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Comment by Strilanc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Solving this debt is not that tricky, it has known legal solutions - e.g. when you have a court order to collect debts from you, where your wages are garnished, it has a floor limit of monthly income that's untouchable and that monthly amount will be available on your bank account no matter what, and there are no legal ways to recover that from you. Threatening to break your legs may work, but that can be handled by the police.

Set this floor equal to BI, and that's it. On the other hand, it will mean that payday lenders will likely not lend to you at all if you have no other income, since you can easily never ever pay them back with impunity; but that might be considered a good thing - people won't get stuck with predatory loans en masse because they won't be given them.

I've not heard of or thought of this approach. It's pretty clever. Still possible to abuse, but it seems at least somewhat less likely.

You would need to outlaw "BI payday loans" for this to not be circumvented almost immediately.

Black and Gray markets exist for a reason, and if you ban something, it wont go away, it will just go under ground.

Actually, you'd only need to classify the money from BI as not being subject to garnishment or collections. This is how Social Security is handled.

With this, they could loan the money to people and people would owe it, but they couldn't collect.

With such small amounts, the fees would be a huge % - no different than loan sharks everyone already has access to.

Not if we use cryptocurrency.

Can you expand on that?

Note: I'm pretty far on the 'yay cryptocurrency' scale, but I'm just missing what you're saying here.

then "We'll simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes."

I agree with that one. It is probably worth it to deliver the money each day or at least each weekday. You could handle the food stamp microloan via and debit card that only is for small food purchases which deducts payment from future daily payments over a certain period of time.

It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month.

Handling the debt-collector issue is probably going to take something like a law to force payments in very small amounts until legitimate debts are paid off.

> It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month.

I've never heard of this. Do you have a link or something? I assume it's like a checkpoint they set up in poor areas so they can get money from the welfare checks or something?

So, its the first of the month and people got their welfare check (or EBT these days), and need to drive into town to buy food. Amazingly, a police checkpoint appears and pulls every driver (well, not semis or high priced vehicles or well those without reservation plates) over. Of course the cars aren't well maintained (poor rural - got a grant based on those stats) so tickets fly. But I'm sure everyone feels safer now.

I am having one heck of a time finding the articles.

Ah so it's not to catch them while they have money, it's to catch them when they know the poor people with poorly maintained cars will be heading to town. That's quite shameful.

What if your washing machine breaks or your kids need new clothes or your car needs gas?

It seems to me with this approach people would be stuck in perpetual poverty even more.

Well, you either live with the problems until you save enough money, or you get a job.

How does the government currently help people that got a broken washing machine?

Wait what? How exactly would these people be OK in the current system? Why would it be worse?

This is about the tiny daily portions of money, not about BI.

It's hard to make long term plans with that, because instead of putting aside $100 at the beginning of the month, now you need to save $3 a day. With amounts that small, it's easy to accidentally overspend.

Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.

Not all poor people are poor because they're drug addicts that cannot handle money. Poverty is hard to escape. I'd rather not humiliate these people any further and make it even harder for them to lead a dignified life just because some people might waste their money in the first week.

> Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.

If unexpected costs happen currently, you either have the money or you don't and have to wait - the situations are the same.

(Upfront payment - Have the money? Great. If not, wait until next payment. Daily payments - Have the money? Great. If not, wait)

> I'd rather not humiliate these people any further and make it even harder for them to lead a dignified life

(FWIW, I live on benefits due to medical issues) How is this undignified? If anything, it's one less thing to worry about (I've occasionally forgot about payments and ended up having ~zero money left just after a payment. A rolling income would at least mean I get money for essentials pretty much immediately)

I feel like it's undignified because it sounds to me like saying "You can have money, but since you are poor and don't know how to handle it, we give it to you in small daily portions so you don't waste it all at once.". Like parents do with their young kids.

If it's basic income, then you should be free to choose how and when to use it.

For your example about forgotten payments, the result would be that you did not pay, so potentially you may lose your insurance, or you receive a fine or something worse. That's a decision you should be able to make yourself.

If you don't have control over your own money, that's not very dignified.

>Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.

How do we help people when this happens NOW?

I'm not sure how that is relevant at all. We're talking about how a BI system could work and whether it could be a good idea to split the money in tiny daily chunks. I stated that I believe that is a bad idea because I believe it's generally harder to put aside a dollar a day than $30 a month at the beginning of the month. So far I haven't heard any counter argument, just "How would that be worse than what we have now".

Plus that question has so many answers depending on which country you live in. I can tell you for example that in my country you are expected to save part of your welfare money for those cases, which does not necessarily work very well since it's often not enough money to really save it.

> What if your washing machine breaks or your kids need new clothes or your car needs gas?

paying out nightly would be better for the "car needs gas" and really no worse of the other two. Many families are going to take a hit on major repairs.

I assume we are talking about the same amount of money as the single monthly check divided up my payment days.

If you get all your money at once you can always have a buffer for these unexpected things. You also have more freedom to waste it all at once, but I don't believe most poor families are really that wasteful. It's just hard to get by. If you get your monthly check divided up, you can't first resolve the situation and then figure out how to deal with it financially. You have to wait. That might be the difference between making it to a job interview or not, or buying medicine for your kid when it needs it.

If you start coming up with extra cases for when it's urgent and you can get a bigger payout, you're again complicating the system and adding extra bureaucracy where part of the idea is that the simplicity of the system compared to classic welfare systems is what makes it more affordable and allows to give bigger monthly payouts.

> If you get all your money at once you can always have a buffer for these unexpected things.

That doesn't work in practice as people are really poor at budgeting thus the big trip on the 1st of the month to buy groceries.

> That might be the difference between making it to a job interview or not, or buying medicine for your kid when it needs it.

If I'm paid daily, its more likely I can buy that medicine or make that job interview. The actual difference is the big payments and frankly sucking up a chunk of the monthly is going to hurt pretty badly. We're talking about the same amount of money distributed differently.

> If you start coming up with extra cases for when it's urgent and you can get a bigger payout, you're again complicating the system and adding extra bureaucracy where part of the idea is that the simplicity of the system compared to classic welfare systems is what makes it more affordable and allows to give bigger monthly payouts.

I don't think I understand what you meant by this paragraph.

You use your savings to fix your washing machine, like how you do so if you are getting lump sum.

If someone is having trouble saving money with daily allowances, they will definitely not save money with monthly lump sums.

With every sentence you type here, the cost of the bureaucracy rises. Also the profits of the payday loan industry...

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