Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

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Other research has found that people's spending on alcohol and cigarettes actually went down when they received direct cash transfers. Faced with a brighter future, many people stop using temptation goods as a way to cope with a hopeless situation, researchers have discovered. In the village GiveDirectly is working with, interviews with nearly a dozen recipients showed that most people have actually worked more since the study began.

Well, this is encouraging.

I am not pro basic income because I think it won't fix anything in the US without other changes first, such as universal basic healthcare and more affordable housing, and most discussions about basic income start from an assumption that it will be handled at the national level. I think the current focus on basic income actively takes attention away from things like healthcare and housing. We already don't want to fix those things because they are hard problems to solve. Focusing on basic income strikes me as a variation on how so many people fantasize about winning the lottery. It seems like an easy answer. And people would rather imagine that there is an easy answer than wrestle with hard problems.

Like others are saying, I am unconvinced that this experiment really proves anything about basic income. But I think this may be the first time I have heard of a basic income experiment where the money came from elsewhere.

Maybe this approach does not further basic income. Maybe it will only provide new models for charity. Or maybe it provides a different model for basic income, one that puts a floor in globally and potentially starts the process of moving towards a world government, which doesn't have to be in place of national governments. It can be another layer on top of them. So emergent global order makes more sense than a top down approach to creating it.

One of the issues with basic income is the questions surrounding how it impacts immigration. If you give all Americans $1000/mo, that makes citizenship here an even more valuable commodity.

But if basic income starts as a global initiative to begin closing the gap between rich and poor nations, instead of a local initiative to help the poor within rich nations, maybe basic income can start resolving some of the problems currently fueling immigration pressures and bring barriers down to a more manageable level.

I’m dubious about basic income because, having done the math on how much it would cost, there are certainly better ways to spend that much money.

If we give every American $1,000/mo basic income, that’s $12,000/yr times 300 million, or about 1.2 trillion per year. For that much money, we could fix all our infrastructure, build better subways in every American city, build a Loftstrom-style launch loop to keep space launch costs down, land on Mars, replace the entire military arsenal, invest billions into basic science, expand health coverage, and still have some money left over. Plus, building all of that shit will probably get the country to full employment, give people meaningful things to do with their lives, and we get a lot out of it.

Or we could just mail people checks so they can sit around at home playing video games.

I don't think actual universal basic income is ever going to happen, in part because of the cost. The reality is that most people envision it as a replacement for welfare, not genuinely a check for everyone, including Bill Gates and other ultra rich citizens.

I think the biggest problem is that it amounts to squandering wealth, not creating more. It envisions most ordinary people as mere consumers. It's a little like saying "Our body would be healthier if we made sure to adequately feed the leeches."

Yeah, no.

We need to not actively turn people into leeches. We need to stop treating them like they can't do anything but consume. It is a terrible way to treat people and it creates a very unhealthy and unsustainable system.

> It envisions most ordinary people as mere consumers. It's a little like saying "Our body would be healthier if we made sure to adequately feed the leeches."

> Yeah, no.

> We need to not actively turn people into leeches. We need to stop treating them like they can't do anything but consume. It is a terrible way to treat people and it creates a very unhealthy and unsustainable system.

What the heck are you talking about... If it's universal, then everybody gets it. How can anyone be a leech? And if you think some people consume more than they produce it's the same problem as with any other welfare. I don't see a problem with UBI being a replacement for welfare to some extent. Giving people dedicated restricted help is like treating them like incapable of decision making. Give them money and let them buy food themselves. What's the difference between a food stamp and food money? Pardon my ignorance.

Regarding creating new leeches, about every experiment with this shows that on average by great margin it activises people. So this in practice shows the exact opposite of what you say. People usually feel empowered and regained control over their lives and try to do something with it.

I am not a real proponent of universal basic income, the results seem too good. Maybe not being used to, and suddenly being given cold cash under monitor has this effect. Nevertheless, in my opinion your logic is completely reversed to what is being published.

Your math is wrong, such a program would cost $3.6 trillion per year

Even furthering my point! An entire Mars program could be done for a tenth of that!

That's not really the cost.

The cost is $12,000 * 300 million minus income taxes raised. Most plans have a slight increase in personal income tax attached, that leads to a breakeven at around $36K -> $40K.

And the comparative cost in the budget is the cost of the program minus all existing welfare programs this replaces. $1,145 billion was the guesstimate for welfare, so for the USA at $3.5 trillion, it would be a cost of $2 trillion.

I wonder too if there aren't more cuts than just welfare that can be made as a flow on of this. The proposal I saw from a conservative economist was $13K, with $3k reserved for healthcare. That would replace a lot of the medical schemes that exist, which many states likely pay for as well.

Still, it is gonna be hella expensive for the first country that does it at scale.

You could raise income taxes regardless, though. And I don’t know how much welfare you would be able to eliminate, since the bulk of those costs are Medicare (which you would have to maintain) and Social Security (which you would also have to maintain but might offset UBI).

Regardless, you’re still introducing a large amount of net new spending—an amount that could be productively invested in infrastructure, research, and other productive projects.

You're just looking at numbers--that's a mistake. The real "cost" is in the unmeasurable factors of how such a policy would change social behavior. For example, if I'm guaranteed $1K/month, I could take that and, using the other passive income I have, quit my job and never work again.

I'm 44, it would be a dream come true. Part of me says "bring it on" but the adult part of me realizes that you can't run a nation where everyone wants to retire early and produce nothing or next to nothing. I reminds me of Firefly and planet Miranda where everyone was drugged for "their own good" but they all just laid down and died!

I wonder if it would make sense to count things like healthcare and education as income. For instance, there are people who think my healthcare benefit should be taxed, and others who want the tuition waiver for graduate students to be taxed. So they are "income" when it's of interest to do so.

In this sense, we provide a lot of "basic income" to people, such as public education, police presence, various kinds of physical infrastructure, etc. The quality of those services could certainly be debated. My own "take" on basic income would be to bolster those services, perhaps even to a radical extent, but to consider that they are still not a complete substitute for each person having some discretionary income.

The main reason the U.S. health care system is broken is that your employer-provided health care is not taxed, but household health care spending is first taxed as income. So everybody is jammed into their employer-provided care and you're hammered if you're outside that system and have to buy health care on your own. Obama tried to start to tax lavish employer plans, which was a sensible reform. Alternatively you could just let all Americans deduct their health care insurance. The current system causes distortions and is profoundly unfair to self-employed.

A predictable emergent behavior of basic income would be to fix housing by itself. $1000/month is not enough to live in many cities, but it's more than enough to live very comfortably in less developed areas. That opens up some really cool entrepreneurial ideas on a lot of levels. For instance if you can get together a team interested in working on a startup, then that team could sustain itself indefinitely if they will willing to locate to a more rural area. This, in turn, would also help develop the economies of these areas with the startups that succeed.

There are even some big scale ideas here. Get just 10,000 people together and that income is $10million/month. If these people were willing to contribute and work together, they could actually begin to build their own new areas from the ground up given nothing more than basic land. Ideally I think the perfect value for a basic income would be enough to provide the bare essentials of housing and sustenance in the areas of the US with lower living expenses.

The one condition of basic income would need to be citizenship by birth to two parents who were also citizens of birth. If somebody immigrates to the nation, their grandchildren can participate in the program. This removes any incentive for social program targeted migration, or to try to give birth just within the borders. Furthermore, basic income would enable us to remove many current social programs, which provide such incentives to a lesser degree, as they would become redundant.

Given the number of articles I have read about homeless people with benefits who could afford to get back into housing if they would just move elsewhere, but they won't because they want to remain in the city they have long lived in, I don't think this is a given. It is actually an option currently for some people. Most don't seem to pursue it. And lots of start-ups feel they can't succeed if they leave the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

> more affordable housing

The US is an incredibly cheap place to live. Go to Europe and see what you can get for the same money.

> The US is an incredibly cheap place to live.

From what I hear - I've never been there - this remains true only as long as you're not ill, don't need education and are employed. In most EU countries these things are taken care of for you, so the comparison seems a bit unfair.

given the highlighted phrase of the parent I believe he was talking about "live" as in housing, not general expenses.

Ok, I didn't catch that - read and answered the post too quickly - thanks for pointing it out, it makes sense :)

A lot of European countries have free health care provided by the government. It is an apples to oranges comparison in many ways.

I don't think many Americans consider how lucky we are that we have practically unlimited land compared to many industrialized nations. In Germany housing is very expensive. Homes are often passed down generations and parents move back in with their kids during retirement much more often than in the US.

It wasn't luck, it is the result of prudent national planning (Louisiana Purchase, Alaska Purchase), quasi-conquest (Texas Independence and Florida Purchase) and outright conquest (Mexican-American War, Indian Wars).

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