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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

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.

View on HN

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.

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

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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