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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

There are additional problems:

1. It's not going to be an amount barely above the poverty line. If it's implemented "correctly" it needs to be enough to do away with all the other welfare programs. Think way, way higher than $12K per person per year.

2. With less revenue coming in, guess who's going to be hit with higher taxes? All those suckers working to make a marginally higher income.

3. If the BI is sufficiently high (think in the $45K range), there will be a lot of people leaving their jobs to live a life of leisure and avoid having their income taxed at a >50% rate. I know I would.

This utopian idea is like every other: sounds great on the surface, may even work reasonably well at a small level, but doesn't scale. Human nature is what it is.

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BI alone is by definition the poorest you can be. That's never going to be nice. It's almost certainly never going to be $45k. So long as money motivates people, people should still be motivated to have more than the poorest.

OTOH, BI does not disincentivize recipients from working, like current schemes do.

The specifics vary by place but almost everywhere unemployment benefits recede rapidly when you are.. employed. If you are disabled but manage to work part time, that can be used to invalidate your disability claim.

The whole point is to get more people working, and make it worth their while. If BI results in fewer people working, it has failed.

> BI alone is by definition the poorest you can be.

So is minimum wage + all eligible welfare benefits. What's the cash value of that? That's your new BI.

Minimum wage guarantees you will make a minimum of $0 + all eligible welfare benefits.

The benefit will be universal, but then you have to pay for it with increased taxes. So the increased marginal rate will disincentivize people from working.

With BI, You will never be in a situation where you will be poorer for earning a dollar you just won't be an entire dollar richer.

We could scale back benefits more gradually than we do today. That would be a lot cheaper than giving everyone a guaranteed pot of money.

Surely income tax would only apply to additional income. e.g., the higher tax rates would apply only to higher brackets.

e.g., 0% on first $20k, 30% on the next $20k, 40% on the $60k after that, and so on.

I think in Australia, the tax-free threshold these days is around $12k.

$45k is way too high. A basic income is per person, not per household. Median personal income in the US is only about $24k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...). About 20% of adults with income currently make less than $12.5k. And if children also receive a basic income payment (which seems to be the case in the parent post's calculation), then no one will be starving at $12k/person.

Right, but like I said, if this is to be implemented correctly your BI has to be high enough to replace existing welfare programs. One of the benefits is that you eliminate the overhead of maintaining said programs and just cut everyone a check.

You need to look at this in the "end game" scenario, which is, we need BI because there will be so much automation that hardly anyone needs to work anymore. You're not going to sell this to the poor by telling them that they're now unemployable and their BI is going to be less than their previous income + food stamps + housing subsidy + etc. So right off the bat, yeah, the BI floor needs to be the cash value of a person with full welfare benefits. And that's a lot more than $12K.

You're also discounting the inevitability that politicians will promise bumps to the BI for votes, people protesting that they can't afford to live in Manhattan on their BI, etc. It will quickly reach a point that even skilled workers will say "F this" and join the ranks of the unemployed.

If per person, it would need to top out at some level.

Assuming your household consists of 5 kids, your spouse and you. 7 people x $12K/person = $84K. That would be 2x the average family income in the US today!

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