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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

To me, it's the other way up: without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income. Usually not direct starvation, but exposure-related due to homelessness, or issues such as not being able to afford insulin. There are basically three kinds of response to this:

a) they deserve it, all of them

b) it's sad, but it's not our problem

c) this is not acceptable and something should be done about it by the state

People who believe (a) and (b) are not going to support UBI. Once people accept (c), only then can we start talking about how to deal with it, and the disadvantages and distortions of the current means-tested system. Liberating the system from means-testing means completely giving up on (a) and accepting that trying to sort the poor into deserving and undeserving is both intractable and hostile to human dignity. But it's a very long way to get there.

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What ever happened to d) this is not acceptable, and something should be done about it by individuals directly? Why do we need to abdicate responsibility for our local problems to a larger authority? Mutual Aid Societies and religions used to fill this gap - perhaps we can jointly invent a new modern substitute.

The problems are not fundamentally of local scope. Consider for example the coal mining towns that have been left in a state of ruin by the shift away from coal. There is no local prosperity to fund local aid there.

Let's use your coal mining example - Gilette, Wyoming recently had two mines close. There are 30,500 residents in that town, and 600 were left without a job. (Compare this to the 153 mining jobs lost across the entire state the year before). If every single individual there needed ten thousand dollars in temporary aid to help them relocate, retrain, or just weather out the year - that's 6 million dollars. So if six million people aggregated a dollar apiece, or six hundred thousand (roughly the population of Wyoming) aggregate ten dollars apiece, then problem resolved.

Being that this is too difficult a logistical problem, we instead propose as a solution raising many times that amount of money in campaign donations, lobbying, and volunteer hours to convince a significantly larger group of (the exact same) people (who we don't think will give a dollar or ten to the same cause) to spend at least that much in gas and time to get up and go vote for specific or general measures to care for these people instead.

Do you see the issues with this logic?

It's debatable whether the amount you could get by taxation would be enough. Why would you expect people to be generous enough voluntarily to solve the problem?

We already have moved these local problems to a larger authority. The modern wellfare programs are just that. UBI proposes to simplify that mess with a single more efficient way. UBI isnt introducing a new form of wellfare, but rather replacing the current ones.

Also very interested in proposals on joint ventures between the church and state to fill the gaps, as UBI will no question still have gaps. But overall UBI is simply replace a slow (testing and reuping, lots of minute conditions), unreliable (delays, not gaurenteed to be there forever), innefficient(high administation overhead, lots of monmey diverted to distrobution and testing, rather than the end individuals) wellfare program(s) with a fast (universal, so no testing), reliable (gaurenteed for everyone, so no thinking it will go away if you get a job or if you run out of balance) and efficient(little admin overhead, higher % of cash going to individuals) wellfare program.

Many UBI schemes propose that local institutions like states and/or cities also impliment a UBI tax to suppliment the federal. so still a local issue and local solution too.

> without UBI, there is a small number of people who die every year due to not having (sufficient) income

If workers spend a few days per year to pay for your ubi that takes away that time of their life. If they spend 1% of their life working for ubi it’s 1% of workers life lost. That’s asking quite a lot.

One could instead think of social programs, such as UBI, as insurance. People gladly pay >1% of income for insurance. I believe that nearly everyone has the potential to end up in the financial dumps (no one is above drug addiction, serious health problems, mental disorders, lawsuits etc). If a worker ends up there, they'll be glad to have the "insurance coverage" of UBI.

If that is so, why don’t you form an ubi society, whose members pay an ubi for everyone that wants to join (and net pay). According to you it won’t be difficult to find people that are glad to join.

To the downvoters of my initial comment: I don’t want people to die on the street. But I doubt ubi is an adequate cure either.

When the people vote for UBI one day you'll have your society...

...whether you want it or not. Which misses the entire point of it being a society with voluntary membership.

Conversely, if we take 1% of a return on a capital asset, the owner spent zero hours labor for that, so they've lost none of their life ...

Except someone spend labor to amass that capital.

If I considered saving no longer worthwhile, I wouldn’t consume more. I would work less and enjoy more free time. Of course this leads to over proportional less taxes for the state or ubi.

I don’t see why you couldn’t try ubi in small scale by the fans. The most obvious reason why it wouldn’t work on small scale and only on state or global level is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.

> is because supporters want someone else to pay for it.

Yes, obviously? Preferably the people with more than one megayacht?

So if you distribute 1000 USD/month to 300 Mio Americans, do you mind to explain where you want to take the money from?

According to [1] the top 3% (>250k USD household income per year) earn in total per month

    127,300,000,000 = 3,800,000 * 402,000 / 12  USD
    vs 
    300,000,000,000 = 300,000,000 * 1,000 USD

needed to fund your ubi. Maybe it's not enough to take from people with more than one megayacht?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

While I was being slightly flippant in that, I note that your example of $300Bn as being a completely unreasonable, unachievable number for UBI is less than half the US military budget, and in fact represents about the increase from the pre-9/11 post-cold-war low point. Also that most UBI proposals involve fiddling with the tax bands so that above-average earners see much less or no net increase.

"Do you want $1000 each for twenty years or a war for twenty years" was of course a question that was never on the table in 2002.

> I note that your example of $300Bn as being a completely unreasonable, unachievable number for UBI is less than half the US military budget

Check your numbers: US military budget 2019 [1] is $686Bn or $60 Bn per month vs $300 Bn per month for ubi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

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