Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

A big thing not really detailed, but briefly mentioned here, is presumably a lot of social services like CalFresh and CalWORKS would presumably be scrapped in exchange. Instead of having a bunch of different support systems for poor people with all of the administrative overhead that comes with it, you'd just issue people money, and get a lot of it back in taxes.

Note that Amazon has to charge state sales tax these days too, as do many other online retailers. So "buying out of state" is going to be pretty hard. People's eBay or Craigslist game might get interesting though with the new margins.

As much as California is one of the few states that might be progressive enough to attempt this, it'd be far better if a less populated (and smaller) state attempted UBI first. If Montana torches it's economy, it's probably a lot easier to reassemble than California's.

View on HN

I have a feeling Montana would be less keen to torch its economy than we are to have them be our petri dish.

One nice thing about California's economy is that it's robust. There's probably enough economic activity that this wouldn't totally fuck us, but the ramifications are surely much stronger than the legislator who threw this together has considered.

I'm in neither state, so either petri dish is informative to me. :)

"The bill would authorize the department to adopt regulations to implement the program" makes it kinda sound a bit like a Brexit vote, in that the bill is really only meant to get everyone to vote to agree to do it, and then the precise details of how you'd actually implement it would be attended to later.

I would say don't presume that. Presume instead that this program will not supplant other programs and it will not be universal.

UBI is a popular idea, but the way you see it isn't the popular version of it, at least in California. I only know this because I had the same misconception.

It's not very clear to me how ""buying out of state" is going to be pretty hard."

I suppose by this you mean that the Californian is going to pay a higher price for out-of-state purchases compared to if they were based outside of California?

I'm skeptical of that. Scrapping those programs means scrapping the jobs of the state employees that run them. I don't think the state politicans want responsibility for that.

Well, presumably as many people as you needed to administrate this program could be taken from the old programs you'd scrap. But worst case, any state employee jobs you lost are still getting $1,000 a month.

I think the California State Employees Association would have something to say about their members’ total comp decreased from ~six figures to 12k/year.

The ones making that much money would certainly be able to find other jobs making similar amounts, elsewhere; and it would be good that they had this safety net, hopefully with medicare for all too.

I doubt the average lifetime bureaucrat can find such employment. Regardless, I don’t think the union will let the state ever put them in the position to need to try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com