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Comment by shafte | Hacker News Reader

The author makes a false equivalence between the RSA in France and the typical UBI proposal. An individual's RSA benefit decreases as their work income increases. This has the effect of making an individual weakly indifferent to working, since it will provide no marginal increase in income. Most UBI proposals involve a benefit that doesn't phase out with income (or phases out at an income level so high that it doesn't matter). The RSA, in both design and implementation, is a lot like the already-existing EITC in the US.

The whole point of guaranteeing income is to try to avoid the distortion of incentives that comes from means-testing benefits. When the author claims that a UBI (like the RSA) would create a permanent class of non-workers, he is basing his argument on an elementary misunderstanding of policies involved.

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No, I think it's a reasonable comparison. Yes, phasing out benefits creates an incentive not to work.

But even many UBI proposals have some phase out, if only because the taxpayer paying money to a millionaire feels fundamentally wrong on so many levels.

And the bigger problem is more basic. The idea of UBI is that freed from the need to work, people will form utopian societies full of volunteering and self improvement and art projects etc. But France and realistically most welfare systems show that isn't true. People don't engage in self-improvement en-masse. They sit around watching TV or scrolling through Instagram all day, feeling useless and depressed.

> But even many UBI proposals have some phase out, if only because the taxpayer paying money to a millionaire feels fundamentally wrong on so many levels.

UBI has no phase out, by definition. Something with a phase out can not be called "universal".

You can decide it's reasonable or not as you wish (but those millionaires pay more taxes than they receive). Just try to criticize the correct program.

Our culture ties self-worth to work. From CEOs to social workers, people get fulfillment and create their sense of self by seeing the impact they have while at their jobs, and we judge others based by the same metrics.

UBI can help people pay their bills, but poverty is a lot more than a financial problem. The communities where work is drying up are the communities most heavily affected by opioid addiction at the moment. Drugs are expensive--people don't get addicted because they lack money, they get addicted because they feel hopeless or lack a sense of purpose. Maybe government assistance can help hopelessness, but it sure as hell won't give people a sense of purpose.

It going to take a big shift in culture before UBI can really work out.

As I understand it an RSA recipient who switches to a full-time minimum wage job more than doubles their annual post-tax income even with some (not all) of their benefit being cut back. If that still disincentives work, UBI probably will too.

UBI advocates do tend to overplay the marginal income incentives. And don't forget that UBI, which would be paid to far more people than current social programmes, requires taxes to cut in somewhere (probably at a lower bound and steeper rate)

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