Legislation proposes paying Americans $2k a month | Hacker News Reader

Legislation proposes paying Americans $2k a month

news4jax.com

18 pointsfreediver26 comments

This is a good idea. Congress should commit to such ongoing payments, and the Fed should back it with a commitment to unlimited borrowing.

Borrowing money is incredibly cheap at the moment, perhaps even negative cost! Three reasons:

1. Interest rates are very very low. Borrow when it's cheap.

2. With these payments, sick people won't need to go to work to have an income.

3. Universal payments can keep people out of programs such as SNAP, state unemployment insurance, etc. These are currently overwhelmed and typically have high administrative costs, plus human costs in terms of means-testing and other shortsighted cruelties (would you like to prove you have been looking for work?)

The article doesn't go into details about the sunsetting provisions (which ought to be tied to infection rate, deaths, etc) but the idea of "the govt borrows until the health crisis is over" is correct.

I will try to explain why this is a really harmful, bad idea; that we should help each other, and there are better ways to do it, and that there needs to be the basic incentive of working, in life, to live.

To the extent that we remove the connection between choices and consequences, we harm everyone. This applies in so many ways. This includes things like lifestyle, including habits, striving to learn & build good family ties, honesty, choosing to pursue education and service, more than just entertainment and pleasure (but with appropriate balance), trustworthiness, avoiding self-destructive behaviors, etc etc. All which greatly affect employability!

But if we make it easily survivable to live on the wrong side of those...what do we encourage? At ever-greater cost to everyone... Think we have a drug problem now?

Some consistently very bad experiences with medicare's and SSA's organizational incompetence (as reflected in ability to provide remotely useful information over many weeks and months, etc) make me definitely not want the federal government to take ever-more resources and control of our economy and lives.

I do believe we are responsible (before God, and if one doesn't believe, then at least to our consciences) to care wisely for one another, and with personal sacrifice to do so -- but not by force.

I also believe, with a fair amount of observation and study among myself and family, that things resembling forcible socialism (or the fed. government solving everyone's problems instead of being strictly limited to its constitutional role) are also harmful to everyone and have been proven many times to be a disastrous failure (Soviets, Venezuela, etc etc).

Charity by force is wrong and foolish, from Christian principle, long historical observation, and (to me at least), logic.

Charitable service done voluntarily by individuals, organizations, families, communities, maybe even states who can then learn from each other what works vs. not, can be wonderful, and I and many others have seen it work in long-term multifaceted practice. But when we force a system on everyone -- bad things happen, in the short and long run.

We can go out and do good and solve problems, by joining with others, using persuasion and fundraising, creating jobs programs (not federal), promoting good ideas, seeing what has worked well elsewhere, but not by forcibly taking control of others people's money (which represents their time and energy, planning and preparation) and thus a loss of freedom for all. Every crisis should not be an excuse to expand control by some, over others.

I have written many more details about this & related subjects at my web site, which is in my profile.

I very much hope we can promote principles over politics, such as: earned trust matters; opportunity, honesty and the Golden Rule matter; charity is important, charity by force is wrong, and breaking the link between choices and consequences harms everyone.

330 million americans at $24,000 a year comes out to $7.9 trillion dollars a year. How exactly are we going to afford that?

Short term: printing presses at full blast.

Medium term: raised taxes.

Long term: we cannot afford this.

The trick is you never make it to the long term. The future is now!

> The bill, known as the Emergency Money for the People Act, would issue monthly payments of $2,000 to individuals and families for six months, or until the U.S. economy recovers from the coronavirus outbreak.

and then:

> Every American adult age 16 and older making less than $130,000 annually would receive at least $2,000 per month.

So every single number in your back-of-the-envelope is wrong.

1. We're looking at some number between $12k and $24k / year.

2. The number of americans who qualify is going to be much lower than 330mil. Since many americans make more than $130k/year, and also many americans are CHILDREN which only qualify for a $500/month check for their parents.

~3. For MANY of the americans who qualify, a significant chunk of the of up-to-$24k would be eaten up by taxes.~ edit: apparently it is not going to be considered income, which suggests it's not taxable. That differs from the canadian strategy.

Canada is doing this now. It is absolutely the correct thing to do. You can't tell people not to work to help other people, and not support them in doing that.

> and also many americans are CHILDREN

only approx 18.7% [1]

> Since many americans make more than $130k/year

Actually, approx 90% of americans make under 130k/yr [2]

> a significant chunk of the of up-to-$24k would be eaten up by taxes.

"Under the proposal, the payments would not be considered income"

So we can calculate approximately:

(1 - .1) * (1 - .187) * 330M = 241M people

241M x $2000 x 12 = $5.8T/year = A LOT

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/270000/age-distribution-...

[2]http://theglitteringeye.com/u-s-income-distributiona-chart-t...

10% of americans is 33 million people. That is many.

You're still using 12 months in your calculation. The act says at least six months, or until it is not needed. So some number equal or greater than 2.9T

Thinking about it as an annual expense seems very wrong. Even if it takes 18 months to recover, I wouldn't say it cost x/year + 1/2 * x/year I would say it cost the total cost over the 18 months.

Fair point about it not being considered income, I missed that detail in my haste to make sure the only comment wasn't such a blatant misrepresentation of the cost of a program like this.

edit: now I'm just nitpicking your math, but 10% of americans make over $130k and 18.7% of americans are children. I have to think a VANISHINGLY small number of those two percentages overlap (children making over 130k) so your calculation:

(1 - .1) * (1 - .187) * 330M = 241M people

should probably be:

(1 - (0.1 + 0.187)) * 330M = 235M people

Which is not materially far off your number, but it is 6M * 2k * 6 = 72B saved for the american taxpayer ;)

Could you please read and follow the site guidelines when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment contains some good points, but badness destroys more than goodness builds up in internet comments.

Corrected. Commented in frustration, cooled off. sigh

Appreciated!

Law of unintended consequences. Some people are making more from expanded unemployment benefits than they did at their job previously. There are stories of employees refusing to go back to work, that's not productive.

Idk at a moment with such high unemployment, that seems like a mostly self-solving problem. Sure person A won't return to work because they're living high on an expanded benefit, but person B doesn't qualify so they are happy to take up the job.

If you give EVERYONE the benefit, as long as it's not counted as income (as this proposal suggests) then I can have this money AND the money i'd earn at the job! Do you want $2k or 4k this month?

> So every single number in your back-of-the-envelope is wrong.

So do the estimate with your numbers, and explain how that gets paid for. It’s still a staggering amount of money that will affect markets and the US ability to deficit spend.

The literal answer to your question is deficit spending, financed through borrowing.

War is the proper mindset. If your country goes to war, what matters is the number of factories you have that can produce tanks and airplanes and guns. You worry about your soldiers running out of ammo or your cities being bombed, not higher prices next year due to borrowing-driven inflation.

What matters is real resources. We are all going to pay for this horrible luck one way or another: through direct payments, or unemployment benefits, or worst case - pounds and pounds of flesh.

The answers are always the same:

1. Redistribution.

2. Debt.

That's it. The money will be redistributed from people who were able to prepare for it beforehand one way or another or we are going to indebt ourselves and/or our children.

It is also possible to save money by not expending it (for example on infrastructure repairs), but this should be treated as short term loan. Expenses typically are not avoidable forever, because each one is done for some particular reason.

The language you use around prepration seems judge-y. For example, would you consider "deciding not to work at a restaurant" preparing for a pandemic? Because up until now deciding to work at a restaurant is something I really appreciated that people did because I like going to restaurants.

If we as a society ask people to stop work to avoid the worst case version of a pandemic, we MUST support them during that time, because we are ALL benefitting from them stopping work. The fact that your job is not gone is luck not preparation.

It is a fact that some people save money and some don't, that some people decide not to do fun stuff and instead learn things and some go partying, that some people try to make their best and some don't.

Every case is individual, but ON AVERAGE, when you print money you dilute the value of existing money which means you take away from people who have money and put it in the hands of ones that were more careless ON AVERAGE.

I completely disagree with your opinion that the majority of people who have more money got it through personal characteristics like hard work and not partying.

But, that said, so some people were able to learn skills that society values more, get paid more, and are thus able to save more money. Great. But lots of THOSE people got their livelihoods crushed by social distancing. You are saying printing money makes everybody subsidize the people who lost their jobs, but not printing money is bleeding their savings to save other people's lives. How is that right? Like even if you have 6-12months of savings on hand, at the end of this you've drained your personal finances to save someone else's life??

These are all intangible stuff devised by human minds.

How is debt and taxes intangible?

If I order you to take piece of your possessions to give to your poorer neighbor, is this intangible? Will it be intangible to your kids when they grow up and are told they can't have this or that because they country needs to become fiscally responsible because their parents were not?

Debts and taxes are just numbers. Capitalism is a system which knows to enforce the consequence of debts and taxes. Outside of the system people can and will shit on debts and taxes. The rich already do.

Your wishful thinking isn't going to change anything.

Capitalism is not imaginary, it is real system you need to work with in a capitalist society if you want to be successful (financially). The rich don't get rich by ignoring the system but by learning and exploiting the tacit rules. I see where your confusion can come from, because the tacit rules are different than the official "wikipedia" rules of capitalism. The same way hacker sees the operating system and software API different way than a regular developer.

Debts and taxes are not just numbers. When you pay taxes you finance the infrastructure that is around you. Have you ever considered where the roads, bridges and police come from? Do you mean somebody built them from the kindness of their heart and police officers do their job for free after they have tended to their field? Have you ever considered there would probably be no working radio communication if not for some government body to regulate and assign shared resource that is electromagnetic frequencies?

If you still think debts and taxes are "just numbers", just take on huge amount of debt and stop paying taxes and report on your experiences.

You can, of course, decide to ignore capitalism. But then you need to understand this is going to have consequences, which is the best proof that capitalism is definitely not imaginary.

Capitalism always need bailouts and can't exist effectively without regulations. So is not a standalone system but as a tool dependent on faith, trust and enforcement from authority. Infrastructure may be an outcome independent of capitalism. Resources exist independent of it as well.

What does "indebt ourselves and our children" mean? Our children will be indebted to...other children.

If Richie Rich buys a treasury bond, then Richie Rich Jr. will be entitled to receive money from Johnny Taxpayer Jr. But this is just equivalent to increasing Johnny's taxes and reducing Richie's. Congress could reverse that with legislation. So, really, why should we care?

Now if we had a time machine and were teleporting ventilators from the future, we might have a problem.

When a country takes up debt it probably must be paid off some way at some point. Even if the country is in perpetual debt for generations, taking more debt now means next generation/s will be able to take less debt. Does that make sense?

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