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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase that XKCD comic, "14 benefit programs?! Ridiculous! We need to create one universal benefit program that covers everyone! Now you have 15 programs."

I get the sense that liberals and conservatives have wildly different conceptions of what a Basic Income would mean in practice.

Conservatives and libertarians may like the idea of giving a single no-strings-attached check every month to everyone and anyone and sending them on their way. Liberals I imagine expect a basic income will be enough to guarantee food, clothing and housing and perhaps some means of allocating portions to those categories, which is more or less what we have now.

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"universal benefit program" meaning it is designed from the beginning to replace the 14, so now you have 1.

Designed to /= actually will

There are plenty of campaigners on the left - the UK Green Party is an example - that openly campaign for a BI in addition to most of the state benefits that already exist. And when it comes to implementation details, it's quite hard to believe that many left wing proponents actually would take the "well if the BI isn't enough for you to afford your social housing once we sell it off, maybe you should just move" route.

Any bill to introduce UBI would almost certainly have to include the elimination of existing programs to get passed.

I don't dispute that many liberals would like to have UBI and the existing benefits (despite that being economically crippling). They're just extremely unlikely to get their way.

There is absolutely no way you could get rid of all of the other programs. If someone is irresponsible with their money (and there will be at least some), I doubt anyone wants families starving in the streets, which is kind of the way a bunch of the current programs are set up (at least in the US).

Pay it weekly.

Payday loan shops.

Don't pretend you can legislate around that problem-- if payday loans against UBI were illegal, the black market (loan sharks) would fill in the gap.

There's already a black market for WIC/EBT ("food stamps"). Replacing those with another program that would also have a black market seems less outrageous to me than supplementing them with another program with the same flaw.

That's very misleading. The Green Party want to keep some of the existing benefits, but massively reduced (so disability benefit, for example, would drop to £30 a week). But since they plan to abolish more than one benefit, there would definitely be fewer than before.

You can read the detailed proposal at: https://policy.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Policy%20files...

Thanks for the helpful link. From what I can see they're undertaking to ensure that not a single disabled person would be worse off under their scheme with many better off, plan on keeping housing benefits in their entirety, intend a revised form of child benefit to similarly not leave families worse off and propose a pension scheme which is higher than BI and current basic state pensions in addition to retaining existing earnings related state pensions.

In short: they're proposing to abolish ~£37bn of targeted subsidies for working age adults but retaining ~£67bn of them. Pensions and child benefits get totally replaced, but by new subsidies that cost more than what they replace. I think this is a much better approach than eliminating all or nearly all the existing benefits as is often favoured by right wing BI proponents, but it leaves untouched or simply renames more than it eliminates, and ultimately they're proposing to balance their books far more from offsetting tax increases than by eliminating traditional targeted welfare subsidies.

Unless you plan on passing a universal benefit program that completely supplements the income of everyone relying on existing program then you are going to have to keep existing ones while cutting the benefits under those programs by a matching amount.

For instance if you currently get $1100 a month from benefit X then you would get $700 BI and $400 from benefit X.

The reason that the 15th program doesn't replace the earlier 14 is because each program is operated independently and according to the motives of its members (who don't buy into the plan to replace themselves).

A legislative mandate neatly solves that problem. The analogy doesn't hold.

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