Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

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I've never really heard of anyone proposing a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on

I've heard of lots of people proposing a very small guaranteed payment from the state, as in, bare minimum for subsistence-level food and shelter, on the order of $10,000/year. You would not be able to "party every night for life" on such a pension.

The idea is that it would lubricate the job market, reducing the costs of employment, by taking some of the social benefits-providing responsibility away from employers and giving it to the government, which arguably should own it. This would encourage entrepreneurship (less scary to quit your job and start your own business if you have a better safety net) and also potentially alleviate homelessness and various other social ills.

Those content to never work and do whatever "partying" they can afford on their tiny basic income would also be free to do as they wish, because who wants those people in the workplace anyway? Save the jobs for the people who actually want them, not the people who only need them in order to not starve.

I strongly suspect that the Basic Income Guarantee would receive increases in excess of the rate of inflation, as politicians use it to buy votes.

I think the $10k/yr figure that was quoted is unrealistic - that would cover food expenses with not much left over for housing costs. Even in a low-cost part of the nation, they'd have to perform work of some kind to earn more.

Ideally, increases would get tied to the CPI, or some other index. I also wouldn't mind a provision that would automatically adjust payments to ensure solvency.

Regarding the amount, it should be small enough to make it difficult to live off of. I don't think it would be a good idea if we created a class of BI dependents. There should still be fairly strong incentives to work. I think the main purpose of the BI would be to alleviate the need to rely on corporate america as a de facto social welfare provider. If you look at what happened to Detroit, for example, after the car industry tanked, the local economy went down with it. At the very least, BI would have provided a stabilizing force, slowing down the decline, and possibly giving residents a chance to re-build the local economy.

I think the main purpose of the BI would be to alleviate the need to rely on corporate america as a de facto social welfare provider.

Exactly. In America we still have social welfare benefits, we just get them mostly from our employers rather than from our government, because at some point, for some reason, we decided that we don't want the government to provide them. The implicit assumption being that people without jobs don't deserve them.

Social welfare benefits really should be in the scope of the government's responsibility, not private corporations'. They shouldn't be tied to a particular place of employment, especially as job positions get scarcer and shorter.

That's a crazy amount of money to spend on food. Does that figure include buying food for multiple people? As a single person that's more than 5X what I spend on food. In fact $10K would completely cover my food and rent for a year with a small bit left over. Obviously this will differ from place to place and person to person.

I think the $10k/year proposal was per person, not per household. Although that begs the question, at what age should the benefit start?

$10k/year is $833/month. $500/month rent and $333/month (about $11/day) for food is pretty basic subsistence for a single person. Yes, you'd have to work if you wanted anything more than basic nutrition and shelter, or wanted to live in a high-cost urban center, but the idea here is just that you shouldn't face homelessness/starvation just because you can't find gainful employment.

If per-person, population of the US is currently about 330 million. Doing the math, that's $3.3 Trillion per year in payments to be made. Social Security expenditures in 2008 were about $615 billion. There are obviously other programs that people qualify for, and I'm specifically excluding Medicare/Medicaid because they're health programs, not living-expense programs.

Even so, if the income guarantee program were implemented, expenditures in this arena would go up by about a factor of 4 to 5.

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