More UBI/Basic Minimum Income

Last week I said it occurred to me that, if things continue as they are, the government will have to do a UBI or a basic minimum income. It seemed logical. Right after I figured that out, a couple of Democrats proposed giving people aged 16 or older who make $130,000 or less a basic income of $2,000 or more a month. There would be a $500 bonus for kids that would cover up to 3 kids.

Obviously, this proposal in its current form is dead on arrival. a) The first stimulus check of $1,200 covered people making up to $99,000 a year. Going over a $99k/year threshold doesn't seem smart, and $99k/year is probably too high already. That's hardly poverty. b) And giving 16-year-olds $2k a month? No. That's designed to destroy families. UBI plans for the U.S. always have a lowest age of 18 years. c) Current UBI plans call for $1,000 a month. The U.S. could barely afford that. It can't afford a $2k/month UBI. I don't imagine Congress going for that. In the first stimulus Republicans wanted to give people $1,000/month or so for two months, and Democrats wanted to give a one-time $3,000 payment. The compromise was a one-time $1,200(April) with a later trial balloon that there might be one more payment afterward(May). d) Parents of dependents who get $2k/month would also get the $500/month bonus. That's crazy. There's no way that kind of double dipping should be allowed.

However, a $2k/month basic minimum income instead of a UBI could work, especially if it was temporary. The Democrat proposal would end once the economy recovered, based on a mathematical formula that determined what "recovery" means. That really isn't a true UBI. It's a temporary basic income. So, hmm, maybe $2k isn't outside the realm of possibility. I maybe could see a $2k/month or $1,500/month basic income for 18-yr-olds(i.e. voters) and older who make below $99k/year, possibly with a phase out above $99k/year like the first stimulus check had.

When would this happen if it actually does? Not before May. The Senate is on vacation until May 4th. I believe the House started another vacation yesterday after the vote for stimulus 3.5. Don't forget that Congress usually only works 90 to 110 days of the year. Something we're seeing from the current coverage is how often they're on vacation. The Senate voted Monday. They get two weeks off. The House probably will get close to that, too. I think a basic income would start in May and could be retroactive to April at least partially. The April basic minimum income would subtract the $1,200 stimulus check from the total.

Besides the fact that people need it, I see other motivations for a basic minimum income plan. There have been various small tests of UBI/basic minimum income plans in various countries. This is an incredible opportunity to test something on a large scale in a large country and see how it works. We can't let this crisis go to waste. ;) Another motivation is political. Democrats are all over this because they think they can accrue more voters. That's the real reason for the aged 16 number. If Democrats can convince those kids they're the ones giving them the money, they would have a new generation of 18-yr-old voters who wouldn't want to lose that money. This crisis is expected to last two years unless there's a vaccine. The basic income would last beyond the crisis. Those 16-yr-olds would turn 18 with a basic minimum income. Republicans have a motivation, too. Before the economy tanked, Trump had an easy path to victory in November. With people seeing hard times, Biden is now in control of key battleground states, according to polling. A basic minimum income would give voters stability and peace of mind and could swing them back to Trump. The nation normally doesn't switch presidents in a crisis. A little money could guarantee that holds true again.

Six months from now might be the time to buy a car.

A UBI story.

Trouble in Saudi Arabia and beyond. The collapse of oil prices could trigger a war.

A video about the collapse of oil.

The Senate wouldn't be able to vote while on vacation next time.

In a previous blog I noted that an immunity passport is eerily similar to the mark of the beast from the Bible because no business would be able to buy or sell unless all employees had an immunity mark. The WHO is saying immunity passports probably won't work. It seems off the table. . .for now.

In Texas, do lives matter? Not if you're the lieutenant governor.  He said there are, 'more important things than living'. #texas #NoLivesMatter

Rich people are fleeing and running away from SARS-CoV-2.

According to the WHO, politicians with easy lives don't understand the gravity of the pandemic. Looking at how Congress is reacting, I already saw that.

 An article about three proposed stimulus plans, including the $2k/month one.

 Have a great weekend.

Are We Headed for a UBI?

It occurred to me this week that, if the lockdown continues and permanently destroys even more jobs than it already has, the government is going to have to institute some kind of minimum income program even if it's "temporary." The two plans I've seen the most are Universal Basic Income and the Basic Minimum Income.

The UBI is a payout to everyone in the nation aged 18 and above regardless of income. Everyone would get it. The figure I've seen the most is $1,000/month, so $12,000/year. The rich would have theirs taxed back out. This is not buy a house and play video games all day kind of money. It's to make sure the poorest people have a foundation under them that would let them survive at at least a minimum level. Unlike welfare, the poor would be able to work and lift themselves out of poverty. People on welfare would no longer be trapped by a system. They would get UBI and still be able to work, too.

A basic minimum income would set a minimum income amount per month and pay people who make less than that amount in order to bring them up to the minimum. For example, if the minimum was $2,000/month and someone made $1,000, the government would pay the person $1,000 to bring his or her income up to $2,000. If the person made $1,500, the government would pay $500. And so forth. The figure I've seen most for this is $2,000/month, though $2,500/month is a close second.

I've looked into this, but I'm not an expert. The U.S. could afford either plan. The key is eliminating all of the 100+ welfare programs the government has, including social security, unemployment, welfare, etc., and putting all that money into a minimum income plan. However, eliminating those programs would not fully cover a UBI. The rich might have to be taxed an extra 2%. Loopholes that let corporations pay little or no taxes might have to be closed. Foreign aid could be trimmed. National lottery? Etc. There are different ways to do either plan and different ways to raise the money that eliminating current welfare programs wouldn't pay. A UBI would need about an extra $539 billion.

Neither of these plans is true socialism, though they strongly resemble it. It would be a combination of free-market capitalism and socialism. People would get the money in a socialistic way. Free-market capitalism would decide what happened to it.

Two verses come to mind. 

2 Thessalonians 3:10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.

 Proverbs 19:17 He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.

And this one is related.

 Proverbs 28:27 He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse.

Socialism has never worked in any country that has tried it. But there is a place for the government to give to the poor and have God pay it back. I'm against socialism, but if a basic minimum income plan could be done correctly, it would go along with the scriptures about helping the poor. Even if some people did end up not working, the benefit of helping the poor is more important. The problem is getting the government to do a program correctly. Corruption is so ingrained in Washington it might not be possible. The current slavery system, welfare, is a slave system for a reason.

Are Lockdowns Necessary?

This is a story about not doing a lockdown. Sweden has been informing the public about the danger and in general letting them take responsibility for their own actions. I find it interesting because my state, GA, has about the same population as Sweden, but we're under lockdown. I've been checking both infection numbers. At first it was about the same, just a few hundred different. Over the last week, GA has increased to 17,194. Sweden is at 13,216. A hidden factor is the number of people driving through GA from NY, NJ and other infected states to get to FL. If that accounts for the difference, doing a lockdown is no more effective than telling people to be careful.

A few stories I've seen this week. 

Maryland police remind residents to wear pants to mailbox: 'This is your final warning'

The rats. They're angry and desperate!

In China, dogs become pets, not livestock.

Some pictures of the mass graves in NYC.

This is a French one. In  New York Samaritan's Purse made a makeshift hospital. Mainstream U.S. media won't cover Christians helping people.

Book Stuff

The month of letting the novella "rest" has passed. I worked some on the non-fiction this week then switched back to the novella.

Have a great weekend.

Mark of the Beast Precursor

Revelation 13:16,17

16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

The mark of the beast isn't here, but for the first time in history we have two major stories about a system that does the same thing the mark of the beast does. The first story is for an immunity registry. I saw an interview with the politician proposing this. Basically, what the immunity registry does is deny people the right to work unless they can prove they're immune to SARS-CoV-2. This ignores the fact that some people's bodies don't produce enough antibodies to register on a test. The second story is about an immunity passport. Like the immunity registry, it would deny non-immune people the right to work. According to an interview on TV, someone has proposed that the immunity passport be a tattoo. If you know the Bible, you already know the mark of the beast will be a tattoo.

So, how exactly is this a mark of the beast precursor? People who do not have the immunity "mark" will not be able to earn money to buy things and would stay under lockdown or other restrictions. Would people under lockdown be allowed to sell things? We don't have full details yet. This system is only one step away from not being able to buy or sell period. Turning it into that would streamline it. Legally, corporations are people, people that are composed of other people. The immunity mark would directly prevent corporations from buying or selling unless the people working inside the corporation have the immunity mark. This is what the mark of the beast is for, to prevent buying and selling. Since corporations make the rules, they would apply the no buying or selling rule to ordinary people at some point. If they have to do it, we have to do it. Knowing that SARS-CoV-2 will hit in waves, this could happen as soon as two or three waves away.

There doesn't seem to be a pressing reason for these governments to be proposing immunity marks. SARS-CoV-2 is a temporary problem that "should" be gone in 18 to 24 months. It's a solution without a problem. At some point we'll have the famous herd immunity the news keeps mentioning or a vaccine. Why spend money creating another system when the problem is already going away? It would have to be global and would cause a tremendous amount of transitional pain. It's almost like governments want to reset the system to suit their own purposes. Picture how this would play out. No one would be able to join the new world system(new world order?) without the immunity mark. A side effect would be that everyone on earth would be identified in a database. Like the Patriot Act, I suspect this "solution" has been sitting in a drawer waiting for the right emergency.

Don't forget. The Antichrist has not risen to power. Even if this immunity mark goes into law preventing people from buying or selling, it won't be the mark of the beast until the Antichrist is in power. However, the immunity mark shows how close the final mark is and shows that governments already want that kind of system in place.

These are stories of interest I've noticed lately.  With SARS-CoV-2 news being censored so heavily, it's hard to find any real news.

 When a health care system is overwhelmed, just sedate the dying and let nature happen.

China wants to use Coronavirus to take over the world. I'm not saying this is real, but it's interesting.

This one's in French. A British soccer player in England invited prostitutes to stay with him during the pandemic.

This is one of various stories about food being lost during the pandemic. Will this lead to food shortages?

Gangs in El Salvador are enforcing lockdown. What?

Political correctness is a form of mental illness. A nurse was suspended for refusing to treat SARS-CoV-2 patients without a mask. This sounds like a story I heard the other day. In that one there weren't enough masks to go around, so the healthcare facility wouldn't let people who had them wear them. They didn't want anyone to feel uncomfortable.

New York City is making mass graves. They're not calling them that, of course.

 Have a great weekend.

Lockdown

Over the past week Coronavirus cases in the county next door have doubled, and the ones in my county have tripled, bringing the totals to 2 and 3 respectively. The governor has declared a statewide lockdown until the 13th with the option to extend it.

After finding too many people who are supposed to be under lockdown making vacation reservations here, my county government has banned reservations and has ordered tourists to go home. We don't want more than the 3 cases we already have.

An update on the Israeli SARS-CoV-2 vaccine attempt.

Where's the real News?

The thing I find most annoying about the SARS, I mean Covid-19, pandemic is the lack of information. Is it censorship or a reflection of the decay of the news media? I know things are being censored. But I also know how dependent news outlets are on governments state and local and businesses for their news stories. A lot of what news pushers do is rewrite press releases and call it news. With so many businesses shut down, the press releases have all but stopped. I see news outlets using a massive amount of empty filler and calling it news.

I watched an hour-long broadcast on Fox news that had about zero news content. They were doing stuff like interviewing a man who was gushing about how awesome it is that people are posting pictures on social media. He said it shows who people really are and lets us connect with each other. /facepalm

The local news out of Atlanta isn't much better. I taped an hour-long news broadcast. So light and fluffy. They didn't even broadcast the governor's lockdown order that was made the same day.

Some real news.

In Ecuador people are leaving bodies on the streets. Some are wrapping them in plastic. In Sweden there's no lockdown. The government is informing the public of the risk and letting them handle it. In New York they're using fork lifts to move bodies. In Italy no one over 60 gets a ventilator. They stopped treating heart attacks and strokes a while back. In Spain no one over 65 gets a ventilator. In New York heart attack victims are no longer allowed ER treatment. If they can't be resuscitated on site, they're allowed to die. Instead of denying treatment based on age, the U.S. hospital system has been discussing a do not resuscitate policy for SARS-CoV-2 victims, even if they could have been saved.

It sounds like NYC is in the middle of a catastrophe, but there's so little information coming out of there. The forklift video was broadcast on TV but without any context. There was no story to go with it. It was a few seconds accompanied by a one or two sentence voice over. If this thing is serious, I want to know exactly what's happening in case it comes here. Do bodies go to funeral homes? Do bodies outgas virus cells? What is NY doing with the bodies? Are they being cremated like in China? What are different states doing to handle the crisis? Is this a real crisis at all?

Based on the latest numbers, the death rate in the U.S. is 0% of the total population.

6907/330,000,000 = 0%

The global fatality rate is also 0%. 

58,243/7,700,000,000 = 0%

Put those numbers(deaths divided by total population) into a calculator. The percentage is so small it shifts to scientific notation. I think the real problem isn't that mass numbers of people are dying because they're not. I think it's that the ones who are dying are doing it in such a relatively short span of time that the health and death care systems are overwhelmed. How can I say mass numbers of people aren't dying? People are dying by the tens of thousands. In the 1918 pandemic people were dying by the tens of millions. The current death total is below 100,000. Maybe it'll jump into the millions later. Who knows?

I've faced something worse than SARS-CoV-2 before.

I bought Cities Skylines, a city building simulator, on sale a while back and played it some. If sewage isn't handled correctly in the game, people start dying. If you don't know sewage is the problem, a problem that can be very subtle, it leads to a mass die off. I had that happen. I had built up a city to a pretty large scale, and nearly everyone died. The healthcare system was overwhelmed. The death care system, especially, was overwhelmed. Cemeteries filled up. I didn't have enough ambulances to move the bodies. I had to do mass cremations. I had to bulldoze a gazillion buildings. My city almost had to start over from scratch but with a large street system. It was good in a way because it let me upgrade older streets without having to worry about occupied buildings, but I digress. SARS-CoV-2 is nowhere near as bad as my sewage problem in Cities Skylines. We're not bulldozing abandoned buildings. Society isn't starting over from scratch.

No one could have foreseen this?

The government is saying no one could have foreseen this. Not long ago there was a show on the History Channel, I believe, about the Reston, VA, Ebola outbreak. The Hot Zone  "The frightening spread of the EVD (Ebolavirus)."

TNT is currently running a series from 2014 called The Last Ship. "The crew of a naval destroyer is forced to confront the reality of a new existence when a pandemic kills off most of the earth's population."

The #2 most-streamed movie in history has become Contagion. "Healthcare professionals, government officials and everyday people find themselves in the midst of a pandemic as the CDC works to find a cure."

Many people have foreseen this in books, television shows and movies.

Treason

The Democrat party and liberal news media have been attacking the President during a crisis. This smells like treason.

Anyone with a brain saw quite a while back that New York City at the least needed to go into quarantine for the safety of the rest of the country. The President floated that possibility for NY, NJ and parts of CT as a trial balloon. There was no quarantine. Apparently, the governors of those states rebelled behind the scenes. Like the Obama administration's pandemic, liberal governors in this one are willing to let everyone else die to save them some inconvenience and loss of political power.

It's become apparent over the last few years that the Democrat party is not only un-American. They're anti-American. They hate America. They hate the truth. They hate our morals and values. They hate our freedoms. They hate our opinions. They hate everything this country stands for. And it's on open display for everyone to see. We're coming to a point in history beyond which either the United States survives or the Democrat party survives. Let's make it America that survives. The Democrat party is an existential threat that needs to be removed from power before they destroy this country.

Have a great weekend.