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Comment by mantas | Hacker News Reader

And Scandinavian or German systems are in pretty bad shape. Both hard to finance (see Denmark raising pension age to 70) and lots of people getting thrown out of the system for minuscule reasons (German pensioners collecting deposit bottles to make ends meet is not unheard of).

In euro style systems very few people receive welfare at a given time. Many people may receive it at some point in lifetime, but not at the same time. UBI would completely change the picture.

On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work. Thus UBI would have to be much higher as current welfare. Unless you expect citizens to live on UBI but keep services cheap with cheap migrant labor.

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> On top of that, salaries for basic jobs would need to get much higher to incentivize people to work.

Not true. The 'B' in UBI means 'Basic'. UBI wil pay your rent, utilities, and food, but not much else. Now, there are some people that are willing to just exist on only the bare minimum, but that's a significant minority. The vast majority of people want more. There will be plenty of people willing to do minimum wage jobs to top-up their UBI so they can afford extras like holidays, nicer phones, meals out, etc...

The main difference would be that the security of UBI would give them more power to distch a job if they were being abused in some way, rather than being so desperate that even if their employer is abusing them they are forced to take it because they need the job to survive.

I feel like too much discussion on UBI is poisoned by the idea that the vast majority of people are bone idle and are willing to just sit at home doing nothing and just existing with the bare minumum required to live. It's just not true

It's not that the majority of people would prefer to be idle, but that right now we manage to make some really uncomfortable jobs pay very little. It's not that you'd not find people to, say, work concessions at the movie theater. It's that the pay for harvesting a whole lot of crops, or do roofing work, will not work out . It's the same reason few Americans do those jobs in the US already.

It would be good for those jobs to be paid more while people like CEOs make less.

A lot of jobs pay only „basic“ money. How do you make somebody do those jobs with UBI?

It would be 'basic' money in addition to your UBI money.

Then society still ends up paying 2x basic amount - both in UBI and salary. So price is much bigger. Now make it that much bigger across many jobs….

Yes, financing UBI can be a problem. Exact details depend on the exact design and amounts, and what level of taxation (and what kinds of taxes) you use to finance it.

It's not related to financing sources of UBI. If UBI provides „basic“ incomes and you pay „basic“ salary on top, society is now paying 2x „basic“ units.

No matter how you finance it, you can find other (better or worse) means to spend collected money.

The only thing that really matters are net payments (and marginal net payments, ie how many cents can you keep from the next gross dollar you earn). It doesn't really matter whether the effective marginal tax rate is made up of income tax or a phasing out of welfare benefits or a combination of both (and throw in some other taxes etc, too).

In the name of simplicity, you might want to have a single government agency that assesses your income and net worth. Instead of having both the tax people and the welfare agencies do that and duplicate work.

So instead of having welfare payments phase out, you could just increase marginal income taxes by the same amount, and end up with exactly the same net payment structure.

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