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Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

I don't understand how the math on basic income is supposed to work. If we gave this amount of money to every person in the US it would cost $7.2 Trillion dollars, roughly double the entire US federal budget. How is this supposed to work? Do only certain people qualify for basic income?

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The basic premise is that everyone is taxed some percentage of their income and then they are paid back some flat amount. For those (probably) in the middle class, this tax/payment will be exactly the same. You pay X per year and gain X per year in benefits. For those who make less than that, they will end up earning more from the payment than they pay in to the system. Those who earn more money than that will pay more into the system than they receive back in benefits.

>Do only certain people qualify for basic income?

The good part about it is that everyone qualifies for the exact same payment, this reduces the cost of administering the program significantly. No need to fill out forms, check if you are covered, prove you make under a certain amount, or talk to 20 different agencies, the only thing that has to be confirmed is that you are a legal resident.

On the pay side, sure. Presumably the IRS would still check that I payed my (now presumably higher) tax payments? So you don't really save anything there.

You presumably save the whole pay side of bureaucracy - some people argue that this alone could finance a significant fraction of BI.

If those people aren't employed by the bureaucracy aren't they themselves going to be on basic income?

Presumably yes (them or people they displace from the job market). But people are only a fraction of operating costs - you have databases, rents, material expenditures, etc. Also in case of top bureaucrats I'd expect their salaries to be higher than BI, so the delta is part of the money saved.

Sure, those reductions in costs are going to hit someone's bottom line.

I've found that doing the math absolutely doesn't factor into this. That's where it falls apart--it's not the most efficient if you're giving money to people only to have to reclaim it from 90% of them. It's a fun thought experiment but at a national scale the math really falls apart because there isn't an external source of funding to grab money from.

Did you know that the US has Social Security and Medicaid and taxes already, taking money and paying money?

Don't need it, necessarily. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/printing-money-...

Imagine that the money comes from no where. We have capabilities to offer people some things that they probably aren't capable of buying. Like say better food, more electronics, better homes, etc., Instead of expecting everyone to work to "earn" their living, we can instead guarantee some basic standards of living by giving everyone money that comes from no where. It just requires us to rethink productivity and economics. If a robot works instead of human, it is still productive and contributing to economy. If it were human, the work itself will have some value and so does the output of that work. With robots, we are only counting the output and not the work itself. What if we were to incorporate that into finances and pay that as basic income? It doesn't matter that the money is essentially created from nowhere, as long as there is some productive work taking place to account for that.

I don't think robots change anything. Robots increase efficiency of human workers, they don't replace them entirely. Netflix and Redbox are highly automated, but they still have human workers; just fewer than Blockbuster did.

Robots that don't need humans is science fiction for the foreseeable future. They are not producing output from nothing; they are just tools that amplify the productivity of human workers.

This has been happening for hundreds of years with new technologies that improve efficiency.

"...they don't replace them entirely..."

Tell that to the thousands of people who have lost their jobs on assembly floors.

In fact, BI is a hedge against the future where there simply won't be enough for all of us to do.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...

http://www.wired.com/brandlab/2015/04/rise-machines-future-l...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/what-happens-when-rob...

...and so on.

There is no such thing as a factory with zero workers. Fewer workers, but not zero. This is not a paradigm shift; the cycle of increased efficiency destroying jobs has been going on for hundreds of years.

There are so many problems that need solving. I don't think we are anywhere close to a world where there is not enough for people to work on. There is currently a mismatch between the skills needed and the skills available, but we should try to solve that problem first rather than giving up and saying that some people just cannot contribute anything.

Irrespective of whether robots replace humans or augment them, we are clearly capable of meeting basic needs of everyone. Basic Income is to economy what basic education is to knowledge and awareness. It doesn't mean that people don't have to work or that we have no more progress to worry about. It's just realizing that we can improve the basic standard of living for everyone to a decent level without asking them to do anything.

I am not familiar with YC project, but many similar discussions in Europe focus around the "guaranteed minimum income", which basically means that you give money only to people that don't have an income. You need to decide a good threshold for that, as you don't want to promote unemployment.

If you set the minimum too high and the GDP drops due to non productivity, it will cause inflation, effectively lowering the minimum income amount in real terms.

Most basic income recommendations are somewhere south of $1,500-$2,000 a month.

But no, every citizen qualifies. That's the basic part.

Universal is the "every citizen" part

Basic is the "only enough to subsist on" part.

This isn't actually an academic experiment. It's a group of very rich people using lesser off people as entertainment.

Not too terribly far off from this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure

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