Moving Forward on Basic Income

What do we do now when people blow their Social Security or welfare check and can't afford rent or food?

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help.

That's where family and charity hopefully take over.

At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing guarantee" fund.... and then we've just recreated the existing system.

That's the best argument against BI I've heard, and one I'd love to hear rebuttals to.

This literally is why food stamps exist. So people on food stamps can only buy food and not lottery tickets.

To add to this, what about those unable to take care of themselves. Children, the mentally ill, those who are badly addicted, those who are easily taken advantage of (like in borderline elder abuse cases).

As a BI fan, this is a great question. While BI does simplify welfare distribution it does put more responsibility on the receiver. If we wanted to protect from misuse of funds we need a way to restrict how they spend their BI, like how food stamps work.

BI should be spent on life necessities while earned income should be disposable and/or go into savings.

There's been a lot of research into this, particularly around the concept of savings as the big obstacle towards independence and freedom. The poorest people who struggle to achieve even a basic income (think participants in microcredit) face a difficult task of building enough savings to live past one catastrophic flood, one bad recession, one big purchase/investment (a new car that doesn't always break down vs. crappy money pit of repairs and bills).

IMO, research into developing savings capacity is arguably more important, and a much broader problem. But the wisdom of saving pennies is not a sexy idea. The people doing the most progressive work in this are orgs like Grameen.

>Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"

At that point we would need to investigate to see if this failure is being caused by mental illness. Treatment would be much easier if our current homeless shelters could use their infrastructure to help people like this. They take your UBI check and give you a place to stay, treat you for drug addictions, etc etc.

Either that or you end up in jail, because making homelessness illegal would not be so immoral under a UBI system.

The idea for Basic Income was that people have a better idea of how they need to apply money then one-size-fits-some programs government makes. This is the same argument that a market economy is better than a command economy, precisely because there are too many hidden variables for a mega-organization to understand.

What happens now, if someone has a financial emergency in our current system? Well, you're just fucked. Unemployment doesn't start until 2-4 weeks after you've been laid off/fired, and that's assuming they didn't fight it. Medical bills just linger, whilst the bill harassers keep calling. Your car broke? Well, too bad.

At least with BI, if money was disbursed every 2 weeks, then the crisis would be averted partially by that. Unlike now, if your car dies, you lose your job, and then no way to get a job or pay for a car.

The same way it works with social security today.

Additional safety nets would be needed. A transition wouldn't likely happen overnight. It would more likely be a gradual phasing out of old programs and a build-up of basic income as money is moved toward that program. At the same time, additional resources would need to be pushed into services to help people budget and manage their finances. A combination of traditional in-person financial counseling and software would work best.

I use Simple, and they have a good model for integrating budgeting into their bank app. A basic income program should follow the same principles, giving out a debit card with a budget along with a website and app to help people manage their money better. The first expense it can cover is a cheap smartphone for those that need it.

Analytics tracking the efficiency of the program should allow a lot of optimizations over time. There's no way to predict exactly what will happen without trying it, but data on a national scale should make beneficial adjustments to things like budgeting software pretty easy.

A basic income is not a perfect and ideal system, but I'd say it's definitely an improvement over the status quo. It does require having some trust in people to manage their money, but with a little assistance, I think people will be able to make better choices for themselves than a bureaucracy can make for them.

What sort of emergency do you envision? Most of today's financial emergencies hinge on either losing your job or incurring extreme debt due to uninsured medical care. I can't speak for all BI proponents but I, personally, support universal health care in addition to BI.

With health care taking care of medical expense emergencies, basic income is left to take care of job-related emergencies. Your example of "my car broke down" would seem to fit that category. So what then? Joe loses his job but basic income will make sure he never goes homeless and always has enough food to eat. Instead of having a major crisis he can take a break from working and maybe upgrade his skills.

I've thought about this as well.. It's certainly an interesting response to BI that I don't think is debated enough.

My thoughts on the matter is that regulation on how the money is spent is only necessary in the cases where it's being abused. Current safety nets pays for this overhead on every beneficiary, whereas it's only really necessary on the people who no amount of unsupervised aid will help them (something like addictions would fall into this category). At this point we could have a single regulation and if BI isn't enough for this person to survive, it can be deemed that this person isn't functioning as a responsible adult and can have other systems act as a sort of legal guardian until they can be trusted to survive on BI. Yes it sounds like house arrest, but we can just have this be completely optional and equivalent to the "next" safety net. It's not more money or more food or whatever, it's simply guidance.

The problem with most BI solutions is they just want to hand out money but not change how its used and where. There is certainly sufficient technology to track and even restrict the usage of BI funds.

So my idea is this, your restrictions on your BI lift as your income does to the point its just flat out money the ends up in your account. You could put forth some requirement that to receive BI you agree to have that portion of your income tracked.

So you get your BI. You are permitted to spend it at certified service and goods providers. A service provider could be your landlord, your mortgage company, or more, when it comes to residency. We already track food stamp usage so you lock down that too good healthy foods; no smokes, beer, or chips for you!.

With regards to medical. Catastrophic and preventative services are where government should look at for health care. Just play it out under similar rules to how most HSA based insurance plans work. You are subject to X amount per year and the rest is not your worry.

the danger of BI is that government fees which adversely impact the poor are just as likely to increase and worse knowing how many programs for the needy can work there are ample opportunities for fraud.

Oh, Canada's liberal party is thinking the BI solution http://winnipeg2016.liberal.ca/policy/poverty-reduction-mini...

> flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

Well for starters I'd imagine a future BI system to handle something like rent via direct transfer to the landlord. Food handled the same way, some prepaid debit card that only works at grocery stores, etc.

I don't envision a system where people pick up a stack of 20's with a post-it note on it that says "remember to pay your rent".

> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

In the simplest case, the same thing as when someone on existing cash benefits has an emergency or blows them all (and, yes, that happens even with restricted-use benefits like food stamps) -- there may be public and/or private emergency shelters, charity kitchens, etc. that operate at a level below the benefit programs that exist now that would be replaced eventually by UBI, and the transition to UBI doesn't really affect the use case for those.

There may be ways to improve the handling of those situations (or mitigate them) within a UBI by adding new public systems that leverage the UBI infrastructure, are voluntary, and don't change the basic nature of the UBI. But those are factors beyond the basics of a UBI -- in the simplest case, that's an issue that exists in the status quo and is not among those addressed by UBI.

Depends which BI fans you ask. The ones who want to completely eliminate other welfare programs are generally right-wing and/or libertarian - they're opposed to existing welfare programs for all kinds of ideological reasons. Left-wing BI fans (like me) are not so gung-ho about eliminating other welfare systems for the reasons you described, and I at least am totally willing to accept that BI will cost money.

That said, I do think there are some welfare items that can be eliminated, namely those that provide an income guarantee rather than a safety net against catastrophic expenses. So for example, section 8 and food stamps might be phased out under a BI system (they're always going to get next month's or week's deposit), but I think government-subsidized healthcare should not be.

WRT things like the car breakdown case you described... I think that's a gray area? With a few very big exceptions (people with disabilities or living in rural areas) the lack of a car is mainly a catastrophic issue because it endangers jobs. If the person has a basic living standard guaranteed, the urgency goes down, and I think you can just say "tough shit, save up until you can afford the repair". But I do think that there has to be a social safety net for people for whom a greater variety of big-ticket outlays are essential.

This really isn't a good riddle.

First, Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCT) work better than most people expect (http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...). As noted in the article, UCTs work surprisingly well in scenarios where lack of capital is the primary problem. A UBI (at least as usually is discussed in the US) is a de-scaling UCT.

Second, most proponents of a UBI see it as more efficient because of the savings on administrative overhead. So dollar for dollar the assumption is that your social safety net with UBI is larger than current welfare.

Which finally brings us to the observation that current welfare is not an all-inclusive safety net, so opposing UBI because it isn't either seems a bit of a distraction.

A more interesting question, raised by the Economist article linked above, is where do UCTs break down? This is a question whether or not UBI should be _entirely_ UCT or if there should also be some Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). This would be like providing incentives for going to college.

CCTs are better at correcting deeper issues that contribute to the cycle of poverty.

Ultimately I feel like a UBI is a good first step, but ultimately a combination of UCTs and CCTs are needed to really combat poverty.

Yeah, it's a great question.

One solution I've been thinking about is if we could hand out the basic income in a daily increment. I don't know the actual implementation details, but something like you get a government card that can work at any ATM or something, which has an account that increments every day.

That way, at worst, you end up hungry for a day, which is manageable.

We'd need "basic income compatible" housing, hence my answer[0] to a previous YC question about what they should fund at YC Research. If the housing is cheap enough to accommodate BI, and it accepted payments every day, then you can't really spend yourself out of accommodations. At least, if the feedback loop is close enough such that "I buy this thing and now I can't get back into my apartment tonight" works, then I think that could prevent homelessness in the "poor budgeting" rather than "mental illness" case.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000558

I'm not a "BI fan" and I'm curious what they think too, but I think it could be done. I think it depends on the kind of emergency.

For not-really-critical ones (eg Joe's car broke down), you could just do nothing - if Joe wants to he can wait and use his next BI check to fix his car.

For life-threatening emergencies like can't afford food or rent, that's trickier. I would say that if we can afford to give a BI, we should also have soup kitchens and homeless shelters that don't have means testing, so while that does create a kind of social safety net "below BI", it should be much cheaper to run and harder to abuse.

The biggest source of financial emergency for most people is unexpected health problems, and I'm not sure what a solution is. Maybe free insurance for everyone? What would insurance fraud look like in such a world?

which welfare program gives people more money if they already blew the welfare money they got?

Also my concern. It's only justification is that it's a more efficient alternative to all other welfare. That would put a LOT of bureaucrats out of work. It'll never happen. Also, it's hard to buy votes with something that doesn't expand.

Delivering the money in small chunks might help. Instead of 70$ every week, make it 5$ twice a day. So no matter how broke you were yesterday, you'll have enough money to eat in a few hours.

Another "make it easy to get food even if you really screwed up" option might be to give grocery stores 'first dibs' on the money. Basically, let people spend the money a couple days in advance if they do it at a grocery store. A foodstamp micro-loan.

The really tricky stuff is probably cases involving debt, where the debt-collector wants to pressure the person into paying them before buying food.

I think as long as they don't get into debt, it should be okay if they blow all their money on drugs and alcohol or whatever once or twice. Maybe they end up sleeping on the street for a few weeks, but I think there's only so much you can to help people who are totally self destructive. There should still be addiction programs that would be covered by universal health insurance to help people who do this sort of thing regularly.

I think to prevent 'payday loan' types of scams, a good fix would be to make these payments totally unrecoverable by debt collectors. Maybe people might still loan 50 or 100 dollars, but they would just be throwing away money if they loaded you up with thousands of dollars worth of debt.

The other side of this challenge is that the "savings" will come from downsizing vast swaths of the public sector. That would be a political nightmare.

I can't speak for MOST BI fans, but I can tell you my own answer to that question.

I believe that (like the rest of the world, but NOT the US) medical care ought to be provided to all, so I'd take medical emergencies off the table.

I also think it is important that there not be a way to confiscate one's basic income for the repayment of a debt -- everyone gets to keep their basic income no matter what.

Furthermore, we need to continue (as we do today) to allow governments to run programs intended to keep the price of food and housing low, like zoning laws requiring developers to produce a certain amount of low-income housing. We also need to continue to provide government sponsored care for those incapable of caring for themselves (for instance, those who need institutional care due to severe mental or physical handicaps).

And after that, if we create a basic income that is sufficient to cover basic living expenses, I think we DO get to eliminate much government aid for poverty. Eliminate unemployment insurance (or rather, the mandate to provide it). Eliminate aid to the poor. Eliminate social security. Eliminate a minimum wage.

You ask "what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food"? I think that yes, you DO tell them that. You example is someone who says "my car broke down" and I think we, as a society, could leave that person stranded without their own automobile. (Today I know of no government programs to help people whose cars have broken down, so I'm pretty sure we can all agree to live with that.)

For people with an income above the level where they can apply for assistance programs, what happens to them if they blow all their money? They're broke until their next paycheck. If they borrow too much and can't pay it off, they declare bankruptcy.

BI isn't a one-time payment. Presumably people would get checks every other week or every month like a paycheck. If they blow it all, worst case they will be stuck for a couple weeks. Not long enough for an eviction to go through or to starve to death. After being hungry for a couple weeks, they should figure out pretty quickly that they need to buy groceries before lottery tickets.

> Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"

Yes it's the same thing on the current welfare. You can blow your bridge card (food stamps) on bad food and be out of it and you don't get more. It would be the same thing, you can blow your money and then you're gonna have to find something else.

I would think any basic income program would come along with available education on budgeting and counseling for how to get out of debt, etc. I think besides lack of opportunity, another big problem with social mobility in our country is lack of financial education. People just don't realize how many sharks there are out there trying to take advantage of them, and just how deep of trouble they can easily get into.

You can present all kinds of edge cases how basic income can fail in individual, specific cases, but those are the exceptions. And you shouldn't kill a great idea because of the exceptions.

Most of our government programs are screwed up because they suffer from "over-fitting". Just like in statistics you can some up with a higher order polynomial that fits all your known data points but in practice it is going to be horribly broken if it is to be used to understand the nature of the curve.

The fact is: 1. We cant prevent all plane hijackings and incidents. 2. We cant prevent a lone wolf attack for whatever reason. 3. We cant help all people in all their difficulties 4. We can not come up with a government program or many programs that will help all needy 5. We can not prevent all frauds

Coming up rules like checking people shoes in TSA lines because of a past data point is overfiting.

The best way would be to come up with a very uniform welfare program that includes everyone without a racial, gender,handicap and any other bias.

Encourage private charity to help people get through exceptional situations.

Another problem with separate welfare programs is the massive wastage in overhead + the total lack of empathy among the people who actually run it. Encouraging private charity would solve that problem to a very large extent, a church group often achieves more with less money. Not to mention when there is more money in private charity companies like Watsi can come up which will bring in more innovative ways to help people. Currently federal government's welfare money will not promote innovation.

everybody will have emergencies and blow the money. BI just makes it simpler to get money back from society in general (where some individuals have plenty) to people in a more just way

Do you think our current government safety nets provide for this already? If so you are living in a dream world.

Besides we already have the answer, payday lending, while often predatory in the current system, becomes easier when you consider everyone you know will have capital to loan you, and everyone already has a basic income from which the loan can be paid.

You need to rely on your friends, your family, and the people in your community that you have helped out in the past.

This is the wrong question to ask, based on the wrong premise.

The point of BI is NOT to save money but to provide income for the increasing number of people who wont be able to provide value for the labour market.

If someone has a secured income then there is also a better chance that they can get insurance, a loan and so one.

That's exactly how existing welfare systems work. If you spend the money you must rely on charities like soup kitchens. BI changes nothing in that regard, what it does change is: it removes means testing and the huge cost, stigma, and unfairness that goes with it.

Many countries already pay for schooling, healthcare and military protection, why not do it for basic living costs?

My belief is that a society as rich as the U.S. ought to ensure that every person has access to basic healthcare, has enough food to live on, and a safe place to sleep at night. In such a system I'd say tough shit to a person who claims to be on hard times.

The best answer that I've heard to this question (when I asked it on HN a year or two ago) is that you give people their money on a weekly basis. If they blow it and have no money for food, well they are going to get another check in a week.

This doesn't totally solve the problem of course, but makes the "I blew all my money on a new car and now I can't eat" issue much more manageable.

If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI.

>> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? <<

What do we do today when someone with a job has a financial emergency or just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? You can't quit your job and instantly qualify for food stamps and you certainly can't instantly qualify for subsidizing housing -- in a lot of places it takes a decade or more to get public housing or a voucher.

It is not an either or.

First, we should provide BI in a half/half combination of monthly and daily deposits since money management is a skill that is often lacking in the people who need BI the most.

Secondly, the government should continue to provide what I would call "Critical Infrastructure" programs, such as funding public transit, the public roads, and public education, public EMS and Fire Response, and public libraries. (I personally think that public dental, vision and preventative care clinics should fall in this category.) What else qualifies as 'critical infrastructure' is something that can be determined by voters at the local, state and federal level.

The finally, we should continue to support the further safety nets that are provided by private charities. (Food kitchens, homeless shelters.

Yeah this is what I have wanted to say about Basic Income. If you support this program, you also have to be ready to watch a junkie starve to death on the street because they blew all their BI funds on drugs and could not afford food (replace drugs with porn, liquor, travel, whatever).

I would propose BI based loan systems. Borrow from bank a large amount and bank will recover the money from BI over a very long period depending on the age of the person.

If a 80 year old person get heart attack he will get far less money and will probably die. But a child can get several thousand dollars as the bank can recover the money over 10 years.

This has got to be the most pathetic strawman argument I've seen on HN in a long time. "BI doesn't work because it can't perfectly protect the most pathological outliers"? Ok. Did anyone say it would solve this scenario? And I'm sorry, but what existing agency currently helps people back on their feet after their 12th car accident in the first place? I'm really struggling to see the unequivocal BI take-down you tried to set up with your "riddle me this" quip.

Right now you can blow all of your food stamps money on bottles of ketchup if you want. Nothing is stopping you. And there is no fall-back. And food stamps don't fix your car, section 8 housing doesn't fix your car, even if you have SSI, it's not really enough money to fix your car.

So all of this is a straw man and completely irrelevant to anything related to BI. Once you expend your welfare, you don't get more just because you asked.

The vast majority of welfare systems in the UK are already just some form of giving people money directly but for various different reasons and with an enormous list of complicated rules about who is eligible.

Just giving the people one bit of cash rather than several, and without the strings, wouldn't add the problem you're describing.

Are there particular programs in the US that are different and you think would be broken if they were changed to just cash?

I'd say you absolutely say 'tough shit'. Learning to manage a scarce resource effectively should be one of the goals of the program. It should not be the job of the state to take care of people who, of their own volition, regularly and repeatedly screw themselves over. That isn't to say that nobody should care for them, but I think that should fall to private charities, family, or other institutions.

If a person's issue is drug addiction for instance (probably the most common type of person who would blow all their money and not have enough for food), i'd like to see free treatment offered to those people. I would not, however, like to see more resources given to them other than that. They can keep getting their BI check and blowing it on drugs until they decide they're ready to stop, or they die. They will have their habit financed which will probably net to a far lower social cost than them stealing to pay for it or whatever else they may be doing.

The other major potential financial stress is healthcare. Healthcare is essentially a random high variance cost. For this reason, I think it makes sense for society/government to socialize high-cost healthcare problems for people. I think this is a true public good in the sense that it allows people to be untethered from their jobs and to pursue more risky enterprises without fear of harming theirs or their families health in so doing. This is ultimately a net good for society far above and beyond the health benefits that it gives to the actual end-recipients of the funds. Smoothing ultra-high variance, random inelastic expenses is critical to promoting innovation and keeping an economy running effectively.

What happens in that situation now?

I'm actually shocked that someone would ask such a riddle. It's not clear to me if you actually thought that question through, or if you're just trying to take down BI from any angle you can.

As many others have pointed out - that's a straw man argument. The existing system doesn't cover your riddle either. Yes, people will abuse systems, and yes, systems will sometimes fail. But that alone is not a reason to stop pursuing it.

This is already an existing problem with SNAP (food stamps), which I believe are disbursed once a month. You can totally use it all the first week of the month and be SOL for the rest of the month.

As for rent, the current "safety net" has no problem with homelessness.

What do we currently do when someone faces a financial emergency or spends their whole welfare check on drugs? Last time I checked there's no government program to fund your emergency expenses.

Basic income isn't a cure for all problems, it's just a massive step in the right direction.

What do we do right now when a wealthy person abuses the system?

How do we deal with this now? If you have a job, and you spend all your money before you pay your rent, how do we help those people out? I'm not aware of any government institutions that will pay your rent for you. If you spend all the money you have on food, I suppose you can get food stamps, but most likely you go to a soup kitchen.

I guess I'm wondering if there is any data on how many people "blow all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food", and how we help them now.

The private sector will be more than eager to supply assistance in converting BI to a reliable stream of minimal food+shelter for those who can't trust themselves to do it on their own.

Protecting troubled individuals from all too nasty excesses of a debtor's prison renaissance emerging from the combined forces of payday loan and prison industries will be quite a challenge. Best solved maybe by forming lesser evil versions of the same.

You just described the simple reason why BI fundamentally cannot work on a large scale. Since we will not be able to leave people on the side of the road if they spend their BI poorly, we will still have to have various programs to help them out. Hence, we might as well try to make those programs as efficient as possible if we are going to have them anyway and not worry about basic income.

I don't think you are doing this intentionally but your question is a bit of a straw man. I've never heard anyone flat out propose BI replace basic social services and safety nets. Those programs IMO would continue to exist and function but with a different set of external realities (since BI would change everything).

It is hard to imagine that welfare itself would continue as there would simply be no one who qualifies but possibly it would for extreme situations. If you assume universal, single payer, healthcare then you are talking about education programs, drug addiction, etc programs continuing to exist as they do now.

Anyway, what happens if you take your entire welfare check and blow it now? You turn to your family or you go on the streets. So not much would really change on that front and this isn't really relevant to BI or a flaw in it.

I know someone who blows his "bijstand" (the lowest welfare level in the Netherlands, about 1000 euro but you will also receive subsidies for rent (up to 350 euro) and healthcare). I can tell you that you will become homeless and live in homeless shelters when your parents can't or will not take you in.

I'm interested in basic income, though I don't know much about economics or politics.

I personally wouldn't expect basic income to replace all of those other systems. I don't like the quote here:

> We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs

I think it should be just "Everyone should have their basic needs met". The money is a means to that end, but only a means, and not the best one for all needs. For example, I don't think people should have to use basic income for medical needs. Healthcare should just be provided.

That's good because our healthcare needs do not fit a nice flat monthly allotment. Most months, most people don't need to spend much on healthcare. Then there are some months where, holy shit, you need to spend tons. Some people have chronic illness and will over their lifetime spend way more money on healthcare. At the same time, most people don't have enough expertise to really shop around and choose how to best spend their healthcare dollar.

In contrast, I think basic income is a good fit for the needs where some personal discretion makes sense. That's probably housing, food, and personal essentials. I think of it as sort of like food stamps, except everyone gets them, even the wealthy, so hopefully they have less stigma. And you can use them to pay rent.

Even then, there needs to be safety nets below those. Some people—probably a small fraction—have either enough mental health problems, temporary misfortune, etc. where they may not reliably use their basic income to secure their needs. Those people certainly bear some responsibility for misallocating their basic income, but I don't believe the punishment for failing to do that should be a slow death by starvation or exposure. I certainly don't think the children of those people should be punished in that way.

I don't look at basic income as "more efficient welfare", though it may have some positive effects there. I care more that it creates a more efficient society by giving people more security and freedom. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck, you can try to find a better place to live, or find a job that's better suited to your skills. If you aren't terrified of ending up on the streets, you have a little more brainpower to devote to learning and improving.

No one is their best self when they are barely scraping by. I think something like basic income can help us all make the most of our potential. It's not a panacea, but I think it can help.

It may also be the case that with basic income that more people have the time to volunteer and provide some of the welfare and social services the government currently funds. That may not pan out at all, but it's a nice idea and a possible emergent property.

Our current social safety net doesn't handle sudden emergencies. People blow their entire general assistance and/or food stamps budget in a few days all the time. There are already not enough shelter beds to handle the homeless population in most major cities. BI wouldn't make any of this worse than it already is.

I think tough shit works for everything but healthcare. When even the private solution (health insurnce) is essentially needs based, it's pretty hard to escape some kind of policy-driven rationing.

The way I see basic income (BI) is like when you get money back after doing your taxes only with a BI you get it up front and more of it.

It's not meant to be your only source of income but I can see how some people would chose to use it as such. At first it would be confusing since any social programs currently in place such as welfare, unemployment insurance would be phased out.

The current government of Canada is proposing to implement or at least look at a basic income.

https://www.liberal.ca/policy-resolutions/100-priority-resol...

Insurance. There has to be insurance, and it should be part of BI. So Basic Income & Insurance. BII.

If someone keeps making claims, then they should be investigated for insurance fraud, and processed accordingly.

As for people wasting their income... This shouldn't be a concern for any BI system. The system distributes basic income. What people do with it should be up to them, just like they are free to spend their pay check as irresponsibly as they wish.

If there are specific cases where someone is mentally or physically incapable of responsibly converting income into basic necessities, we could let there be basic shelter and food (what homeless shelters are today) and have those expenses deducted from their BII.

Given how bad Americans are at planning for retirement, I think you're right. BI is a terrible idea.

Given that the project is at the privately funded research phase, questions about possible problems related to government implementations at scale are probably at the who-the-hell-knows stage.

As I interpret the YC Research's statements, it seems to be more a matter of adding a private basic income to the menu of existing public and private resources. If I had to predict, I wouldn't be surprised if the most problematic financial situations involved health care issues...i.e. Joe having a stroke. What does "basic income" mean for a person in the ICU?

So I guess the answer to the question is, the safety nets below basic income are whatever if any safety nets already exist.

Of course there are safety nets, look I can only speak from my perspective living in Sweden but it's my perception that we already have a sort of basic income through the various social services available.

I never understood BI until you said "cut a check", so that's the difference between BI and what we have today in a welfare state.

Because today you get a grant for your rent and you get a basic minimum income from social services. All of which is designed so that you should be able to survive but not in excess.

It's two sums of money that is essentially a BI but instead of cutting a check it's calculated based on your standard of living.

For example if you're keeping a 3 room apartment without a job then the public insurance company that issues the housing grant will require you to move to a smaller apartment to keep your grant.

There's also additional money you can request if you're sick or old. And of course some people have a disability so there's money for that too.

The problem with having many small creaks like that is most people don't know about all their rights, or are just too lazy to pursue them.

BI won't save much money, it's just a political myth. administrative costs over all welfare programs are just a few percent.

Source: an economist in a panel i heard.

Our current approach is telling them "though shit", so at worst we're back where we started. Most proposals protect UBI from wage garnishment so that people don't end up homeless because they are in debt. They also typically assume the existence of universal healthcare, not just treatment but also long-term care of the disabled. So I think the worst thing that can happen is temporary homelessness due to poor money management. Hopefully homeless shelters and social workers will still exist.

Do add to that point, how do you handle people who need more than just BI, because they have some disabilities and because of ths they can't work. Remember there are lots of people who not only have physical disabilities but also mental disabilties and as such need support. How do we handle people who are sick in terms of cancer at alike?

We exclude all those people who really need our help.

I would lean towards the "tough shit" method. Although, if it was paid bi-monthly they would only be screwed for 2 weeks. Not long enough to realistically have any life threatening consequences. They would learn pretty quick. Maybe even do weekly.

I hope BI just never flies because financial problems grow out of real problems. You cannot solve human problems by cutting a check to all the poor people. Poverty grows out of very real problems like chronic health issues, learning disabilities, abusive relationships, etc. These are not going to be magically fixed by giving all poor people a check. Furthermore, I have my fears that both poor people and the rest of society will put less effort into helping people with very serious, intractable problems to actually resolve them because "Hey, you have your UBI." And I think that is likely to cause far worse problems than we have currently.

I just hope to god UBI never is real. Pilot programs often go well. People who have the proverbial rich uncle to draw upon tend to do better than folks without such a resource. These pilot programs are more like that. When you actually try to guarantee universal support (a la communism), historically, it has always failed to work out well. It is a fundamentally broken model.

From the limited data I've seen, people don't blow the money. They don't make all the bad choices we assume - or at least no more often than today.

> just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

I would hope we (not necessarily by way of government) still offer them help, but in that context it is clear the kind of help they need is not simply handouts.

The best solution I can think of to counter people blowing all their money is to trickle the money to an account, instead of giving it to them as a single fat paycheck every month. So if instead of giving them $1500/30days, give them $50 a day or maybe $25/day and a $750 "rent stipend" bulk at the end, so that they can't blow more than a certain amount a day unless they've been actively saving. This encourages the behavior of saving which is the biggest missing skill for the poor (because they are not used to having anything to save).

As for what happens when that gets blown out because of an emergency, I think addressing the cost of health care in a place like America is an independent and arguably more important challenge than providing BI. The system built around insurance policies and over-priced hospital procedures is ridiculous to say the least. You shouldn't need insurance to afford simple checkups, prescriptions and treatment, which would prevent most overcomplicated health conditions for the financially constrained.

Every other financial emergency I believe can be responded to with "tough shit you've exhausted your social safety nets," and it's probably ok. BI won't solve everything (or even anything) magically overnight, the intent is to build a culture long-term where people manage their lives around it and don't have to be told "tough shit" from birth.

Pay daily instead of monthly. This way it is harder to "blow all their money" and not being able to afford food. Or a hybrid approach: 50% of the monthly income upfront and the other 50% distributed daily.

The system already tells them tough shit. If you're on welfare and spend it all, you don't just get more food stamps. Why should this be any different?

No one is saying that the idea is to immediately and completely dismantle the current welfare system.

It seems to me that the general idea is that current welfare systems, at least in the US, are piecemeal at best. There are many, many people who slip through the cracks because they don't know help is available or are unable to navigate the various bureaucracies well enough to get the help they need. Many others refuse to even ask for help because they don't want to admit how poor their position is or they want to avoid the humiliation of asking for help and being turned down. Basic income eliminates that problem because it is applied equally to everyone. On top of that, it will create enormous social pressure for people to spend their money wisely.

I think the concern about people blowing their money is valid, and it will happen, as it has with our current system. There will always be a few people trying to get over. That being said, I think that our current system does a lot to create these people. Try genuinely asking for help, only to be told that you are an idiot, an incompetent, and a freeloader. It's not hard to see how that sort of humiliation can breed resentment, which can lead to people misusing their welfare benefits out of spite or hopelessness.

That being said, I strongly feel that BI can do a lot to minimize welfare abuse. For most working people it won't be too much of a stretch to build up an emergency fund, and, for many, the extra money would mean the difference between living paycheck to paycheck and being able to actually build a savings. Also, for many working people (i.e. walmart employees), 10k is the difference between self sufficiency and living on food stamps, with all the arcane requirements that entails. By filtering out these good people (for lack of a better term) it will be much easier to assess whether the people asking for further assistance are in genuine need, mentally ill, drug abusers, physically disabled, or just fiscally irresponsible. From there, it will be much easier to provide these people with more comprehensive assistance based on their needs, be it personal finance classes, assisted living, drug treatment, housing placement, etc.

From there, the idea is that we can streamline the current welfare system by eliminating more general programs in favor of more direct and targeted assistance. Obviously that's not going to be all that easy to do, given the quagmire that is our current welfare system, but I don't think it's an insurmountable problem.

I wonder what proportion of the welfare programs is just handing out money to the poor.

All the rest, like counseling, helping to find jobs, extra equipment for disabled persons, ... this would certainly stay in place.

> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"

That already happens with existing welfare programs. It's not immediately obviously why BI would be worse.

As with current welfare programs: you get a check every <interval>, end of story. People are free to make bad decisions and get themselves evicted, but those situations will be because someone is incapable of managing their money, not because they're incapable of making it.

Likewise, landlords will be more willing to give people a chance because they know you're not going to 'lose your job' so to speak. That said, the idea of a basic income seems like it should also include free courses on managing your money – best practices, techniques, ways to work around impulse buying, how RRSPs/401k/etc. work, and so on.

Also, welfare programs as currently implemented aren't a safety net below existing incomes; they're not a line of credit that you fall back on when your car dies again. They're programs which are paid in lieu of an actual income, which is frustrating to apply for and be on, and in most cases they pay you so little that you can't afford e.g. child care and rent, but which also force you to prove that you're out there applying for jobs even though you can't afford someone to watch your kid while you do.

What I think the system(s) should do at this point is actually 'arrest' the person, take them to someplace that evaluates them for why this situation occurred and then addresses the malfunction.

Maybe it's a legitimate case of hardship; the individual is doing the best the can, but society and circumstances have simply doomed them to failure. Forgiveness (of various kinds) and moving forward are recommended.

Maybe they are in an area where the cost of living is too high or they can't find jobs to supplement the basic income and allow them to afford additional expenses. Find them a job and/or help them move to an area that society needs them.

Maybe they cannot manage their own life and circumstances: convert BI to paying for semi-managed lifestyle (E.G. a dorm and/or community food kitchen in their housing block).

You might have noticed a common theme here, instead of handling an exception with a punishment you handle it with identifying the actual cause and attempting to address it. Any 'punishment' as a result is a loss of freedom (in exchange for society helping you with your problems).

i dislike basic income, here the concept defined by the term

that said, similarly, i think economics will be dismantled by means of capitalism without the need to acquire capital

as for bi and welfare, i consider the two completely separate

i think bi and welfare should coexist until one eventually renders the other unnecessary

in which case the notion of eliminating programs will be, in hindsight, correctly assumed

The system does currently say "tough shit" once resources have been exhausted. They just come in a bunch of different forms, and are sometimes incredibly difficult to deal with. I got somewhat involved in activism and support work for homeless folks a few years ago, and it was eye-opening. So many of the chronically homeless are mentally ill; and so many of them find it impossible to navigate the system to receive benefits because of their mental illness. The process is horrifically complex; when I tried to help folks get through it, I also occasionally found it impossible to figure out which benefits someone qualified for and how to apply for them. This was especially problematic for people who'd been kicked out of their family home as a teenager, due to being gay or other conflicts, and had never had a government-issued ID.

So, I've come around to a basic income, especially for the people who have the hardest time making it through each month. The people I know who have had success getting out of homelessness did so only after they had some sort of steady income (whether that was a part-time job, or getting some sort of cash benefit from the state). Almost every person I've worked with had been through the system a few times; they'd been provided housing one or more times, but had lost it due to being unable to keep up with the requirements (regular paperwork, office visits, etc.). They'd had food stamps occasionally, but also found it hard to keep on top of the process to continue the service or restart it after having found some short-term employment that disqualified them.

Honestly, the more I've interacted with the current support services in place, the more confident I am saying that it has the opposite of its intended consequence. I think it further entrenches people in cycles of poverty. And, not because of the bullshit GOP rhetoric about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or whatever. It didn't take long for me to realize that if there is no support infrastructure for the most in need, it is equivalent to saying, "If they can't support themselves, they should just die." because that's what happens when people completely fall through the cracks of the current system, which happens more than most people realize.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you're arguing in support of keeping a system that doesn't exist. There's already a point where the system says, "Fuck off and die." And, from what research I've seen, and from what I've experienced among the handful of people I've been around as they've gotten out of homelessness and began to be members of society on an equal footing again, is that the most sure-fire way to help someone out of poverty is to insure they have a steady income that they can plan their life around. Mysterious and arbitrary benefits increase the uncertainty of being in poverty; not knowing if you'll still have food next month, or not knowing if any given medical problem will be covered, leads to lots of sub-optimal decision-making.

Basic Income won't solve everything; mental illness is terrible and often untreatable, addiction is a tough problem, etc. But, of all the options, I'm reasonably confident it's the least damaging.

> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe's twelfth "my car broke down" case of the year?

I think you're comparing BI to a different standard than the existing programs.

The question isn't "Is BI perfect?", but rather "Is BI better than what we have today?"

The exact scenario you laid out can easily happen with the various programs that exist today. If BI reduces (but not eliminates) those scenarios, that would be a worthwhile improvement.

This happens now, all the time. There isn't a government office of "I need money because my car broke down". Soup kitchens will still give out food and the Salvation Army will still provide shelter. Perhaps even more so, because Basic Income will allow more people to donate time and money to charity in their communities.

I would think it would be the end of the line, just as social welfare programs are today. For example, if you run out of food stamps for the month, you can't just go get more.

I don't want it to replace existing welfare programs. I want it to be additional. Welfare is good.

What do you mean "save us money"?

Same thing that happens now when you use all your SNAP benefits in the first week of the month.

A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget. Uber drivers. Servers at restaurants. General hospitality workers that are getting automated out. Ordinary white, working class Americans who lost their factory jobs to China in the last recession. People who are voting for Trump.

These people should be allowed to make the trade-off between using their BI to live in the city and use public transit, or to live in a cheaper, more rural town and having a car. Similarly, they could choose between eating chicken for dinner every night, or eating ramen all week and splurging on a box wine on the weekend. BI lets adults do this. It's embarrassing to stand behind someone at the grocery store trying to buy a bottle of wine with EBT.

It's worth noting that BI does not, by itself, solve mental illness, drug addiction, medical emergencies, or fraud. However, a homeless person that receives BI could rent themselves a small apartment somewhere -- which could reduce the number of 911 calls that person causes as a homeless person, and in turn free up cost savings for e.g. a social worker visiting them at their new apartment.

>what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money

New startup ideas:

1. Create a BI Credit Union: Like all CU's it will be owned by its members (the people on BI are the shareholders). The BICU will extend credit to these its members (who likely never had credit before) and because members are on BI, the loans/credit would all be pretty standard limiting the risk of default. Maybe members could even take a more active role in voting on approving individual loans of its members as opposed to Bank underwriters.

2. BI Death Insurance: Say you are one of the first recipients of this initial YC BI Project experiment which I believe lasts five years. You can pay a premium and in the instance you die before the end of the 5 years, x% of the remaining BI for the period will be distributed to your beneficiaries.

>But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed?

It always bottoms-out somewhere. You pick based on how often these emergencies or "emergencies" seem to happen, how many of them we have the budget to handle, and how likely it is that a certain number of so-called emergencies represent real emergencies.

> what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

What if this happens to someone on welfare?

My personal idea of a solution is to make basic income a "stream" of income instead of a lump sum once or twice a month. We have the technology to make a transfer happen hourly, or even minute by minute. By apportioning the income in that way it becomes impossible to "blow all [your] money" to the point where you can't afford food, because if you just wait half an hour or whatever you'll have enough on your card again for a decent meal. Rent is a little more complicated because with our current system you're typically expected to pay a month or more up front, but there could be an opportunity to come up with new rent contracts and payment methods at the low end that are paid hourly or minutely instead of weekly or monthly, removing the need to save up to pay a lump sum.

There's actually nothing in this scheme that's tied to basic income either -- we could do this reform with existing entitlement payments today in a totally revenue-neutral way.

Add a way to restrict your own purchasing. Rather than have the social program give you X money for food and Y for rent, you get BI, and then you can assign X to food and Y for rent /yourself/, so that your card (because it'll probably be a card) rejects purchases that don't fit your self-assigned allotments.

Heck, that might even work for normal people who want a better way to handle their money. Does that exist yet?

> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?

They still get the BI check every week which they can still use to buy food and pay the rent, so homelessness or starvation doesn't happen. Now they may have some other bills they can't pay, so their cable gets turned off and they lose their car and have to buy a fifteen year old one or carpool or take the bus.

I mean what happens now in that case? If wrap your car around a pole and don't have collision insurance the government isn't going to buy you a new car. If you rack up gambling debts the only thing Uncle Sam will give you is a ticket to bankruptcy court.

'Tough Shit'. If food stamp recipients sell all their food stamps (this is common by the way), they don't get more.

I think there ought to be two different classes of BI proposals. One would be a cash disbursement, like an actual paycheck. The other would be a single, orchestrated way to get food and housing -- basically a single, unifies program that provides what the first form of BI would buy. I think which one you should support largely depends on whether or not you can trust people. If you can, the first BI alone would be sufficient. If not, the second form of BI would be the only practical option, unless you consider a drastic enlargement of traditional welfare without any oversight BI, but to me that's absolutely ludicrous. Additionally, ignoring other, more complicated problems like mental health, I believe that the first form of BI is sufficient and that a very, very small portion of the population would actually blow the money and perhaps they could be absorbed by the prison system, where they would get a roof over their heads, daily meal, practical job training, and even real experience they can take with them (of course they would be free to leave at will).

> a financial emergency

1) That's a major benefit already of BI: people actually have more financial means to develop a safety cushion.

> just flat-out blows all their money

1) They'll do that anyway if they have an addiction or some sort of character flaw. There exist underground economies for the benefits (obviously at a lesser cash equivalent) to enable them to convert benefits to what they really want.

2) If it's endemic, the current high-danger interventions such as substance abuse homes, child protective services are usually invoked.

The basic response to the general question you're asking that is usually given is private charity. And it's not so much because of some conservative political agenda, but because you're talking about edge cases, and there is no feasible system anyone's suggested to get people "emergency cash" without bureaucratic delays. BI (or negative income tax, I prefer) is not a perfect system. You should be asking whether it would be superior for the people by in large who most need it than the current byzantine, perversely incentivized, and corruption-prone systems.

BI means that BI is the major form of monetary welfare assistance, but it doesn't mean it's the only safety net. Providing emergency shelter and food assistance for those who might otherwise starve or be homeless is actually pretty nearly dirt cheap, and there's no good reason to simply discontinue doing things like that (both privately and publicly run) even with BI.

Also, who cares about fraud? You can't solve the free rider problem so don't worry about it. It's an equivalent problem to letting the guilty go away because we're so concerned about avoiding incarcerated people or protecting people's rights. Yes, murderers absolutely do go free sometimes because we have a robust (sometimes) system of civil rights and legal protections, but that doesn't make the system worthless. Similarly, there will always be free riders who take advantage of any system of welfare more than they should. But realistically those people are not a serious drain on the resources of a rich, industrialized nation, and the benefit to the public at large from providing robust welfare support is more than enough to offset that problem.

And how do you prevent this money from being siphoned off by the payday loan industry? Lots of people will be willing to trade their monthly government check (plus some usurious interest rate like 30% compounded monthly) for a lump sum today.

One way is to think about BI as insurance. Then the emergency cases are averaged across the entire population. Joe's twelfth car break-down can be classified as "insurance fraud".

I fully expect the market to take over in this regard, providing opt-out "BI services," which will provide people all basic needs that fit within the basic income stipend. That way people won't even have to think about taking care of their most basic needs (utilities, food, communication, transit).

Given the that someone on BI has a guaranteed income, loans will be no problem and affordable. The risk being assumed by the lender is lifespan and capacity to live within your means.

And if you get to the point where your cost of living and debt repayments can't be met by your BI, I guess you need to get a job, be institutionalized or declared bankrupt. Just like today. BI isn't going to replace prisons, mental hospitals, or rehabilitation centers (although it may provide a way of funding them, if for example you sign away a prisoner's BI to the prison).

Basic Income doesn't necessitate eliminating all other social programs, though. That'd be, perhaps, a libertarian ideal, but as the minister above and at least many people discus it, BI allows a reconstruction, not the destruction, of the social welfare apparatus.

What happens now when someone receiving benefits blows all their money?

I guess the same would happen under BI.

I would argue, that if you can't handle your budget better than that, you are mentally ill, and need help.

For some, it could be enough to get the payment daily, instead of monthly/weekly.

For others, they should not have direct access to their account, but would need to ask for permission from a legal guardian.

If you paid it weekly, or even daily electronically, this would be a non-issue. Joe doesn't have enough cash to buy food? Tough shit; he'll get $20 in his account tomorrow and can buy breakfast at 12:01am if he's hungry.

Every welfare or social safety net has a similar schedule. We would not give someone a $12,000 welfare check on January 1st and expect it to last very long. People reliant on welfare or BI have proven that they have very low financial literacy.

The way we solve giving money to people with low financial literacy is the same - don't give them their money all at once - spread it out over time to limit the financial harm they can do to themselves.

Not an answer to your question, but I think it's ironic that some people are proposing basic income as a solution to reduce overhead. After all, if we only need basic income because technology is taking people's jobs, then surely technology can also be used to minimize almost all the overhead in government departments.

So I think we just need far better social welfare programs, and far better government software.

I'm imagining a new kind of welfare that provides good quality housing, healthy meals, sports and other kinds of activities, counseling and mental health service. All free, and available at any point during your life. We already have the foundations for something like this in countries like New Zealand.

I think the US has a long way to go, and there are a lot of old mindsets to change. I feel that basic income would be a short-term solution to a much more complex problem. I don't think it can be properly tested in the US until the general population views socialism more favourably.

And I don't think we even need it in New Zealand.

How is that different from spending all your welfare money before the next cheque arrives?

Same thing that happens now. Do you think that a person on government assistance now can get more money just by asking for it?

Basic income has a whole host of pretty interesting self-reinforcing feedback loops that seemingly would improve things overall.

For example, people would be more likely to leave jobs that were unsafe, treated people poorly, etc. Including situations where employers weren't following labor laws and regulations (which is a huge problem today). Meaning that maybe it'd be more likely that the fire code, sanitary regulations, etc. were followed consistently. Additionally, people would be more able to have the flexability to be able to train for new careers (whether on their own or through a school or program). Shifting the balance of power in the job market to labor would also generally improve the wage situation, which has stagnated for the last several decades due to the growing power of employers.

"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth."

"We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate capital, and this claim becomes an income stream that goes to everyone. I don't see why my children and your children have a right to a trust fund [or] why Paris Hilton has a right to a trust fund, when nobody else does, or very few people do.

Think of basic income as a trust fund for all our children - to be financed by dividends from our aggregate capital, which was after all, created collectively."

The right to turn down all work, at an evolutionary level, is granted only to photosynthetic organisms.

Comparing mafia and creditors is non-sense: mafia get their power from their choice to use unjustified violence, while creditors get their power from your choice to borrow in the first place.

Let's say you have a person living in a remote area and they don't interact much with other people and they don't have a basic income. Are they free?

Let's say someone lives in the city without BI, is it fair to say that moving into the wilderness is an option for them, and therefore they are free? Does it change if they started in the wilderness?

>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse.

Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

>"The right to turn down a job is essential for a well functioning labor market, and for a civilized society. And to have that right, a genuine right, to turn down a job, you must have an alternative: An outside option. Because desperate people will accept to do desperate things..."

i think it will bring downs the salary for a number of professions - why bother to pay when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?