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Comment by Qwertious | Hacker News Reader

>The cost of rent and everything in the market goes up with the tide. The middle class, and even moderately well off professionals, get a quality of life and pay CUT (in effect, since they don't get the raise).

I disagree - a UBI means that anyone who's able to live frugally may, at any time, retire. This gives enormous bargaining power to workers, as if the pay is too low then they can say "fuck it, I'm moving to <insert rural ghost town>, buying an abandoned house for $1, and living off my UBI".

Not only does this put downward pressure on rent, it also encourages jobs to be more available in rural areas, as people will move to there for lower costs of living instead of moving away because it's unaffordable due to lack of jobs/UBI.

Your wage is not determined by your productivity, it's determined by your bargaining power (your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) being the main one, but how unique your skills are determines your employer's BATNA).

In other words, employers will employ you for any amount that still lets them make a profit off of your labour, but they will pay you the least they can get away with paying without you walking away. Some people literally can't afford to walk away, and they're the people who are paid dogshit wages. A UBI would let them walk away until their job calls them with a good offer.

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Regarding UBI I have asked this in multiple forums (not HN) so I'll ask again and see if you (or anyone else) has a response to this. After the oil bonanza in the middle East, a number of countries pretty much had a UBI like system for all their citizens and most still do. In effect, what I saw when I've been there was not that people have engaged in creative endeavours, or things that UBI proponents often claim will happen once everyone has UBI. They imported lots of workers from poorer countries to do all the shitty work, and treat the workers horrifically. The amount of time spent toward religious activities is absurd. E.g., shops and markets entirely close down multiple times a day for prayers. This has other knock on effects as well. How do we know this is not what the US would head toward if UBI is implemented?

The amount of time spent toward religious activities is absurd. E.g., shops and markets entirely close down multiple times a day for prayers.

Ah yes, the God of Commerce doesn’t like it when you give other gods more attention.

It isn't about God of commerce, it is about forcing everyone to follow someone else's diktats. Its like how no one can buy alcohol on Sundays in many parts of the US except to a far larger extent.

Why do you believe the shop workers want to stay open? If they're religious, they probably want to be praying.

If it's a theocratic state, that might be an issue, but if it's just a religious populace I see no reason to believe you're right.

Because many of them said so to me. A lot of people aren't that religious, the vice police literally beats people if they don't conform.

Interesting points. On the other hand, Norway found oil very late and was a very organized society by then. You can find the good drama miniseries "Lykkeland" showing the early part from a small town perspective. Fishermen became oilmen. Religious fundamentalism went down, wellbeing went up.

The problem is the following: An export surplus is unsustainable over the long term. Achieving balanced trade is a good thing. However, if the entirety of your wealth is built on oil exports, it also means it is very cheap to import everything that isn't oil as people must sell you their (non oil) things in exchange for your oil.

You must diversify your economy to become less dependent on oil. However, it is easy for the government to take control over oil. The president can become a multi billionaire while ignoring the rest of your country.

A UBI that doesn't apply to foreign migrants isn't exactly universal.

Also, the second order impact of oil money appreciating the currency and therefore the reducing the international competitiveness of non-oil industries definitely has a big impact. In contrast, in a UBI situation, GDP still depends on the productivity of the country, not just the wealth generated from a niche (in terms of employment) extractive sector.

What's the plan for dealing with the increased immigration then? UBI significantly increases the cost per citizen for a country, which would make migration much worse.

Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then prices will go up. When you have 200 million apples and 300 million people then UBI won't get the 100 million people an apple. Growing more apples does. And this same process would apply to virtually every good and service people consume.

You might be right on rent, but that would probably exacerbate the price of goods problem further since there would be fewer people willing to do those jobs.

UBI will only make people better off if more goods and services are produced as a result of it. Or alternatively, if goods and services are somehow moved from excessive consumption by the rich to the poor. But that last part is probably a drop in the bucket. Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.

This argument is usually countered by pointing out that a lot of our production is mechanized nowadays, and this percentage is only increasing. Currently capital owners take the overwhelming majority of the gains from that, UBI tries to shift that more to everyone. UBI won't prevent more apples from being produced.

You rightly point out that that does not apply to supply-inflexible goods like housing in cities.

We already have that productivity and more, but we waste it.

Artificial scarcity is created by producing machines that intentionally break, bunkering and throwing away stuff, patent trolling and so on.

UBI alone likely won’t fix this though.

The Saudi Arabia way is to bring in third world country workers. They have tons of natural resources per capita though, so I don’t think this luxury applies to most countries in the world.

Except that repeated experiments have found that raising wages and improving working conditions raises productivity and efficiency. Costs of good sold doesn't go up, so there's no need to raise prices.

People who are able to focus on their work because they can pay their bills, have good working conditions, are healthy and able to care for their families work better. Big surprise.

Of course there's an upper limit to this - if you're paying your apple pickers more than the retail price of the apples then you're going to be in trouble. But in those cases, the price of apples needs to be higher so that apple pickers can have some basic human dignity. Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.

No large scale experiment exists for UBI.

But the experiments that have been done support it.

There's this set of objections to UBI based around "yes, ok, it works in the small scale, but it'll never work on a large scale".

If we did a large scale experiment, and it confirms that it works, the objections will move to "sure, OK, but it'll never work on a national level".

So let's just implement it and see if it works. If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.

> But the experiments that have been done support it.

They really, really don't. All the experiments on a small scale show is the trivial conclusion that if you give people some central government funds for a year or two, they tend to be slightly less poor at the end. None of them come remotely close to suggesting that people are so much more productive that they can cover the costs of UBI to people already out of the labour force by choice, never mind those that may choose to exit it in future.

> If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.

Only if the country still has the ability to change and the economy isn't permanently damaged.

I think we can always manage to let people starve.

Disingenuous argument which completely ignores the ramifications of severe economic downturn on a global stage.

> If it doesn't work, we can always just go back to letting people starve.

Elderly people already get a UBI in the form of Social Security, and that's politically impossible to cut regardless of whether it's a good or bad idea.

Once you turn it on and people get used to it, you can never turn it off in a democracy.

That's a vacuous statement. No large scale experiments have been done, so it proves nothing for or against UBI.

Small-scale experiments have been quite successful though.

> Small-scale experiments have been quite successful though.

And are absolutely useless to study the very important effects that these kinds of systems have on a nation's economy.

I'm not a fan of UBI. I agree with you that the small scale experiments are worthless.

I've looked to history for examples of actual real world attempts to guarantee some minimum quality of life for all citizens of a particular group. They consistently do well for some self selected and committed initial group and then go badly when the doors get flung open to include everyone.

One result I recall hearing about is instituting policies like "You don't work, you don't eat" in order to prevent freeloaders from utterly killing the whole system and taking everyone down with them.

>”You don’t work, you don’t eat”

Tale as old as time:

> For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule:“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Thessalonia...

>>Except that repeated experiments have found that raising wages and improving working conditions raises productivity and efficiency.

>No large scale experiment exists for UBI.

Non sequitur.

I know my accounting degree is getting a little dusty but in what version of the world do you think you can "raise wages" while "costs of good sold" doesn't go up?

When the supply of goods goes up too, the marginal cost of labour goes down or the percentace of product cost of labour is small.

All of those become more and more true (and are already true for a large class of products) as mechanization and automation increases.

Those things are happening anyway. They might reduce the magnitude of the effect, but prices will still go up as wages go up. Also as automation increases productivity, leading to a wealthier economy, workers move into service sectors which are labour intensive.

You can't just say, well, just reduce the amount fo labour to keep costs down. That labour still needs to be employed doing something.

I think GP is arguing that increasing someone's hourly rate will proportionally increase their work output per hour. (I don't believe this to be true.)

https://s1.q4cdn.com/806093406/files/doc_downloads/2019/05/P...

it is in fact disproportionate, raising wages raising productivity by a greater amount.

Given the evidence, do you now believe this to be true?

If wages become a smaller portion of COGS, then there’s no contradiction. Eg if you buy equipment to make the process more efficient, you can amortize that equipment into COGS and the labor component can remain flat or even decrease even with higher wages for staff.

Or your competitor can invest in equipment just the same and keep wages flat, and beat you on price. So nice sleight-of-hand but that's just an accountancy trick. Prices are still higher than they would otherwise be with stable wages.

Price isn't determined by input costs but by supply and demand..

That's a very naive take on the economic realities. Supply is very often determined by input costs. If it costs more to provide a product or service, supply drops driving up prices, which in turn can lead to a drop in demand. Depending on market elasticity, one common way the market gets out of this negative feedback loop is by compromising on quality in order to hold down prices.

You can see this in the current economy as restaurants and packaged foods suppliers in some sectors reduce the size of portions.

The cost of video cards didn't go up despite everyone getting $2000 checks! I mean, you can't actually buy one unless you want to wait in line at a Microcenter for three days, but they are still the same price.

When you only raise it for a minority of a populace. While UBI is "universal" it gets clawed back via taxes for majority of populace. So prices really only raise for the products/services that are dominated by the marginal labor rates of those whose wages are net-increased. AFAIK, that is primarily the lower-end of the restaurant industry and the non-mechanized segments of agriculture (mainly squishy fruit/veg).

In the world of 'repeated experiments' ostensibly. Perhaps some should go wreck that world's economy and leave ours alone.

> Except that repeated experiments have found that raising wages and improving working conditions raises productivity and efficiency.

Source?

>Apples should cost more, but we have created an evil system that destroys apple pickers' lives so that the rest of us can have cheap apples. Let's not do that any more.

What if raising the price of apples lowers demand, causing less jobs to he available? Presumably apple picking is the best job those workers can get, so the likely consequence is that they'll be unemployed and we'll have to substitute 100% of their income (rather than 50% or whatever if they were picking apples). That seems like a poor allocation of labor/resources.

https://s1.q4cdn.com/806093406/files/doc_downloads/2019/05/P...

> Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn’t address that point.

“UBI” isn’t actually a specific plan, its a broad concept within which there are many specific plans. But the broad concept itself does address this, though many of the more detailed plans do so in…more detail.

At a high level, one of the central points of UBI as a replacement for traditional means-tested welfare (and why some of its earliest advocates were right-libertarians, not lefties, such as Milton Friedman who advocated “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI) is that it eliminates the disincentives to earning outside income that come with the sharp (sometimes greater than 1:1 when aggregated across all benefit programs a person qualifies for) funding reductions for outside income that come with means tested benefit programs, increasing the marginal reward (and thus incentive) to work.

> Rich people still eat the same amount of food for dinner.

No, they generally don’t. Oh, sure, that might be true by mass, or even by calories; but not by labor-hours of work that went into it, or dollar cost, which is what is relevant here. And that’s true across all categories of consumption.

> “negative income tax” which is identical to a UBI

Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.

> Some consider those distinct as they state the UBI would not decrease with additional earned income.

They are the same; both have the effect that benefits are “drawn down” through marginal taxation of outside income, though Friedman’s specific NIT proposal had an exceptionally high (though still lower than the effective drawdown rates often faced by means-tested benefit recipients) marginal rate (50%) for the the below-break-even bracket (essentially, the bracket whose outside income was less than “Effective UBI”/(bottom tax rate)), which most UBI proponents would reject in favor of consistently progressive rates. But this isn’t an inherent feature of generalized negative income tax.

UBI may not decrease, but progressive taxation on income, coupled with adjusting rates (to pay for the substantial increase in federal expenditures) will have the exact same mathematical effect.

Whether or not individuals benefit from UBI isn't the point. The point is that it changes the nature of money printing in our economy from being top-down to being bottom-up and it changes the dynamics of how companies operate to get those dollars. The effects on individuals and prices hardly matters at all.

Right now we have a trickle-down economy which caters primarily to the needs of institutions and big capital holders. This is why our society is so politically charged and divided and why we have such fast growing inequality.

We're already essentially giving institutions and capital holders free money through capital appreciation. We need to give some free money to those at the bottom too or else it's not fair and it will lead to a revolution sooner or later.

Somebody has to actually create all the stuff that people consume. UBI doesn't address that point. If these employers have to pay more to hire people, then prices will go up.

An alternative is to greatly increase temporary work visas, and make those immigrants exempt from getting UBI as a clause in their immigration visa. Of course this might lead to other issues.

Ok, this actually proves why it cannot work. UBI as a unemployment benefit replacement cannot apply to immigrants (to prevent abuse) thus we get a two class system where people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back.

However, UBI funded by taxes on bad behavior can still work but it would not act as a replacement for unemployment benefits.

people pay taxes into the UBI pool but never get anything back.

They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars. That seems to worth a lot to a lot of people. You are of course right about the very obvious two class system it will create and the long term social consequences of such a system are tricky to predict.

Edit: The US birthright citizenship rules might actually make this harder to implement.

> They get to live and work legally in the US and get a salary paid in US dollars.

If this is so good why the need for a UBI for citizens in the first place?

Because the US should want to provide a better quality of life for its citizens than what those people feeling and risking everything in a desperate attempt to get into the US have in their home countries.

The US (it’s just people) already has a higher quality of life for its citizens - that’s why people come here.

Serious question, but what's wrong with having a two class system? Wouldn't these people be better off living in the US rather than living in whatever country they are assumably leaving for economic opportunity, even if they don't have as many rights as a citizen.

There doesn't have to be something wrong with it, it's all down to the implementation details. For one, possibly extreme, example of how it could turn out badly, look at countries like Qatar and how they treat their second class workers.

Yes according to the textbooks, production should go down if you remove desperation as a motivator to work, in the real world however almost every data point collected shows the opposite effect on the overall productivity, ie societies with extensive welfare schemes outproduce those who don't allow people an exit from the rat-race. Nobody have gone full UBI yet but the economies that have gone the closest to actually implementing UBI(say Scandinavia) is among the most productive and healthy economies around.

What does tend to happen when a system is put in place to provide support for those who refuses to accept any employment, is that the ability for wealth hoarders to use their hoards as a lever go gain more wealth and power declines as the bargaining power gets more even.

One of the benefits of universal(non-means-tested) welfare project is that the graft and administration overhead of those systems tend to be much lower then "charity" based welfare projects and UBI is the ultimate in low overhead universal welfare. And when you look at the structure of most post-industrial economies admin overhead and graft is more then 50% of the economy, i.e. it's by no means a given that we cannot keep up production of goods and services with even 60% of the population of UBI.

This is only a fundamental problem if UBI is so high there is no incentive to work whatsoever. Every UBI proposal I've seen puts the income level at, or some small fraction above, the poverty line. The majority of adults (currently) earning more than that are unlikely to want to lower their standards of living. Some will, sure, but not most. And likewise many of those in poverty would be willing to work to raise their standing of living beyond UBI, especially if they have more of an economic cushion to find a better position.

So I don't think we need worry about everyone stopping working. What we need to consider is the marginal effect of the small population that does. If the unemployment rates doubles, what impact would that have on the economy? There is a lot to figure out with a problem like that, but it is a different caliber of problem from total economic meltdown.

I don't think UBI is ever the answer and the article hints at that. Giving the low paid workers 'bargaining power' doesn't negate the points OP made. Flooding the economy with free money to everyone also doesn't hold up to actual analysis. The US has 300M+ people, even $1000 a month to each person is utterly unrealistic in terms of our GDP.

The answer is highly targeted programs that increase general prosperity. Money for cheaper energy, better services, public works, public transportation, more housing and favorable investments in future technologies are what drive prosperity. Make people as a whole less motivated to work is the antithesis of economic prosperity.

Targeted programs don't generally work; they rely on the idea that whoever is doing the targeting can predict the future better than everyone else, which isn't usually true.

> Make people as a whole less motivated to work is the antithesis of economic prosperity.

Making people as a whole less trapped in dead-end jobs is great for economic prosperity. We know that people are more productive once they have a safety net that lets them take risk, e.g. there's a huge bump in people starting their own businesses - a big economic positive on average, but risky - once they hit the medicaid eligibility age. Or taking the time to retrain and switch careers - again, positive on average, but something a lot of people can't afford or don't dare to take the risk of.

> Targeted programs don't generally work; they rely on the idea that whoever is doing the targeting can predict the future better than everyone else, which isn't usually true.

What are you saying? That most government programs aren't working? Please share the data.

I don't have to be able to predict the future more than everyone else to vastly expand water reservoir's, increase education, build solar/wind/fission, public works... also, i've seen HN comments do extremely complex calculations about delta V but no one seems to do that math for UBI. what's 300m * $1000 a month? and 1,000 still doesn't cut it in most major cities.

> The US has 300M+ people, even $1000 a month to each person is utterly unrealistic in terms of our GDP.

Except that this isn't how UBI should be implemented. An easy way to do it is to change Federal income taxes. Make $0/year? your tax bill is -$12000. Make $10000? perhaps it's now -$10000. And at some point - probably $40000 or $50000, it's 0, and then after that you pay gradually increasing taxes, the way it currently works.

so in other words, you don't have to give this cash to all 300M people. T(Though you do need to account for the fact that having this option available will change people's life choices, if we're going to estimate the funding needed)

Probably we'd also need to raise taxes somewhere to fund it - increasing marginal tax rates for higher tax brackets, possibly coupled with some new tax brackets at the upper end, seems like a possible answer.

You just described a "negative income tax", which isn't the same thing as UBI.

> You just described a “negative income tax”, which isn’t the same thing as UBI.

A negative income tax is exactly the same thing as a UBI in a system that also has progressive income taxes.

See the post above about the niece who couldn't take a better paying job because then she wouldn't qualify for food stamps...

The niece couldn't take the better paying job due to a "cliff" - the abrupt loss of food stamps due to a tiny increase in income.

If it was gradual withdrawal rather than a cliff, she could afford to take the job.

The UK's Universal Credit is supposed to be gradual and therefore work out to everyone's benefit. But in practice it has few of the good qualities of either UBI or negative taxation. Universal Credit has plenty of nasty cliffs, complicated rules and cruel penalties that push unlucky people deeply into poverty, and it also has an extremely heavy administration cost - every employer must file everyone's individual employment taxes every few weeks online and face heavy fines for getting anything wrong or being a day late.

That's the other argument for UBI - get rid of the bureaucracy approving benefits.

The bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term. That is simply how politics works.

> he bureaucracy exists to limit welfare spending though. If you have a fixed budget it is more efficient to only give it to those who truly need it even if it is self defeating over the long term.

If it is self-defeating, it is not more efficient. And we already have a bureaucracy whose functions include verifying income claims and adjusting net payments based on them in the income tax system, we don’t need a bunch of different bureaucracies doing that redundantly with slightly varied definitions and rules and paperwork that serve little practical purpose besides justifying additional bureaucracies and enforcing self-defeating funding cliffs.

You will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse. I'd argue it'd be larger since the scale is increased

With UBI, there is no means testing. So the main “abuse” possible is income tax evasion.

It is possible that there would be fraud around pretending to be a person when that person doesn’t exist, or continuing to collect benefits for someone who is dead.

But “are you a live person” is much harder to fake than “did you make sure you didn’t do these 6 illegible things that would make you ineligible”.

Huge income tax evasion and money laundering. On a massive scale like we don't have today. It would be harder to detect

If you're doing the negative income tax, yeah. If you do plain UBI, no, because it's an unconditional payment.

We're not talking about hiding money obtained via UBI

Then how will UBI encourage income tax evasion? You get it unconditionally so it won’t change anything…

Again, we're not talking about UBI money, we're talking about money earned after UBI. Without UBI, people who work in cash businesses have to report a certain amount of income to justify their living expenses. With UBI, there is nothing to justify, and it makes it much easier to operate your own cash-only side hustles tax-free as long as you live in a place you can afford solely using UBI.

> You will still need the bureaucracy there to be monitoring for abuse

When you eliminate means-testing in favor of income taxes and eliminste the myriad different definitions of income and assets for qualification for different programs and the opportunity it creates (and the incentive funding cliffs create) for specialized benefit fraud, there is no special “UBI abuse” to monitor for. You have to monitor for tax fraud, but we’ve got a bureaucracy doing that at society-wide scale anyway.

That's a cliff in the benefits and tax system. If you make a tiny bit more, you shouldn't get worse off.

UBI could be a solution but has its own drawbacks. Progressive taxation without cliffs is another possible solution.

That is, you pay higher taxes but only from the amount above some threshold. That way, only the derivative of the tax rate has cliffs.

That’s how progressive tax systems currently work (and always have worked).

> UBI could be a solution but has its own drawbacks. Progressive taxation without cliffs is another possible solution.

You mean with no public support? Because UBI is social support without cliffs, and typically paired with progressive taxation. So if you mean progressive taxation with social support and no cliffs, that's not an alternative to UBI so much as a long-winded description of UBI.

> That is, you pay higher taxes but only from the amount above some threshold. That way, only the derivative of the tax rate has cliffs.

That's (ignoring things like the injection of means-tested welfare into the tax system via EITC) progressive taxation and tax bracket marginal rates work normally. UBI is just adding public benefits in without introducing cliffs.

Functionally they're equivalent. In a UBI/negative-income-tax schenariom things like food stamps also shouldn't be cut off at a simple threshold, but instead factored in at your marginal rate. If your marginal rate is always your marginal rate, then it's always beneficial to take a higher-paying job.

The problem with means testing is that it effectively raises the marginal rate, often to astronomical percentages. For example, the withdrawal of a $1000 benefit because of an additional $1 that pushes you over a means testing threshold means your marginal tax rate on that dollar is 100,000%. Of course the rational thing to do is to not earn that dollar, or indeed any of the next $1250 that it would take to get you back to where you started (assuming a normal marginal rate of 20%).

In a UBI scenario food stamps shouldn't exist, i think? The idea is to replace most benefits with just the basic income and save money not tracking those benefits.

That's the idea. In practice you need to be careful as a failure mode of introducing UBI is it being used as an excuse to cut benefits without an adequate replacement.

For example, a reasonable stepping stone would be for people to get their food stamps by default, but then be able to "pay" some of the taxes on any income they earn using those food stamps. This means food stamps are being reduced gradually and at the marginal tax rate, so it's fairer than just falling off a cliff when you hit a threshold.

> In a UBI/negative-income-tax schenariom things like food stamps also shouldn't be cut off at a simple threshold, but instead factored in at your marginal rate.

In a mature UBI system [0], food stamps as use-restricted means-tested welfare wouldn't exist at all. (Food stamps in their original purpose as a system of agricultural subsidies might.) Their function would be rolled into the single benefit payment.

[0] transitional proposals often keep other means-tested programs during the transition, scaled back as UBI scales up.

You can't buy food now with a letter that says you're predicted to owe less tax next year.

It’s not universal unless everyone gets the same amount.

They do get given the same amount, they just get different amounts taken back depending on how much they earned.

That’s just a tax. Wouldn’t progressive taxation already take care of that? Do we need another tax just to make UBI work?

No, UBI plus current progressive taxes is basically identical to the negative income tax idea. You might want to adjust levels or whatever but that's not strictly necessary.

Some people, mostly people who don't like the idea of UBI seem to think you can't tax it back again and everyone needs to always get X extra every year on top of what they would have before. I'm not sure if they dislike UBI because they think that, or think that because they dislike UBI.

As a low end worker, I have actually seen this happen from the stimulus checks alone. Many places in my town raises wages because they can't find people to work for pennies anymore.

Stimulus payments (particularly, the enhanced jobless benefits) are not like UBI, they are essentially means-tested welfare. Like means-tested welfare, you lose them rapidly by gaining outside income, eliminating (or reducing) the benefit of the first big chunk of outside income you gain if you are currently receiving them. That’s exactly the perverse incentive in means-tested welfare that UBI removes, you “lose” benefits only at the rate of marginal taxation, which (especially at the low end) is much slower than the rate at which means-tested welfare programs reduce benefits with additional income, making additional income opportunities more attractive to pursue for UBI recipients than means-tested welfare recipients.

This is something I find many UBI opponents do not understand. And you explain it very well. Thanks.

Another way to look at it:

For a low-wage earner today, the choice is:

* Don't work, get $300/week * Work, get $400/week

Depending upon circumstances, many find the former option better.

But UBI is proposing an option like this:

* Don't work, get $300/week * Work, get $280 + $400/week

With this kind tradeoff, many more will chose latter option.

> Make people as a whole less motivated to work is the antithesis of economic prosperity.

People don't stop working if you give them basic income.

They do stop working two or three jobs to make ends meet. This is good, because it kills people.

They do stop doing the shitty underpaid jobs that no-one wants to do if they can possibly avoid it. This is good. Those jobs need to be redesigned because they're shitty. There are many happy garbage removalists out there, or cleaners, or retail clerks. It's not necessarily the nature of the work that makes a job shitty, it's often the incidental bullshit around it that makes it shitty. Making employers as a whole less motivated to keep their employees happy is the antithesis of basic human respect, and needs to be changed.

We have to get out of this bullshit Protestant Work Ethic mindset that work is about suffering and that we get paid a salary to compensate for that suffering. Work is what gives our lives meaning. For some of us, that meaning is found in climbing the corporate ladder, others enjoy serving food, others have a sense of satisfaction from their cleaning gig.

If the only reason you work is because you're paid to do it, find another line of work. No-one deserves that kind of misery.

"People don't stop working if you give them basic income."

They do, or we wouldn't have any retired people.

"Basic income" is just another way of saying "receive a state pension at 18".

The alternative is obvious - ensure that everybody can always sell their labour hours at a fixed rate.

If you have to give up your hours to earn money, then that is the same as everybody else. There is no longer a differential between the "unemployed rate" and the "employed rate" which eliminates the rate per hour 'dead zone' required to attract people from "doing nothing" to "doing something".

> They do, or we wouldn't have any retired people.

A lot of retired people still work, despite not needing the income.

> the rate per hour 'dead zone' required to attract people from "doing nothing" to "doing something".

There's this myth again. People don't need to be attracted from "doing nothing". The default state of people isn't sitting around on their porch drinking beer. I mean, don't get me wrong, that's fun for a while, but it's not a long-term occupation. The default state of people is doing useful work that gives their lives meaning. We don't need to be "attracted" to that. That's the default.

And a lot of retired people do not work. Can society sustain a big portion of people of any age leaving the job market? Who will put together funds to pay UBI?

The answer is actually yes. But only if you drop the current crop of disproved morality based economic models that make up the bulk of the curriculum at most schools of business.

The reality is that any modern economy based on fiat-money have unlimited cash and tend to benefit enough from weakening the bargaining power of the entrenched elites though inflation funded welfare, that you can set the bar for how poor the poor are allowed to become without necessarily impacting the real world industrial/agricultural output, but because of dogmatic policies designed to facility wealth hording we pretend that we cannot really end poverty.

Another problem is that we measure societal success based on how well the 20% richest lives rather then on how well the 20% poorest live. which again support wealth hording policies that will eventually clash with the ideal that democracy, freedom and equally, should be available to everyone not just an small elite as was the case in ancient Rome or Greece(and to some extend The American south until ca 1970).

That doesn't explain at all what would happen if 50% workforce walked out the door tomorrow and expected the rest of workforce to provide them.

Stopping money printing is an interesting idea though.

> Stopping money printing is an interesting idea though.

If I'm reading it right, that's the opposite of what the person you replied to was suggesting:

> The reality is that any modern economy based on fiat-money have unlimited cash and tend to benefit enough from weakening the bargaining power of the entrenched elites though inflation funded welfare, that you can set the bar for how poor the poor are allowed to become

I'm not sure how to read it TBH. When you print money, value of assets keep going up with the inflation. So the rich who have assets would stay rich, the poor would loose.

If OP wanted to claim the opposite, I don't see how it makes sense.

if 50% workforce walked out the door tomorrow

You could always import more, UBI exempt, workers if that becomes a problem. Of course that might bring some of its own problems.

Why would you come to work to a country with super high taxes?

On the other hand, workforce may be coming from another UBI territory with same taxation. What would happen in their former country? Would they still pay UBI taxes to it?

Why would you come to work to a country with super high taxes?

Because even with the "super high taxes" you'll probably still earn more than you would in your home country of Honduras or Mozambique or wherever labor will be imported from. People are crossing the border today for a chance to illegally pick produce or work low level construction. Making that easier will only make it more popular. Plus adding a clear path to Citizenship (say after working 7-10 years on a non-UBI visa) will only make it easier to attract people.

As to who gets UBI what happens when you leave a country with UBI, that is an interesting question. My initial reaction would be that you can only get UBI if you are a citizen or permanent resident AND live in the country (say a minimum of 4-6 month out of the year). If you emigrate you lose UBI, but that is a separate discussion.

If they're not eligible for UBI, but still pay full taxes, their pay would be meager for those poor paying jobs. If not negative. If someone is well educated and working in a well-paid sector, it may be not worth it to come to UBI country. Unless one lives in a complete shithole without stable government. Of course, then someone is not likely to be well educated...

In most theories I saw, UBI would supplement low wages and become negative only for well off people. So you'd have to pay a nice sum of money for someone to have same take-home pay as UBI jobless. This means UBI countries would need high import tariffs to compete with cheap import from non-UBI.

Now what would be nice is to work illegally in an UBI country.

Path to ubi sounds like a massive Ponzi scheme TBH. Come work for 10 years for an easy retirement. Especially if you can move back to your homecountry and keep earning UBI.

Everything comes down to how you tweak the numbers. If I was to set up a UBI system I would first of all make it so that once you earn around $40-50k or so you're essentially paying back all your UBI in taxes. UBI will essentially be a benefit only for people earning below median wages. UBI will make it much harder to hire for low paying jobs and that is why you will have to rely on much higher levels of immigration from low wage countries to make up the difference. If you're not OK with that, then you probably shouldn't be supporting UBI.

For higher wage, higher quality jobs it might be slightly harder to attract foreign talent, but even with a 20-30% real wage decrease from todays levels the US will still pay more than just about any other country for high end jobs, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Come work for 10 years for an easy retirement. Especially if you can move back to your homecountry and keep earning UBI.

That is why I think it's important to tie UBI to residency rather than just citizenship. If you leave the US you lose UBI.

> once you earn around $40-50k <...> median

An absolute sum of money is meaningless in such discussions. In my whereabouts $40-50k would be easily top-10% of not top-5% earnings. Median is a better measure. But how do we calculate median in UBI society? Do we calculate every resident? Only UBI citizens? Only working UBI citizens? Or do we take median pay of today, look what professions it is and then look at what those professions make after UBI?

Personally I'm very skeptical of UBI. IMO it's not possible till all low paying jobs are automated away. Otherwise your solution would create a very unhealthy two-ways society. Sort of like Arab oil states today. Where locals live off oil money and lots of 2nd-tier residents from poor countries are in sort a sort of modern slavery. I don't see how a healthy democratic society could in such a way. There're too many different groups with different incentives.

The $40-50k is based on current salaries in the US. If you're looking at different country or different time then you obviously have to tweak those numbers based on median income. Exactly what median to use is an interesting problem.

However setting the levels of UBI is probably not hard part, agreeing how to raise it every year to adjust for inflation and other cost of living increases is where all the problems will come from. I fear the UBI will also require a more dynamic tax code (to control inflation, as postulated by MMM) that will be very tricky to implement politically.

As to the two level society, I think that is inevitable with UBI. Hopefully it won't be as bad as what we're seeing in some oil states, but it will be similar.

Personally I don't think UBI is good idea, but do think it's doable. It will however permanently change the country, possibly for the worse.

As you mentioned US-wide median, it got me thinking. I wonder if big and diverse territory wide median would work. I'm not that familiar with US state-to-state median differences. But in EU absolute median could differ 3x from country to country.

Existing salary laws already create a lot of opportunities for arbitraging. E.g. truckers and handymen working in expensive, living out of cars or cheapest houses they can find and then spending their time off (as well as paying taxes) in cheap countries. Country-adjusted UBI could make this even worse. While EU-wide UBI median would create it's own share of issues.

Any idea is doable if you throw enough propaganda and/or gunpower behind it :)

Is that any real difference from today where less then 30% actually works in direct production?

Remember that 50% is an majority and would be entitled to basically run the economy as they saw fit, and yet we have never had a case(outside of apartheid/slave states) where an majority did that.

What UBI represent is more of an re-balancing on the employer/employee power balance as it grant's the employee the power to say NO without facing complete ruin.

For UBI to work the presumption that people wont just retire to cheap housing in the countryside living on bread, beer and love, but for the most part seek some kind of meaningful occupation, which real data based economical models seems to suggest they will.

The problem here is of cause that everything about UBI invalidates any economic theory compatible with an moral philosophy derived from Luther and Calvin's (protestant) Punitive Christianity, which unfortunately is the base for a lot of modern economic theory.

Be it direct production or not, it's still a part of modern economy.

When people think about UBI, they think about living on UBI and still using products and services of a modern economy. Not living off the grid in a shack bumfucknowhere and doing substance farming (and brewing beer, of course) on the side.

If people flat-out dropped out of the economy, that'd create another interesting problem. Who would use produce of those people who keep participating? Would participating people produce&consume enough to put together UBI for the folks who got out?

Going further... Off-grid folk would make bread & beer and those wouldn't be taxed. UBI-producer would make bread & beer and those would be taxed through the roof. What if off-grid folks kickstart black market and trade non-taxed stuff between themselves? While still receiving UBI from UBI-producers. Then it'd make sense for an UBI-producer to go shopping in said black market too :) Buying less products from other UBI-producers.

> weakening the bargaining power of the entrenched elites though inflation funded welfare

Why would this happen?

The rich and powerful do not have tons of cash. They have tons of assets, like houses, land, buildings, companies, boats, cars, etc. Inflation simply makes all of those things more valuable, so their wealth is not affected. Meanwhile all the extra free money that everybody else has is still not enough to buy those actual assets. Aren’t you pretending that supply and demand doesn’t exist?

All of this is assets that can loose value when inflation goes up, as they are denoted in the same currency that's inflating the reason they don't now is that we deliberately tie the value of money to the value of land.

The problem for the wannabe feudalists is the same that killed off the landed gentry, when workers got rights and privileges in the 18th century, is that land not worked is not really worth anything so they will have to spend more and more of their profit maintaining the productivity as people gain more economic power to live elsewhere or differently.

And cheap land is around especially if you break free of the large cities.

So... yeah, you're ignoring supply and demand.

We haven't tied the value of money to the value of land. Land has value. If you want it, you have to pay for it. (Unless you are advocating for the government to seize all property.)

If the value of money goes down (which is what you said to let happen), then the cost of land goes up. On what basis do you claim that hard assets will decrease in value as cash decreases in value? Can you name some examples where this has happened?

Edit: I don't think you can, because the definition of inflation means that the costs of things are going up.

> The default state of people isn't sitting around on their porch drinking beer. I mean, don't get me wrong, that's fun for a while, but it's not a long-term occupation. The default state of people is doing useful work that gives their lives meaning... The default state of people is doing useful work that gives their lives meaning.

I disagree. That rosy perspective comes off as being really naive

It's based on extensive experience. I've been homeless, long-term unemployed, manual labourer, company director, CEO, and everything in between. I also have an MBA, but that's probably irrelevant here.

People really don't want to sit around doing nothing. They want to be useful, contribute, lead productive lives. Sitting around on the porch drinking beer is really boring after a relatively short while.

Again, if the only reason you're working is because you're being paid, go find another line of work. No-one should be that miserable.

Great, but I also have extensive life experience too meeting people from all walks of life, and I know plenty of people who would rather sit around and get loaded than work. Hell, there's enough of them already without UBI such that it is already a burden upon our healthcare system. The last thing we need is more of them.

> Again, if the only reason you're working is because you're being paid, go find another line of work. No-one should be that miserable.

reminds me of a great Office Space quote:

Michael Bolton : No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.

Please tell me, who actually works because they enjoy cleaning shit up and not to just get paid?

The cleaner at my old office in the UK. Loved her job. Semi-retired old lady, came in, chatted to everyone, only worked a few hours a week, great cleaner.

Ex-girlfriend worked as a maid in a hotel in Broome while travelling. Perfect job, no responsibility, you could do it with a hangover, free accommodation, enough money to drink, an instant social life with the other employees. Stayed there for months until she decided she had to see other places.

I'm not saying they'd do it for free - well, possibly the cleaner in the UK (forgotten her name). But they definitely weren't stuck there doing a job they hated just for the money.

It's great these people liked their jobs. I don't think you're going to find enough people like that to fill every janitor position though. Not to mention all the other jobs which tend to be less desirable that society needs. In any case, I think the discussion has changed here because there is a difference between 'hating your job' and 'doing a job to get paid'

The Protestant Work Ethic is based around the noble sacrifice of people who work vs people who don't. It almost doesn't matter if you enjoy your work. If you don't work, you shouldn't eat, and work is defined as something that someone pays you for.

You can see it here: the number of comments saying basically "why should I work and pay taxes to support people who sit around all day doing nothing?"

This totally ignores the carers who don't get paid, but look after their relatives (and if they didn't, the state would have to either pay for that care, or let them die and confront some nasty truths). The volunteers who do god's work and never get paid (I'm an atheist, and I think it's horrible that we as a secular society depend on this, but I recognise the work of people of faith supporting our needy). This whole unpaid system of "work" that isn't "work" because we don't pay people to do it.

There is, as you say, a huge difference between "hating your job" and "doing a job to get paid". And it's a massive flaw in our society. No-one should hate their job. Why do we do this to people?

> The Protestant Work Ethic is based around the noble sacrifice of people who work vs people who don't. It almost doesn't matter if you enjoy your work. If you don't work, you shouldn't eat, and work is defined as something that someone pays you for.

Forget Protestants, how about Mother Nature? You better reproduce and increase entropy of the universe, and who cares if you enjoy it? It's just reality (unfortunately for us).

> This totally ignores the carers who don't get paid, but look after their relatives (and if they didn't, the state would have to either pay for that care, or let them die and confront some nasty truths). The volunteers who do god's work and never get paid (I'm an atheist, and I think it's horrible that we as a secular society depend on this, but I recognise the work of people of faith supporting our needy). This whole unpaid system of "work" that isn't "work" because we don't pay people to do it.

I actually agree with you here. It is a shame they are not getting paid or some other advantages. UBI could help in this case, but I think there are other solutions that could be more targeted OR society itself could make this more efficient so that either they are paid or it's cheaper to have a service take care of it.

> No-one should hate their job. Why do we do this to people?

Economics explains why people will take on opportunity over another one. It's all about what they are willing to do for a price. And you know what else? If people are able to freely choose any opportunity they can have in a particular place and choose it, it means that it is (in their eyes) the best one available for them.

And it's also relative. There will literally always be people who are dissatisfied with their job if not just because everyone else has a better one (in their eyes).

Is the system perfect? No--hell no. We can help people change careers if they want to and increase social mobility etc., but UBI is not the only way. I think a targeted approach is more efficient than just giving everyone money

That's just wrong. A Basic Income is nothing like a retirement pension.

The 'B' stands for 'Basic'. Most of us already work to get better things. That won't change.

Its a strawman that won't die - that the Basic Income is going to make people well-off for no work.

I try to assume good faith with these people – that it's not a straw argument –, but in doing so, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place:

• I can assume they're just wrong, and don't understand the implications of what they're saying, ignoring other people because they're profoundly confused

• or I can assume, instead, that they believe the basic entitlement of all people is less than the staying alive threshold – i.e., that human life doesn't have inherent value.

I hope this is a false dichotomy.

I can try to provide a perspective.

From what moral authority do positive rights originate? (a right that requires someone to provide you with a good or service)

From what moral authority do negative rights originate? (a right that prevents somebody from interfering with you or harming you)

Over the course of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, negative rights have been developed successfully in legal systems around the world. We've seen demonstrable evidence that enforcing protections of negative rights results in a happier and more productive population.

Different countries have also, generally more recently, brought forth positive rights by various means- welfare programs, socialism, full communism, or otherwise.

People that tend to care more about negative rights than positive rights tend toward right-libertarianism. Positive rights, in a sense, require those who can provide to forfeit some of their freedom, in order to help those who require it. There is a non-zero risk that a well-meaning welfare or socialist policy fails in its mission despite good intentions. Many of the communist states with the most heartfelt populist movements have seen the deepest failures. So in the right-libertarian mindset, there is a risk of a two-fold (or perhaps threefold) failure:

-It promised to provide (positive rights) prosperity to all, and it didn't

-It had to trample on the negative rights of the wealthy to try to redistribute their wealth

-(more vague)It eroded many individuals' notion of self-determination in the process, and in doing so left them less likely to work towards their own values.

Separately, there's the important notion of what the "staying alive threshold" is. Almost nobody in G7 countries dies of hunger or thirst, and those who do were likely in a crisis not determined by lack of access. Statistically, life expectancy increases with income up to and past $100,000/yr. The spectrum in between is fraught.

Or you could try actually assuming good faith, and assume that rather than being evil people who want people to die or simply "confused", most critics of UBI take the view that people who need state support to have enough money to live should still be able to get it (conditional on signalling their willingness to work for it if able to, rather than citizenship) and people who do not need state support to have enough money to live on shouldn't automatically receive the same amount of money. The choice isn't between life and death, the choice is between some real or hypothetical welfare state system approximation of "to each according to his need" and "to each irrespective of his need"

And it's absolutely not a straw man argument to say that a UBI is equivalent to a non-contributory pension for the much younger though (unless you believe that state pensions should be too little to survive on!) and well-evidenced that the average person retires earlier when offered state pensions earlier, especially if (unlike many of the workers funding pensions) they've already paid off mortgages.

The basic entitlement of “staying alive” requires somebody else to produce something and give it to you.

Why should they use up their finite life for your benefit - unless you are prepared to do the same in return.

If human life has inherent value why do you believe that you should have command of a chunk of somebody else’s?

The capital endowment of society is already used up paying for those who are retired, so you can’t call in that.

This is the big lie of opponents to the UBI. Nobody is doing much of anything so somebody can have a toaster. It's made in an automated factory from automated delivery of automatedly accumulated raw materials.

Yes, yes, of course some engineers and truck driver and so on were involved. But one person for every 10,000 toasters, because automation.

The lie comes in when the equivalency is made between somebody getting a 'free' anything, and somebody had to sacrifice for that, or work for that. This is no longer the case, and hasn't been for decades.

Automation has made it possible to provide for almost everybody, with a tiny fraction of the inputs it used to take 50 years ago. But folks who's impression of what a factory is, or what work means was made in the 1950's keep exclaiming incredulously "Who will make things, if everybody has a UBI?!"

At root I blame the Protestant Work Ethic. Well-meaning folks want to keep believing that hard work results in a commensurate benefit. This has been a diminishing force in America at least, for decades. In our lifetimes it will disappear.

UBI really stands for "Unemployment Benefit Increase" - since that is effectively what it ends up being once you look past the monetary obfuscation and net everything off. It has to be sufficient to allow people to live on permanently, or it isn't an actual income. Any less and it becomes a wage subsidy to private employers, and we already know that doesn't work thanks to many years experience with 'tax credits' or 'Earned Income Tax Credits' (depending on your jurisdiction).

Ultimately if there are fewer jobs than there are people that want them, then wages get competed down - particularly in the secondary job market where individuals are near interchangeable. Give people money and the wages get competed down further. Which is what we see with the few retired people who continue to work. Very often they will volunteer just for something to do.

Offer a competing public job and you get a different effect. People move to that job and earn a wage. There is no argument about 'living incomes' then - if you are giving up your 8 hours you deserve a living wage. Private employers have to compete to get labour, rather than having it subsidised. Private wages are held up - particularly in the secondary job market which is changed overnight from a 'gig' economy into a 'talent' economy.

The private firms at that level will struggle pass the cost on, because if they do then those on the public job scheme will be permitted to replace them. You can't do that with an unemployed buffer stock. You can with an employed one that you can direct.

The resolution process in the 'battle of the markups' is moved from wage earners to low capital depth operations that frankly add very little value and ought to be competed out of existence by their higher capital depth competitors.

except that the reason why the whole Basic Income thing started was due to automation's possible effect on the job market. As I understood it, it's more about a future where there simply aren't enough jobs on the low end to work, or the economics would make them like Mechanical Turk; impossible to actually live on.

There won't be jobs for a lot of people to work to add to it.

> That's just wrong. A Basic Income is nothing like a retirement pension.

>The 'B' stands for 'Basic'. Most of us already work to get better things. That won't change.

To me UBI is like a pension because you're getting a monthly payment for not doing anything. Your point doesn't really refute that.

'Like a pension' means a whole lot of things, not just one cherry-picked feature. Pensions are enough to live on for instance.

Might as well call a dividend a pension - you get that 'unearned' as well.

> They do, or we wouldn't have any retired people.

Most software engineers or equivalent workers could retire right now or within a few years with their savings if they kept their expenses at what basic income would give. Yet basically none of them do it, why?

Because there is no guarantee that future expenses (medical, food, housing) will be fixed in cost

There you go, there is no guarantee of future UBI either.

> They do stop doing the shitty underpaid jobs that no-one wants to do if they can possibly avoid it. This is good. Those jobs need to be redesigned because they're shitty.

Re-designing jobs to be less shitty is one way, of course, but the reason they were not already done is not because the owners are evil per-se, but because it is too expensive, etc

See real world UBI examples in middle-east, where citizens get money, most of the world is done by imported labor, 2nd class citizens that are treated terribly, but their govt. and citizens are ok with the status quo.

So, here, we will have the worst of both worlds... - No money to pay for it ( No, the Fed printing press is not the equivalent of oil ) - More people to take care of.

> get out of this bullshit Protestant Work Ethic mindset that work is about suffering

Well, you created the strawman.

It is more about the values of diligence and discipline, no different from anything you want to achieve, like excelling in sports, arts, etc

> Re-designing jobs to be less shitty is one way, of course, but the reason they were not already done is not because the owners are evil per-se, but because it is too expensive, etc

Or simply because they don't have to. Too expensive is very often code for "Sure, I could change the job, but that would cost ME something and I still get enough workers without doing it, so ..."

sure, we are witnessing mini-experiments like the raise in minimum wages in various areas across the country, and we get to witness the 2nd order effects - some beneficial, and some not ( some even unexpected )

An impartial observer will hopefully make predictions (driven by his biases, of course) but in a few years, use the hindsight to learn lessons.

> If the only reason you work is because you're paid to do it, find another line of work.

Find another line of work, sure. Quit your job without getting a new one and expect me to pay all of your expenses the rest of your life, not so much.

whats 300m * $1,000 a month? This is my biggest argument against UBI cause even 1,000 a month won't cut it in most us cities.

> This is my biggest argument against UBI cause even 1,000 a month won't cut it in most us cities.

What cities exist where you get more than $1,000/person-month in means-tested welfare?

Any benefit beyond the current means-tested welfare maximums from UBI is gravy; the main point is to replace means-tested welfare with a system that removes administative costs produced by duplication of function and perverse incentives created by fubding cliffs.

That's $1.2 trillion per year.

The USA spends $1.03 trillion per year on benefits at the moment, [0]. Most of that will be replaced. That's only federal benefits - more is spent by states.

I don't think this covers the administration costs of policing the benefits system (but I'm not sure).

There's also the veteran's pay and benefits which isn't technically part of this, but would be less necessary with UBI.

It's roughly equal to what the whole benefits system costs now.

[0] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...

It's not supposed to be $1000 to each and everyone just like that. That's be too much for pretty much any government. But imagine that you give $1000 to a person without a job. Then said person gets a job and for every $1 they earn, you subtract $0.5 (or any other fraction that makes sense) from the UBI. When that person earns $2000 they do not get any more UBI. The majority of people with a job is not going to get any UBI, but they have that security should they lose their job. It will also be targeted at the people who earn the least amount of money.

This is the definition of UBI (from Wikipedia):

> Universal basic income (UBI), also called unconditional basic income [...] is a sociopolitical financial transfer concept in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a legally stipulated and equal financial grant paid by the government without a means test.

Adding a means test to ensure that only some people receive the income would make it non-universal. You're describing a classic unemployment welfare system, but proponents of UBI argue that a universal income is simpler to administer and creates fewer perverse incentives.

People would still pay taxes on income. If the taxes you pay are larger than the UBI amount then you effectively don't receive it any more, even if it's accounted in the way that you receive $1000 UBI and then pay $1000 (or $2000 or $5000) in taxes.

In pretty much every developed economy, the government spends between 30% and 50% of GDP. The US economy is $21 trillion. $1000 per month for 300 M people is $3.6 trillion, or about 17%. It's within the realm of a political choice.

And of course the US doesn't actually have 300 M people over 18, 20% are under 16.

And also consider, that UBI would be clawed back via taxes for the majority of the population. And consider that social security is already accounted in the current spending.

The number is feasible for the US, though it would be one of the larger spending programs ever conceived. But not impossible.

> And consider that social security is already accounted in the current spending.

Social security is not means-tested welfare.

I presume that if we had a UBI, then we wouldn't also have social security (or social security would be a smaller layer on top of SS). If that is the case, then my point was that we can ignore the individuals currently receiving SS when accounting for the net additional costs of UBI.

> I presume that if we had a UBI, then we wouldn't also have social security

Why do you presume that? Its common for UBI advocates to advocate it (at least as it matures) replacing means-tested benefits; its a lot less common for them to advocate it replacing other things, including earned benefits.

That is fair, it is less commonly advocated. And further, as a political matter, I don't think social security is going anywhere even with UBI.

But just from a cost standpoint, it seems unlikely that we could actually afford a UBI would that actually provides universal-net-income. In practice those making above a certain threshold (from actual work, investments, or pensions/social-security) would have some kind of claw-back baked into the tax-system. The system still needs to be universal, everyone gets UBI payments, so that we don't cause the perverse effects of current means-tested programs, yet in practice, many individuals would just pay-back the UBI in taxes.

> But just from a cost standpoint, it seems unlikely that we could actually afford a UBI would that actually provides universal-net-income.

The point of UBI isn’t provide a universal net income, that’s plainly impossible (at least, from first order effects; after factoring in induced economic growth, it may be possible, but it is still not the point.)

The point is to eliminate the welfare trap posed by rapid early clawback of outside income in means-tested welfare programs, and eliminate the inefficiencies of redundant tax and welfare bureaucracies. If you tie in taxes on capital income as a progreasive taxes on non-capital income, it can also be a way to mitigate inequality driven by progressive automation and other factors driving returns to capital and a narrow subset of labor.

3.6T a month? that would be greater than the whole of the US economy every year. Taxes are only a portion of that, so we would probably be spending 60-70% more than we are making from taxes on just UBI and no other social programs.

> 3.6T a month?

No.

with P as “person(s)":

300MP × 1k$/P/mo = 300G$/mo

300G$/mo × 12mo/yr = 3.6T$/yr

UBI isn't a solution to poverty. Anyone who thinks that hasn't understood the underlying problems the "free market" and hence capitalism suffers from.

I have come to the realization that a perfectly free market is impossible as human nature and psychology dictates its self destruction. What is needed is a free market without the self destructive behavior. The five biggest candidates: export/import surpluses, excessive cash hoarding, rent seeking and cash inheritance [0]. The solution to these problems can involve a UBI but the UBI is never meant to achieve poverty reduction or provide bargaining power or whatever specific goal UBI proponents have in mind. It is merely a fair distribution mechanism.

Think of a speeding ticket whose payment is then used for a UBI. The point isn't that suddenly everyone can afford more things. The point is that a fine is a good punishment for a minor offense but the proceeds should not be used to fund the government lest it starts enforcing the law for the sake of government funding.

You can solve these 5 problems with taxation and fines and then redistribute the proceeds to everyone. The benefit will not come from the UBI, it will come from the fact that we cease self destructive behavior. Without the self destructive behavior we will be richer in real terms without engaging in a single hour of work. In other words, UBI is a good idea but not as a replacement for unemployment benefits.

[0] Cash represents a debt that society owes to the holder of the cash. Such a thing should never be inherited or held onto for long periods of time. If someone were to decide to spend all their money on stocks or gold and let their children inherit these tangibles, they would be acting in an exemplary manner as property should not be touched. As money represents the future property of others (it is not your property yet), it must not pass on.

People can trade cash for property, so the "debt that society owes to the holder" is transferrable.

As such, why can't people transfer cash to their descendants directly? What's the point of trading it for property, which can then be traded back to cash anyway?

Bargaining power fixes:

Provide 'employment transition' by banking vacation carry over and get paid out when someone quits (optionally paid at the otherwise normal rate over time until depleted).

Medicare for all with dental, vision and hearing - Single payer healthcare so that it isn't tied to a job, and helps return those out of work to work if our medical tech is sufficient.

Make current US job benefits (vacation, sick pay, medical co-coverage) paid by taxes on corporations proportional to the pay for workers. Hourly workers should pro-rated with E.G. 20 hours of work for 'full benefits'. Also require hourly jobs to be scheduled in advance in some fair way that doesn't de-facto allow an abusive employer to have someone on call without paying them to be on call.

The socialization of the vacation benefits also benefits corporations, since they would no longer hold those assets on their balance sheet as liabilities.

You could simply just stop treating vacation time as a perk or something you earn and, instead, simply give everyone paid vacation time.

It doesn't have to be expensive: Norway collects taxes in a way that means you basically fund your own vacation: The downside is that you don't get that money if you didn't work last year, but there is a push to fix that.

And I completely agree about scheduling: Employers should pay extra for changing a schedule in too short of a frame. Yes, this also means that everyone might get paid extra for releasing the schedule too late.

I'd also add that everyone should have the right to work contracts. At a minimum, it'd state how to break the contract (fair notice, both sides, exceptions apply), rate of pay, number of hours expected (even for salary workers), and a start date.

> UBI means that anyone who's able to live frugally may, at any time, retire

Will never happen: a soon as it starts rolling to a significant number of people, the minimal rent set by landlords will be the amount of UBI. In addition to its other issues, it can't work in a market where landlords can freely set their rents.

Landlords' bargaining power goes down a lot once people don't have to live somewhere where there are jobs available.

On the other hand: with UBI even the landlords in the middle of nowhere can demand higher rent, since everyone now has a spare $1000 per month

Laws of economy are like laws of physics: you cannot cheat them. All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything, but no poor person will be better off because of it.

Small scale experiments on UBI are successful only because they are small scale, so they cannot affect economy at large. Once you make UBI truly universal the reality kicks in, and inflation eats it all.

> with UBI even the landlords in the middle of nowhere can demand higher rent

If that was happen it would only encourage people on UBI to buy the cheapest houses or by land to build. Not being bound to a location, they would be able to do so easily.

> All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything [...] inflation eats it all.

Plain false. UBI does not create new money out of nowhere.

Of course UBI will create new money - how else are you going to finance it? Giving each adult American $1000 per month would cost at least $2.5 trillion. Let's assume that UBI replaces all other Social Security spending - that's currently $1.2T, so you are still $1.3T short. You cannot collect that much in new taxes.

Even assuming that you somehow manage to finance UBI with tax raises alone think about what you'll be doing: you would be moving money from the rich to the poor, which sounds good in theory, until you realize that rich people and corporations keep their money in financial assets. Now, the reason why all the FED money printing so far caused only mild inflation is because the money flew to financial markets. If you use taxes to redirect it to common people then you are doubly screwing them: you are crashing stock markets, ruining their 401(k) savings, and at the same time causing price inflation of everyday things.

> Of course UBI will create new money

Not at all. In a lot of countries it's not possible to arbitrarily create money out of nowhere.

Most proposed UBI implementation replace the existing welfare and a plethora of financial aids, programs and tax reliefs, leaving the overall tax rates roughly similar to the existing one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

That dynamic only really works when the supply is fixed. Many places don't restrict the supply of building more, or denser, homes the way the big coastal cities foolishly prefer.

As demand and prices rise, supply will to rise to meet it, if not physically or legally constrained.

> On the other hand: with UBI even the landlords in the middle of nowhere can demand higher rent, since everyone now has a spare $1000 per month

There are still no jobs there, so either those landlords keep the rent low enough that people can afford some kind of existence on UBI, or their houses stand empty (like they do at the moment). And competition would limit rent - on a national scale there is already a lot more housing than needed and the result is that rent is very low in flyover country, but people still can't afford to live there, whereas landlords in the cities that have jobs are currently a de facto oligopoly that can squeeze and squeeze.

> Laws of economy are like laws of physics: you cannot cheat them. All the UBI will do is it will raise the nominal prices of everything, but no poor person will be better off because of it.

At first order UBI is wealth transfer not wealth creation - the working poor will be better off, the middle/upper class will be worse off. At second order UBI unlocks a lot of real value that's currently a deadweight loss: people who could work for a few hours a week, but don't because that would lose them their benefits. It frees up the labour that's currently burned on complex benefit administration to be redirected to doing something productive instead. And by making it easier for people to change jobs, get training/education, or start a business, it increases labour efficiency.

There is no free lunch in economics, and if anyone tells you their policy will make people better off then you're right to ask where the brass tacks of that value creation actually lie. But UBI has some compelling answers.

Where I live it is reasonably common to have housing co-ops in larger towns and cities. Rent is much more affordable because their goal is sustainability, not profit extraction.

>Will never happen: a soon as it starts rolling to a significant number of people, the minimal rent set by landlords will be the amount of UBI.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VanDwellers

There are plenty of country towns that are rapidly emptying due to lack of jobs, and literally offer to sell you a house for $1 if you commit to living in it (and maintaining it) for a year. An awful lot of small towns are desperate for new residents.

There's no actual housing shortage. There's a shortage of housing near the jobs.

But even if that's not the case, riddle me this: how much does rural land cost? An average of ~$3000/acre in the USA (an acre is 4046sqm). Source: https://www.landsoar.com/acre-of-land-cost/

If landlords increase the cost of rent, people will just build cheap houses in cheap areas.

It's true locally but you can always move away so it is not a global problem.

The bigger problem is that you have to punish working people with an income tax that funds the UBI. In most cases taxation is basically a punishment for bad behavior. You can optimize taxes the same way you can optimize profits. Tax involving activities cut into profits, so they should be avoided, at least from the perspective of an accountant.

i.e. people don't stop working because they have money, they stop working because they get less money from work

Ubi will only allow people to retire if it's a substantial amount. Can society really afford that right now?

Will this increase the number of houses available? I think the opposite.

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