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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

We did a type of UBI experiment in the United States with the universal Covid payments. Low income workers got 80% of the salary. Many chose not to work. Why work 40 hours to make 20% more money than the dole? I’m acquaintances with two local business owners, a roofer and a general contractor, and they told me plainly that they were understaffed because their workers were taking a vacation until the Covid payments ended.

Seems like a more valid experiment to me.

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You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic, at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap (i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/18/amazon-wh..., though I can't remember which warehouse had no soap). That is not applicable to UBI.

Also keep in mind that during this time period many schools were closed, so some of these people were staying home to monitor their children, not just "deciding not to work". Parenting is labor.

> You're ignoring the fact that they chose not to work during a pandemic, at jobs that almost universally had very poor protection for employees - little to no PPE, in some cases not even hand sanitizer and/or soap

Are you friends with any roofers?

We need roofs fixed and structures to be made safe to live in. We are still in a pandemic - should we keep paying people not to work? Eventually nature ruins our structures and people are homeless. I just don’t see how your logic is sound.

If you're saying you think rooftops are more important than lives, I don't know what to tell you. If roofers are refusing to show up to work because they'd rather accept fairly small checks from the government, maybe you need to offer them better pay or better health safeguards? We've had lots of people die during all this.

One reason the pandemic has lasted so long is that we've refused to take difficult measures, so instead we drag it out and people keep getting exposed. There are countries on this planet that have gone back to normal without these issues, because they took more difficult measures early on.

It’s called Florida - no one wears masks anywhere there. Death rates are middle of the pack.

Instead of "middle of the pack" you could be at the bottom of the pack like New Zealand - ~15k total cases, 50 deaths reported, vs Florida's 5 million reported cases and 63k deaths. The population ratio is ~1/4, so it's slightly less bad for Florida than it looks. Of course, that's an unreasonable target, but it's an example of a real western nation managing COVID at scale. Your only choice isn't to just let everyone get the disease and hope herd immunity kicks in fast enough while praying that Long COVID doesn't cause problems later.

The actual UBI element in Covid payments was minimal. Most of the money went into traditional unemployment benefits, which make low-income jobs unattractive by increasing the effective tax rate to something like 80% or 90%. That's one of the key issues UBI is supposed to fix.

UBI would require complete restructuring of income taxes and benefits. Everyone would receive a fixed sum every month, standard deductions and other common deductions/tax credits would go away, and you would pay something like 40-50% combined income/payroll tax for every dollar you earn.

It's not basic income if it goes away when you get a job.

A large part of the problem that UBI was envisioned to solve is that means-tested welfare systems can find a steady-state equilibrium as poverty traps (as you noted, if you lose your welfare upon getting a job, the welfare support itself becomes a disincentive to working).

Which is fine, because general contractor business owners and roofing company owners do the least arduous work and make quite a lot of money.

The question is whether UBI reduces willingness to work, not whether small business owners struggling agrees with your politics, i.e. it is not “fine”.

It is "fine" actually, because if your UBI competes favourably with the wages you'd otherwise pay, those tiny wages are in some sense risk mitigation. You bank margin so you can ride out when the work or workers evaporate temporarily, then someone sinks the expense when you eventually need to pay or charge more, and it's probably not them because they can't afford roofs in the first place.

My politics have nothing to do with it. I know roofers, roofing company owners, general contractors, construction workers, and others. I am a contractor, and I'm struggling. It's fine

They "chose" not to work because the whole entire point was encouraging people not to work during a pandemic.

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