I really liked this last line. I agree. I think that I would be much more productive in my life if I didn't had to think aboud keeping my job and having enough funds for expenses.
Hopefully, minimal income will become a standard thing in the future.
That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills.
Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do, realistically.
I'd say many would like to have more people to have this sort of opportunity, which is currently only limited to the very privileged.
So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.)
So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now.
I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.
Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with.
But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.
How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?
I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off.
Good luck with your efforts!
I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.
Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?
I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway.
If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.
This will never fly politically. You think lower-middle class people (the vast majority of the country) are going to agree to that?
1. Young age - obsess about what others think of them
2. Middle age - don't care what others thing of them
3. Old age - realize that nobody is thinking of them
Which is liberating for intellectual freedom.
Minimal income could only be achieved by more and more government intervention. Answer yourself how good that would be.
Yes, it may require higher taxes or new taxes like a carbon tax or land value tax. But is higher taxes == more government intervention?
Let's talk numbers: to give every adult in the us a BI of $25k/yr , would require $5T. Current tax base of the US is $1T.
I've noticed a trend where someone thinks that some napkin math ends a conversation, and it seems a bit like scientism to me.
For example, many BI schemes I've seen discussed assume that most people with jobs will be taxed to reclaim the UBI and the actual benefit is for people trying to get out of poverty who aren't trapped by egregious equivalent tax rates where they lose 2 dollars of benefits for every extra dollar they earn and so rationally decide that working less is more financially rewarded.
Why don't you run the numbers for that?
But could you please share some numbers for those offers you proposed - they'll be interesting to hear.
This way you're not giving a flat $25k to someone who's already earning $100k. But if that person loses their job, they'll still get enough to live on.
This is one of the main problems UBI seeks to address by not being means tested like current benefits.
If instead of phasing out the earned credit for any earnings below $25k/year it was just withdrawn above that threshold (an effective marginal tax rate of 100% beteen $25k-$50k/year) then you would get clustering of incomes at just under $25k/year with no incomes between $25k-$50k/year. Potentially you could phase it out starting at $25k as arguably the incentive effects are less pronounced at higher incomes. Obviously this could not be considered universal however.
If you earn $0, you get $25k.
If you earn $10k, you get $15k
If you earn $24999, you get a $1 credit.
Anything $25k and up, you get 0 credits, with a progressive tax scheme to support the above.
I guess it's not "universal" per se, but the only means testing would be to figure out how much income you made, which the government already does in the course of collecting income taxes anyway.
Many people are not going to just sit around the house and play video games all day. People have a natural desire to do productive things.
Per a very worrisome concurrent to this 4 8 2017 thread about stroke survival and cost, how is a UBI in a land of 'buy more hamburger, buy more tobacco, buy more white bread, buy more audience-centric entertainments' ... maybe all using non-pedestrian means for the purchase [ vehicle, taxi, ...] not having a hidden cost to society in obesity/stroke/diabetes constant diet and exercise sub-par but par for that the neighbors are doing and up to and demand for friendliness, earlier stroke risk in a sizable number of the UBI while young but much more less healthy, not out of breath activities during ones day 2019 vs 1819, and the consequential thirty years after its onset not Pritikin or similar while young and in one's productive years, tearing asunder the capacity of society to deal with it in a traditionally within-ones-extended family medical care with once a week medical assitance, where the norm is now maybe or will be, confiscate, put in villa of warehoused stroke obese survival bedrooms, with TV, cake, etc, and overworked underpaid and maybe even deprived of retirement income for current health plan tax, nursing staff and the like?......Which is not to be overly critical of the conversation, because I was once a part of a same group and overfed, but due to ignorance and naive utopian goal from being bullied that in hindsight was only extremely damaging to my own health, vs victimizng to others which one could take it as, since it encouraged overeating if one was observing my overeating, and was accompanied by my strange silences as one by birth-surgery isolation not very conversant, still, in conversation as I prefer to write to expound, as this, and .... well, whatever. ..... tl;dr... UBI may impose a decades-later extreme uptrend in stroke among a not-small subset of its recipients... costly to society and the families of those UBI gainers of income at the earliest years of its onset. Something to put into the mix, if one is so inclined. [ text input box here not conducive to editing, and also out of time, dual-reason only of draft quality small treatise, I as newbie to YN may be excused. Thanks! IAMYD ]
if you earn $500, ($50 in taxes), you get 2 for one credits, so that pulls $25 out of your 1000, you take home $500 for working, and $975 for BI.
if you earn $100000, $10000 in taxes, you get a 2 for one credit, so only $8000 in taxes.
BI makes it always better to earn some money.
People always seem to forget the tax credit side, and assume we're just writing everyone a check.
The idea is that, currently, "not working" is dis-incentivised to such a degree that it creates more problems than it solves. Consider:
- For currently unemployed people: are they lacking in motivation, or in ability?
- For people who legitimately cannot find employment: is it moral to expose them to policies aimed at punishing 'freeloaders'?
- Considering existing work-requirements even for basic assistance with food and housing: is it correct to say these operate from a model of human motivation where people stop trying as soon as they can afford the basic necessities of life?
- Do you stop trying as soon as you know you have enough food and a roof over your head for the foreseeable future?
- Do you know anybody who does that?
- If people are forced into jobs with the thread of starvation or homelessness, what are the trade-offs they are required to make? I. e. to what degree is this forcing short-termism, and hindering their ability to invest time into, for example, education?
- To what degree does the looming threat of starvation compromise the position of low-income workers in negotiations with employers?
- Consider some model citizen from the lower middle class that you can think of: maybe a factory worker from the midwest, or an accountant's clerk in Houston, whatever... They have been gainfully employed for all their (adult) life, and will be for the foreseeable future. Question: How much needless anxiety is that person possibly experiencing, because they are just some random economic events away from complete destitution?
- To what degree could society profit by mitigating some of the risks associated with attempting something new?
Right now if you receive welfare, and you make a dollar, you lose a dollar of welfare. That's the actual disincentive to work.
(And don't bust my chops about using the word losers. I am homeless. It is not me looking down my nose at other people, JFC.)
If automation takes over, human labor is going to have to be redirected at the household and community level.
$25k a year is about the poverty line for a family of four.
And people at the poverty line get state support(Medicare , etc) . So that's more money.
Isn't this whole notion of BI dependent on the political support of a large share of Americans who think they'll get money - and now you're saying they won't ?
Or in other words - why aren't talking about unemployment insurance that doesn't forces you to work ? because that's what's your offer is.
BI is not the same as unemployment insurance, because that would require you to work beforehand. It's also not the same because with every dollar you earn, you loose the same dollar from your unemployment insurance. BI would mean that the first couple of thousand of dollars you earn, you will keep. Essentially it provides an incentive for those on welfare or unemployment to engage in at least some work, because they can keep that money.
"But...but redistribution!"
Yeah, about that. Unless you've been protesting the massive policy-driven upward redistribution of wealth that's happened over the past three decades, your position probably isn't as principled as you imagine. More on the specifics of how the great grift worked can be found here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/how-middl...
Let's focus on education and healthcare first. An effective universal education and healthcare system could be the foundation for BI in the distant future (both socially and politically).
In UK history some monasteries probably get close to being communist communities, but they're very small scale.
I am not aware of a successful "communism" that scales above the Dunbar number, and while I can point at ones that are arguably successful at sizes below that number there are even more that have failed even below that number.
[1]: People who post to the internet about how wonderful Communism are generally posting about how wonderful it would be to have a government who would target them for death pretty early on, as they are the "talkative ones" who would be watched. Same, incidentally, for the people who actively riot in favor of giving the government lots more powers to, oh, say, take "care" of people passionate enough to riot in favor of overthrowing the government, which is really appealing right up to the point that you are the government.
If they're "staying more equal" then surely that shows you didn't have a communist state.
IMO the transition is nearly impossible because you need those in power to want benevolence and humanitarianism more than power and wealth.
>I can point at ones that are arguably successful at sizes below that number //
Please do?
Of course, once we have true AI, human history is also over.
Additionally, there were few incentives for people to be creative (you couldn't benefit from your creative work), and also many restrictions on creativity (art/culture was directed by the state, freedom of speech minimal).