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Comment by johnohara | Hacker News Reader

Last week Breitbart threw a number of 144,000,000 as the current number of working adults in the United States. It sounded about right.

Let's use 150,000,000 instead and pay them a basic income of $20,800 per yr ($400 per wk, $10 per hr). That's $3.120T with a "T", just south of scheduled 2013 U.S. federal expenditures of $3.803T -- with a $900B deficit.

A BI would double federal expenditures. Honestly, how likely is it for a guaranteed basic income to pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the POTUS in the next 5, 10, or 25 years?

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Not double, actually, because part of the point of a basic income is to replace much of what we currently think of as welfare. For example, Social Security as we know it could simply vanish, its function completely replaced by the basic income. In theory, salaries for government employees of all types could also be reduced by an amount equal to the basic income, leading to no change in take-home pay but saving money within the programs which employ them.

Nevertheless, as you point out, it would necessarily represent a massive expansion in federal spending: on the order of 50% or more.

That's a pretty unfair straw man. One of the most oft-cited "points" of BI is the savings related to cutting tax breaks and social programs. I'm not well-versed with the numbers, but I've heard these are pretty high.

In addition, "higher taxes for those with above-middle-class incomes" to balance out the expenditure is an almost universally quoted corollary of BI. Citing the cost of BI without the obviously necessary offsets isn't constructive.

An alternative implementation, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, would be a negative income tax (NIT). This would work by establishing a 'baseline' wage, and if someone is below that baseline, they are subject to a negative tax (i.e. they receive money from the government). This would probably be a much cheaper method of establishing a BI, as only those with low or no wages would receive the benefit, but would also allow for massive reductions in welfare programs. Something to consider.

Wouldn't basic income replace many of the means-tested assistance programs? There's cost savings not being accounted for.

Could it be a sliding scale? So, if you're not working you get $20k, but if you can earn $5k you get $19k, etc? That way getting a job is financially incentivized, but the government doesn't need to support people who are perfectly capable of earning $70k on their own.

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