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Comment by blackflame | Hacker News Reader

Unconditional handouts are only good for the person handing things out.

Can you explain your comment? I'm having a hard time understanding how giving someone something without conditinos benefits the giver more than the receiver (or, as you say, _only_ the giver)

I am guessing here, but usually the implication is that you are 'bought' and now even more beholden to a (possibly corrupt) government. I.e. the oft repeated 'if you arent paying, you are the product' mantra. The outlay is somewhat small for the amount of influnce it can have on the lives of people who come to depend on it. It may be irrelevant, or a genuine concern, depending on the context.

I think he fears that the main effect of a UBI-type program will be raised rents, it will be a transfer of wealth from members of the wealthy class to other members of the wealthy class, something of a Wework-style boondoggle.

I feel like the lowest-overhead way to manage such a theoretical would be to have a progressive tax rate that, in the higher brackets, negates the UBI.

That is, you give out $X to everybody, but everyone making over $Y+$X total has $X added to their taxes.

This feels a little silly on a but-you're-doing-things-twice level, but it lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in.

it lets a UBI program and taxes both operate independently without needing to cross-verify things, which allows for lower overall staffing and less in the way of possible bureaucratic loopholes for people to get stuck in.

In software engineering terms, it reduces coupling. We do the same thing with Social Security: benefits are taxable so recipients with high incomes end up getting checks and paying some portion of them back, but that's simpler than trying to have the SSA figure out everyone's taxes.

This sort of logic just fails to understand human behavior. First off, you make the terrible assumption that there will be more people earning at least double $X so that you can take half of it to give to another that isn't making X. That's nowhere even close to a 50-50 split, and this policy would make it even less even not more. You cannot tax yourself to prosperity. All you are doing is taking money from the people that are producing and giving to the people who are not in the hopes that they might suddenly decide to be entrepreneurial with their newfound financial freedom. Guess what, that desire to become financially free is a far stronger motivator.

In the US, CPI doesn't include health care and housing. If health care and housing were to be added to CPI, interest rates would go up, resulting in lower asset valuations(both housing, and stock market). The elite will never add housing and healthcare to CPI to keep their asset valuations pretty high.

UBI without cheap housing and almost universal healthcare will just siphon off the majority of monthly UBI payouts to land lords and healthcare cartel.

Only after fixing housing and healthcare first, can one see the benefits of UBI.

People aren't going to vote against the hand that feeds them. Money is a proxy for the top of the hierarchy of needs, and if people are going to be voting merely to satisfy their hierarchy of needs then other policy comes second.

Say you've got one party running for office that promises to continue handouts, or perhaps expand them, but also is highly authoritarian, but there's another party that wants to protect fundamental freedoms but wants to reduce handouts. Who do you think has the upper hand in that scenario? It'd be one thing if the populace was well educated and had an interest in their own freedoms, but we're not exactly known for that these days.

This is one of the reasons that California is in the state that it's in. It dwarfs all other states in welfare spending, has the most homelessness, has an exponential feces and public urination problem in its big cities, and the return of medieval illnesses. The problem is unlikely to resolve any time soon because enough voters are dependent and detached from society that those in power can sit back.

That's why there are people who are wary of handouts. It's not that they don't want to help other people; it's that handouts are an easy way to influence the populace, and once you give out handouts, it's extremely difficult to take them away, lest you are willing to lose elections.

>>People aren't going to vote against the hand that feeds them.

This is demonstrably false. Here in the US, conservative states are net recipients for federal aid, yet they continue voting for the party that is determined to shrink the federal government and abolish many of the aid programs they are benefiting from.

How often do conservatives successfully run on the platform that they're going to end handouts? (Besides Trump)

Have you ever spent any time south of the Mason-Dixon line?Conservative "austerity" is the bastard stepchild of Jim Crow and it's pretty much been the central party plank for decades.

If California actually paid to take care of the massive amount of homeless people I think this number would shift blue quite a bit. You cannot tax yourself to prosperity as a society.

Many answers! What I think the GP is saying is this: A system of handing out benefits needs a class of administrators to actually hand it out, keep track of who should get it, who's already got it, and so on. For sure it's good for these people.

Aid to the developing world is often criticised on these grounds. It can be pretty hard to figure out which programs have how much benefit for the intended recipients (some do, but some send the wrong things, or out-compete local businesses, etc). But what's easy to see is that any place with lots of aid has quite the fleet of white toyota 4x4s, with foreign experts driving around, and all of their jobs depend on these programs.

It isn't beneficial to the poor suckers whose livelihoods are taken so that the giver has "unconditional" "gifts" to give I'm sure with "no strings attached"

The "poor suckers" in this case are people donating to charity, and the unconditional gifts are, in fact, actually unconditional gifts, specifically set up that way so the effects of them can be studied.

UBI is not a donation. It is forcibly taken at gunpoint (though they will ask nicely many times before pulling out the gun). Also, there can be no "unconditional" giving without "unconditional" taking in a world with finite resources.

The article this comment thread is about is about a study of efficiency of charity methods. It is useful for studying possible effects of UBI-like programs, but it isn't about UBI.

As for UBI specifically...

> It is forcibly taken at gunpoint (though they will ask nicely many times before pulling out the gun).

This is the case with all taxes.

> Also, there can be no "unconditional" giving without "unconditional" taking in a world with finite resources.

This already happens all the time. The money for the military and Medicare has to come from somewhere, after all.

Resources are finite, ergo it’s a zero sum game. To give unconditionally to one, you must take unconditionally from another.

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