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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

Except, of course, you cannot leave aside the issue of affordability and sustainability, which is by far the main issue of UBI in terms of public finance.

If you do then, considering the overall cost of actual UBI, the claim that this saves on bureaucracy is like claiming that spending 100 to save 1 (both on a recurring basis to make it worse) is sensible since it saves 1. This 1 in potential savings is simply irrelevant (and in reality would be replaced by another bureaucracy anyway) because it is dwarfed by the overall additional cost. Or, what you call 'UBI' is just a single benefit to replace a number of existing benefits, like the UK did with "universal credit".

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I don’t think anyone is saying that the savings in bureaucracy are so great that UBI wouldn’t be a net cost, but that the cost may be less than one would expect.

Also having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

I'm suspicious of the downvotes your comment has attracted - I suppose I'd like to challenge whoever is feeling so negative to explain why they think UBI gets pushback, if not the sustainability aspect?

I think everyone agrees that if we all got infinite amounts of free stuff that would be great. Failing that, finite amount of free stuff is good. There are good reasons that despite that we have a pay-as-you-use economy.

People keep trying to come up with financial perpetual motion machines where everyone gets lots of free stuff. Much like perpetual motion machines, there are broad principles the limit what is possible - people on average just don't do things if there isn't a reward for doing it, and we need people to first produce the stuff before it can be given away.

There are grave questions about whether a UBI can be simultaneously effective (ie, a meaningful amount of money) and also sustainable (ie, not catastrophically dis-incentivise working). It may be possible to do both at once, but that is really the only aspect of the debate worth talking about - otherwise it is a bit of a no brainier for everyone to get free stuff.

How about if you need $x money for UBI you raise the taxes by $x. Then what you've done is just redistributing some money from those earning most to those earning the least.

If you want a higher income gap between those working and those not working, you can make the income tax negative at the bottom.

Posted this on another comment but:

Having gotten clued into modern monetary theory from The Deficit Myth lately I’ve come to question all the hand-wringing about cost. If the government can just print however much money it costs to pay out a UBI, then it’s more about controlling inflation with a significant increase in deficit spending, not about if a (monetarily independent) state can “afford” it. Taxes may be a part of that to drain money from the general supply and incentivize work, but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

MMT says that if you have unused capacity in the society, the government might as well use it (by printing money). As long as it doesn't compete for resources it won't create I inflation but simply grow the economy.

It's a pretty distinct issue from redistribution.

Distinct? It seems to just be a rephrasing. How will we create unused capacity? We'll take money from some people so it can't be spent on whatever capacity they want and so spend it on the capacity we want.

On that level MMT isn't particularly troubling to me. The thing I don't like about it is when the proponents start implicitly talking about having politicians directly control the money supply. The status quo has the Fed - which ultimately is a creature of congress but there's at least a bit of inertia for congress to enact its will and the Fed has room to do things outside of that will.

> ... but it’s not necessary to pay for it.

Your point seems rather close to:

* There would be high spending

* There would be high taxes

* The high taxes and the high spending would be linked

Those three things link together into paying for the spending with taxes. "Controlling inflation" is a series of measures that have all the properties of taxes, it is just a euphemism. Much like how the term is "quantitative easing" rather than the more easily followed "money creation".

The characterization of UBI as "free stuff" is a non-starter. It's an emotionally-laden term which also fails to consider how UBI proponents frame the benefits in terms of establishing a baseline quality of life (food, shelter, clothing). To conflate that with "free stuff" as if we're discussing free government-provided Playstations won't move the debate forward.

> The characterization of UBI as "free stuff" is a non-starter...

There isn't any negative emotion associated with free stuff. Free stuff is great.

The issue is that there is pretty solid social ... I don't want to say understanding, perhaps suspicion is the right word ... that giving out free stuff hasn't ever worked well.

So the political faction that likes the idea of free stuff comes up with a reason that this scheme will work - trying very hard to come up with a framework where people get to consume stuff without necessarily having to do the work to produce an equivalent amount of stuff.

Much like a perpetual motion scheme, the system gets more complicated to the point where eventually nobody can explain why this specific system can't work ... but there is a core relationship here that needs to be broken, and the debate needs to centre around whether it has been broken this time. It cannot be hand-waved away. The enormous costs associated with a UBI are an important factor and there are questions about whether it can be sustained long term.

My workplace's monthly coffee mug giveaway is "free stuff". An impoverished family's housing allowance is not "free stuff". Can you see the difference?

What standard of living is considered baseline quality? Would an internet connection be included in baseline quality of living? I know this is HN, and everyone is microoptimizing their day schedule to fit in time for their side projects, but you'd be surprised how many people would be completely comfortable with living a basic life with basic food, shelter and some internet access.

Now there's nothing wrong with that, but someone still has to work for the UBI to work.

Yeah, I'm not sure I wouldn't just switch to this lifestyle and devote all my time to those side project.

You're mistaking me for a proponent of UBI because I gave a clear definition that didn't involve trivializing the needs of the poor. I actually don't think it would work.

> how UBI proponents frame the benefits in terms of establishing a baseline quality of life (food, shelter, clothing).

As always the first question is: Why do you mean by UBI? It seems that everyone has their own idea.

If that means a benefit to ensure everyone has a minimum income to buy basic things then this is nothing new and exists in most Western European countries. In that case 'UBI' is just a new term for an old thing used purely within the US political debate (perhaps to avoid stating that this is what those 'socialist' Europeans have, I don't know).

On the other hand if UBI means what it is supposed to mean, i.e. "is a theoretical governmental public program for a periodic payment delivered to all citizens of a given population without a means test or work requirement" [1] then you can immediately see that the main issue is indeed feasibility and sustainability because unconditionally giving a meaningful amount of money to every person in a country is extremely expensive and the money still has to come from somewhere.

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

The concept of "free stuff" is also rather artificial: it comes from the idea that we MUST pay for things.

Imagine we build self-sustained machines capable of producing and distributing enough food for twice the Earth's population. Does it still make sense for people to have to PAY for their food?

As a reminder, many of our ancestors gathered fruits that grew on trees or hunted animals -- they did not need to PAY anyone for food.

The idea of paying for food makes sense in a world where food is scarce and great effort is required to produce it. As the difficulty in producing in volume decreases, so should this artificial price we put on it.

We still don't have such food-producing machines. But that's a direction in which we're going, and we should shape our society with this kind of thing in mind.

They may not have PAID for food but they did WORK to get that food. With UBI no work required.

I agree with you on the distinction but violently disagree on the conclusion. With UBI you still pay for things and the capitalist system still functions; it just lifts a baseline for all of society.

Food these days isn’t just literally apples picked from a tree though. Putting aside the labor for harvesting and transporting the raw ingredients to you so that you didn’t have to do it, someone put labor into cooking something nice at a restaurant - I think that labor should be rewarded in some form, and I also think electing for a luxury over, say, just making the food yourself.

But putting even all that aside, I disagree that payment isn’t necessary in a world of abundance. It’s not just a means of rationing limited supplies; a main point of capitalism is to incentivize people to do things (well) in the first place, and to coordinate action between different actors in society that may not be communicating with one another. Prices do that. I don’t think we as a society have worked it out how to coordinate and incentivize labor if payment isn’t part of the process.

I honestly do not believe that a UBI is necessary nor can it solve problems that we face. The only appeal is in the simplicity and naivety that politicians will not add clauses and complexity (they will).

It's also a funding nightmare, not because of inflation or free stuff or dis-incentivising working, it's because the sheer amount of money would rival the GDP but the vast majority of people will just get most of it taxed away so that it has a net zero effect.

If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.

> If you are going to throw around money it would make more sense to just give people meaningful employment and if nobody employs these people they can get a temporary job from the government. After all, a minimum wage is completely worthless if you can't get a job because of it.

The purpose of minimum wage is (or ought to be) to ensure that no one who is working is unable to afford the necessities of life.

UBI establishes that floor without requiring a job, which inverts the meaning of the phrase "every wage is a living wage".

Therefore, UBI can eliminate the need for a minimum wage. In practice, transactional costs establish a floor below which it is impractical to pay for work (even piecework, ala MTurk), and UBI establishes a (probably higher) floor below which people won't put up with crap jobs, but both of those are probably lower than minimum wage.

Regarding the sustainability argument, there is actually pretty solid evidence from previous trials that it it does not dis-incentivise work. It's worthwhile reading Rutger Bregman's "Utopia for Realists", many people do not now that it was Nixon of all people who wanted to implement a UBI, in the initial voting the democrats rejected it because they thought it was too low (and likely also because they did not want to give Nixon a "win", yay for a 2 party adverserial system).

It's also telling how the opposition against UBI formed (largely driven by one of his advisors). The argument were framed largely around lazyness, i.e. people become lazy. A significant motivation for the opposition is that some of the studies found that divorces increased (likely because women didn't feel tied to a relationship because of financial dependencies), which was ideologically incompatible with conservatives.

Another interesting point is that similar arguments to the "UBI is paying for itself" is used by conservatives when it comes to tax breaks. They are always assumed to pay for themselves because of increased economic activity. Both of these are likely wrong (well actually the tax one has been shown to be wrong many times).

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