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Comment by dandare | Hacker News Reader

UNIVERSAL

You keep using that world.

I don't think it means what you think it means.

I'm strongly in favour of a UBI. It totally makes sense, at least in wealthy Western societies; there's a whole expensive bureaucracy involved in means testing, prosecuting welfare fraud, and so on.

But to make it work, it has to be Universal, i.e. everyone gets it automatically.

I hate government welfare programs about as much as possible, but the "administrative overhead" arguments I see from UBI advocates really doesn't make much sense. The savings from eliminating most overhead in welfare programs isn't nearly as much money as most UBI advocates seem to think. Roughly 5% of the cost of the food stamp program in the US goes to administrative overhead. Social Security (which doesn't have means testing, the only requirement is age-based) spends ~0.6% on overhead. From what I can find about Medicaid, admin costs are generally around 5%. You'd only save ~$40 billion a year if you eliminated all administrative overhead for Medicaid (which is nothing to sneeze at, but it's nowhere near enough to fund a UBI).

People are saying it's a benefit, nobody (maybe with the exception of an occasional misinformed internet commenter, but I don't think I've even seen that) is claiming the saving in reduced admin costs would fully fund UBI. And the fact it wouldn't fully fund it doesn't take away from the fact that saving billions and billions of wasted money wouldn't be a big side-benefit that helps reduce the cost.

UBI would be funded by increased taxation on the wealthiest, but the fact that the majority of current welfare admin costs would be saved reduces the amount of tax-based funding meaning that more benefit comes out of each dollar taxed.

I don't know how you fund UBI; I'm not an economist. But I know it can be done, because I know the government has funded some astonishlingly costly projects.

The thing about UBI is that it takes away financial terror from everyone; whatever happens, you won't have to beg on the pavement. Socialized health assures you that you won't be forced to sell your family's home if you get ill.

It's hard to measure the value of these social goods, so they don't get measured. But they are undeniably goods.

Where are you getting the overhead numbers? Does that include non-reimbursed costs to beneficiaries that were eligible but not receiving due to bureaucracy? What about other externalities incurred in the process?

The SSA (and the agencies over various other welfare programs) publish overhead costs, etc. No idea if they account for the concerns you mentioned or not:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

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