Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty | Hacker News Reader

Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

nytimes.com

109 points_airh244 comments

Something that is missing from the basic income/poverty debate is the notion of "learned helplessness"; after a long time in poverty, people get used to the lifestyle and have difficulty adjusting to "regular" life.

For example, if you've been homeless your entire life, you've never had to lock your apartment door or carry a key around. My partner (a social worker) had a client who's apartment was always getting robbed because whenever she left, she never locked her door; it was not something she was used to doing. Another client was unable to set an alarm and follow a schedule. 20 years of living on the street, waking up whenever he felt like it, meant that he had completely lost his faculties for time management. He couldn't hold down a job and regularly missed appointments.

Part of my partner's job was carrying these people through their journey to "regular" life. She would show up to their apartments and take them to their appointments. She would call the woman who didn't lock her doors every morning to remind her to lock her door on her way out. Etc. Etc.

Basic income doesn't solve any of this. It just drops a load of money into a person's lap who has no idea what to do with it.

Basic income doesn't always solve this for someone who is already homeless, but it might still act as a preventative measure, giving someone enough of a financial buffer to avoid homelessness entirely.

If you heard some of these stories, you would find that it's not just a lack of money that causes homelessness. To be brutally honest, it's a mixture of stupidity and often, an addiction. These people need other people actively intervening in their lives to keep them on track. The preventative measure should be the social worker, not the pay cheque.

I think the operating word is "some," not all. We know that UBI will sometimes be misspent. Most if not all aid programs have this problem. That doesn't mean it isn't worth it for those who would put the money to good use.

It's a problem if the math behind UBI presumes savings from eliminating a ton of social programs and we later find that there are substantial numbers of people that still need those programs even with UBI for non-financial reasons.

If we find that non-trivial numbers of parents blow all their UBI on XYZ, are we really going to let their kids starve? Or will we see that programs like SNAP need to remain in existence?

I think a good UBI program will eliminate the crappy social programs, and will keep some around to help transition people to the new society and also to help people who aren't helped just by having money to spend. For instance, child abuse: we have CPS for a reason, but giving everyone a monthly check isn't going to magically eliminate child abuse, so obviously we still need CPS for that. There's plenty of other places where we'll still need social workers to help people. But the savings we'll realize by not having armies of government workers making sure someone isn't "cheating" by getting a welfare check and then trying to supplement that with another source of income, along with various other benefits, will help pay for UBI. And eventually, by eliminating poverty and changing the culture (with both UBI and social workers), we won't need so many social workers.

Is over-hiring of social workers in welfare sector a problem in this country? It seems that applications for something like SNAP are handled online, distributions are done directly to debit cards, and a bunch of enforcement and fraud prevention work is offloaded to agencies like SSA and IRS.

I don't have any numbers handy, however I think it should be fairly obvious that even with some stuff handled online, there's still a lot of federal workers behind the scenes. Anyone who's worked in the federal government knows there's a ton of federal workers who really don't do much all day long, and get paid a lot for it.

If the SSA and IRS don't have to do so much enforcement work for entitlements, that's a bunch of people there who can be laid off to save taxpayer money.

For SNAP they did the analysis of various policy steps that could result in administrative savings - https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... (it's a very wide image, so zoom in and scroll to the right until you hit "Policy Options").

Eliminating the asset test (the area where undoubtedly some government employees work full-time) would actually increase the program cost. Most of the savings are actually derived from juggling the numbers behind "the cost of a nutritious diet".

I am personally not opposed to going full-throttle on something like SNAP - just send a free card to anyone with a SSN who requests one (I am sure agricultural and retail lobby would concur), but I think the potential savings are overblown - Medicare, SS and SNAP are generally tightly administered.

Don't forget mental illness as a cause.

http://www.nutrition411.com/content/refeeding-syndrome-0

Basic income doesn't solve any of this. It just drops a load of money into a person's lap who has no idea what to do with it.

What do you mean by this? Poor people would definitely know what to do with it.

They might know what to do with it. They might also spend it all on drugs, or fall prey to scammers or thieves.

"He couldn't hold down a job and regularly missed appointments."

I think this is part of the problem - right now in society, if you can't be on time and hold down a job, you'll go hungry and have no place to live. Basic income removes that harsh penalty, and lets people live regardless of whether they can make an appointment.

"Basic income removes that harsh penalty"

The real challenge of a basic income isn't how to pay for it; it's how to convince regular people who get up every day and go work at jobs a lot shittier than most of us here have that that's a harsh penalty.

There is enormous social momentum behind the idea that you should work if you can.

>The real challenge of a basic income isn't how to pay for it; it's how to convince regular people who get up every day and go work at jobs a lot shittier than most of us here have that that's a harsh penalty.

That's not a problem. If a job is shitty and ultra-low pay so that no one wants to do it now that they have a UBI to live on, then the business owner needs to either increase the pay enough to make someone want to do it, or he can just shut down the business or do it himself. UBI prevents people from having to toil at horrible jobs unless they choose to, rather than being forced to in order to survive. That can only be a good thing. It then means that true market forces can now set the wages for jobs.

UBI prevents people from having to toil at horrible jobs unless they choose to, rather than being forced to in order to survive. That can only be a good thing.

I agree with you. My whole point was that most people do not agree with you. There is enormous support for the idea that you are supposed to work for what you earn. Full stop. End of story. Anything less is charity that should, at best, be accepted as a last resort.

Sorry, I misunderstood. You're right: America absolutely has a Protestant work ethic instilled into its culture that will make UBI hard to get passed into law. The problem is, that like most religious concepts and ideals, it's completely obsolete: all the drudgework jobs are rapidly becoming automated, leaving many people unable to find decent-paying work to support themselves.

the rich claim that the poor and homeless are lazy and by not being lazy they could have all the riches... yet most rich people were born rich, and most rich families have been the richest families for centuries. Furthermore I know many homeless people who work very hard for the little they get, while I know many rich people who sit on their Yachts all day, or take 6 week vacations every year. -- The rich are just as lazy as anyone who isn't rich if not MORE lazy because they CAN be lazy -- especially those who got wealthy by luck of birth.

6 weeks vacation is considered lazy? I don't disagree with your point btw just shocked that that's considered lazy.

Yay for living in Sweden!

And yet many people knows of at least one family of super lazy people who would happily live on basic income.

The trouble is convincing them that these people will never ever do anything productive anyway so the best we can do is loss minimisation by ensuring they don't turn to crime and fix basic medical issues early. And that they're not worth a single second more worth of attention compared to the other 99% of society

Exactly. And what's more, they are productive, even if they just subsist on UBI alone. They're getting their UBI mostly from extremely wealthy people, who would otherwise hoard it mostly. By redistributing it to poor people, it's going to be spread around in the economy more, creating economic gains. These people are going to spend it on rent, food, clothes, maybe a car, and various other stuff. They might not be creating any wealth, but they're advancing the economy, which will create wealth elsewhere (such as when someone comes up with a new business to provide a useful service to these UBI "leaches"). And more tax revenue will be generated from their economic activity too. This is why wealth concentration at the top is so bad: the wealth stagnates and does nothing for the economy when it's just held in offshore bank accounts; when it's spent, even on booze, it has many consequential effects: paying for bartenders, janitors at the pub, delivery drivers (maybe not with robo-trucks...), brewery employees, etc.

Finally, you never know what these "lazy" people will spawn: one of their kids could become a great author or scientist or something.

>The real challenge of a basic income isn't how to pay for it...

No, actually that's the real challenge, as the author of the article points out. We would have to raise taxes tremendously to give everyone a nontrivial amount (the numbers are in the article) even if we ended all current income redistribution programs.

And we'd have to raise taxes even more than you'd think at first glance, since a whole lot of people would stop working in response to higher taxes and UBI.

I probably would. Even without UBI I would probably retire early if my taxes were raised significantly, and I can't be the only one.

But government spending within the national economy is not income constrained, so raising taxes is not a requirement.

Then why do we have taxes at all?

Good question, what drives politicians I can only guess. Neoclassical economists have their heads buried firmly in the sand, preferring their a priori fantasies and pushing that as their agenda.

Taxes are good for creating currency demand (and large scale markets systems resulting from it), shaping incentives and income redistribution. It can also be used to put a brake on a bubble economy.

It's a good question, but it's clearly not merely to raise money. They print money.

To control the money supply. It's true that the government don't need to directly fund all spending with taxes, but if more money is issued than collected, the amount of money in circulation increases and the currency devalues. Obviously this should be avoided as the more the currency you're printing is worth, the better off you are.

So practically speaking, you do have to fund expenditures with taxes. You can't just create value out of thin air.

Not to disagree with your point, but shouldn't we examine the reasons behind and for necessitating that all people work? Not to get too existential, but does anyone really believe that's why we're here, or what we should be doing with our lives?

This is a very good point. We are at a point in society where we have replaced multitudes of workers with automated machinery. (1st world countries)This in turn is supposed to make way for more high thinking jobs, but in my understanding does not. To me it seems we have reached a point where we should find a way to fund people who want to do creative work, or experimental. To me, yes, we are meant to work. But that work is not just for a company. Perhaps teaching yourself how to garden, painting, etc. Doing something, that's work.

To validate the point of work being why we are here I will roughly quote Marcus Aurelius: When you wake up in the morning get up and get going. Why are you wanting to sleep and be lazy? Does the honey bee say forget this and sleep all day? Does the ant forgo his work and sleep and eat all day? No, all creatures go to work. What makes you any different?

This is of course out of context, as this is just reasoning for himself to get up in the morning, not a blanket statement about society.

> right now in society, if you can't be on time and hold down a job, you'll go hungry and have no place to live. Basic income removes that harsh penalty, and lets people live regardless of whether they can make an appointment.

Historically, that would be an incredible luxury. (I'm interpreting "make an appointment" as a figure of speech that encompasses, e.g., sowing crops at the right time of year, harvesting when the crops are ripe, hunting when the game is afoot, etc.)

Historically speaking, it's an incredible luxury to expect all of your children to survive past infancy. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be a basic expectation for citizens of an advanced modern nation.

Though it lets people live whether or not they can make an appointment, it doesn't let them live as well as they could and could leave them a bit of a buffer so that they can re-evaluate what they are doing.

For some people, the fact that they desperately have to make that appointment on time removes the motivation.

You and I enjoy our jobs because we don't desperately have to be on time. If I had to punch a time card, I'd be fucking out of here faster than you can type "logout" and hit Enter.

People can probably fix their lives with greater ease and probability of success if they can calm down a little bit.

When I was in my teens I worked summer jobs in a German social welfare agency (Sozialamt). There were many families that had been on welfare for generations and it was noticeable that their kids had no idea how to make progress in school or how to hold a job. They simply didn't know and had nobody who could tell them. They also had no role models.

I think with basic income there is a risk that a lot of people will forever be lost for the working world. Especially if the basic income is so low that you can barely survive.

I'm unsure about the German system...

I've been on welfare here in the USA. The way it works is dependant on your income. The more you make by hard work, the less assistance you receive.

That sounds fair... Until you realize that section 8 (housing) is the same way. Food stamps are the same way. At the time, there was a cutoff for the free clinic (which counted benefits as income).. I made $100 too much.

When doing work and getting paid $1 means taking $3 in losses from assistance programs, this grinds people further into poverty. The further I try to dig out, the deeper I get until I hit the point that I can start to survive without any assistance...

This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

It needs to be done in such a way that the total-income curve is monotonically increasing, so recipients never have a disincentive to make a little more money in their job. This should be fundamental and obvious, but because doing it requires just the tiniest bit of linear algebra, our elected representatives are not capable of it. Mind-blowing.

The system is this way by design. The people who drafted, voted on, and passed these programs did so with disincentivizing its recipients from making more money being one of the goals.

I disagree. I think it's more likely that we're still using programs designed for a different era.

For example, food stamps (SNAP) were made permanent in 1964 as one of the great society programs. WIC came a few years later. I suspect - but have not researched - that you will find this is true for a lot of current welfare programs.

There may be people in power making bad decisions about administering these programs, but I don't believe they were designed to ensnare.

> This is clearly the worst aspect of our system and shows that it was designed by the mathematically uneducated.

Actually, it mostly shows that the programs are not a system, and were designed separately from each other, with inadequate consideration of their interactions. The fact that they often have overlapping target populations and that benefit reductions due to means-testing are therefore sometimes much greater than 1:1 isn't due to problems with math, its due to the fact that the questions that were asked and which math was deployed to answer weren't even the right questions.

I don't think math has anything to do with it. I think the narrative of, "if you're poorer, you need more assistance" is all that happens. I think most politics is about winning an argument about what is "fair" and not actually analyzing consequences or incentives.

Really wish we'd focus less on what is fair and more on what brings the greatest outcome.

Right. The income value I keep seeing floated is in the realm of US$8000 per year. This is not basic income, it's basically a large tax credit. I don't know why it's called basic income, there's nothing really basic about it when it can't completely pay for one basic thing like say rent or mortgage.

Actually, under some models $8000 could be enough. A job paying that much locks you down, but if you got that much in basic income you could move somewhere for which that is enough to leave, albeit cheaply. I know there are places in rural Pennsylvania where you could get by on that. Those places don't have much for jobs to go around, but population influxes of people with lots of free time and a willingness to work a little for some spending money could change that.

On the other hand, there exists a worry that people on such an income who couldn't find additional work would keep getting pushed around to new areas as the influx develops each cheap locale.

Well, enabling nomadism in a modern society very well may have positives for individuals and local economies alike for all the same sorts of reasons why nomadism is a successful and very efficient strategy of survival.

The ecological era "farmer" gene required a disposition in humans to feel compelled (or at least comfortable) staying put. And that gene just so happens to be common today in developed nations. But it's not for everyone, and the economics right now are very much against the nomadic personality type.

That could be mitigate to a good degree by such a small guaranteed income.

Indeed; if people feel more secure, they can ditch their job and find a better one, perhaps while improving their skills. A basic income could be a lubricant for people to improve their lives.

You mention rent. Something I'm confused about BI is that it doesn't seem to account for regional prices - 8k for housing goes a lot further in Newark than it does in Manhattan, and when you start comparing different regions the differences are probably even greater

Of course it doesn't, and it shouldn't. If it did, everyone would move to the high-cost locations because they'd get paid more, and then the BI would have to spiral upwards endlessly to pay for that. If someone demands to live in the most posh district of SanFran, for instance, why should society pay for that (esp. when it won't be just them, it'll be hordes of people wanting to move there)?

If someone wants to live in an expensive area, they need to earn their own money to pay for it. The whole point of BI is to make sure people aren't starving or homeless or in danger of that. If you can live comfortably on the BI in bumfuck, PA or KS, then that's enough for you: society has done its part in making sure you're provided for. Maybe it's not exactly where you want to live, but society has no obligation to provide for your whims. If you don't like it, get a job and make more money.

But wouldn't that lead to people living in the middle of nowhere where there aren't many jobs?

Edit: also what happens to all the people living in projects in what would otherwise be expensive areas? Ship them off to a sparsely populated non desirable area? Good luck with that

If a bunch of people move to the middle of nowhere, they will need goods and services, and thus jobs will be created as enterprising people move to provide them.

But those customers don't have money to spend -- why would anything but the most predatory business (rent-to-own/layaway firms, payday loans, etc) move to service them?

The people themselves can provide the services. They have no other jobs anyway, remember?

They do have money to spend: their UBI check. Part of it will go to rent, but the rest will go to things like groceries/food, clothes, the local water and electric companies, the local Wawa/Sheetz, etc.

Layaway firms aren't that bad, it's the payday loan places that are bad. That can be fixed with legislation, if we stop electing crooks like Hillary and her buddy DWS who are in the pocket of the payday-loan industry.

>But wouldn't that lead to people living in the middle of nowhere where there aren't many jobs?

In theory, no. A UBI is not a free pass for a luxurious lifestyle, it's a basic income. If you want more than that, you'll have to work. If you want to not work at all and sit on your ass, then sure, you can go move to Tornado Alley or frigid Minot or wherever and live cheap and make some extra cash doing odd jobs like shoveling snow maybe, and smoke pot most of the time. I don't think most people want to live that way; people are too greedy for that, and want a nicer standard of living than the bare minimum. So, people will strike a balance, like they already do: they'll look for places that are affordable, but where jobs are also located. But unlike now, they won't feel so much pressure to live where jobs are, and might take a chance moving somewhere cheaper. We'll probably see more movement to lower-cost, smaller cities, and maybe some revitalization of small towns, but overall I don't think it'll be all that huge. I would expect a lot of people to move out of the really high-rent places where they're being subsidized by government programs to stay there.

>also what happens to all the people living in projects in what would otherwise be expensive areas? Ship them off to a sparsely populated non desirable area? Good luck with that

Why not? If they can't pay the rent, they'll be evicted. Then they'll have nothing but the clothes on their backs, and their UBI check, so if they want to have a roof over their head, they'll get a bus ticket to someplace cheap. This is a good thing: they're not contributing productively to their current city of residence, and instead of draining it of taxpayer funds, and they're taking up space that could be used for more economically productive residents. If their labor is really needed there, then the business owners need to raise their wages to allow them to afford the rent there, otherwise the businesses can go under. If the place is so high-rent that all the businesses move out and all the service workers move out, no problem, it'll collapse under its own weight and then after the landlords all go bankrupt the rents will go back to sustainable levels. Trying to keep people like that in an area isn't doing anyone any favors, except those who are profiting from the situation.

> We'll probably see more movement to lower-cost, smaller cities

Some midwestern states already offer free land+settlement programs to anybody who's willing to move in http://www.freelandks.com/availableland.html and market distortions made real estate in some US cities extremely affordable http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/1-buy-hous...

Yet the economic activity in those geographies leaves much to be desired.

No one is taking advantage of those opportunities because there's no jobs there. With a UBI, people who want to just live off the UBI alone may decide to move to places like that, esp. if they're itching to "get away from it all" and live in solitude in a rural setting (in the case of KS anyway). They can't do it now because you can't survive without an income, and there's no jobs there. You can't survive on free land alone. Growing your own food isn't that easy, nor is it very nutritious (early farmers had terrible health and were a foot shorter than their hunter-gatherer ancestors; eating too much of the same thing is bad for you). Without an income, where are you going to get money for seeds? And how are you going to pay for other things like electricity to run your well pump, or parts to fix your well pump when it breaks? With a UBI, those things suddenly become possible if you really want that kind of lifestyle.

As for Detroit, $500 houses aren't very appealing in a place with a reputation for horrible crime, and where again there's no jobs (if there were good jobs there, the houses wouldn't cost $500). But who knows, a UBI might allow a bunch of young hipsters to move into the place and try to turn it into an art colony or something.

Fair enough. There're examples of that behavior in the retiree community, where a Social Security recipient moves to Costa Rica, Thailand, New Zealand or (until recent violence spike) Mexico to arbitrage their Social Security check into greater buying power.

Yes, but Costa Rica, Thailand, and New Zealand are not barren, desolate places where these retirees need to live "off the grid". They're civilized, populated places; retirees move there because the cost of living is much lower: they can afford a nice home and some servants which they can't afford on the Social Security pension here.

With a UBI scheme, this can't be allowed. People on Social Security can do this because they've earned that check by paying into the system over their working years (and in reality, expats like that have more money than just a measly SS check; it's not that cheap to live in those places, especially NZ; these are middle-class and up people with IRAs). UBI is not like this: it's unearned, but it's a dividend paid to citizens in the society for being part of that society, and taking advantage of the fruits of that society (like automated production). It's also an investment: it's meant to allow citizens to be free of severe financial worry, so they can take more risks (like starting a new business), or take more time off for good mental health. Part of the bargain, however, is that they have to actually stay in the society. That UBI check they get needs to be spent in the country, where it can be circulated back into the economy, for it all to work. If they just move to Costa Rica and spend all their UBI money there, that isn't helping the American economy.

See: Spatial Mismatch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_mismatch

Something that you can get if you have no income can't be a "tax credit". Tax credits are usually non-refundable: they reduce your tax, but not below zero.

I'm pretty sure there are places in your country where $8000/year would be plenty enough to live on. Not in any luxury, obviously.

Living in central SF, or Manhattan would be unfeasible. Is that s bad thing? BI could prevent urbanization, and make small businesses blossom in smaller countryside towns.

And outside of a city you would have better opportunities to grow some food on your own, making your BI last a bit longer.

"BI could prevent urbanization, and make small businesses blossom in smaller countryside towns."

I agree that urbanization has its downsides. However, lets remember that they aren't making land anymore:) As someone who grew up on a farm, I remember looking at suburbs as they sprawled out, taking over farmland. I was thinking, what are those people going to eat? Also, my observation is that there are more small business downtown, whereas walmart has dominated rural areas. Totally anecdotal, I know.

"And outside of a city you would have better opportunities to grow some food on your own"

I imagine this must be a dream to those who grew up in cities, having a secluded house with a nice garden. I know i am living the dream with dozens of restaurants/bars/shops within walking distance! But if we take an acre of farmland, and replace it with a house, lawn, and .1 acre of garden, what happens to the food supply? Apartment buildings and urbanization have their pros.

The US has way lower population density than the EU, and even here there's plenty of space.

And you don't need much space to grow some veggies.

Im not sure what you mean by plenty of space? I know when Ive had my urban friends over to my parents house, they all remarked about how empty it is 'out here'. But it is not empty, that farmland is in fact being used. Maybe things look different in my chunk of the world, I do come from a community that is largely agricultural.

you dont need much space to grow some veggies, true, the point I was trying to make is that replacing an acre of veggies with a house and .1 acre of veggies reduces the total supply of food(since good, farmable land is limited). Given the demand for food is rising, the impact on the price of food is somewhat predicable

It's true. In addition to basic income, many people need support to get out of their (inherited) impoverished habits. Many people come from dreadful backgrounds and so have no idea how to look after themselves and are surrounded by bad influences.

I often think that all some people need is to be extracted from their environment and transplanted into a new one somewhere else in the world with new friends and a different job. Cut-off from their unhealthy social network they would rebuild themselves and thrive.

Yes, it does solve these. Because people who lost the faculty for time management or security can learn it again. Putting someone in a house and giving them an alarm clock is a very good start.

There is a much much deeper question here. Which life is really better?

I took 10 months off where I lived with just two backpacks. I wasn't homeless by any means, I had my savings I was living off of (technically homeless I guess, but not in the cultural sense).

Even though I had a lot of expensive electronics, I didn't buy a lock until about 7 months in. Even then, a lot of hostels didn't have large enough lockers for my small back which contained my laptop, camera, etc.

There is a sorta social contract with backpackers I can't really explain. I still kept my stuff hidden, but I never had any real fear of people stealing my stuff.

Those 10 months were the best I've felt in a while. I was away from the cube. I was working on my own research (I wrote a lab manual for a friend's class based on some papers we wrote). I worked late into the night and walked around new cities every day. I was never tired, exhausted or irritable. I dreams of getting back into school and working on my PhD, but I'm still working on fellowship applications and I ran out of money .. so back to full-time IT work I went.

That "regular" life you talk about -- getting up early and working the 8-5 grind to get a paycheck just to keep on doing the same fucking thing day in and day out. That's bullshit. And that's coming from a software engineer who gets paid a lot and I have a lot of freedom in my work.

For those working low income jobs where they barely have enough and have to scrap and save every paycheck, that's super bullshit.

> For example, if you've been homeless your entire life, you've never had to lock your apartment door or carry a key around.

I live in a place with a massive homeless population and tent cities. People have their stuff spread out with them, but they have no fear of anyone taking it. Part of it is the poor looking after each other, part of it is if stuff is stolen, it's not like they have much to begin with. Suddenly you're housed and now you have something worth breaking into.

I'm getting a bit ranty at this point, and I'm not entirely sure what my TL;DR is. I realize being poor and homeless can suck terribly. But the things you mention...those aren't the bad things. Those are amazing ways to look at the world that are taken away when you try to bring civilization to the savages.

Call it vagrancy, it sounds more romantic :-) I've been doing the travel and vagrancy thing for a few years and it's a very different experience having owned and lived in the same house for 15 years before that. And it's very valid to question which is better and realize that mainly they're just different, and also it can be viewed as a continuum, rather than succumbing to binary logic and the ensuing value judgment.

The barrier to entry is money, whether savings or income. I rather like the moment the fictional Sam Clemens just starts grokking the concept of Star Trek economics and decides it might be worth giving up cigars for. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708829/quotes?item=qt0551002

I was homeless for about four years, so I know exactly what you are talking about with people losing or never having the basic skills to cope with modern life.

However, that's just not a reasonable argument against UBI.

Consider: Having too much money is never a problem. Quoth the sage, "If it is money, it is good.", also "Too much is always better than not enough."

Misspending that money is the problem. But if everyone around you has UBI too, their ability to spare time and effort to care for you and help you learn to cope with life is fantastically increased.

Helping others is hugely rewarding, fulfilling even, but most people are limited either by their real or perceived lack of funds, or by minor personal problems. With UBI the bottom Nth of people's BS is handled, freeing them up to help others whose BS is a little too formidable for them to cope with on their own.

If you take a step back and look at the larger picture, and take into account the synergy that will be unleashed by UBI, I think you'll reconsider. :-)

While I was homeless I noticed how few people really made a difference. There are some, but you figure out pretty quickly which people to go to (and which to avoid).

Do you think crime will increase when every person receives money at the same time?

I think money management skills are going to be needed even more (but just receiving a deposit doesn't teach you how to master your money).

I definitely think some places will self-destruct, but I do have faith in the basic goodness of human nature. Gandhi said something to the effect that you can't make a system so perfect that the people in it need not still try to be good people. I've also heard it said that "Even God hesitates to offer anything but bread to the hungry man."

Will UBI solve the human condition? No. But it seems like a workable possible solution to how to handle rampant and permanent unemployment due to advancing automation. Something worth trying. ;-)

>Helping others is hugely rewarding, fulfilling even, but most people are limited either by their real or perceived lack of funds, or by minor personal problems. With UBI the bottom Nth of people's BS is handled, freeing them up to help others whose BS is a little too formidable for them to cope with on their own.

Is there any data to support this? I'm genuinely curious. Thinking that people in general are innately good/helpful is a point where I seem to differ to a lot of others. It's just not something I see from looking at the world around me. The majority of people already have others around them with more formidable BS to deal with, and we all ignore them just fine.

Government policy is for long term. We can think of how to help people to transition, but can't just stop progress because some are used to current system.

And long term basic income will work precisely to reduce learned helplessness. Society will provide some cash, but individuals still need for look for a hostel to stay in, manage money for meals etc. I would prefer daily deposits to recipient accounts so that if someone spends money for one day unwisely they don't end up needing other services for the rest of the month.

Does basic income claim to solve this problem for people already in poverty? Or does it claim to prevent future generations from ever being in poverty?

If basic income were implemented society-wide it might prevent learned helplessness from happening in the first place. Assume you start receiving BI at 18, then you never fall to a level of poverty so low that that degree of learned helplessness sets in.

That is surprising. If you have been homeless all your life, you probably have had more than one experience in which your stuff was taken or you were even attacked, for instance when sleeping at night. You would think that a key to door that you can lock to protect Your Stuff would be like a magic talisman to you.

It solves it by keeping people out of poverty in the first place.

But will it keep them from GETTING there? Isn't that the move important question?

With BI, hopefully fewer people end up in hemelessness like that.

BI won't magically solve every problem, like mental illness, which is another large factor for homlessness.

The issue you raise is an issue that exists without UBI and which a mature UBI, in the long-term, mitigates this by avoiding anyone having the experience of living "a long time in poverty".

That's not to say that transitional services to people who have previously had that experience aren't a good thing to have along with UBI, but it doesn't invalidate the concept of UBI.

The very first argument in the article is flawed which leads me to wonder how much of it is or isn't flawed. It talks about a Universal Basic Income for everyone over 21.. then it complains that would cost 3 trillion dollars for all of the 300 million Americans. According to the Census Bureau as of 2015 there were 321 million Americans and 24% were under 18. No clue how many were under 21. But that still takes it down to 244 million people. If we left Social Security alone then that would cut another 46 million people out as well. The article doesn't even attempt to explore cost savings by eliminating excessive management of all of the existing programs.

You are arguing about specifics that do not make any difference to the overall argument the author is trying to make. UBI for 244 million is still unfeasible.

UBI is just a bad idea, jobs in themselves have nice externalities that UBI wont give. People that have jobs generally don't commit crimes. Also a UBI will disincentivize working jobs that are undesirable but are necessary for a functioning society.

How about people who want to serve society with "jobs" that don't pay well (or at all) but are incredibly valuable, like charity work? Wouldn't a UBI free them up to do that?

> Also a UBI will disincentivize working jobs that are undesirable but are necessary for a functioning society.

That's kinda the point. You drive up the cost of undesirable jobs until you find someone who'll work it. If no one wants to work it, you'll need to automate it or do without.

Yes, this! I hate the "But who will pick up the garbage?" argument so much, the lazy thinker who says this is implying that our society only functions if there's an explicit hell waiting for those who fail it. And that's kinda fucked up, eh? If UBI fixed just that it would be worth it, IMHO.

Also, have you ever talked to the people who pick up your garbage?

Another option is that people deal with their own garbage and maybe learn to reduce and re-use and demand less packaging.

Why do they not talk about the tax increase that pays for it? It's supposed to be closer to neutral. I.e. people making $100k get an extra $10k tax burden to cancel out the $10k they just got. Pretty important factor to include in the discussion, yeah?

obviously someone else is going to have to pay for people making under 10k.

Yes. Obviously. So the "cost of UBI" is clearly not $10k times (number of humans in the USA), but more like $10k times (number of eligible people making under $10k). The article omitting this pretty important thing basically discredits it and probably its parent site

>So the "cost of UBI" is clearly not $10k times (number of humans in the USA), but more like $10k times (number of eligible people making under $10k).

It is "$10k times (number of humans in the USA)," because the "number of eligible people" IS the number of humans in the USA.

You left out the "making under $10k" part, which is the whole point.

I didn't leave it out because UBI isn't means tested or income based.

They're not explicitly eligible, but rather implicitly eligible, because of the tax increase on the top end to cancel out the $10k they don't need and to pay for any gap that still needs closing after we redirect money from existing systems.

The people who as a result of this policy and the taxes net money is small, and that is the real cost. Not $3T which is a bald faced lie.

Don't they actually get more like an extra 30-50k burden to cancel out the 10k they got and pay 10k to several other people?

The people who make under 10k outnumber the people making good money by a factor of 3-5?

I'm not sure that's the right ratio to look at - someone making under 10k isn't going to pay taxes at all. The average income in the US is just over 50k - I would expect that's about the income where your UBI would be 1 for 1 - your taxes go up 10k and you get 10k from UBI.

He's calling the veracity of the article into question by citing an example, not "arguing about specifics."

When you can't get the simple things right, why should we think you got the harder things right?

Are you saying that people commit crimes because they have too much time on their hands?

It's an unfounded assumption, the reality is (and you can prove this with data) most people committing crimes today do it as an act of desperation. Professional criminals are definitely a real thing, but they'll exist with or without a basic income. However, if a basic income eliminates poverty, it may have a real impact on crime.

>Are you saying that people commit crimes because they have too much time on their hands?

Partially, yes. Why do you think after school programs are so good at keeping kids out of crime?

What about drunk/intoxicated driving? Ive seen a couple comments saying its ok if people smoke pot and play video games, but what about those who want to go out and drink? 33% of all traffic fatalities are alcohol related[1], and that adds up to be quite a few people. Ok, self driving cars will fix that eventually, but what about domestic abuse?

1. http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...

people generally don't commit crimes for want of a job.

and a better way to look at it is that it incentivezes changes in society that reduce the undesirable work that's necessary for it to function.

Notice that people do undesirable jobs because they probably don't have many other options. UBI gives them another option. This would either make pay for undesirable jobs increase, OR people would be forced to automate them. Seems like a win win.

>OR people would be forced to automate them

as if it were that easy. Why don't we worry about UBI once we actually reach the post scarcity economy?

Because it's not the post-scarcity part that's the driver, it's the post-jobs part, which is a very real problem for a small but growing part of the population.

Look, this straw man has been beaten to death. I don't think anyone who has seriously considered UBI is arguing that all working age people should have +${UBI_AMOUNT} extra dollars. Most people would have extra taxes roughly equal to their income from UBI.

If you want to argue against redistribution, then do so, but don't throw out this we can't afford it lame horse anymore.

Yep, and it doesn't even bother talking about the $21–32tn of untaxed assets(http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_R...). Or that we tax the rich too little while we tax everyone else too much to keep public perception focused on taxes being too high(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_...).

Or that we tax the rich too little

The top 3% of income earners pay 51% of all income taxes.[1] You think that's too little? What should that number be?

[1]http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-...

Whatever percentage it needs to be ratcheted up to in order to ensure that everyone is fed and has shelter.

Seems like we can work backwards to determine that?

what if it's more than 100% of their income :)

are YOU prepared to pay let's say an 80% income tax and a 25% sales tax for example ?

I'm prepared to pay whatever is necessary, while also contributing to whatever tech is needed to drive costs down to reduce the monthly government-wide nut needed to pay for entitlements.

Food too expensive? Robotics farming. More energy needed? Scale up solar, wind, and utility scale battery storage installations. Moar cheap transportation? Scale up bicycle and electric self-driving car manufacturing.

It _can_ be done. We simply need the will to do so. Work backwards, first principles style. We have lots of atoms and electrons, lets organize them efficiently for everyone's benefit.

I can buy the tech side of things and if you think about this - just about everyone's standard of living today, including the poor, is way higher than in the past which can in part be attributed to technological advances.

On the monetary side of things - it's very easy to 'proclaim' that you're willing to sacrifice your standard of living for the benefit of the others. When it comes to concrete implementations however, things typically don't work that way, ppl tend to bust their asses when there's concrete material compensation involved, otherwise - not so much. And if you take any material incentive to work away by providing free money you get multi-generation welfare families which we have in abundance as is. One can argue that these folks would be better off without the free money killing their will to work - to 'organize atoms and electrons' for ANYONE's benefit, yours included.

Point taken.

Not sure that is a relevant measure. Those people will also be paying a relatively low percentage of their income to taxes overall thanks to taxes which are flat or capped, so I'm not sure why it's meaningful what percent of tax revenues they contribute.

As an admittedly extreme example, if the population consisted of 100 people who make 2$ and pay 1$, and one guy who makes $1000 and pays $100, he's responsible for half the tax income but probably still isn't paying his fair share since he's only paying 10% instead of 50%.

Well, considering ~40% of Americans pay no income tax, I'd say the top is paying more than their fair share?

How is that relevant?

Incomes taxes (not including payroll taxes) make up ~47% of all federal dollars coming in. Payroll taxes (Medicare, SS), make up 34%, but half of that is paid by the employer, so it's really 18%.[1]

So income taxes represent almost 3x the income stream that payroll taxes do. So I'd say not paying income taxes is a pretty big break in my book.

[1]http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-source...

That's just for the Federal system, it ignores all state taxes.

Because total tax expenditures are far from just income tax. There's property taxes, vehicle taxes, gas taxes, "christian sin" taxes, lottery (which is a tax on stupid people), social security tax, medicare tax, sales tax, specific item/service sales tax, city taxes, county option taxes.

And that's not even remotely the amount of taxes on businesses that raise the price of goods secretly to compensate the taxes hidden.

And also, even illegal immigrants pay these taxes. They aren't even exempt. And many use fraudulent SSNs, so taxes are taken an applied to those SS accounts, but the illegals never use them. Yet more money for the coffers.

But some percentage isn't paying any of one specific tax.

Whatever.

Income taxes still make up a near 50% of total tax dollars, right?

So the only response to that 'fair share' argument is still only "take more from those that have/work and give to those that don't/can't".

I mean fine, but let's call it what it is.

> lottery (which is a tax on stupid people),

The lottery is a tax on hope

The top 3% do pay their fair share. More than their fair share really. It is the .1% or even .01% that draw far more from society than they pay.

not sure about the top 3% but the top 1% have 34.6% of the wealth(measured in net worth) and the top 5% have 61.9%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...)

So yes! I do think its too little, especially in the top 1%. I think some moderately more progressive tax rates would be an improvement.

One of the things that appeals to me about UBI is that it is a dramatic simplification of welfare bureaucracy. I would love to see something similar to the way we calculate taxes. Simplifying and closing tax holes would help extract more taxes from people who should be paying more while not punishing wage earners who have most of their taxes preempted out of their paycheck.

I think Buffet should pay a higher tax rate than his secretary. http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...

And I think Mitt Romney should pay a higher rate than me. http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/21/pf/taxes/romney-tax-return/

The problem is that we treat capital gains differently than we treat income. Most of the top 3% work and pay income taxes, but the top .1% don't really pay income tax.

Are you proposing we eliminate the charitable tax deduction? That's one of the main drivers of Romney's low rate.

Perhaps my comment wasn't clear enough: I'm proposing we treat capital gains as income. From the article on Romney:

"The reason Romney's rate is so low -- despite having one of the highest incomes in the country -- is because his income was derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments. And that form of investment income is typically taxed at just 15%, well below the 35% top tax rate for high earners."

That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that taxes on the richest brackets are at their lowest point in like 50 years, while simultaneously those people have accumulated an even higher portion of the total wealth/income in the economy. Taken out of context, what you are saying seems significant. Looking at it historically, the rich haven't really had it better regarding taxes and their share of the country's wealth in the last century. Put this way, raising taxes or adding new higher tax brackets seems pretty reasonable.

The percent of all income taxes paid by the wealthy has gone up over time, not down.

As mention before on HN, yes rates were higher a while ago, but so were deductions. Nobody actually paid a 90% marginal rate.

Or, we could revise corporate and capital gains taxes, tax currency exchanges out of the country, and then tax everyone at 50%... from there, that would be enough for a "basic income" where everyone is taxed the same on what they earn.

I don't think corporate taxes work, what's needed is systems and taxes in place to encourage keeping money more local, as well as diversifying or paying out dividends, which would in turn be taxed (assuming adjustments in capital gains). I'd just assume get rid of corporate taxes with the above adjustments and also get rid of corporate personhood and significant campaign reform.

Income taxes... You realize there are more taxes than just income, yes?

Seriously, the whole "but rich people pay all the taxes, and poor people pay no taxes..." myth needs to die a horrible death.

But I live in a state which just lowered the income tax. And increased every other tax, as well as created a variety of taxes on services that were previously untaxed. And they then tell us our taxes have gone down. But somehow, the vast majority of people seem to be have less personal profit than the year before (assuming all income and costs sans taxes remain the same).

I'll take your bait: I do think 51% of all income tax is too little for the top 3% of earners, because they are paid such a large piece of the pie; you're looking at it in terms of number of people paying tax and not percentage of total income made.

Think of it this way: "The top 10% (in my country) pay 74% of all taxes," really translates to "This group makes 90% of all income and but only pays 74% of taxes."

That means that those who make 10% of the total income (again, in my country) pay 26% of taxes. It's not the top that are hurting because they're paying tax in excess of their means, they're getting off lightly.

I guess the right amount would be, if you're democratically inclined, to whatever reduces political influence of the wealthy over the less wealthy. The current US distribution and it's political and economic destabilizing effects seem in favor of higher taxation on the top incomes.

Also: "A universal basic income has many undesirable features, starting with its nonnegligible disincentive to work."

I can think of two responses to this:

(1) Perhaps work that doesn't pay more than a UBI can provide is not work worth doing --

(2) Except for charity work, which is extremely valuable, and which would be greatly incentivized because having a UBI would free up people's time to work on it.

> Perhaps work that doesn't pay more than a UBI can provide is not work worth doing

This is a frequent argument invoked in favor of a higher minimum wage, and the answer is maybe.

But then you find out that some fairly useful work, such as running a convenience store or a corner bodega in a low-income neighborhood involves significantly lower margins than operating a Whole Foods or organic juicery in a ritzy residential neighborhood, and people start decrying "food deserts" http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2015/02/03/food-deserts-contin...

Grocery stores in general, even large supermarket chains, have incredibly low margins (5%, typically). They survive on volume. So it's not about margin as much as it is about income.

At any rate, a UBI could possibly make these low-income operations sustainable by providing a helpful boost to the owner's income.

its almost as if hiring a low income neighborhood worker for an extremely low wage isnt particularly beneficial to the neighborhood.....

> Perhaps work that doesn't pay more than a UBI can provide is not work worth doing

Work doesn't have to pay more than a UBI provides to be worth doing in a system with a UBI -- the idea that it does is a failure to recognize the central difference between UBI and means-tested benefit programs. Because UBI doesn't get reduced for additional income (beyond the effect of regular income taxation), there is little to no disincentive for additional work; additionally, most UBI proponents favor UBI eventually eliminating minimum wage (though in an early-stage, not-yet-adequate-for-independent-support UBI, the UBI might merely reduce the minimum wage by some amount), so that UBI reduces the structural barriers for low-money-value work that remains mutually beneficial getting done.

(1) Perhaps work that doesn't pay more than a UBI can provide is not work worth doing

I largely agree with you here, coal mining being a notable exception. As much as I want to be only on renewables, coal makes up 33% [1] of our current production. They talk about how gas prices are a drag on the economy, I dont want to find out what happens when 33% of power becomes much more expensive!! And fwiw, I do not share the optimism/pessimism that all jobs will be obsolete in 5 years. I dont agree with people who are saying, "just automate it!" Easier said than done(which is a good thing).

1. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3

oh no! the most pollutant form of energy will become more expensive! whatever shall we do!? /s

this is only a bad thing to people heavily invested in coal. There are other sources of energy which are nearly competitive on price already, with a labor hike Solar would become drastically more competitive (IMO more in line with costs of externalities)

If we start excluding groups, can we stop calling it a "Universal Basic Income" and admit that it will be yet another political weapon to wield?

Absolutely, as soon as you introduce ANY means testing at all, it is not longer UBI.

UBI will be yet another political weapon to yield, just on the taxes side rather than the payout side. Where do we draw the line between who nets positive on UBI after their tax increases, and who loses money? That would be an enormous political weapon to yield.

I did some back of the envelope math several months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10172397

He also haven't looked into the strong philosophical arguments for BI, dating back to Paine in the 18th century. Justice and freedom are keys to all of these arguments, e. g. that of Van Parijs, where if one looks at work as a fundamental resource, you should be free to take or not take a job.

There's so much literature on this—why not look into it?

> eliminating excessive management of all of the existing programs

There are really just three - Social Security, Medicare+Medicaid, and EITC. Above you mentioned keeping Social Security around, so that really leaves just two programs, and it feels like the elephant in the room - Medicare - has been scrutinized by both parties so often, that one might wiggle a few percentage points of savings here and there, but nothing critical, especially in light of baby boomers retiring in larger numbers.

If you have a good plan for drastically cutting down the costs of Medicare, those are worth hearing about, whether or not UBI is involved.

An absolutely key feature of basic income is the security it gives someone who is on breadline.

I can only describe the situation in the UK - but imagine this generalises. If you are on government benefits, and you accept some money to do a small or casual job, you face a choice. Not declare it, and face court and destitution if you are found out.

Declaring the income, on the other hand, is an administrative nightmare. Worse - it might trigger a recalculation, or removal, of your benefits. Most benefit seekers don't fully understand how their benefits are calculated, and, again, they could be destitute if benefits are removed or reduced.

So, for any long term unemployed person, it's often best to sit tight and not take any risks. Thus the person is trapped in poverty, plus of course the sense of self worth that comes from doing a job.

This is also true for an entrepreneur who decides to quite his job and build a business. Basic income can provide some security while you get that business going. This is not typically true of unemployment benefit.

Everything comes back to what unemployment benefits are - a payment conditional on not doing any work. That causes so many problems, and basic income can solve them.

On the cost: basic income, at substantial levels, is clearly very expensive. However, you simply tax that money back. This can leave pay after tax absolutely unchanged for everyone, while still delivering the advantages described above.

Keep in mind when discussing UBI, especially in the context of poverty, that it is not a solution to poverty. It is a solution to automation crashing demand by throwing earners permanently out of the economy.

Robots take the jobs so people have no money to spend even as the robots make more stuff, cheaper.

What to do with the people? Throw them in a volcano? "Hunger Games"? Let's just give them money and see what happens, okay?

That's UBI.

UBI isn't for the bum. It's for you (okay, well, your cousin. You read HN, you're probably fine.)

>[...] Why not subsidize workers’ wages instead?

Sounds like a great idea! Companies get to save money and the tax payer effectively pays the companies profit.

Well, corporate income tax is higher that individual income tax for the vast majority of people... so it probably would mean more tax revenue overalll.

And no, income earned in the US cannot be kept offshore, so yes, taxes will actually be paid on it either when "earned" by the company or distributed (buybacks, etc).

Problem is with capitalism and it's founders that told us all that you can't live without work. In next decades we will need to change the system diametrical because robots will take all not creative jobs out there. If we want basic pay we will need to tax corporations that use robots at around 70-90%, money from tax will go for basic pay, money from people that receive basic pay will go to corporations etc. Thing that needs to be controlled is capital, it can't be taken out of the market like it's done now, companies are gathering billions of dollars which are taken out of the market. Capital taken from the market can not be redistributed again. One thing is for sure, current system need to be changed and adapted to robots revolution.

maybe people should start owning the robots.

I remember thinking this as a kid. "Just make it illegal for a corporation to own a robot, each person only owns one robot and they keep the value it generates." Thought I'd solved the problem ;)

I think the reality is that it's not really a 'robot' in the sci-fi sense - it's a thousand automated machines doing one tiny piece of the process, and slowly your factory with 500 employees only needs 5, and output and quality have increased. There isn't really a single robot to 'own', and even there was it would be far too expensive for one regular person to own it.

why not own part of one. of course I think the world will reorganize into 3 markets managed by blockchains/oracles: equipment rental, labor/services market, attention market.

Would owning a part of the 'robot' be intrinsically different that owning a part of the corporation that owns the robot? Ownership in the companies that we work for is nice, but for most of us it's not enough to live on.

We could intentionally try to make automating more expensive so that companies just don't do it. The problem is automating is actually great for everyone else - as a consumer I'd rather buy a car that is better made, safer, and cheaper from an automated factory than one that might be prone to human error and is more expensive.

Co-operative ownership of automated means of production could work.

If robots take all the jobs, then nobody has to work anymore and everything will be very cheap. Think robot maids, drivers, and robot-cooked meals. People are so used to today's world of not-so-many-robots that people think not having a job is bad.

Not having any money or job is bad, though. I don't see the state as being reliable enough to care for the mass of useless and unemployed. They will probably set the UBI at a level below the necessary, there will be protests and riots, people will ask for more, politicians will tell them their excuses for why it isn't possible.

If push comes to shove, owning some land and cultivating it could be a job. The earth will hire people its owners to work it. That is, if people will be legally allowed to cultivate their own seeds on their own land.

I see a possible utopia where individual farms or larger agricultural areas will be owned and worked by communities of people. They will be independent as a community from state welfare. They will be able to implement their own lifestyle as a consequence of their independence. Technologies working for this are: solar, batteries, 3d printers and robots.

This is roughly the starting conditions for large parts of America. The problem is that is isn't very efficient. The people who have the resources to do this generally have better options and the people for whom this would be preferable to the lives they are living have neither the knowledge or resources to do this.

There are certainly groups in the middle, farming cooperatives are still present in the area where I grew up, but those that exist do so largely for ideological reasons: family tradition or religion.

Cheap is relative to what you have. If you have no money, no one is going to build the robot that will make things for you. When automation increases without basic income, the share of resources going to those who are automated away gets squeezed, not increased.

(Dude, the "work ethic" predate capitalism by all of recorded history. C'mon.)

(Also, buy some robots. Enough to make more robots.)

Rentier classes clearly do live without work, it's largely a question of how large of a population can live without working. If the fundamental tension in Marxist theory is real, then one could argue that a UBI is insurance against a populist uprising demanding a living wage.

Religion might have been the opiate of the masses in the past, but if price stability with a dole is feasible then I can guarantee you there's going to be a significant share of the population who wants to do nothing but sit around and engage in idle socializing, sports, or art.

Provided that there's also still a differential for working, then people will still chase after prestige but not be threatened by destitution if they choose a sub-optimal career path.

Relative poverty is insoluble without totalitarian levels of redistribution to a very low common denominator, and that is unlikely to include the inevitable oligarchs. Absolute poverty is rapidly being solved (https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...) by markets and globalization, and radical redistribution such as a basic income tends to interfere with that.

By some measures, poverty already is a solved problem in the United States. Relative poverty is all we have left to solve....

There are quite a lot of people in the USA that consistently starve. I'm quite sure that according to most definitions that's clearly absolute poverty, not a relative one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

"Food insecurity" is not remotely the same thing as starvation. I would wager a fair amount that no one in the US has starved to death due to lack of money (ignoring neglect of children, catatonia, etc) in quite a while.

I'm pretty sure he was talking about food insecurity and not actual starving to death, though his use of the word in this case is actually quite correct. Starve does not solely imply starvation unto death, Mr. Pedant.

And his point still stands, it's an issue in the US that has yet to be solved.

In the US, "poverty is not a direct causation of hunger."

A quote from your link: "poverty is not a direct causation of hunger."

(Of course, that's referring to the United States)

Poverty is an issue long solved in USA. We are talking about relative poverty and governments are trying to push totalitarian redistribution schemes everywhere.

  > Poverty is an issue long solved in the USA.

When? How?

EDIT: While I disagree with the parent poster, primarily because I've seen plenty of homeless, underemployed, malnourished individuals in my travels around the US my entire life, and no significant decline in the past several years, my questions were not meant entirely sarcastically.

If poverty is solved, explain how or by what measure you consider it to be solved.

My viewpoint:

From a purely technical standpoint it could be considered solveable. We have sufficient housing, clothing, food for literally everyone in this country, and more. The issue becomes one of distribution. But just having the resources doesn't mean that the problem itself is solved.

I was going to say "Well jeez, can someone please alert the media? Where's the photo op with "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner in the background? :P

The grandparent's POV is a pretty common one. Just about anybody can get a job making minimum wage, which will bring home at least (7.25 × 40) × 4 = $1,160 each month (more in some places).

That is enough money in most places to rent a basic apartment and buy plenty of food to eat. Plenty of people in that bracket also have cable TV and a car and a smart phone. It's not easy and it's not all that much fun, but you're not going to starve or freeze to death and the Wheel of Fortune you watch every night is the same Wheel of Fortune that Bill Gates watches.

That's the definition of "solved" that's in play here.

Which isn't actually a solution, we still need to connect people to those jobs somehow. Many people live in areas where those jobs simply aren't available. I drive through those towns all the time. There's insufficient money invested in the area in other businesses to offer a middle class that can support a lower class making minimum wage.

These people need to move, which is a non-trivial cost. There's no guarantee they'll get a job when they go to, say, Atlanta. And they'll be paying more in rent or living in even worse living conditions (crammed into small apartments with more people). They'd be giving up their connections to family and friends and a community that they've been a part of.

The problem of poverty will only be solved when no one is in poverty for any reason but choice. Calling it solved because technically there may be enough minimum wage jobs for everyone is the same as saying hunger is solved because technically there's enough food for everyone.

> Just about anybody can get a job making minimum wage

It can be hard to see because the problem is so unevenly distributed through the social fabric, but this is just objectively not true.

You should read "anybody" here in the same way as if I'd said, "Just about anybody can walk across a room."

That's also just objectively not true, but when we're talking about the population as a whole, then it's an OK proxy for the complete truth.

I agree in general, I just don't think it's a good enough proxy in this case.

homeless, underemployed and malnourished etc. in USA are far better than Homeless, Underemployed and Malnourished 50 years ago and even the lower middle class in the rest of the world.

I would prefer to be a homeless in USA than lower middle class in India.

That doesn't make poverty solved. That means we've improved the lot for many people, but we haven't solved the problems of poverty. They're still homeless. They're still underemployed/unemployed. They're still malnourished.

When those are consequences of anything but rational, healthy, deliberate choice [0], or very temporary circumstances, then poverty is not solved.

[0] Which pretty much means religious/cultural reasons. The rationality of those choices are still debatable, but they aren't predicated on mental or physical illness.

You are grossly misinformed:

https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/

I think you both know that you're talking past one another, seemingly intentionally. It's absolutely true that, given even a minimal family/friend support structure, people to the very left of the earnings curve have a decent standard of living in the U.S. today. If you have an able body, it's pretty hard to starve (or even go without cable TV). I think you both know that.

On the other hand, some people obviously don't have able bodies or any support network to speak of. I think you both know that, too.

So, why he disconnect?

> If you have an able body, it's pretty hard to starve (or even go without cable TV). I think you both know that.

I'm not so sure. I know people who are able bodied, college degree educated, and some months can barely afford groceries after all non-discretionary spending is accounted for.

Barely afford groceries after all non-discretionary spending is a lot different than "can't afford groceries or non-discretionary spending." I've been in the former category, for quite a long time - I would not call that poverty. If that was the worst of what people experience in the US, I would also call poverty solved.

(It's not the worst of what people experience, and I would not personally call poverty solved.)

Many people are still homeless in the US. Calling that 'relative' poverty is abusing the term enough to become meaningless.

The most enlightening thing about this debate is the idea that we don't care about peoples basic standards of living and are happy to pretend there is no problem.

PS: Although the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in January 2012 annual point-in-time count found that 633,782 people across the United States were homeless, other counts vary widely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

Note: Many people end up homeless temporarily which makes counting complex.

There's probably a significant percentage of homeless people who are homeless because they have untreated mental illnesses. They'd likely be homeless even if they weren't monetarily impoverished.

I don't think it's all that clear cut. Living on the street likely promotes a range of mental health problems. Though, most of this is temporary. One out of 50 children or 1.5 million children in America will be homeless each year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

And what if they could afford health care (or rather the state stepped in) to help with that addiction/mental illness?

A study just done about a year ago in the City I live in, housed a fairly large number of the non-temporary homeless people (between 20 and 50 I want to say, the numbers escape me) in an apartment complex that provided basic social services and access to health care. They found that in actuality, this helped solve many of the long term problems (even if it did not solve all the problems for all the people), as these people now had access to health care, _AND_ it saved money, because these people were no longer ending up in the emergency room or the local jail (and a few other cost saving measures as well)

I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about.

> I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about.

I'm 100% sure I don't know what I'm talking about! That's why I couched my opinion in all the weasel words like "probably" and "likely".

Okay. I'm sorry to have gotten on you. There so many comments in this thread I found to be so completely wrong, and/or unsympathetic, it had really bothered me, and I took it out on you. Thank you for admitting that you may not fully understand what is a very serious situation for many. And sadly, at least in the US, we do a rather poor job of solving the problem, not because we don't have the resources, but because a large amount of people (and their leaders) simply ignore or don't wish to fix the problem. It's frustrating, and all the more frustrating when you read comments about it on HN, which again, tend to lack sympathy for their fellow human beings. And again, I apologize.

When you haven't even fulfilled the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I don't think that it matters whether the poverty is relative or not.

You could simply introduce more taxes. For example, one interesting idea is a universal land tax - with more expensive/desirable land being taxed much more - the idea being that there's no fundamental reason why the right to use a piece of land would belong to one citizen and not the other just by the virtue of their birth. So those who want to use scarce land (wealthy people, corporations) would be paying rents to the rest of the society. That would quite quickly restore inequality back from inherited inequality to just meritocratic inequality (people who produce more would be richer).

not the other just by the virtue of their birth

What makes you think most land is owned through birthright? Any stats to back that up? I would assume most land was purchased.

And if you levy a big tax on property, be prepared for the value of that property to drop dramatically. Money flows freely from one asset to another. If land becomes unattractive, those dollars will just go elsewhere.

> What makes you think most land is owned through birthright? Any stats to back that up? I would assume most land was purchased.

Purchased from whom? I would imagine a lot of land in the most desirable locations (cities etc) are owned by private individuals or family trusts/companies, so they have been/will be inherited (even if the owners change in between). And if it's owned by a corporation, I guess the same logic could apply.

> And if you levy a big tax on property, be prepared for the value of that property to drop dramatically. Money flows freely from one asset to another. If land becomes unattractive, those dollars will just go elsewhere.

Yeah, that's kind of the point. Land used for investment is the purest form of unproductive rent-seeking.

So no actual stats, just your gut feelings about how you think things work.

Living on a piece of land is rent seeking? I don't think you know what that word means.

Land being lived on by its owner is being used to live on, not for investment.

The fact that you even think "totalitarian levels of redistribution" is a cogent concept is a strong indicator that your opinion on this topic isn't worth much.

... unless, of course, that individual votes.

"Your opinion is worthless" isn't a useful debating tactic when you're talking to people with as much political power as you yourself have.

Who said I wanted a debate? Perhaps I'm having a bad morning and simply wanted to vent at the uninformed adolescent libertarianism all too common on HN.

This article is yet another example of binary thinking.

Basic income could be started at any amount. It won't pay the rent, but an extra $100 a month makes a difference for people living on the edge. The first $100/month will make a bigger difference than anything added on top of that.

The problem is that a very small number of people are on that $100/month edge, a percentage of them will increase their expenses until they are as desperate as they used to be, and the increased taxes to pay this money will put others on the edge. When considering BI, or any large money transfer program, you must consider the entire system, not just the beneficial effects on a small number of people for the first few months.

Money is correlated with happiness. Sure, people will still yearn for more money, but with the more expenses people will be more happy.

That is the least important point, but please keep in mind then that the decreased expenses (alternately, increased tax expenses) to offset the cost of BI will make others unhappy.

At this point we are just being handwavy. This is the problem with discussions like this, there aren't any hard facts to support the arguments. Are people being forced to pay .1 pct more of their income or 10 pct more? etc...

It's not hand-wavy to try to convince BI proponents to at least consider second-order effects. But you're right; better modeling and experiments will be good for future discussions.

I agree. just saying that you can't assume the second-order effects will result in a net negative outcome on the whole system

I agree with you that a proper study would have to take all that into account.

But since we're just hand-waving here, I'll argue that the point where you're paying, say, $50/month more in taxes than you get in benefits is likely to be at a high enough income that $50/month doesn't make nearly as big a difference to your life.

Also, there is an insurance effect. A guaranteed $100 a month (even if you lose your job or have to move) provides more financial security than a larger amount that you can't necessarily rely on. And folks who aren't good at saving money (for whatever reason) will benefit more from having a bit more financial security during bad times, even if increased taxes means you don't make quite as much money in a good year.

Sometimes when people talk about this, it sounds like they think any amount of financial security is bad for poor people - it provides the wrong incentives. But that seems backwards to me; when you're desperate, you're more likely to make decisions you regret later.

I am totally in favor of financial stability for low-income people; I just am not in favor of initiatives that have bad unintended effects like harming people and reducing the wealth that makes long-term cash transfers possible.

Theoretically, you can only tax people in such a way that they never fall below the $75,000 a year happiness threshold and use the money to bring people closer to $75,000 a year. In practice (and this is not hand-waving, it is the history of the United States) it's so much easier to pay for social programs with regressive consumption taxes (food, fuel) that they end up high enough to cause hardships. $100/month for, say, half the adults in the United States would be $144 billion, about the size of the federal education budget. Re-arranging the tax structure to accommodate this would not be easy, and I think you have to assume that at least some of the additional tax burden would fall on people who need all the money they currently earn, and on the people who receive the benefit. Likely, a high percentage of it would. I don't think an assumption that political capital would be spent to keep the tax progressive, since there are higher-priority proposals in existence that do this for Social Security/FICA/Medicare, and even those have side-effects most don't care to recognize.

UBI won't solve poverty for a very simple reason:

Every time government starts to subsidise something the price of subsidised goods goes up. I've seen this in Europe with wind farms, "eco" lightbulbs, farming equipment. etc.

And UBI is equivalent to subsidising all basic goods at the same time. So the only noticeable effect of UBI will be price increase, so that it would take your salary + UBI to purchase goods that now can be purchased by your salary alone.

Net result: increased bureaucracy, increased cash flow for the government (higher taxes), higher profits for corporations (higher prices), no benefit for poor, big hit for middle class (which is most heavily taxed).

We already have a basic income, at least in Europe, not sure about the USA. Unemployed people get welfare. Changing this system to what BI advocates propose is not a huge change:

- Simplification of the welfare system, you get money automatically, no need to ask.

- In the current system, if you get employed, you lose benefits, so the jump in your income is small, a disincentive to work. In the BI proposals, income vs income-plus-welfare curve is smooth. That's the main improvement I think.

- More money gets redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. Personally I think the current level of redistribution is fine.

It doesn't make to tax citizens only to give the money back to them.

Another way to implement a mincome is to have a flat tax rate and give every citizen a large standard deductible. If one's taxable income is negative, then one would receive money from the government, which is interpreted as a negative tax payment.

Furthermore, the purpose of a mincome is not to alleviate poverty, but instead to to replace current systems of welfare (food stamps, social security, etc).

> replace current systems of welfare

Yes. The broken, trapping, inefficient, bloated, bureaucratic messes that cost way to much and don't help people nearly enough.

I made the same submission here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11806509

Maybe they should be merged.

I hope Switzerland votes for UBI, it would be interesting to see actual data rather than just conjecture. The point about people losing the will to work is interesting, as he also makes the point that jobs give us purpose and structure in life. If money is no longer an issue, or less of an issue, people may choose to do jobs because they provide purpose and structure. It could also increase innovation. There have been lots of article on HN recently about the privileges white males have in terms of financial security, that make it safer to start businesses than non-white and non-males. UBI might allow more people to do this.

Another interesting aspect would be the economic effect of everyone having a minimum amount of money. I don't know enough about economic to say what the impact would be on basis good vs luxury goods and everything in between but I imagine it would have an effect.

This is nuts. Basic income is not to provide extra spending money for 100% of americans. It's help 10% of the most poor while everyone else ends up paying back the money in taxes. So we are talking about 300 billion. This is half of US military budget and will be instead of, instead of in addition to, current aid programs.

It is true that basic income will not directly improve lifestyle of the middle class. It can well result in indirect improvement by poor becoming more productive and government bureaucrats currently running the program getting more useful jobs. But we probably need to other things as well to improve lifestyle for the other 90% of the population.

One of the points the author proffers is that displacing more targeted, conditional aid with UBI may not actually be better. The question of whether---if you just give people money---they spend it wisely enough to maintain their needs is an open question.

It's sort of the formalized version of "Don't give that wino a dollar; he's just going to spend it on more booze."

(The sense I get is economists lean towards "Yes, people generally look after themselves given the money to do so," but I believe this is an open question policy-wise).

So just give money in small daily deposits. If someone spends all money in beer one day, he/she will be hungry the next day and make better choices.

It will absolutely solve poverty, what it won't do is make everyone rich.

And frankly the world is likely to be better off that way.

research have shown over and over that as economic differences grow, social structures deteriorate.

In my country, there was a movement that tried to make education free of charge. One of their arguments was that it was going to be actually cheaper for the government.

This is what the logic was: the student loans system has a high interest rate, and when the loan is defaulted, the government needs to pay. So what the government ends up paying is not only the actual loan, but the loan with some accrued interest. Also, the default rate is high. So in this case it makes sense for the government to just pay directly.

Now, following the same mindset, how much does the government pay if there is people without a basic income? is it more than just giving away that money directly to people? If there answer is yes, then probably it's not a bad idea after all.

Now, of course there will be issues. The food stamps system imposes some restrictions that you will no longer have if you just receive basic income. Also some people might just do the minimum required to get that income and live at the expense of the government. There might be pros and cons that need to be considered.

Here's a thought experiment I've been been wrestling with... Imagine a dirty low skill job. Something that currently doesn't pay much and is generally considered low status. Assume it's a job no one really wants to do but do because it pays them a living. What would happen to that job under UBI? I would assume that due to vacancies demand for people willing to do this work would go up, and companies would need to lure in applicants by raising pay. Imagine that would indeed attract workers. How would this affect that company? It's costs would rise. Will it become less competitive? Will it raise price? Would the sector have to be subsidized to stay afloat? Would it start some kind of 'moral revolution'? I imagine new coping mechanisms would need to be devised and the economy would morph into something quite unlike what we live under today.

Of course it will not solve poverty. That's not the point. The point is that it will solve the self-destruction of social wealth. In particular, it will prevent the expansion of poverty to include the vast majority of currently wealthy persons.

At a minimum, we need free universal healthcare that shouldn't be replaced with basic income, because poor sick people often need more expensive healthcare than a reasonable basic income can pay for. Similar for education, the current system of loans just sucks compared to universal free education which was achieved by the frigging USSR.

Also it seems pointless to give basic income to well-off people. On top of free healthcare and education, why don't we just top up everyone's income to the equivalent of the minimum wage? Sure, that will disincentivize jobs that pay close to minimum wage, but such jobs are dying due to automation anyway, and good riddance.

> Also it seems pointless to give basic income to well-off people.

Otherwise taking the basic income might be seen as a symbol of being poor. Also, well-off people might be envious of people receiving basic income.

(tl;dr people aren't perfectly rational)

>why don't we just top up everyone's income to the equivalent of the minimum wage?

That's what UBI essentially is, giving everyone about the equivalent of a minimum wage income.

> On top of free healthcare and education, why don't we just top up everyone's income to the equivalent of the minimum wage?

That strongly incentivizes under-reporting income. One of the strong points of universal income is that it is relatively easy to administer.

And well-off people would be taxed more so as to return all or most of their payments. It's not pointless, since it serves as a safety net the instant the large salary goes away, with no application or needs-based investigation that slows the process and costs more money to administer.

Yes, fair point.

The way you fund it, of course, is to further tax the higher end of the income bracket. It's an innocuous way of redistributing wealth. It helps everyone but the very wealthiest, which are the ones who need it the least. Jobs are not the answer, at least in my mind. A universal basic income would allow people to spend some time possibly developing a passion that they love, not slaving away at a job which is at best given out of pity, and at worst a waste of time which they are obligated to attend at a negative cost to everybody. A universal basic income is upfront and direct about its purpose.

The biggest concern that I have with UBI is how do we avoid the Basic Income Trap? It's pretty widely accepted that we fell prey to the Two Income Trap [1]. If we institute UBI, how long will it be before a person needs their UBI and another job (or two, or three) just to scrape by?

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap

If the UBI isn't set high enough to allow someone to survive, then it by definition is not a "basic income". It has to be set high enough for this.

This may require some kind of extra government programs and legislation to do things like 1) make sure enough low-cost housing is available, and maybe 2) help people learn to use it effectively, including maybe moving them to low-cost locations if necessary.

It's not so much about setting it high enough as keeping it high enough. How do you convince the wealthy and powerful to keep giving up more and more of their income to keep up with inflation so that UBI continues to meet the definition of 'basic income'?

If there's inflation, the wealthy are going to earn more money in absolute dollars (if they don't, that means they're getting poorer). The same tax rate will automatically bring in more money from these people. I don't see the problem. You're making the common mistake of thinking that a given tax rate (as a percentage) equals a fixed amount of revenue, which is just plain wrong. A fixed percentage of a rising amount of income will result in a rising amount of tax revenue.

Ok, that's fair - I still see a few problems though. First, if you're right and the wealthy keep making more in absolute dollars and therefore paying more in taxes (IE UBI doesn't make them poorer) then we still have to index the UBI against inflation. And every time UBI goes up, it will be an upstream battle against people who had the same common mistake that you suggest that I made. In other words, in this case at least, perception is reality.

Second, what if UBI does make the wealthy less wealthy? Isn't that kind of the point of wealth redistribution? To reduce income inequality?

I don't understand what you're getting at here. Yes, the point of wealth distribution is to reduce income inequality. The UBI achieves that, by taxing high-income people and redistributing it to everyone (in effect redistributing it to the poorer people, because the wealthier people will be paying it all back in taxes). With tax rates fixed, revenue collected will be greater if wealthy peoples' incomes rise, and this will allow the UBI to be indexed up. Why would there be an "upstream battle"? Nothing has to change when the tax rate is the same. What's the problem?

There is an incredible amount of businesses set out to make money from those without steady pay, or who live paycheck to paycheck, which includes some UBI recipients (if they require a large sum today they may borrow money from a payday loan company, for instance, and the interest is insane). One challenge is going to be preventing this from becoming the new form of exploitation. That comes down to education, and there are a lot of americans in debt.

There's two things that can be done here:

1) We could definitely use better education in this country. Kids should be taught in grade/high school how to handle money, personal finance, etc. They used to have something called "home economics" when I was a kid, but it was only for girls and probably concentrated more on doing dishes or something.

2) We need to stop electing Democrats like Hillary Clinton and DWS who are big backers of the payday-loan industry, and enact legislation which severely clamps down on these practices. Interest rates over some decent number (say, 15%) simply shouldn't be allowed, as they're usurious.

There's really no reason someone on UBI should ever need a large sum of money. They're not in danger of losing it: that's the whole point of UBI. What would they need a lot of money for, beyond what their monthly (or biweekly, or whatever) UBI check gives them? Maybe a deposit for rent, that's the only thing I can think of. There can probably be some kind of laws or programs set up to handle this kind of thing without letting payday-loan vulture exploit these people. If Democrats actually cared about poor people, they'd already be working on ways of helping them with things like this rather than taking "campaign contributions" from the payday-loan vultures.

> Kids should be taught in grade/high school how to handle money, personal finance, etc

I think that's a pretty swell idea.

> There's really no reason someone on UBI should ever need a large sum of money

I don't think that's true. The problem is living paycheck to paycheck without savings. UBI adds steady income but if the recipient fails to save, then when large expenses come like bank overdraft fees, medical expenses, and general rainy day stuff, they'll have to take out loans or credit card debt. Which goes back to why education is so important.

I completely disagree. There is no good reason for these people to need large sums of money.

>then when large expenses come like bank overdraft fees

Simple: ban them. These should not be allowed, ever. If the bank is too stupid to prevent you from overdrafting using technical means, then they should eat the loss. The only reason overdrafting is possible, in this age where no one uses paper checks any more, is because banks can make money on usurious fees. Ban them.

>medical expenses

Not needed. We should have single payer healthcare.

>and general rainy day stuff

Like what? The UBI is the safety net. Maybe if their car breaks down or something. Still, the whole point of UBI is to be a safety net; if someone is such a mess they need to constantly take out loans to try to get to work, then maybe they shouldn't be working a regular job at all. Ban payday loans and let them learn how to live on the UBI. It's not like they're going to lose all their money and be on the street; that's the whole point of the thing.

I'd be interested to hear more about the last part concerning "subsidizing wages".

Welfare for many in this country basically is a subsidy for their wage (cue memes of "walmart welfare").

Take for instance when the big layoffs started in the tech/housing sector, you would hear stories of people staying on unemployment because it paid MORE than a new job in the same field would pay. And we kept extending benefit timeframes which just resulted in a vicious cycle.

That's a pretty big incentive to not work.

> Almost a quarter of American households make less than $25,000. It would be hardly surprising if a $10,000 check each for Mom and Dad sapped their desire to work.

Ah, but a transfer payment which targets the poor is worse in this regard. A $10,000 check that you lose if you work saps your desire to work more than a $10,000 check that augments your income.

To the ruling class, it's not about solving poverty, but about postponing insurrection due to lack of work.

UBI would also provide entrepreneurs and small business owners with a safety net so they'd be able to take risks they wouldn't be able to before.

Any word about where that money goes? Back in to economy!

> Where would that money come from? It amounts to nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government. Nothing in the history of this country suggests Americans are ready to add that kind of burden to their current taxes

Taxes would have to go up, in some cases drastically. It's an easier sell if people immediately get a good chunk back.

> A universal basic income has many undesirable features, starting with its non-negligible disincentive to work. Almost a quarter of American households make less than $25,000. It would be hardly surprising if a $10,000 check each for mom and dad sapped their desire to work.

Except if they keep working the money just adds up. I certainly wouldn't want to stop working and give up my lifestyle.

Maybe instead of working to make enough money to just get by you keep working and put a chunk of that money into savings, or upgrading your lifestyle a bit. Maybe moving to a better area, fixing up some stuff around the house, get your kid a couple toys, etc...

Yeah, people in situations that make working hard might quit but maybe they should be allowed to. Or maybe they should quit for a while and come back when it makes more sense.

In every debate, there are people on the wrong side of history. Mr. Porter, welcome to that list. Granted, the point that it won't happen today is true enough, but it is an inevitability (assuming we don't blow ourselves up beforehand), so it's important to start thinking about it now.

What frustrates me the most with these articles is that they don't base any of their information on actual fact. Take, for example, the argument of disincentivizing work. This is one of things that seems "logical" if you're a pessimist or an asshole, but past experiments with basic income have proven it to be untrue (look at the "Mincome" experiment in Manitoba for proof).

letting politicians keep all the money has not worked either

Reply on news.ycombinator.com