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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

>"dismantling some/all of the existing welfare state."

I think this is going to be a nigh insurmountable hurdle. To be upfront, I do not support UBI and I am extremely skeptical of it. But plenty of my friends on 'the left' adore the idea.

I don't believe the same people who champion a UBI would suddenly become cold and say to a disabled recipient, "No, you will not get extra money because of your special needs. You will get nothing else because we dismantled your welfare benefits in order to give everyone a UBI."

The response, then, would to be adjust the UBI payment amount for individuals with special needs to make up for the loss of those other welfare payments they needed to live. But to do that you would still need some sort of bureaucracy in order to assess claims and increase the payout. So in the end, can you even say you've replaced welfare with a UBI?

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To realize the premise of what would originally have been called UBI would in fact require UBI is in fact enough money to support a disabled person. This is a significant barrier to any incremental rollout.

I'm not speaking for everyone who supports UBI, but converting the existing welfare model to UBI doesn't necessarily mean removing private charity/non-profits organizations.

Having UBI means those organizations can be more focused and targeted, leading to better help for individuals in need.

What if they don't? What if a religious charity/non-profit refuses to support gay or lesbian people with disabilities? If we dismantled the welfare state to fund UBI, then those who need the most would be at the mercy of whatever organizations are around to help them.

Hence the “some/all” in the quoted text, yes?

Yes, and I'm not quite sure whether the GP was leaning more towards the 'some' or the 'all' side. I've encountered a lot of UBI proponents who fall into the 'all' camp, and use that as a selling point. I think the 'some' side is what would realistically happen, and even then, I think it would only end up being a tiny amount of the welfare system that ends up getting dismantled. Simply because the people fighting for UBI also fight against inequity and getting rid of programs specifically to fight inequity will be anathema to them.

> I don't believe the same people who champion a UBI would suddenly become cold and say to a disabled recipient, "No, you will not get extra money because of your special needs. You will get nothing else because we dismantled your welfare benefits in order to give everyone a UBI."

Yep, I’ve been saying this forever. Once UBI is implemented you’re going to hear countless sob stories about how <some unexpected event occurred> and now the UBI recipient can’t afford food or rent. So there will be a push to implement some sort of emergency backstop behind UBI for these situations. And then a number of people will learn to exploit this system for extra bucks by claiming some sort of emergency, every single month.

The problem with all these feel good social programs is that the proponents always assume that everyone will behave properly and follow the rules as intended. They never account for the 10-20% of people who just want to game the system and ultimately cause its downfall.

> ”The problem with all these feel good social programs is that the proponents always assume that everyone will behave properly and follow the rules as intended. They never account for the 10-20% of people who just want to game the system and ultimately cause its downfall.”

No social program in the world ever accounted for fraud, and every one of them has suffered a terrifying downfall. Where once prospered the Kingdom of Sweden now only a barren crater remains, laid to waste by naive social programs.

> They never account for the 10-20% of people who just want to game the system and ultimately cause its downfall.

Your estimate is off by an order of magnitude or two. Welfare programs have fraud rates in ranging from tenths of a percent to a couple of percentage points[1]. Most of that fraud is actually conducted by businesses that are serving customers who receive benefits.

[1] https://ivn.us/2014/04/01/really-responsible-welfare-fraud

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