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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

"Another popular left-wing idea is a universal basic income" UBI is not only supported by left-wingers.

Being a take-my-money-and-leave-me-alone libertarian who values time and mental effort much more than money, I would love to replace the existing hodgepodge of a welfare system in the US with UBI + single payer health insurance.

I'm the same as you, except that I'm still not convinced yet. The more that I see this idea being pushed, the more I'm convinced that people are going to want to add this to the list of the many government handouts, not replace them.

That's the case of many UBI supporters including ones in the Hacker News community.

I'm okay with that, as long as the proportion of welfare distributed through UBI, as opposed to traditional welfare programs, goes up over time.

That's not what would happen. Such a simple, elegant system would never make it through congress. It's frankly naive to believe that UBI would be implemented the way libertarians envision it.

There are many reasons to believe that we would end up with UBI in addition to most of the programs we currently have. They are the same reasons we have the programs we have now, and those reasons will continue to operate in politics and society.

This is the best-written take on the subject I've seen so far: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...

I would be all for UBI if I thought it was possible to implement it in a simple and effective way, but that can't happen in a democracy, especially not ours.

Lawrence Lessing had the right message this campaign cycle, at least.

> but that can't happen in a democracy

Is implying every variation of democracy has been tried, and all have proven unable to establish... UBI? That is a low bar to set for policy implementation potential.

But this applies to any government program proposition. Before you can actually propose to enact anything, you need to actually be represented and have power in your own government. That is the first and foremost problem in the US, as this Princeton study shows[1] (tldr, policy propositions in congress have no correlation with the will of the people, and steep correlation with campaign financiers will).

But this is not a UBI-unique problem. Want more / less free speech / guns / healthcare / infrastructure / military / welfare / social security / taxes / anything from the government? You might want to actually have influence with it first, which you do not have if you are not rich right now.

[1]: https://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/economic.pdf

Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837459 begins with Milton Friedman.

And I found Charles Murray's recent explication of the topic rather compelling.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...

I think it was a "eurolibertarian" response to the European welfare state.

As someone who actually owns rentals in poor black neighborhoods, UBI is the most retarded ivory tower idea I've seen gain traction. All the black families on my street have section 8 vouchers, so they basically have no debt service. What do they do with all this free time? Deal drugs, look for marks to mug, break into vacant apartments, wake up at 2 pm, etc. Drive through my street around noon and count the number of able bodied men doing absolutely nothing productive and you'll lose count. They're hopeless.

What's the avg. yield on those properties? There obviously must be an incentive to invest there, if there's low income potential + lots of potential hassle with tenants etc

Section 8 vouchers are a means-tested benefit program where the net benefit decreases with outside income, and, as such, create a disincentive (especially since people qualified for them also, nearly invariably, are on other means-tested benefit programs whose benefits also decline with additional income -- sometimes, in aggregate, leading to a greater than 1:1 decline in benefits compared to increased income) to productive activity.

This is precisely one of the problems with means-tested benefit programs, especially with an uncoordinated collection of such programs, that UBI, with its unconditional nature, is designed to solve. I don't see how that description of the effect of Section 8 vouchers (even if it is assumed to be both accurate, and generalizable) illustrates that UBI is a "retarded ivory tower idea".

UBI will only increase the amount of syringes I have to pick up in my backyards.

There is a significant difference between asserting something and providing other people a reason to believe it.

This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based, and that determines whether your ubi is net positive or net negative. So again, your net benefit decreases with increased outside income, because you're paying more in taxes.

It's not means testing that's the problem. The problem is that a linear combination of benefit programs with a below-unity benefit-to-income slope has an above-unity slope, which means that making an additional dollar disqualifies you from more money than the dollar gives you. The benefit programs as a whole aren't designed holistically to avoid this (and other) traps, so any welfare overhaul that consolidates multiple independent programs into a systematic whole should solve these problems.

And even before unity-in-dollars, it can be way below unity-in-utility for opportunities available.

With any kind of percentage based tax you're paying more taxes with more income. That's by design and it would still apply if we didn't have any kind of welfare system.

If you're paying for the BI with a tax on income, then yes there is effectively still a phase out. But it's the slowest possible phase out.

> This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based

There's a degree to which this is true, but there is a radical difference between tax system "means testing" and that with existing means-tested public benefit programs. With existing poverty support programs, its quite possible to lose nearly (and in some cases even more than) $1 in public benefits for each $1 in outside income (and much more at certain breakpoints), and to do so while your total income is under the federal poverty level.

OTOH with stae and federal income and payroll taxes together, you can -- in a relatively high income tax state like California -- currently reach a maximum marginal rate (including the employer share of medicare taxes, and assuming that payroll taxable income and income taxable income are equal, which both overstates the tax rate on nominal income and ignores minor differences between the income those two taxes apply to) of 55.8%, but it takes $1 million in taxable income to reach that point (some UBI proposals would add higher maximum marginal rates, at even higher income levels.)

So, sure, the tax system reduces the incentive for earning additional income, especially at higher income levels; the problem UBI address is that existing poverty support programs do much more to reduce the benefit for earning additional -- or even any non-benefit -- income, and they do it at poverty levels.

(And, on top of that, they add -- with each program -- additional layers of bureaucracy to enforce those rules, rather than letting the tax system be the single point in which means are considered.)

There is a wonderful article about effects of poverty in nautilus about Eastern Cherokee Indians post-casino prosperity and how their health and academic performance improved.I do not know of UBI will yield that, but effectively these native americans were getting checks for no work in exchange.

When there is no hope, there is no plan esp. long term plan, life becomes day to day exercise of attaining happiness now!!!

To make that argument you also need to make the argument that UBI is roughly equivalent to section 8 vouchers.

And they are hopeless because they are section 8 vouchers. There is rampant evidence welfare systems in place stratify society in the exact same way that literal walls built decades ago to segregate neighborhoods worked. If you are on welfare, you are operating in entirely different socioeconomic circles from people with access to capital and thus upward mobility.

If you grow up surrounded by people who subsist on poverty-wage welfare checks and you are literally isolated to that community because you parents are a part of it, how in the universe are you ever meant to obtain aspiration or escape it? There is no special snowflake effect here, people are the product of their circumstances (another important sociological observation the last two decades of post-cold-war-propaganda has presented ample evidence towards) and if you have a society built on a foundation of traditional racism and segregate people on that basis you should not be surprised when the members of that group lack strong work ethic or an attitude of improvement. They are put in a cultural cell with iron bars on the windows and while you can with effort escape it you are in a prison with all your friends, family, and everyone you have ever met, so when even given the option to escape, you often do not. It is why prison recidivism is so high with long-term incarcerated, and why particularly ostracized minority groups show less economic mobility.

Unconditional Basic Income is unconditional, not means-tested like Section 8. Section 8 creates a strong disincentive to work (legally) because you will lose your benefits if you make too much. Section 8 is not a program designed to help the poor, it is a program designed to subsidize landlords.

This is basically exactly what I would expect someone who has gotten rich from exploiting poor people to say. We need fewer people like you in the world.

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