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Comment by od2m | Hacker News Reader

So sick of non-economists advocating economic policy which they don't understand.

Welfare programs of any type are only viable when the ratio of payers to payee's is high. They're desirable at this level. However, entitling every citizen to money which for he does not have to work for exposes the government to UNLIMITED liability as humans are free to create more humans at any time they choose. We cannot expand the GDP any time we would like, in fact paying people not to work removes the excess value of their labor from the GDP (assuming there was a job for them).

When you total up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid debts the United States is completely broke. Something on the order of 100 trillion dollars of future liabilities. We can't even afford our modest socialism we have now.

TLDR? The numbers don't work.

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'basic income' or 'negative income tax' is an idea supported by Milton Friedman, who is generally regarded as a knowledgable economist of the Chicago school and a critic of many aspects of the Keynesian welfare state. You may know Milton Friedman from such economic ideas as 'fiat currency' which has been the dominant monetary policy globally for the last 40 years.

Since non-economists should not be critiquing economic policy according to you, may I ask what your credentials are in this field?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

NIT and BI are to diffrent things but with simular spirit. Make it rule based, simple to administer and most importently keep to the principle, if you work you get more money.

Uhh.... fiat currency is not monetary policy. You meant monetarism, which has most certainly not been the dominant monetary policy for the last 40 years. It's been influential, yes. There have been periods of time in which it has been in vogue, yes, but you certainly cannot call it the dominant monetary policy globally for the last 40 years..

There's no need for a basic income to be set so high that it subsidizes infinite children. If the BI for a family of four was $25,000 in today's money for example, any more children than two would be as financially uncomfortable as it is today.

The key to basic income is to make the amount paid enough to live, but not to live well. The more basic the income becomes, the less incentive it creates not to work. In addition we have more people who want jobs than there are jobs available in our current economy. We can tweak the numbers without wrecking the whole system.

You have it backwards. Most industrialized countries are below the replacement rate even with current monetary incentives (e.g. tax breaks) to have children. Kids are an enormous financial burden to parents, and financially they benefit the wider society, not the parents. Assuming you don't want social security (or its equivalents) collapsing, you want to incentivize having children at least to the replacement rate.

I keep hearing about social security collapsing without more children, but I don't see how adding more people helps unless they contribute some production. Having more kids that will, 30 years from now, wind up unemployed or doing some unproductive job (let's say dog psychologist) not only doesn't alleviate the burden, it even makes it worse. Is "dog psychologist" really useful to society?

If your choices are "30 years from now, I'll have to support myself" or "30 years from now, I'll have to support myself and 2 unemployed kids living with me", what do you pick?

I think the problem might solve itself anyway. What old people will need in the future (as they do now) are goods, services and care (they'll need food, shelter and medical care). Traditionally, kids provided these to their parents in their old age; who grows their own food anymore? With all the increase in automation we're seeing, old people need their kids less and less, if someone else gives them food and care anyway.

It's interesting that there's another HN article talking about the benefits of a four-month paternity leave - https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/996111776858 I seem to remember that one of the reasons Europe has longer maternity and paternity leave is because of the need to increase birthrates post WWII.

So basic income might work given current levels of employment and GDP et cetera, but it might not work in other cases. And what might happen in those other cases is really bad: unlimited liability. Got it. But why should that be the end of the conversation? Sounds more like a challenge that might have an answer or it might not. Saying "it can't work" doesn't really help.

$100 trillion! Wow, what a big number!

But completely meaningless unless you give a timeframe for the future liabilities. How long do you expect the United States to last for? Twenty years? 100 years? 1,000 years?

An unfunded liability is money you've promised to pay and don't have, I.E. debt.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732335320457812...

Why must the basic income payout be held constant?

I would advocate adjusting the payout on a regular basis. Ensure that the program neither massively hoards assets or runs more than minor deficits.

The United States is not broke and cannot go broke unless we foolishly decide to. Please read: http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf or spend 2 hours to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg

"we're broke" thinking is what causes the http://www.lostoutputclock.com/ to keep on turning, and that lost output is the health and welfare of our citizens.

Austerity mindset has had catastrophic results in Europe, and it starts with the assertion that "we're broke" or "we can't afford it", both of which are completely untrue as far as the U.S. is concerned.

IMHO GDP, dollars, etc. have nothing to do with this problem. Currently there is a huge overproduction of food, clothes, shoes, etc. for the US citizen. All that huge ads industry is only there to force people to eat more, throw out their perfectly good clothes, shoes, cars, phones, etc. because of fashion. It's no problem really to meat the needs of additional people in case a basic income produces those.

Social Security isn't welfare. We pay wages (FICA) into that. It's just like hiring a rather crappy financial advisor.

High birth rates mean more youth to contribute to the working population to deal with the ever increasing number of retirees, a sort of policy that Japan could benefit from! What if people on basic income got more money as they got older?

One problem I read about is that a lot of Japanese young men aren't working, just sitting around at home all day (living with their parents). Not only are they not contributing to society, they're actually living off their parents. This comes from a recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5993441

> So sick of non-economists advocating economic policy which they don't understand.

tell us about your credentials as an economist

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