And he basically has tax shelters and incorporations

in Delaware and Arizona and the Cayman Islands

And he basically pays about an $0.08 to $0.09 on the dollar.

If you add up all my state and local, I'm paying German rates of tax, but I'm

But it hasn't really become a political topic.

Because if that becomes the issue, then you can make an argument for that

type of radical redistribution, which is essentially

And given that you've got most of the money,

You do in volume terms, but you're cheating on the margin.

So there's a wonderful book called Treasure Islands.

And the estimate in that is if you go to all the tax havens where all the

Mitts in the world have all their cash stored, and this

There's other places, like art, warehousing, and all that sort

That's a lot redistribution you could do.

And all of that is basically money that people have avoided tax on.

So if the Community Chest agreement is, "you made it here, you pay your taxes,"

well, we're making it everywhere and we're not paying any taxes.

Hence Poland, Ireland and all that sort of stuff.

So you can see the beginning of movement on this, particular on the corporate side.

But let's get to the heart of the matter.

I often think that economists forget that the most basic thing you learn in

economics is the labor-leisure trade off.

As we get richer as a society, we're meant to work less.

We're not meant to be more insecure, working for crappier wages more and more hours.

Well, it's actually about the property rights behind it.

So let's go to San Francisco for a minute.

I love the fact that when you need to get to the airport,

I love the fact that it doesn't smell like nine people who've

been murdered in the back of this car before I get in it, which is your average

And I love the fact that all even if these guys are

basically ripping off the drivers, a much larger proportion of what they're

actually earning goes to them than rather it goes straight

to medallion holder who holds the license that's basically

a money pump from basically poor immigrants

who are earning an equivalent of less than minimum wage in tips.

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Mark Blyth on Basic Income, Tax Havens, Automation and Why Should We Work?

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