Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The point is when you give the same subsidies to a healthy 22 year old who lives with his parents and a single mother of three, we're dealing with one of two situations:

1) the subsidies are sufficient for both groups to do OK. This is fine in theory, but taxes would have to go up by a lot to have the minimum take care of the needy with the largest expenses. The UBI would have to be closer to 25,000 USD. If it's politically impossible to raise taxes to the level needed to let poor people live in dignity today, then what are the odds the American people sign off on the massive tax hikes needed to fund a non-destitution basic income?

2) the UBI simply isn't sufficient. Some people are getting money they don't need and other people are getting much less than they need just to survive. Every dollar that goes to the first group means there's less for those who really need it. In other words, the proposed system is a cruel dismantling of the welfare state.

Raising 3 children is practically a full time job, just one that happens to be unpaid. With the UBI the minimum wage would go away, meaning that the single mother is going to make a few dollars an hour in her part time job. That will barely cover the cost of the car she needs to get to her job, and the cost of the babysitter. The suggestion that being a single mother isn't much more expensive than a being a single young adult is absurd. I really struggle to respond to this. Just think about it: a single person can share an apartment and bike everywhere, enjoy the simple bohemian lifestyle. Being a beach bum doesn't cost anything. Do side jobs and hustle whenever you need a few bucks. The single mother in contrast needs a car and a house with rooms, just to start. That's going to take a big chunk out of the 10,000. Just living nearby a school is already expensive, and not optional. And the children themselves cost money too, in a million little ways. Diapers, clothing, entertainment, food, trips to the doctor, the list is endless.

I don't believe I'm misrepresenting the situation, this is just how the math works out. If the UBI means giving money to people who don't really need it then taxes must go up by a lot or the poor are getting a really raw deal.

I think you are probably right that a welfare system that does not consider the cost of dependents is likely misguided.

And we're in agreement that properly raising three kids is a tremendous undertaking that demands either a whole bunch of money or almost all of your time.

I take issue, though, with the idea that a family of 4 living on other people's money should spend so extravagantly. You do not need a car. You need a 2-bedroom home within 2 miles of a school. Housing will almost certainly be more than half of your expenses. Food for 4 people is a few thousand more. Clothing, entertainment, and diapers cost almost nothing (do not use disposable diapers except on special occasions). If you want to work part time then find another mom who will swap days with you or pay you to take her kids while she's working. I could see $10k turning out to be slightly less than what's really needed, but it shouldn't be considered "cruel joke" territory.

In the spirit of not paying people more than they need, I could suggest paying the young adult who gets free housing from her parents only $3k per year, but that opens a huge can of worms that'll have kids pretending to rent their own apartment to get more UBI while really living at their parent's house, etc.

Again, I think we're in agreement on the flaws of this UBI proposal. But I assert that, until such time as our society reaches a level of technological advancement where no one needs to work, the amount of extra work that working people are required to do to support nonworking people should be no more than the minimum amount to maintain their health and physical comfort. If you think people should get more than that, I'd like to know how you propose to decide how much.

At the present technological level tough choices have to be made to divide the scarce resources we have. In my view this necessitates means-testing and a conventional welfare state. A UBI only makes sense to me when there is so much wealth in society everybody can be gifted a subsistence income, without having to cut other necessities such as healthcare, infrastructure, and so on.

As for the example: Rural poverty is a huge problem, and not everybody can live in cities. Without a car you're stuck in the house because you can't leave your kids unattended. You need to drive miles just for groceries. People around you live in squalor and substance abuse is ubiquitous. Finding a sitter on short notice? Forget it. Move? With what money? Living on a tight budget is easy when you're young, healthy, educated, etc. In the real world poverty doesn't look like that. You can make a back of the envelope calculation where 10k a year is sufficient for a one parent family of four, but I don't think it holds up in the face of all the struggles poor people face.

Why should people be entitled to three children they can't afford rather than a beach bum lifestyle? If anything we should incentive the latter; at least it doesn't hurt anyone else.

Because not everyone chooses to have multiple children they can't afford. Maybe their breadwinner partner died. Maybe they were going to be pushing it with two kids, but the second pregnancy was twins. Or the first was triplets. Or they had great family support that allowed them to work a couple of days, but those people moved elsewhere.

I don't think people should be jumping into parenthood without knowing what it really entails (costs and brutal demands on your time) so I'm sympathetic to your angle, but reality plays out differently. And kids are the result of some pretty basic urges that are obviously difficult for many to deal with appropriately (think ahead, get/use contraceptives, actually abstain, whatever).

But if you give people direct financial incentives to have more children, as OP wants, that's what they'll do.

Look what the birth rate was 200 years ago when children were considered retirement investments (or elsewhere in the world where that's still true).

In Australia, we have (had) the "baby bonus". Seems a bit wrong. I'd rather support sticks to things like childcare subsidies and so on. I have two children in childcare 3 days a week and it would cost me over AU$600/wk without the subsidies.

Obviously there has to be a strong balance between an incentive that keeps a reasonable birthrate and one that overly encourages those desperate for money to procreate. The latter is disastrous for countless reasons.

Not sure how they'd balance it with a UBI.

From the article:

>Or consider the unemployed young man who fathers a child. Today, society is unable to make him shoulder responsibility. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his monthly grant to be extracted for child support before he ever sees it. The lesson wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.

> Or consider teenage girls from poor neighborhoods who have friends turning 21. They watch—and learn—as some of their older friends use their new monthly income to rent their own apartments, buy nice clothes or pay for tuition, while others have to use the money to pay for diapers and baby food, still living with their mothers because they need help with day care.

The author seems to be proposing that child support for 3 children can/should be taken from their fathers' UBI grants. Therefore, the mother would receive a larger grant based on her number of children.

Those quotes are about enforcing responsibility and repercussions for unwise decisions, and how that functions as deterrence. Taking money away from the father is framed as punishment, the mother getting money is just a happy coincedence (remember he excludes children from the UBI and then he sketches a scenario where a dad has to lose a lawsuit before having to pay). He doesn't concede that people in some situations simply need more money to live, because that concession would be fatal. After all, if some people need more money than others then you need to do means testing (oh wait, that's what every country is already doing and the root cause of all the inefficiency he seeks to eliminate), which is the exact opposite of the UBI.

That is certainly correct in many cases but I don't think you can get around gizmo's argument in the general case. The father could not simply leave the mother but for example die in an accident. A one size fits all solution seems really problematic considering the huge differences between personal circumstances.

Assuming the father is a living US citizen whose identity and whereabouts the mother knows, of course.

Either way, that doesn't really affect the argument that a BI payment supposed to be a minimum for one person to live off is unlikely to stretch to paying for the food, living space and private health insurance costs for another three, even if another parent's minimum payment is also being garnished to help.

The author's arguments you've cited essentially amount to the view that children of single parents should be punished for their parents' life decisions. It looks particularly crass in the context of accompanying arguments in favour of spending money on adults who choose to "idle away their time" and including those fortunate enough to be "already living off other people’s money".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com