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Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

Only if the world were zero-sum, which it's not. Remember how only rich people used to have cell phones, and now billions of people have them? The price of most goods is close to the marginal cost of production, which means that giving more people money may actually lower the cost of many goods (by increasing volume). Artificially scarce goods, such as an apartment in SF, may get more expensive however since their price is set by the marginal ability to pay. The good news is, you don't have to live in SF.

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I guess apartments in San Fransisco already cost more than what someone living off basic income could afford, so the prices should not be driven up at all. Indeed, people living there would presumably get a net reduction in income (from tax increases to pay for the BI), so the prices should go down.

If you read the article, the BI being proposed would drop off after you began earning more than $30k and the drop would stop at $60k in earned income. I imagine a rather high percentage of people living in San Francisco already earn well above $60k annually.

That's not a UBI scheme. That's just welfare.

The article proposes that we replace welfare programs, social security, etc, with this UBI. Then, at some point, it says this:

Government agencies are the worst of all mechanisms for dealing with human needs. They are necessarily bound by rules applied uniformly to people who have the same problems on paper but who will respond differently to different forms of help. Whether religious or secular, nongovernmental organization are inherently better able to tailor their services to local conditions and individual cases.

I find it ironic that this individual is for the so called UBI.

> I find it ironic that this individual is for the so called UBI.

Why do you find it ironic? UBI gives people money without telling them what to do with it. It lets the market (i.e. the people) decide what they need instead of the government.

For example, you can imagine a shelter that will provide food, housing and services for the disabled in exchange for their UBI, which doesn't cover the entire cost but covers most of it and the rest is covered by donations.

It's all the same. Otherwise, you're going to increase taxes even more for people making more than the UBI to compensate. This is simply pushing numbers around on the page - either you're getting the UBI and paying it all back in taxes, or you're not getting the UBI and not paying it back in taxes.

No, it's not the same, because the big benefit of UBI is you don't have to pay a huge gaggle of bureaucrats to verify this person gets benefits and that person doesn't.

> Otherwise, you're going to increase taxes even more for people making more than the UBI to compensate.

There are funding options other than income tax.

Seems like the median income is about 77k:

> .. Our own San Francisco Association of Realtors says that the city’s median household income is a mere $77,700

http://sf.curbed.com/2016/2/23/11101182/11-percent-of-househ...

I've never understood why subsidies like this almost always come with income phaseouts. What's wrong with giving everyone a basic income? People who make a lot of money would more than repay it in taxes, and taxes would have to go up on higher earners, but that's not a real problem.

I didn't write the article and I am not for the so called UBI. I am very much against it. I am willing to be convinced otherwise, and the start of this article sounded not crazy to me, but I stopped at reading at some point because later remarks reflected enormous cognitive dissonance in the writer, suggesting they really haven't thought it through and full of baloney.

> People who make a lot of money would more than repay it in taxes, and taxes would have to go up on higher earners

Doesn't that amount to the same thing?

The difference is you have to make more money first.

"Phase out" means middle income people receive lower benefits in exchange for higher income people paying lower taxes. It's just a code word for screwing over the middle class.

Except that the marginal cost of production will go up because of the increased competition for scarce goods, of which every single produced item has some component, not the least of which is land and labor.

So yes, there is likely an inflationary effect, but it is impossible to accurately predict.

It also depends on the net change in people's overall income as most basic income proposals include scrapping piecemeal and overlapping welfare systems.

Personally I think I could be convinced if it was essentially a replacement and thus simple to administer, but would have to be coupled with strict immigration control for the first country to try it.

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