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Comment by cmdli | Hacker News Reader

From the $1 trillon stated in the article, spread across 300 million people, each person would get around $3000 a year. That honestly doesn't seem like it would help a lot, considering it would replace current welfare systems. The Swiss proposal of around $2600 a month, implemented in the US, would cost nearly $10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible.

I don't think the problem with basic income is an ideological one, its a numbers one. There simply isn't enough money to implement it without massively increasing taxes.

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I absolutely agree but my biggest fear is that socialists don't give a shit and will push "progressive taxes".

I live in Scotland and they love the fact that they can raise taxes here now... they openly talk about it and very few people I know bat an eyelid!

But it's the curse of socialism imo: As long as you tax people earning more than me then I am fine with it.

Sadly, something I have heard too often

Edit: Spelling

Very few people bat an eyelid because the upcoming election is a guaranteed SNP win, and they aren't planning on raising taxes - despite claiming to be a more progressive party.

If Scotland was really keen for tax rises the SNP would implement them given they are currently focusing on nothing but winning sufficient support for a second Independence Referendum.

There are some sorts of political proposal it's reasonable to be shocked at people talking openly about. For me, they're things like: Reintroducing slavery. Switching to communism. Putting people in prison for having the wrong religion. Expelling all black people from the country.

... Do I understand correctly that you consider raising taxes to be in this category?

I absolutely don't believe they are in the same category: How the hell did you equate them?

Who honestly wants to pay more tax? Really? I ask you in all seriousness.

I am well-off but up until recently I earned enough to keep my head above water. I had a disposable income after all bills were paid of around £100 a month: One burst tyre in my car and that was it but I had no debt (apart from my mortgage) as I lived within my means.

I work hard, I get up early and study and so on and I am a contractor now, earning good money.

That being said: I have no issue with taxation. I believe in taxation but I do not believe in constantly increasing it nor do I believe that it is a moral issue like it has been made recently.

For as long as I can remember, no Government has decreased taxes in the UK. None. They shuffle them around but they never decrease them.

I read something a year or so ago (can't remember the reference, maybe Taxpayers Alliance) that showed over 60% of my money is taxed now through income tax, stealth taxes etc.

Enough is enough!

I equated them because you said:

> they love the fact that they can raise taxes here now... they openly talk about it and very few people I know bat an eyelid!

which looked to me (and still does) as if you were expressing surprise that people openly talk about raising taxes and that others aren't surprised they're doing so.

> Who honestly wants to pay more tax?

Me. More precisely: all else being equal I prefer to pay less tax, but all else is not equal and I think increasing the taxes paid by people like me and using the resulting revenue to increase funding for (e.g.) the national health service or benefits for disabled people would, overall, make the country I live in a better place.

> no Government has decreased taxes in the UK

Well, according to the graph here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni... tax revenue in the UK was a smaller fraction of GDP in 2005 than in 2000. It's a little under 40% (which already makes it quite implausible that 60% of your income gets taken in tax).

Finer-grained comparison is really difficult because the tax system is complicated (income tax, National Insurance, VAT, capital gains, ...); over the last few decades income tax has decreased substantially for most people but other taxes have increased.

> over 60% of my money is taxed now

This is not something you should be believing or disbelieving on the basis of something you read from an anti-tax campaigning organization. You should have all the information you need to work it out.

I don't know whether I'm paid better or worse than you are (I would guess fairly similarly) but I do not pay anywhere near 60% of my earnings in tax. Adding up all the taxes I can think of, I reckon I pay either about 30% or about 40% in tax; the lower figure is if I count capital gains (largely untaxed because most of my assets are in tax-efficient things like ISAs and pension funds) as "income" and the higher figure is if I look only at salary.

(Maybe the numbers look worse for contractors than for salaried employees? I am not counting, e.g., corporation tax paid by my employer; neither do I see any reason why I should.)

"they openly talk about it"

Neither the SNP (by far the most powerful political party in Scotland) or the Conservatives (who look likely to be the 2nd most powerful party) are advocating tax rises.

Of course, there are people advocating tax rises - Labour, Lib Dems and the Socialists - but they are, of course, quite free to do this and the public will no doubt be just as free to not to vote for them.

The main problem with a general basic income is that it would be enormously wasteful, regressive and unfair. If you have a good economic situation, 250$/month is peanuts. If you are grasping for air, it won't be enough; even more so if it comes at the expense of getting rid of public programmes that can target concrete problems and leverage economies of scale.

Other approaches (e.g. minimum guaranteed income for the jobless and tax credits for the working poor) look like a far better use of resources.

If you're earning more you will effectively pay the money back in higher taxes, so the transfer will be much the same as for a minimum guaranteed income, but without the costly administration, confusing rules and moral judgement that come with minimum guaranteed incomes

How much money is actually spent on the costs of administration that would actually be eliminated by UBI, which is mostly just qualification paperwork?

You'd still need fraud prevention--people faking identities. You'd still paper pushers who coordinate payments and customer service.

I can't believe this really would create all that much savings when averaged out over 330 million people.

Ignoring the government's costs, people on welfare in the UK can easily end up spending 20 hours a week on claiming that welfare, spread between having to transport themselves to attend a weekly signing on session, making a set number of job applications that meet the criteria (at the same time as conducting a real job search), attending worthless courses and filling out the paperwork. If you remove the moral judgement you remove the need for this busy-work, which is a massive overall cost to society

That's not really a cost to society. It's a cost of time from those who have plenty of time to spend.

They are, last I checked, members of society. It's also unhelpful to assume they have the time to spend on this - low income already means that basic things like shopping and getting around take a lot longer since they can't pay for convenience, and they could be spending the time they have on education or even hunting for actual jobs rather than going through a meaningless tick-box approach.

Of course, when you do introduce actual numbers and note that poor people looking for work generally get more than $3000 per year in benefits, and early retirees and stay-at-home spouses generally don't, arguments against a proposal that would in practice take away from the former class of people and give to the latter become a profoundly ideological argument.

> The Swiss proposal of around $2600 a month, implemented in the US, would cost nearly $10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible.

That number sounds higher than it would effectively be:

1) The population is ~320m, but ~65m of those are under the age of 16 (add on another 8m if you say under 18), who presumably don't need the same $2600/month right from when they are babies. That shaves of $2.8trillion

2) Some people currently on benefits will get to keep all of the $2,600, some people will break even receiving $2,600 and paying an extra $2,600 in tax, and at the richer end of the spectrum they will receive $2,600 and pay more than $2,600 back, to balance it out across society. Even before you start counting the extra money you get from taxing the rich with more than the free income they receive, if you draw a line at the median of society and say that everyone richer than that pays back the $2,600 they receive each month in tax (i.e. saying the richest half don't need this basic income) then that's $3.8trillion that is technically being given out but immediately bein taken back by the Government. (Hopefully they negotiate good bank fees! Obviously the benefit to this seemingly pointless giving out and taking back of money is not having to deal with the legwork of judging who deserves benefits.)

So that's cut almost $10trillion down to ~$3.8trillion that's actually being given out.

3) Now take off current welfare costs. Wikipedia says "Total Social Security and Medicare expenditures in 2013 were $1.3 trillion" and I'm too lazy to find a figure that doesn't include Medicare. Let's imagine that it's split 50/50, we have $3.2trillion left to find.

And this is when you start moving the line we drew down the middle of society and figuring out what % of the $2,600 different levels of society should get to keep or have to pay back in tax or have to pay extra in tax. If you think the rough amount of welfare spent on society currently is right then you can balance it so that less people get supported and less taxes are needed. If you think more people should receive more support and richer people should pay even higher taxes to cover that then it can be pushed in that direction.

The simplest way to logically think "can it be balanced?" is to imagine that 100% of the population gets given $2,600 (or whatever amount) each month, and 100% gets taxed that exact same amount. Everyone is receiving that basic income, and (other than relatively small admin costs) the program is break even. Then you just play with numbers, always balancing both sides, to redistribute wealth from richer people to poorer people (which is already what the welfare system does).

> we have $3.2trillion left to find.

Bear in mind that the current US budget is $3.8 trillion dollars. So even in this best case scenario we have to nearly double our budget. There just isn't enough income to make this work.

You probably have to give children some sort of amount. Maybe even the full amount. The public isn't going to buy into a program that gives an abled bodied man who smokes pot and plays WoW all day the full share but give a single mom the 4 kids the same amount.

There is also no way this would work if 50% of the country doesn't really get the income because you raise their taxes to take it back. Middle class taxes are a third rail in American politics. Even socialist Bernie Sanders won't raise their taxes.

You'd be better off just raising the earned income tax credit.

You're right I forgot to add back in some amount for children. Somewhere between $400 and $1300 would be fair, so let's say a middle ground of $850/month which adds back $0.75trillion.

As to raising taxes - if a UBI were ever to exist this would have to happen to the middle class, because the middle class (or most of them, might depend on how defined) do not need $2,600/month on top of their current situation and if they get this then certainly it wouldn't be affordable. It's not nearly as hard a sell as a normal tax raise though, you just explain that for X people under a certain wealth level the "new basic income tax" will be capped at the same amount they receive as basic income so that they don't lose any money in real terms.

If there is enough to implement it with a big tax increase but not without a big tax increase, and if that makes it infeasible ... isn't that exactly an ideological problem?

(For the avoidance of doubt, an ideological problem can be a serious real problem. If a basic income can't be implemented without a tax increase that voters would never tolerate, that's a good reason not to do it. If it can't be implemented without a tax increase that would wreck the economy, that's also a good reason not to do it, but I think that would rightly be called a numbers problem rather than an ideological one.)

Doesn't the US spend that much already on quantitative easing :) ?

>$10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible.

There's nothing infeasible about spending $10 trillion a year. The US can quite literally print and spend as much as it likes in dollar terms. The only limiting factor is inflation.

As soon as public spending starts causing ~> 12% inflation year on year you need to start worrying about "can the country afford this?". Not until then. The government certainly wasn't worrying about the total dollar number during the war or the last bank bailout.

...and how do you stop companies from hiking prices to absorb it?

Purchasing power will still be increased through imports.

Until the BI is implemented in those countries, and the companies there have to increase the prices.

That just brings another problem. You will have two kind of countries: some with BI and some without BI. How are you going to convince the people from the countries without BI not to move to a country with BI?

You can't "import" housing though. And businesses collude all the time.

I think UBI is untenable until we hit some Star Trekian post scarcity economy.

But if people could decouple income from location, people could move to cheaper housing. There are free houses in Detroit and Baltimore because there are no jobs and that area sucks. In a UBI-topia, people would leave Sf and move to Baltimore.

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