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Comment by dskloet | Hacker News Reader

That's a terrible way to implement UBI. It causes the dreaded welfare trap where people are incentivized to do nothing. UBI should be unconditional. This makes it much easier to implement, removes the stigma, and most importantly avoids the welfare trap. You want people who rely on welfare to be encouraged to become self sufficient, not trap them in dependence.

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Welfare traps are a policy feature for company owners who employ a lot of people. It's a strong disincentive for employees who are trapped to ask for a raise.

Nonetheless when they appear their presence is typically (naively) chalked up to simple incompetence.

>Welfare traps are a policy feature for company owners who employ a lot of people.

It's simpler than that. There's not even a need to speculate about outside meddling.

No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program. If you start with the program serving 10k people budget negotiations, getting those job reqs, etc, etc. will be harder if the program is so good that next year there's only 9k people on it. There's a massive incentive to just not give a shit about giving people a bridge to actually get off of welfare because why would any organization actively give a shit about creating a pathway toward making itself less relevant.

>It's simpler than that.

This isnt complicated.

>No bureaucrat or appointee ever got a promotion or got more resources at their disposal for getting people off of government services and shrinking the relevance of the program.

I can remember a number of such examples where there were incentives this being just one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/cruel-...

If business runs government then it's in their interests to keep benefits systems stingy, capricious, hard to navigate and unpredictable as it makes people more reliant on their employers.

Removing it altogether would probably trigger riots but the frog can certainly be boiled.

Is the welfare trap real though? I suspect it may be for tiny minority, but imo most people would prefer to actually do something than sit on their ass and collect money for nothing. Again I may be grossly naïve in this area.

It is absolutely real and the biggest cliffs are for those already working full time.

Here's an example showing how someone making 31k per year needs to find a job making 80k a year to increase their net income.

Regarding who this impacts:

Approximately 35% of Americans make <31k and would see their quality of life go down if they took a job paying >31k.

Another approximately 40% of Americans earn between 31-80K and would be better off financially if they took a pay cut to 30K (at least in the short term). They get to see those making less living better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap#/media/File:Welfa...

OK, that is a different kind of welfare trap. Something similar occurs in the UK, where earning more money from an employer can reduce benefits payments and you end up worse off in real terms. However I was really asking about the welfare trap of "get money for doing literally nothing", which I personally believe is a nonsense that only a tiny minority would be happy doing.

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