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As I understand it, the basic income idea is based on that realistically almost everyone at some point uses government aid or finances (directly or indirectly). basic income is just making sure that when you need to make use of that aid, you don't have to jump through hoops, requirements and paperwork.

By giving everyone enough to live and not starve, you can do that. Without needing bureaucracy. It goes together with other great ideas like a minimum livable wage[0], pensions, public education and public healthcare.

If we are the rich west, why can't we just take care of everyone? we'll still be plenty productive. And if you want more go work, go study, go for competitive jobs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage

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> As I understand it, the basic income idea is based on that realistically almost everyone at some point uses government aid or finances (directly or indirectly). basic income is just making sure that when you need to make use of that aid, you don't have to jump through hoops, requirements and paperwork.

That points at an alternative way to conceptualize a basic income: at the end of the day, it's the net transfer that matters. Ie all the money and welfare services you get from the government minus all the taxes you pay.

On average over all of society that net transfer has to be zero. (Modulo complications to do with souvereign wealth funds and government debt.)

Now, most people around the world want rich people to pay and poorer people to receive on net.

The usual way to achieve that is via means testing in both the welfare and the tax system.

Basic income can be seen as a way to simplify government bureaucracies by shifting all the means testing out of the welfare system and into the tax system.

> By giving everyone enough to live and not starve, you can do that. Without needing bureaucracy. It goes together with other great ideas like a minimum livable wage[0], pensions, public education and public healthcare.

These other things don't sound like good ideas to me. Especially outlawing poor people's jobs seems cruel and a bad case of 'Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics' to me. See https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

> It goes together with other great ideas like a minimum livable wage[0]

Isn't that redundant with UBI? If UBI is already providing a minimum standard of living, then it's mathematically impossible for any wage combined with UBI to be below that standard.

I imagine, in a country with UBI, people wouldn't talk about "minimum livable wage", but rather "minimum livable all-source income."

Also, UBI provides a minimum standard of living, but I believe the idea there is that you'd have to make several potentially-drastic changes in your life to truly be living the sort of "minimum" life that it pays for. For example, I believe that UBI isn't supposed to pay out more for people who live in areas of a country with higher costs of living; so part of "living minimally" would be moving to the lowest cost-of-living part of the country.

Remember, UBI is usually spoken of as a federal program; whereas "minimum livable wage" is usually modelled by state or even by city. So it'd make sense to talk about needing a certain level of wages, above-and-beyond your UBI, to survive in a high cost-of-living area.

(What would happen if UBI was based on regional cost-of-living? Well, for one thing, we'd see a lot of people who either don't "live where they live", but instead consistently renew their IDs within the highest cost-of-living areas; or, if the controls are tighter, we'd see people migrating to high cost-of-living areas to live out of their cars in the middle of them, to save up the most money.)

> (What would happen if UBI was based on regional cost-of-living? Well, for one thing, we'd see a lot of people who either don't "live where they live", but instead consistently renew their IDs within the highest cost-of-living areas; or, if the controls are tighter, we'd see people migrating to high cost-of-living areas to live out of their cars in the middle of them, to save up the most money.)

IMO those would be exploited infrequently enough that it would be worth it to base it on regional cost-of-living and tighten the controls until exploitation falls below an acceptable level.

The real exploitation wouldn't come from individuals, but rather real-estate developers, who would see an opportunity to build communities with absurdly-high costs of living (due to e.g. being built in the middle of nowhere with everything needing to be imported, like Dubai), where the government would basically pay people to live there, by increasing their UBI commensurate to the increased costs of being there vs. somewhere else. Unlike now, there'd be no disincentive to moving somewhere "more expensive" — you'd be given exactly as much money as you need to balance those expenses!

You'd also get the same sort of wealth-transfer effect that you get when people move from poor countries to rich countries to gain access to rich clients who pay more for the same service; or, for that matter, when people move from the rest of the US to SV (but with the government, in this case, taking the place of FAANG.) Namely, that most of the goods that people want aren't inelastic-demand goods priced in "percentage of income relative to the norm for this market" terms; but rather are priced in absolute, static dollars.

This means that in a low cost-of-living area, saving 10% of your UBI could buy you crappy clothes and a crappy car. While, in a high cost-of-living area, saving 10% of your UBI could buy you nice clothes and a nice car, and maybe a boat and a new phone every year, too. Who, then, wouldn't want to live in a high cost-of-living area? You don't have to do any more work, or have any more skills; you just have to choose to live in a "basic" big-city apartment instead of a "basic" small-town detached house.

Which, of course, means that everybody would move to these places, and their housing markets would halt and catch fire from the overburden of all these people trying to cram into them. It'd change an equilibrium of regional housing prices into a rich-get-richer one-directional reaction. And probably cause hyperinflation besides, as the government would have to print money to pay everyone's rent, as the rents in high-cost-of-living cities would rise exponentially as infinite demand meets finite capacity.

My understanding of basic income is a bit different. The average American adult needs to make 1500/month to meet the basic requirements of life. This is equivalent to paying off a mortgage over the term of your life of about $500,000, or student loans to the tune of $250,000. (I used an annuity calculator for these figures https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/investing/annuity-calcu...).

Basic income can be distilled to notion that, if student loans are bad for humanity, then it is reasonable to suggest that this intrinsic debt might also be bad.

It is a very complicated issue. I'm all for needs based aid from the government without all the bureaucracy. It would even allow us to help more people on the fringe.

However, one thing that no one ever talks about or thinks through is that a lot of that "waste" is someone else's job and pension. If you cut 90% of the staff at all welfare and other programs offices, those people need other jobs or have to go on the same programs. Additionally, it is the universal part of UBI that people struggle with. If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money. We'll need regulations (and people to enforce them) to make sure housing prices stay reasonable for lower income people. This is why government housing exists today, the cost can be locked. All said, I think UBI doesn't work because it can't be universal, but we should be helping more people and the well off can afford to pay 1% more of their largess to do so.

> Additionally, it is the universal part of UBI that people struggle with. If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money.

Think about this another way: if it is true that the prices are going to rise because of UBI, i.e. because everyone can afford the "basics"(the B of UBI), then it means that the lower prices of today require that some people do without these basics.

Keeping a hulking bureaucracy around as a jobs program is the last thing we need. So far, whenever a disruptive technology or policy change has happened people have found other work to do. Let's not worry about the oncologist jobs as we search for the cure for cancer.

People can get different jobs; its not a blanket "they're all on welfare". That's the issue: what will people do when they don't starve if they don't work? Historically, they get better jobs. Because they have the leisure to do so, and partly because employers must pay well to get anyone.

I don't think we have enough data to say anything. For example, it might as well be that housing prices decrease, because people can now choose where they live independently from having a job. Cities might become much less attractive.

Furthermore, a lot of that overhead are people like social workers and so forth. Even if one accepts the principle of reducing means testing and so forth, is it really the proposal that everyone gets sent a check once a month along with a note that basically says "You'll get another one next month. Until then you're on your own. Enjoy."

If this is a problem, then the government can create productive jobs for these people.

> However, one thing that no one ever talks about or thinks through is that a lot of that "waste" is someone else's job and pension. If you cut 90% of the staff at all welfare and other programs offices, those people need other jobs or have to go on the same programs.

Framed another way, we've freed up more people for more beneficial jobs. If those don't exist (and broad classes of jobs are eliminated all the time with practitioners finding alternative employment, so I'm skeptical they wouldn't) then your argument boils down to the ideal form of welfare for those people being make-work exactly matching their current situation. That may be the case, but it doesn't seem blindingly obviously true for any reason I can see.

> If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money.

Maybe, but you'd probably expect the opposite effect in most markets (and indeed, for similar policies like a higher minimum wage we typically observe small increases or small decreases in prices as a result). As a low-order approximation, the demand curve would have a (nonuniform) rightward shift where for any given item/price an equal or greater quantity are demanded because people are better able to afford things. Assuming a monotonically decreasing supply curve, that would move the equilibrium to more things being sold at a lower price.

That of course fails if any of the assumptions are violated (and ignores any other effects like increased taxation) -- e.g. at any price building new housing in the Bay is capped for all intents and purposes, so ignoring any other effects one might expect housing prices to continue to increase here. Housing in most places would probably eventually have a small dip/slowdown in price though, and commodities almost certainly would.

> We'll need regulations (and people to enforce them) to make sure housing prices stay reasonable for lower income people.

Arguably yes (though price fixing might not be the best solution to that problem), but that seems independent of the UBI question.

> but we should be helping more people and the well off can afford to pay 1% more of their largess to do so.

We should help more people, but I think it's more expensive than you're imagining. The top 1% of families make $400B (give or take $100B). 1% of that is an extra $500 per family below the poverty line, or $50 per bottom-99% family. It's not nothing, but $300/yr barely covers a single person's worth of beans and rice if they have the means to find a cheap bulk source, if power/water/time for cooking are free, if they're on the smaller side and not doing strenuous labor, and if they eat no vegetables or anything to offset that nutrient deficiency.

>If we are the rich west, why can't we just take care of everyone?

What does it mean to "take care of everyone"? That their "basic needs" are met? What do you define as basic needs? I will assume that this will include at least food, housing, and clothing. Is it acceptable to provide everyone with rice? Potatoes? Do we have to provide them meat? Is it acceptable to offer them housing somewhere in the country or does it have to be near where they currently are? If the latter then how do you determine who gets displaced further away?

Now the answer is likely going to be "we give them money, so they can decide". The problem with this answer is that life doesn't cost the same everywhere in the US. $1,000 a month is enough to live on in some areas, whereas others $1,000 will barely get you a living space and nothing else. Obviously you can't give people in more expensive areas more money, because then everyone would want to be in the expensive areas.

So, how much should we give people?

When answering that question keep in mind that there are 330 million people living in the US. If you give everyone $1,000 a month it will cost you $4 trillion. US tax revenues in 2019 amounted to $3.5 trillion.[0]

To put this into perspective: US mandatory spending in 2019 was $2.7 trillion.[1] This is stuff like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans programs etc. You can't just renege on all of these obligations, because the government gave people guarantees on them - that's what they paid taxes for. It's unlikely people would accept less money than what they were promised. Not to mention that you probably couldn't cut Medicare and Medicaid anyway. That's already a trillion gone from the budget.

You probably also can't cut much from discretionary spending. You'd be cutting the military and basically every other non-social service the government does. Stuff like NASA and environmental research etc.

Ultimately, just $1,000 a month per person would require an enormous budget increase to the tune of >$2 trillion a year. Keep in mind that the US budget deficit is already at $1 trillion a year. You'd have a deficit of $3 trillion or require an enormous tax increase (almost doubling tax revenue). And it still hinges on there being no reduction in productivity.

If you then want public healthcare too, then it gets even more expensive. Medicaid covers 64.1 million people[2] at the cost of $409 billion.[1] Getting rid of Medicare and Medicaid and replacing it with healthcare for everyone would add up to an extra cost of ~$1.3 trillion, assuming that the healthcare costs for everyone else is about the same per person as it is for people on Medicaid.

"A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56325

[2] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...

The goal is to ensure people have a minimum. Taxing money back is perfectly fine if you need to. People can move to less expensive areas which the UBI facilitates. This makes expensive areas less expensive as well.

In terms of how much to give, the idea is to eliminate poverty. Children should not grow up hungry and fearful nor in shame of their parents. That is the fundamental goal. Our current welfare programs do not address this (see Tyranny of Kindness from 1993 for an in-depth personal account of the system then -- it has not improved though it has changed).

So go with the poverty threshhold numbers and see how it goes. I think $1000 a month sounds perfectly reasonable.

Also, various programs are income related and so without changing them at all, they can become less needed.

As for healthcare, while I am dubious about government run healthcare, from what I've read, the government pays for over half of the healthcare costs in this country already. The US also spends twice as much in terms of GDP on healthcare as most other countries. So if we were to reduce the healthcare costs to the level of other countries, then our government could cover universal healthcare without paying more for that. And since premiums would disappear, it could even tax a lot more without changing the ultimate take home pay after taxes + premiums.

In theory, that is how it could go. I don't believe it would turn out well, but that's because I don't believe the government would handle healthcare well. It is not because of the cost of it. And given our current system, I could probably be persuaded to try it.

Coronavirus should be a real wake up call to many of the economic left. A few months of furlough schemes by the government and countries have taken a huge hit to their economies. I have no idea what percentage of people got furloughed, but its clear to see not everyone got furloughed, it was for a few months at most and its going to cost a hell of a lot.

The obvious justification is that increased government spending is balanced by increased tax revenues, which hasn’t happened in this situation because no one is able to work or spend.

I don’t see how the cost of furlough is an argument against higher spending. No one thought it would be anything other than mad spending with little immediate gratification. The payoff comes from, well, not plunging masses into poverty for not foreseeing the greatest economic disruption since 1939.

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