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Comment by seahawks78 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it is especially if you are living in one of metro regions/tech hubs i.e. SF Bay area, Seattle, NYC etc.

Grad student stipend checking in. $21k/year in a large metro area (although not quite on the level of SF/NYC expensive). Median household income in my city is ~$100k/year.

Yes this is "enough" but no, it is not enough (especially after having worked and lived for a few years in a medium/low cost of living city).

That being said, $5k/month for "basic expenses" is definitely ridiculous. NYC/SF COL is like 30% more expensive than where I'm living, not a full 2.8x more expensive for basic expenses.

Edit: Also worth noting that in this context the $5k/month is spendable, so in SF for example this translates to about $82k/year pre-tax income, which according to the 2019 census is well above the median individual income of ~$52k.

Those are places that force poor people out because not everyone can live there. What kind of logic makes you believe that every single individual should obtain the right to live there for free? There is a reason why those places are expensive, because a huge amount of people wants to live there.

Most people don't.

The number itself as it pertains to cost of living isn't ridiculous, but the implied policy proposal of "let's give everyone $5000 so people in high CoL areas can cover their basic expenses!" is ridiculous. The #1 cause of high CoL in those areas is because it's a desirable place to live and there are more people who want to live there than there are housing units, so people bid up the price. Giving everyone $5000 wouldn't make it suddenly affordable, because everyone would just increase their bids by $5000, causing the situation to be the same.

No I didn't mean blanket 5k to everyone. It could very well be dependent on the place you live. 1k - 5k might be an acceptable range. If you live in NYC you get more, rural Alabama may be not so much. But you get the idea.

Assuming that not everyone can be successful in life (in spite of having boatloads of IQ + work ethic) UBI might be one of the few ways left to reduce generational in-equality. Don't get me wrong - I am no fan of socialism/communism and I understand the problems that come with a collectivist mindset. But I am also practical. I certainly don't want to live in a dystopia where a select few "masters of the universe" type rule over vast swathe of humanity.

>It could very well be dependent on the place you live.

Then it would have to be funded with local taxes. Why should people with a median salary pay taxes so that someone can get a UBI that is higher than the median salary?

>Assuming that not everyone can be successful in life (in spite of having boatloads of IQ + work ethic) UBI might be one of the few ways left to reduce generational in-equality.

Or you could just get rid of money hoarding and land hoarding. Just think about it. The time people spend unemployed or underemployed is gone but the money isn't. Thus the value of the claim to labor (money) is greater than what the economy can support. The inevitable result is inequality just from a pure logical perspective. The conventional solution had been to just let the economy grow endlessly so that the economy becomes strong enough to support all the freeloaders. Alternatively you let inflation act as a soft default on that unsustainable claim to labor.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-...

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