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Comment by osmala | Hacker News Reader

This basic income experiment has plenty of flaws. Many people get DOUBLE that from government as benefits anyway, so the premise of that experiment is flawed. The disintensives for smallish amount of work still continue. Finland has additional benefits for rent, additional benefits for supported children and increases to standard unemployment benefits for having to support children. This isn't really the basic income as most people understand it. It really doesn't replace benefits bureaucracy with something more streamlined that deals away with disincentives. By disintensives I mean the situation in which reduction of benefits and cost of getting to work eat the salary and there is almost nothing left from the work if its a part time job.

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This is not a basic income experiment. This is an experiment to redefine and simplify unemployment benefits.

Specifically, this experiment eliminates (much of) the problem that earning a few hundred euros will cut your unemployment benefits by the same amount. It allows people to take part-time jobs without being penalized. It's not perfect for the reasons you give and more, but it might be significantly better than what is currently in place.

The premise that one can find some universal income amount X and do away with all other types of benefits is a pipe dream anyway. For some, X will be enough to scrape by. For others, X will not be enough for their medical care necessary to survive for two weeks. There will always be a need for some extra needs-based benefits.

> For others, X will not be enough for their medical care necessary to survive for two weeks.

Finland (like much of Europe) has universal healthcare and a national health insurance plan; this is not an issue. There already is an 'X' that people can (adequately) survive on when on welfare. If basic income is something that a state wants to research in earnest, these kind of experiments provide valuable data and can be seen as a tentative first step towards a national basic income plan.

I just wish it would stop being touted as a basic income experiment. It's not even close.

Any experiment that changes benefits to be unconditional whereas they used to be withdrawn if you get a job, will provide very useful insight into peoples behavior under a basic income experiment.

That is why this a useful basic income experiment - regardless of whether the program itself is classified as basic income in its current form or not.

> Any experiment that changes benefits to be unconditional whereas they used to be withdrawn if you get a job, will provide very useful insight into peoples behavior under a basic income experiment.

Not really, because (i) tax credits and other proposed "welfare trap" reduction methods have been around and studied for a while and (ii) it doesn't attempt to study any of the features of BI widely believed to have negative impacts such as the cost of extending welfare to millions of people not currently [interested in being] eligible for it, possible social effects of decoupling benefit entitlement from any indication of desire/need and net income reductions to some current welfare beneficiaries if other programmes such as housing entitlements are cut. As a general rule, experiments which don't test any of the perceived negative effects of a proposal generally mislead more than they inform in debates about whether it's an improvement on the status quo.

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