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Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

When people on the far left and the far right agree, they're usually onto something. My favorite examples are the NSA spying stuff, and this.

Lefties hate the NSA spying and love a universal basic income because the spying tilts the power away from the people, and the income tilts toward the people.

Righties (well, go far right enough) hate the NSA spying and love a universal income because of government overreach in the first case, and the ability to drastically simplify government welfare--cutting out a ton of means-tested programs and their agencies, and replacing it all with a check each month.

Gotta love it!

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>and the ability to drastically simplify government welfare--cutting out a ton of means-tested programs and their agencies, and replacing it all with a check each month.

As someone that leans left, this is one of the big arguments I make in favor of UBI.

Frankly, I'm tired of arguing over the minutia of welfare, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage, social security, etc.

Fine. Scrap most of our social assistance programs outside of healthcare and replace them with a UBI.

The progressive in me likes it because it gives everyone a minimum safety net and the capitalist in me likes it because it opens up entrepreneurism and the ability to pursue potentially innovative businesses -- especially in an economy increasingly geared toward service and information work -- to huge portions of the population that are otherwise locked out. Active, small businesses are good for everyone.

I agree. Markets and businesses are changing so fast that most people are going to have periods of tough career change in their lives.

Allowing people to make those important transitions without completely losing financial stability will help everyone.

The problem is, when you scrap all of those programs you immediately create more unemployment. There are a lot of jobs supporting social services, the hard part is going to be finding a way to phase in UBI without wrecking the economy.

Removing jobs is viewed as an upside of a policy like that, not a downside (by economists only, pretty much, but they're right about it).

I suspect one of the side effects is that UBI would lead to a decrease in full time employment and an increase in part time employment. Basically, having a job would become a matter of making enough to live the lifestyle of your choice rather than a matter of having a roof over your head and the ability to eat.

It's one of the reasons I mentioned scrapping the minimum wage when implementing UBI.

The job market becomes much more of a market where work is paid for what it's worth because it's an actual market and employers don't have the undue leverage of simple survival over employees.

Just for once, I want to hear a truly honest conservative politician: "We need to drastically shrink the government, which is why when I'm elected, one-eighth* of my constituency will be immediately unemployed!"

(Not that there isn't a good case for eliminating federal waste; but the reality I never hear uttered in the conservative bubble is that the largest government expense is federal employees and subcontractors.)

By that measure, the "truly honest" progressive politician would say: "we need to drastically raise social program spending and taxes, which will dramatically increase unemployment!"

(Not that there isn't a good case for improving federal social programs; but the reality I never hear uttered in the progressive bubble is that the largest government expenses are social programs like social security, medicare, and medicaid.)

I don't understand your rebuttal, how does increased spending on social programs lead to higher unemployment? Are you suggesting that increased social spending leads to people tactically becoming unemployed in order to gain benefits while not working?

Romer and Romer showed that higher taxes lead to lower growth and vice-versa; the additional taxes required to finance the social program spending will sooner or later lead to reduced opportunities for employment.[1] Others have shown that a larger "social safety net" leads to higher unemployment for a variety of reasons.[2][3] It is also logical that people's aversion to unemployment is proportional to its cost (to them), and that if it is less costly, they will expend less time and effort in the stressful, taxing, and unpleasant task of looking for work.

[1] http://eml.berkeley.edu/~dromer/papers/RomerandRomerAERJune2...

[2] http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr646.pdf

[3] http://time.com/9009/unemployment-is-worse-than-death/ (the point is made more thoroughly in the author's book)

Yes, a lot of people employed to make unemployed people feel guilty. (And make them jump through hoops.) Inefficient and mean-spirited bureaucratic overhead.

That won't be the hard part about phasing in UBI without wrecking the economy. All those people that are now unemployed are now earning the UBI.

Except it won't necessarily match their previous salaries. There are a lot of high 5 digit and low six digit incomes in the social services job hierarchy.

> There are a lot of jobs supporting social services, the hard part is going to be finding a way to phase in UBI without wrecking the economy.

You phase it in by starting it at a low level without replacing/reducing existing programs, and then as you ramp it up you start eliminating other programs.

Another overlooked right-leaning perk of UBI: depending on the details, it could allow reducing or even eliminating the minimum wage. This means that labor would be free to seek its true market value, resulting in more total jobs, and reduced incentive/necessity to ship jobs overseas.

Yup, exactly why I included the minimum wage in the list of things that could be scrapped in favor of UBI.

Whoops, overlooked that in your post! But I think it bears repeating. :)

You don't need a minimum wage when you have an UBI worth its name (not just around / below the current minimum wage e.g. like discussed in Switzerland £1,500 a month or more).

People will either do the job or you have to pay a reasonable amount for it - one key principle of the UBI - more people get a choice how they use / sell their time and are not prey like today in many regions / countries to the few who dictate how much they will receive for their time.

Not sure any of us will see it, but I foresee a day when "employee" will be all but extinct. The reason? I think technology, taken to its logical extreme, will empower individuals to the point they'll be able to run fortune 500 scale businesses out of their garages (with all the automation-as-a-service that I imagine will exist). And board rooms? Who needs 'em when you've got the full power of sentient AI to help you accomplish what you want to accomplish.

I like the idea of a Universal Basic Income but running the numbers is eye opening:

£1,500 ~= $2,274

$2,274/person/mo * 12 mo/yr * 300,000,000 people = $8,186,400,000,000/yr. $8 trillion a year to provide that level of UBI to all 300,000,000ish Americans.

Not an inconsequential amount of money!

But if you combine that with a progressive tax rate wont the government take large swathes of that back in the form of taxes?

How much would that be? 40%? That still close to $5 trillion.

How will willingly pay $5 trillion of taxes after all the hard work only to watch everybody else living of their work for free?

Subtract 2 - 3 trillion worth of welfare, unemployment benefits, the minimum wage, social security, etc and it suddenly starts looking feasible. Expensive, yes, but feasible.

Please help me understand this. You promise to pay someone $x, but you will only pay $x-90%(say $y)

The person receiving $y is actually getting it from the very taxes they pay. So essentially what you are giving them is a tax discount. Except in cases where a person makes $0, for which you have social security anyway.

So this is basically a tax discount? You could simply say based on their income some a% of tax discount will be offered every year.

The GDP is something like $14 trillion. We're talking about 60% of the GDP being redistributed. That will work really well... especially when the GDP drops by about a third, which will surely happen.

"We're talking about 60% of the GDP being redistributed."

When assessing the amount being redistributed, much of what's paid in UBI should be netted against what's collected to pay the UBI.

That is, if I am receiving $27k/yr in UBI, but paying $30k/yr in increased taxes toward the UBI, really only $3k/yr is being "redistributed" from me.

This is still going to be a substantial sum, but quite a bit less than "people * UBI amount".

Please don't take this as my asserting that I think $27k/yr would be sustainable in the US - for the record, I don't.

And another right-wing perk: if the basic income had a minimum age, it would attenuate the dysgenic incentives of modern welfare systems.

The idealist in me loves it. The political realist in me just doesn't see it.

Government programs have huge constituencies and embedded supporters within and without government who will fight tooth and nail to keep them. There is no way you will actually cut down on them as suggested.

The best part is, the minimum income applies to them, too!

While they're figuring out what to do next with their lives, they won't be left in the lurch, they'll get that sweet, sweet (well, minimal) UBI check just like everyone else.

Not with that attitude you won't!

I highly doubt scrapping all social assistance is politically possible. Sure, basic income would be better than a patch work welfare state present in most of the developed world, but I am skeptical that it will be any different from other transfer programs already in place.

>Sure, basic income would be better than a patch work welfare state present in most of the developed world

In many countries the government negotiates medicine prices as one entity for the entire country. This gives it a lot of leverage and the ability to provide medicine for all its citizens at a price far lower than what they would each individually be able to buy it at.

Now if everybody had basic income the governments might start getting pressured to stop acting as an intermediate negotiator.

That is one of the best summaries of why this appeals to both the left and the right. Well said!

Also, less bureaucracy to languish and become inneficient, entrenched, and corrupt.

Not everybody on the left agrees:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/the-failure-of-a-past...

"The idea of a basic income guarantee is very popular with readers, more so that the notion of a job guarantee. Yet as we have mentioned in passing, this very sort of program was put in place on a large-scale basis in the past. Initially, it was very popular. However, in the long run it proved to be destructive to the recipients while tremendously beneficial to employers, who used the income support to further lower wages, thus increasing costs to the state and further reducing incentives to work. And when the system was dismantled, it was arguably the working poor, as opposed to the ones who had quit working altogether, who were hurt the most."

I've yet to hear a good explanation for why basic income is superior to a job guarantee. We do not live a techno-futurist utopia where robots do all of our work. We do not want to be welfare queens; work gives us dignity. We do not even have world class infrastructure, we have infrastructure that is falling to pieces and direly needs work.

The last time we were in this situation, FDR created jobs. Jobs that built stuff like schools, hospitals... the lincoln tunnel.

A "basic income" is not the same as a "basic income guarantee".

But surely similar things would happen?

Let's say your wage is 30K per year. On Jan 1 a UBI of 12K per year is to be instated. What would happen to your wage in a year? Personally, given that most all businesses want us to be loyal to them with no loyalty returned to us, my guess would be that you are let go and someone would be hired to do your job for 20K per year.

Nope, both are completely different.

With BI, for each extra dollar your employer pays you, you get an extra dollar.

With income guarantee, for each extra dollar your employer pays you, you get nothing.

> But surely similar things would happen?

The difference between a UBI and an income guarantee like the Speenhamland system is that the latter is a means-tested program that eliminates the marginal benefit of additional work and requires more administration, while the former, because it is unconditional, providing a fixed benefit regardless of outside income, has less administration and preserves the marginal benefit of additional work.

> Let's say your wage is 30K per year. On Jan 1 a UBI of 12K per year is to be instated. What would happen to your wage in a year? Personally, given that most all businesses want us to be loyal to them with no loyalty returned to us, my guess would be that you are let go and someone would be hired to do your job for 20K per year.

If they could get someone to provide the value you do for $20K now, they would. If you think UBI makes that more possible, you have to believe that it also makes it just as much more possible that you'd be able to get someone else's former 30K job for 20K of job income, which, with a 12K UBI, gives you a 6.67% increase in total income.

A job guarantee has similar results to heavily unionized labor: inefficiency. People waste their time doing things that don't matter. Basic income is great because it provides everyone a safety net efficiently. With basic income, they don't have to worry about survival, so people take jobs because they think it's beneficial to them. It sets up the right incentive structures for a productive free market.

"A job guarantee has similar results to heavily unionized labor: inefficiency."

Involuntary unemployment is more efficient is it?

The article you cite used a system that is most definitely not a Basic Income, and not Universal, to make its point against a Basic Income.

You want a way in which the Universal Basic Income would be superior to a Job Guarantee? Administration. With a job guarantee, you will need a massive administration. While I agree wholeheartedly that meaningful work supports dignity. Creating jobs and Universal Basic Income are not opposed to each other.

What exactly was wrong with FDR's public works adminisration and works progress administration?

They built a ton of stuff we still use today.

I have no objection to hiring people to build useful stuff.

That prospect differs from a "job guarantee" precisely where that stuff is not sufficiently useful. In the margin there, I object to paying people to take time and effort away from places they may find more value, to do things that are of minimal value, in the name of "dignity." In fact, I think paying for useless work is destructive of precisely that dignity (along with a pile of economic value).

"That prospect differs from a "job guarantee" precisely where that stuff is not sufficiently useful. In the margin there, I object to paying people to take time and effort away from places they may find more value, to do things that are of minimal value, in the name of "dignity." In fact, I think paying for useless work is destructive of precisely that dignity (along with a pile of economic value)."

So you are saying, in essence, that people's art projects, poetry and one person startups and time spent watching daytime TV are, on average, more useful than projects like the lincoln tunnel, schools, hospitals and bridges and you object to resources being taken from one to build the other?

That so mischaracterizes what I am saying that I don't believe you are interested in having a meaningful conversation. I'm done here.

We do not want to be welfare queens; work gives us dignity.

Bourgeois moralist crap. If working gives you dignity, by all means, work. But being forced to work to survive is not dignity, and the result is the bullshit jobs we see everywhere. If people who have free time feel the need for better infrastructure, they'll build it.

"Ne travaillez jamais!"

Yeah, no kidding, ask the people working 3 minimum wage jobs how much dignity the scheduling nightmares and that 4 hours daily on the cross-town bus gives them.

If the government instituted a job guarantee with a decent living wage, those 3 minimum wage jobs would magically start paying more and treating their workers better.

Because if they didn't, nobody would do that work.

That is only studying first part of the problem. Minimum wage also means, net expenses to produce things also goes up. Transferring the burden of paying the minimum wages to consumers[Who are being paid the minimum wages]. Thereby going back to square one.

This or, since budgets remain same. You will employ lesser people to do same job. Because that is the all budget you have to pay people.

>Minimum wage also means, net expenses to produce things also goes up. Transferring the burden of paying the minimum wages to consumers

Nope. Shareholders. Minimum wage hikes eat into profits before affecting prices or employment. This is why businesses hate them with such a seething passion.

To look at a more concrete example, compare the minimum wage in Australia vs. the US and the cost of big mac in both countries.

I don't understand what "bourgeois moralist crap" means, but there is a great deal of scientific literature supporting the parent's claim. One need only 'Google' unemployment and happiness, to find some. Here are a few of the top hits.[1][2][3]

[1] http://www.jil.go.jp/english/JLR/documents/2012/JLR34_ohtake...

[2] http://wol.iza.org/articles/unemployment-and-happiness.pdf

[3] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jmcb.12154/abstra...

That involuntarily unemployment leads to unhappiness is completely irrelevant in a discussion about UBI, which would only allow unemployment for those who wanted it - while allowing others to work.

In my second sentence, I implicitly agreed that some people might feel more dignified by working. The bourgeois moralism comes from using that to justify forcing everyone to work, as if dignity had to be imposed on people, those brutish sinful beings who have to be saved by those who know better.

And by the way, this moralist view is probably one of the great culprits for the effect shown in your links - like those people in the Philippines flogging themselves until their flesh is raw and bloody, we can do terrible things to ourselves when we've been convinced that we're lesser human beings.

>That involuntarily unemployment leads to unhappiness is completely irrelevant in a discussion about UBI, which would only allow unemployment for those who wanted it - while allowing others to work.

A) Nobody much really wants voluntary unemployment. Not for extended periods, anyway.

B) Involuntary unemployment still exists with UBI meaning you still get most of that unhappiness.

C) It's not like we're short on useful work even if we are flooded with bullshit jobs and unemployment. We just have a really wasteful allocation of labor.

>The bourgeois moralism comes from using that to justify forcing everyone to work, as if dignity had to be imposed on people

A job guarantee isn't forcing anybody to do anything and it isn't imposed on anybody. It's an offer of a job to anybody who wants one.

>And by the way, this moralist view is probably one of the great culprits for the effect shown in your links - like those people in the Philippines flogging themselves until their flesh is raw and bloody, we can do terrible things to ourselves when we've been convinced that we're lesser human beings.

Economic policies that enforce idleness are only going to contribute to that.

Nobody much really wants voluntary unemployment. Not for extended periods, anyway.

Funny thing to say on a site where so many people chose a more challenging life exactly because they didn't want to be employees.

Few people want to be idle. That doesn't in any way imply they all want to be employed. There are many ways in which people enjoy living besides being employed - volunteering, studying, researching, exploring, creating art, developing a non-commercially-viable craft or skill, traveling, founding startups and other organizations, the list is endless.

B) Involuntary unemployment still exists with UBI meaning you still get most of that unhappiness.

When you don't need to pay anything to offer a job, there's absolutely no reason for most businesses not to accept anyone. Only unpleasant jobs that few people want to do will still have to be well remunerated - as it should be.

It's not like we're short on useful work even if we are flooded with bullshit jobs and unemployment. We just have a really wasteful allocation of labor.

Which is a great practical point in my favor. The State is one of the greatest sources of bullshit jobs; there's no reason to assume the new guaranteed jobs would be better allocated.

A job guarantee isn't forcing anybody to do anything and it isn't imposed on anybody. It's an offer of a job to anybody who wants one.

If people can't survived without a job, they are forced to get one. If society can easily avoid that but chooses not to for BS moralist reasons, the people advocating for that are forcing others to have jobs.

Economic policies that enforce idleness are only going to contribute to that.

The idea that there is only a choice between idleness and employment is one of the BS parts of the moralism I was referring to.

> When people on the far left and the far right agree, they're usually onto something.

A similar observation is the "horseshoe theory": "The horseshoe theory in political science asserts that rather than the far left and the far right being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, they in fact closely resemble one another, much like the ends of a horseshoe."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

The problem comes with narrowing all political variation down to "left" vs "right". More dimensions are needed to tease apart the differences / similarities.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum#Other_multi...

A horseshoe could be multi dimensional.

> When people on the far left and the far right agree, they're usually onto something.

In the 1930s the global far left and far right agreed on authoritarianism. While I personally think UBI is a great idea, I think that invoking a principal of that the points on which the far right and far left half similar views are likely to be correct to promote it is probably a substantially less great idea.

If the far left and the far right were forced to agree on the level of BI or accept the status quo I think we'd be back to the status quo though...

I first heard of this idea through HN and have discussed it with several people who I consider far right.

They are all concerned that this will ultimately end up as just another dole and the mother of all doles. They ask questions I don't have good answers to like:

1. This includes healthcare?

2. This includes disability?

When I say...well, I don't know about healthcare, its curtains.

Healthcare costs are a problem because they can often be unpredictable and catastrophic. A UBI wouldn't fix that; you still need either an insurance or a single-payer system of some sort. The short version is that you're going to end up with risk pooling of some description either way.

Where the appeal comes for the right is that a UBI would let you eliminate our patchwork of other social assistance programs and all the headache, cost, and inefficiency of their associated bureaucracy.

The basic pitch isn't actually all that different from the flat tax ideas that are popular in conservative circles with the distinction that a UBI would disproportionately affect the wealthy rather than the poor.

Which is a bit ironic because the infrastructure of basic income will require tracking of US citizens on a scale never before seen in the US. I'm not for or against basic income at this point, but it does make me chuckle a bit about idealists and their inability to see what their ideas will look like in practice.

I am very much against the UBI but I don't see the tracking issue you mention. I'd love to know more about it!

Please elaborate. I would think that all the government would need to know is whether each citizen exists, is still alive, and what's their bank account. With no in-depth knowledge of US government, I think it knows on average much more about each citizen.

The government already, in theory, has a means of making payments to nearly every citizen (social security). So drop every welfare system but the Social Security Administration, and expand its payments to everyone, rather than just those currently qualifying (survivors and retirees, primarily). (Easier said than done)

...and keep track of every single one of those US citizens' addresses and/or bank accounts. Every single one.

http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/

The SSA is currently handling some 64 million beneficiaries.

I'm not contending that it'd be easy, but it's a scaling problem at this point. Systems exist to handle it already.

My apologies if my original comment appeared to be about it being unrealistic. It was about expansion of government involvement which personally I'm not particularly against(or for). I was talking about it being larger than it is now as opposed to being practical.

How would they need to track us differently than, say, with Soc Sec?

My assumption was that Social Security typically only effects most US citizens after 65 and/or working(paying income tax). For example, while debated and likely not highly accurate, ~10% of the US citizen population doesn't have a valid id. Also, the amount of those with identification with the valid current address is even lower. When you are talking about the bottom 1/3rd of the population especially there are a lot of people outside the system who are actually US citizens. One can definitely argue that these people will receive a net benefit for entering back into it, but they will also be back into the system as opposed to now. Like I said before, I'm not against it, I just chuckle about the fact that it creates a larger percentage of the population tracked by the government.

> My assumption was that Social Security typically only effects most US citizens after 65 and/or working(paying income tax).

Social Security, because eligibility is contribution based, effects people (from a tracking perspective) from the time they start working in a Social Security covered job (pretty much all legal jobs other than the subset of non-federal public sector jobs that don't participate in social security.)

You could very easily argue a UBI dramatically reduces the amount of information the government has on current welfare dependents. Besides, it can't possibly be any more "tracking" than what the IRS already does

Considering the population involved in taxation is ~48% I feel like 100% is a bit higher. There is certainly additional tracking based upon the listing of dependents ect. but I'm confident it's less then every single US citizen.

Nearly the entire population, at least those of working age, are involved in taxation to some extent.

Everyone pays, directly or indirectly, sales and property taxes. Every employed person ,that isn't paid under the table, pays payroll (ok, a few legal exceptions to this) and income taxes (if they make enough money). Those who don't make enough money to pay income tax are still involved with the IRS because they need to file for refunds or other programs they may qualify for.

That is absolutely correct about "involvement". It was a poor choice of words. I was talking about income taxation.

Well, the US right wing, maybe, which seems much more State-adverse than right-wing parties here in Europe.

What about the Chinese right-wing? Or the Russian? Or did the context of the article give enough clues that they weren't talking about those, but maybe so for Europe?

Do you have a point?

Hmm, never heard of people on the right wanting a basic income to simplify government welfare.

In the 1980s it was advocated by those on the Right for that reason, albeit with a different name, a negative income tax.

It was one of the reasons advocate by Milton Friedman.

> Righties (well, go far right enough)

Milton Friedman is now "far right"?

I honestly cannot understand that people (left or right) are still discussing basic income. A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that you have to basically double the tax rate to pay for it. Here are the numbers for Germany, but I'd assume that the situation would be similar for many other countries.

Assume we give each of the 80 Mio germans 10000 Euro per year. That's an expense of 800 Billion per year. Contrast this with a total tax income of ca 600 Billion per year [1]. It's not gonna fly...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steueraufkommen_(Deutschland)

The argument that is made is that because you can entirely abolish a whole slew of agencies and other programs (welfare etc.) it's not as simple as just looking at current budgets, you need to factor in the savings you get from axing the agencies.

To be clear I'm not saying that it's viable, I'm just saying that your calculation is not the one proponents of the idea are using.

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