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Comment by astrodust | Hacker News Reader

The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately.

The Mincome experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome) dabbled with this idea and the results were rather surprising. Most people seemed to want to work rather than loaf around and collect benefits.

Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate loopholes be "crazy"? Would investigating why trillions of dollars in tax havens have somehow escaped oversight be "crazy"?

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> The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately.

This idea does not stand up to any scrutiny at all. The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.

> Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate loopholes be "crazy"? Would investigating why trillions of dollars in tax havens have somehow escaped oversight be "crazy"?

None of those suggestions would come anywhere near the amount of money needed for a BI program.

> The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program.

Most of the cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is in validating and enforcing the conditions on beneficiaries. Unconditional Basic Income avoids these costs quite directly.

I honestly don't think any bureaucracy would be trimmed whatsoever; it'd be replaced. All of those government jobs wouldn't be cut, they'd be moved to the new program. No matter how simple you try to make it, something like this would end up ridiculously complicated. You'd need a bureau in charge of deciding how much a person in each zip code gets, how much taxes to raise, which taxes to raise, monitor improvement, monitor areas for local government abuse (billing the federal government for fake people to get the extra cash, as an off-the-cuff example), etc.

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