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Comment by cavisne | Hacker News Reader

This is in some ways a preview of why the theory of basic income replacing other government spending (and therefore being fiscally conservative and libertarian) is false. Alaska is redirecting money from universities to basic income (the oil dividend) and it’s considered an outrage. The same thing would happen for any government program.

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Well, in theory, people can use that basic income to pay for school... or they could, if the school wasn't so bloated and overpriced, which the school has been getting away with because the government has been giving it so much money.

True, federal subsidies and loans responsible for inflating tuitions nationwide have reached a total of $120 billion per year.

https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2017report/fsa-repo...

Not at all, the permanent fund dividend is immensely popular in Alaska. Additionally, it is actually money from the PFD that is used to fund the state government because the last democratic governor was unable to push through tax increases.

What Alaska needs is a balanced package of raised taxes and budget controls, what we have is political gridlock and dysfunction.

There weren't tax increases, we don't have taxes to increase. We use oil tax and PF revenue to fund our government almost exclusively. Some municipalities and cities have sales/property taxes, but most don't.

I agree that we need a balanced package, but we also need to stop paying billions a year in tax credits and incentive to oil companies.

Replacing government services with cash seems to be fairly libertarian: decrease the size of government, increase freedom for consumers who would be served by the market instead of these services, no?

The point is they won’t be replaced, as removing any government program is considered an outrage. So the end result of basic income is the existing level of spend + basic income.

This post is about cut services.

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