Scott Santens

Founder and CEO of @ITSAfoundation; unconditional universal basic income (UBI) researcher and educator; sign the AI Pledge for Humanity

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

I've been researching the idea of Unconditional Basic Income since 2013. Here's a list of findings I've compiled from various UBI experiments, unconditional cash transfer studies, and cash dividend research.

The data speaks for itself.

Data: https://t.co/gTtB9g78KU #basicincome

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

It's annoying to see the "$40T in debt, how do we do anything" replies as if doing stuff that actually helps people is out of bounds while tax cuts for the rich and a ridiculously low min wage that underfunds programs and $500B more for the military is just fine.

If Trump really wanted to do a $5000 dividend for everyone, we could do that by raising taxes where they should be raised. Tax these companies that got all the tariff rebates after we paid higher prices on everything.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

@AeonCoin Not if it involves taxes.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

He's lying his ass off, and even if he were telling the truth, the GOP is losing the House, and even if they kept it, that's bullshit to only do if they win. But hey, sure, talk about a universal dividend and treating us like stockholders. It's certainly capitalism not communism.

[CBS News @CBSNews]

President Trump on Wednesday promised that if Republicans win the House and Senate during the midterm elections, he will pay a $5,000 "dividend" to "every adult citizen in the United States of America."

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

The opposition should lean in on the $5000 "Trump Rebate" instead of calling it a bribe or calling him crazy. Call his bluff. Offer up a bill that would be a giant tariff rebate to everyone that would tax it from the companies that got the tariff rebates. Start talking about UBI!

[Judd Legum @JuddLegum]

1. Elon Musk is spending millions pushing Americans to VoteSafe, which bills itself as a voter registration site but is actually a digital surveillance machine.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

If you live in or around Portland, OR, and are interested in basic income, come to this event next week!

https://t.co/X4ROSPGbqW

[Sam Biddle @samfbiddle]

I don't think I've ever seen someone tweet that their job has a >10% chance of ending humanity

[Prof. Eliot Jacobson @EliotJacobson]

One more totally fucking nuts graph for today, care of a request by @LeonSimons8.

Not only is the current standard deviation for the Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature above 4SD over the 1982-2011 mean for the first time on record, but no previous year even reached 3SD.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

Read, sign, and share the AI Pledge for Humanity at https://t.co/0VyGoJTcL8. When you add your name in support of others adding their name, tell us why you too feel universal basic income is important.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

"AI is becoming an enormous disruption. At the present, to receive income support, vulnerable people have to jump through many hoops via official policy that governments put in their way to limit payments, and any "infringement" of those policies means that they are cut off from support. A UBI, which this will help pay for, will provide a measure of security to all of us, without the demeaning process of having to jump through hoops to achieve it. Study after study has shown that when a UBI is introduced, lives are vastly improved."

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

The red line in the chart below depicts the amount of collective bargaining power. The reality of our situation is the need for—and what must be a collective demand for—universal basic income distributed as a GDP dividend. As the economy grows more productive, everyone deserves to benefit to some degree in the same way stockholders receive dividends. Labor unions will not return to having the power they once had to demand a fair slice of productivity for workers, and unions never represented all workers anyway. They never represented unpaid care workers for example, and good luck with gig labor unions. With UBI though, everyone gains their share and the power to withhold their labor until their demands are met. That will mean higher pay for jobs people don’t enjoy doing. That will also mean instantly stronger unions with UBI functioning as unlimited permanent strike pay. It even is general strike funding, which is true power to the People and how to restore democracy to being of, by, and for the People.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Why corporations spend $1.7 billion on union busting each year in one chart:

[PolitiFact @PolitiFact]

Recounting his response after the 9/11 attack, President Donald Trump said he brought workers to the site and was carried off by firefighters during an evacuation. We looked into the facts behind Trump’s stories. https://t.co/ZJkaP45Fw9

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

"GeT a JoB." That's what a bootlicker says.

[NBC News @NBCNews]

It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track. https://t.co/Jzee2LKyyV

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

@itsolelehmann Seriously, it's not difficult. Remove financial insecurity as a barrier. Do universal basic income for both adults and kids. Do universal healthcare. Do pre-K and child care.

https://t.co/LwZDX5jFG7

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

When people proclaim their fear that universal basic income will mean other people (not them) won't work, this right here is the real issue. The real question is "For what price?" will employers find employees, which is a question of bargaining power. Unions and UBI provide power

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

If you were looking for one image that showed how diminished worker power creates the conditions for oligarchy, this would be it 👇

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

"Article V is not the flashiest problem with our Constitution. It is passive in a way that the other malformed institutions—the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court—are not. But I think it has an incredibly toxic effect on our political life. The Constitution is meant to be a creation of the People. It is the terms on which we live together as a nation, and the very premise of democracy is that we write those terms for ourselves. But because Article V so poorly realizes our founding principles of popular sovereignty, we have no efficacious means, as the People, of rewriting our social contract. The Constitution has become something alien to the People of today. It is something we have inherited from the ancient past, like the constitution that Solon bequeathed to the people of Athens.

This was never what the Founders intended, and it has, I think, a number of baleful effects—even aside from the way it insulates the other flaws in the Constitution from needful reforms. The Constitution is meant to be the register of our fundamental commitments as a nation. But we, who live under the Constitution today, are not in any sense the people who made those commitments. This cannot help but weaken the vitality of those commitments. Moreover, to the extent that people are dissatisfied with the constitutional system, there is no real outlet for that discontent. I do not think this is unconnected to Donald Trump’s political success, for he promises, in his own twisted way, a constitutional revolution, supplanting our Madisonian system with one rooted in the theories of Nazi legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. This is not, of course, a healthy outlet for frustration with the Constitution, nor even a legitimate one. But there is no healthy, legitimate outlet for those frustrations, and it is not surprising that they have sought an unhealthy one.

Fixing the amendment process, then, is not merely a technical matter. The point is not just to enable other needful amendments to be adopted; it is to fix, to reconstruct the terms on which the American People are constituted as a political community."

https://t.co/K6zDuaDWeG

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

@TheDreamSphere If you want to help people via UBI you could join Comingle.
https://t.co/w0hF4Sn7dn

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

I wrote about the proposal for RISE Pilots, which is a new conservative alternative to UBI that looks to consolidate a bunch of existing programs into one benefit with a low phaseout rate—which is good—but instead of using unconditional cash, using programmable currency with behavioral requirements.

https://t.co/2nhqiQrAr4

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

@IntegrityJohnny Okay. Yeah, I'll let them know.

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

Unless We the People mobilize around and win unconditional basic income (UBI), and tax corporations and the rich appropriately, then it's likely best to go long on guillotine ETFs.

[Superman @thesupermanmx]

MIT mathematically proved that AI will destroy the democracy.

A Nobel-winning MIT economist published a terrifying paper called "Automation and Repression"

As AI and automation replace human labor, wealth concentrates heavily in the hands of a tiny group of capital owners. Inequality skyrockets.

When inequality hits a critical mass, workers realize they are being crushed and the threat of a popular revolt spikes.

Faced with that threat, the ruling elite are forced to make a choice.

They can redistribute the wealth through taxes, or they can use force to keep people down.

The paper mathematically proves a dark reality: there is a direct, inescapable link between automation and political repression.

The more capital accumulates through AI, the more the elite prefer repression over redistribution.

Why? Because sharing the wealth cuts into their power. Funding a police state protects it.

It gets worse.

The authors modeled what happens when an economy starts inside a clean, stable democracy.

As automation advances and capital concentrates at the top, the math shows that the elite eventually find democracy to be a liability.

They stop supporting democratic systems. They back a coup. They install a repressive system just to protect their automated wealth.

Nobody is voting to end democracy.

The technology’s economic incentives just make authoritarian control the logical next step for survival.