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There is a simple solution to this: An immigrant can become a citizen but doesn't receive the basic income until they have been here for 25 years, but also doesn't pay income tax until the amount they would have paid in tax exceeds the amount they would have received from the basic income. Thus, the immigrants who would have been a drain on the system become breakeven and net productive immigrants see no difference in practice from any other citizen.

A "Basic Job" is not a "much better policy" at all. Paying people to take care of our public spaces is worthwhile (and should be done regardless, and much is done regardless), but makework is a disease. With BI, I have assistance when I work on my startup or retrain for a different career or take care of my children or volunteer in my community - there's no bureaucrat judging my activities and deciding what is and is not worthy.

A lot of BI proposals pay the BI only to citizens. New immigrants aren't citizens; it takes many years to move from permanent resident status to become a citizen.

This would create an underclass of immigrants & refugees, and create incentives for voters & politicians to make getting citizenship even harder than it is today.

This is definitely not a good situation, but it is better than forcing people to stay in Haiti or Sudan.

This is a possibility - but so far the US tends to not do this very well. I don't have great data on the subject, but I've seen at least one study suggesting immigrants with children tend to be a net drain on the US.

http://cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to do what you propose, though I think a BJ is a better policy than BI regardless of immigration. But I'm not aware of any western society that actually manages to do it.

The linked article does not support your assertion that "immigrants with children tend to be a net drain". it simply says that the majority of this population uses at least one welfare program. it highlights low levels of education as the main driver of this, with the benefits usually going to the american-born children.

I suspect programs like Head Start and the school reduced/free lunch program account for a significant portion of the reported welfare use. Do you think that a poor immigrant family with working parents that uses these programs is a "net drain" on society?

The linked article estimates tax liability for immigrant families and shows this is less than welfare consumed. Like I said, not great data, but I don't have anything better. If you do I'd love to see it.

Given that Head Start doesn't even have any measurable benefits, I definitely think those consuming it are a drain (if they pay less in taxes than Head Start costs).

> In conclusion, children who were enrolled for 2 years had higher scores than those who only stayed for a year, which shows that being enrolled in Head Start for a longer duration benefited the children.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start_Program#Effectivenes...

Those effects were not present in the RCT. Even after reducing the p-value cutoff to 10% (rather than the standard 5%), only a few of the expected measures showed a statistically significant effect (some positive, some negative), and virtually nothing persisted as far as 1st grade.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_su...

(See also this comic if you want to point to a few blue and yellow cells in their charts. http://xkcd.com/882/ )

"Given that Head Start doesn't even have any measurable benefits, I definitely think those consuming it are a drain (if they pay less in taxes than Head Start costs)."

Given that Head Start doesn't have any measurable benefits, we should conclude that Head Start is a net drain. It doesn't follow that those consuming it are. Head Start is probably an insignificant portion of the costs society invests in these people, and taxes are probably an insignificant portion of the benefit these people provide.

There is already an underclass of immigrants, those on H-1 visa (work visa), with all the restrictions of their position (employment restrictions, conditions on the length of stay in the country, and so on). Also students (F and J visas), severe restrictions on work, sometimes a requirement to leave the country (USA) and never show up for two years. Probably more cases like that, these are just the ones I had to deal with.

So does that make the millions of illegals in the country an under-underclass?

>Immigration is probably the most important issue of our time. If we have a BI, we can't have immigration in any form remotely resembling what we have today, let alone some ideal situation where we have drastically more immigration. It's as simple as that. The cost of a BI (and the welfare state in general, really) is that millions of people are stuck in Haiti, India, Afghanistan and other desperately poor locales.

No. There are countries that have comprehensive social security and have immigration resembling what we have today - e.g. these countries have immigration that they already have.

Could you explain how to have both a welfare state and a lot more immigration? How do you make the numbers work?

A lot more than what? One can have welfare state and a degree of immigration. Usually more immigration means that it's more expensive. Sweden has considerable immigration when compared to many other countries, and is also a welfare state. Immigration doesn't mean open borders.

For humanitarian reasons, it's important to get as close to open borders as we can. What benefits of a first world welfare state do we gain that are worth consigning a human being to live on $1300/year (the GDP/capita of Haiti)?

Sweden is a pretty terrible example to cite. Go read the blog of Tino Sanandaji (an Iraqi immigrant to Sweden) - he does a great job showing why it's a failed policy and prevents some of the best arguments against immigration that I've read.

I didn't argue for Sweden's immigration policy - I argued that Sweden's immigration policy is possible.

It's very difficult to design domestic policies optimized for a foreign population. Evaluation of the american welfare state need only consider the impact on the american population.

Simple solution, have X amount of savings, or a job lined up. I'd love your opinion on the merits of anyone else being allowed into a country without X amount of savings, or a job lined up.

A glib response: I'd love your opinion on the merits of deporting unemployed Americans with $0 in savings to Liberia.

More seriously, suppose we had no BI or other welfare state - what is the harm of allowing an Indian to show up in NY with no money or job? The only cost I see is that he might annoy 30-100 potential employers before he finds someone to pay him $7.25/hour to wash dishes, making him richer than 95% of his countrymen. He might sleep on the street for a little while.

Now, there are real worries - he might eventually become a citizen and vote for Indian-style governance (see, e.g., the voting behavior of Mexican Americans), contribute to a corruption-tolerant culture, or other such things. But those are second order worries.

> I'd love your opinion on the merits of deporting unemployed Americans with $0 in savings to Liberia.

Don't import them and provide them with a basic income? I was just saying that while we'd actually have to review some other policies that would be affected, many of our policies are sub par at best, so I fail to see how either limiting immigration to X amount of people a year or simply paying them X a year is a fail for basic income.

> What is the harm of allowing an Indian to show up in NY with no money or job?

I'd rather look at MI as an actual citizen's benefit. Maybe a year wait from immigration? If our current policy is to bring people over who have no means of funds or help or work, and who require assistance, then IMO that's a bad policy.

Also, what would be the largest difference between our current system and one where everyone who's lived in our country for a year, and is currently living in our country, gets X amount yearly? If you ask me, the risk for this person remains the same, and our obligations only begin once the person has established themselves within society at large by way of working or find assistance from family or friends or loans.

"MI"?

Minimum income

Note that minimum income is a very different (and to my mind far worse) proposal. If you make $Y and $Y < $X, you're paid $X - $Y. Which means there's no reason to work unless someone is offering you a wage above $X.

> $7.25/hour to wash dishes, making him richer than 95% of his countrymen.

Once you adjust for NYC's cost of living, he'd probably be poorer than his countrymen. Even a large percentage of Americans couldn't afford to rent an NYC apartment.

I am not convinced that BI and open borders are incompatible. So a lot of people move to the US - how is that harmful? Historically, increased immigration has lead economic happytimes. It's unlikely to get overcrowded; if the entire population of the world moved to the US we'd still be substantially less crowded than Singapore, and there's no freakin' way that would happen.

If we find that BI has problems, we roll it back. If we find that the only problem with BI is immigration related, we can encourage other countries to implement it too - possibly coupled with aid, if they need it.

I'd want to take a closer look before doing it, but it doesn't seem as crazy as common wisdom would suggest.

What about a Basic Job for non-citizens, Basic Income for citizens?

How does having someone do busy-work in exchange for the basic income address any of the objections?

Objection (1) - a BJ creates no disincentive for work. You can earn $7.25/hour at the BJ or $7.50 at McDs.

Objection (2) - it reduces the incentives of immigration with the intent of collecting welfare, thereby reducing the objections to immigration.

Objection (3) - due to the fact that it has no disincentives for work, and the economic cost will be far less than a BI ( I did some back of the envelope calculations here http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic... ), it's far less likely to reduce growth than a BI.

> Objection (1) - a BJ creates no disincentive for work. You can earn $7.25/hour at the BJ or $7.50 at McDs.

If the work they are doing has little value — which seems like it would have to be the case, since otherwise we'd already be paying all these people $7.25 an hour to do it — I don't see how it's substantially different from idleness. It seems like you're basically replacing "Do whatever you want and we'll pay you a basic income" with "Do a meaningless ritual as half-heartedly as possible and we'll pay you a basic income."

In fact, I'd say a Basic Job program might disincentivize meaningful work more than a Basic Income. Somebody could start a business using their Basic Income, but a Basic Job would not provide the same opportunity.

With a BI you have three options while still getting paid - productive work, unproductive work or Halo 3.

With a BJ, you have only two options - productive work or less productive work. Some of the people who would (given the option) choose Halo 3 will now choose productive work. That will be a net gain for society.

Further, we will get some value out of the Basic Jobs. We might pay $7.25/hour for the DMV to be $3.00 cleaner, for a net loss of only $4.25 rather than $7.25. We tried this scheme once already and got a national park system for our trouble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

It's also vastly cheaper than a BI because most people will choose not to use the BJ. Rather than giving $7.25 to 300 million Americans you only give it to 30-40 million.

> Objection (1) - a BJ creates no disincentive for work. You can earn $7.25/hour at the BJ or $7.50 at McDs.

That's the problem, isn't it? It still creates a disincentive for "real" work. You get people who take and stay in the basic job instead of finding a "real" job because the basic job is no harder to do and much easier to get, which reduces economic productivity because the basic job is less economically useful than a bona fide mutually beneficial transaction between private parties. And someone who spends all day working the basic job in order to not starve doesn't then have as much time to earn a degree, practice making art or music, volunteer at the local community center, write open source software or any of a variety of other things that are more personally rewarding and socially valuable than digging holes and filling them back in.

> Objection (2) - it reduces the incentives of immigration with the intent of collecting welfare, thereby reducing the objections to immigration.

So you don't give immigrants the basic income right away.

> Objection (3) - due to the fact that it has no disincentives for work, and the economic cost will be far less than a BI ( I did some back of the envelope calculations here http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic.... ), it's far less likely to reduce growth than a BI.

What happens when you account for the preference of those making minimum wage to take the basic job over a job that requires much seeking and interviewing to get but pays the same amount, and the cost of paying people to do unnecessary things when they could be doing productive things like working to improve their marketability for higher paying jobs?

The simple solution to that is to make the Basic Job worse than other jobs - for example reduce the pay to $7.00/hour and don't make them easy jobs. Then any private sector job will be preferable.

That doesn't do anything to address forcing people with no skills to do meaningless labor instead of spending their time to learn new skills. And making the labor intentionally hard just to make it undesirable seems unreasonably cruel, especially since the entire premise behind a basic job is to provide a job where none other is available, meaning that choosing to take a private sector job is by definition not possible for many people or the program would be unnecessary. Whereas reducing the pay leaves you in the position of either not providing a sufficient safety net, or having to raise the minimum wage (and correspondingly increase "real" unemployment) just in order to make it sufficiently higher than the amount set for the basic job.

The labor isn't meaningless, it's simply worth less than $7.25 to the private sector.

Do you consider the work of FDR's CCC (e.g., forestry, national parks) to be worthless? Do you believe that the CCC destroyed jobs via the mechanism you described here? All I'm proposing is replacing welfare with the New Deal. I take it you were opposed to the New Deal?

Also, you seem to be under the impression that people who would hypothetical receive the BJ cannot find a job. Most are not looking for one.

> The labor isn't meaningless, it's simply worth less than $7.25 to the private sector.

It's labor chosen by the government for arbitrarily many individuals with an unspecified skill level. The government is not suited to finding economically productive work for arbitrary individuals. The market would find far more productive work for these people at a wage that corresponds to the value of their work if there were no minimum wage, but then they wouldn't be making enough money to live. The government could provide for these people by paying the difference between the price the market values their labor and the minimum wage, except that all existing minimum wage jobs would then begin paying $0.01/hour knowing that their employees would have the rest made up by the government. The way to fix that is to pay the minimum wage unconditionally and then let people have whatever their private sector employers pay them on top of that, but that's just a basic income.

Step back for a minute and separate the two programs from each other. Suppose the government has work for these people at a value of $3/hour, and it a) provides a basic income, then b) offers to pay them the $3/hour their labor is actually worth on top of that if they do the basic job. The only reason they have to turn down the basic job is if they can find something more valuable than $3/hour to do somewhere else -- some other job, or some personally rewarding activity which is more valuable than being paid $3/hour. Why is that a problem? Why is it bad that a person has found some activity that they value at a higher amount than anyone is willing to pay for their labor in the market?

> Do you consider the work of FDR's CCC (e.g., forestry, national parks) to be worthless?

There aren't enough jobs like that for everyone who needs one, and not everyone who needs a job is qualified to do the productive work the government needs to be done. Also, those jobs today pay more than the minimum wage, so are you proposing to reduce their compensation?

> I take it you were opposed to the New Deal?

FDR would have been better off implementing a basic income than the New Deal, yes.

> Also, you seem to be under the impression that people who would hypothetical receive the BJ cannot find a job. Most are not looking for one.

You're assuming the people who take the basic job will almost entirely be people who are currently unemployed, rather than people who have horrible low paying jobs, or who lose their jobs and find it easier to take the basic job than find a different private sector job.

...value of their work if there were no minimum wage, but then they wouldn't be making enough money to live.

That might be true if minimum wage were $1/day (PPP adjusted). If you don't believe me, just read up on any of the countries I mentioned in my other posts on this thread.

Just out of curiosity, what is the motivation behind nonsensical claims like this? I ask simply because I've heard lots of people make the exact claim you did, and I wish I knew where this nonsense comes from.

Suppose the government has work for these people at a value of $3/hour, and it a) provides a basic income, then b) offers to pay them the $3/hour their labor is actually worth on top of that if they do the basic job. The only reason they have to turn down the basic job is if they can find something more valuable than $3/hour to do somewhere else -- some other job, or some personally rewarding activity which is more valuable than being paid $3/hour. Why is that a problem?

Ignoring the potentially bad incentives this creates for employers, I would generally have no issue with a program that allows the basic jobs to be performed in the private sector with government subsidizing them.

I do, however, object to paying people to play Call of Duty, which is what a Basic Income is.

You're assuming the people who take the basic job will almost entirely be people who are currently unemployed,

No, I'm assuming most of the people on the BJ will be the people who are currently not in the labor force.

It's strange how low skill workers are so lazy that they will all switch from McJobs to Basic Jobs just to avoid interviewing, while simultaneously so industrious that if you pay them to play Call of Duty they will instead go get a McJob. What kind of utility function causes this to happen?

> That might be true if minimum wage were $1/day (PPP adjusted).

PPP adjusting $1/day from the third world countries in which people live on it is approximately the minimum wage. If you live in the poorest parts of the world, you may have no money, but there is open land. You can construct some kind of hovel to live in. You live an agricultural or hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You buy poor quality food from unregulated sellers. It isn't fun, but it's cheap.

You can't do that in an American city. There is no land where it is legal for you to build a shelter, so you rent. There is no land for you to grow food or hunt game, so you buy food from a store. The store is not allowed to sell you unregulated food for a discount. That is certainly much easier than the way it is in the third world, but it is also much more expensive. You can't live on $1/day in New York City, no way no how. Depending on charity or welfare doesn't count -- that isn't living on $1/day, it's just sending the bill to someone else.

There is also the matter that there is more to being alive than not starving or freezing to death. "Living wage" doesn't mean the minimum amount you need to carry on breathing for another day:

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

> Ignoring the potentially bad incentives this creates for employers, I would generally have no issue with a program that allows the basic jobs to be performed in the private sector with government subsidizing them.

> I do, however, object to paying people to play Call of Duty, which is what a Basic Income is.

I think you're in trouble then. Because if you allow private sector employers to choose what jobs they hire people taking the basic job subsidy to do without the employer having to pay any minimum amount of money, you're inviting someone like me to pay someone who takes the basic job subsidy a trivial amount of money to play Call of Duty with me. And then the government is still paying people to play Call of Duty.

What you're fundamentally up against is the fact that enjoyable jobs (like "play Call of Duty with me") command less in the way of wages than less enjoyable jobs (like "flip these burgers"), because the "employee" prefers to take the enjoyable job and the employer can therefore pay commensurately lower wages. That means in a free market that some people will choose to spend their time doing things you think are frivolous.

Ask yourself this: Why is it so unreasonable that some number of poor people take the basic income and live extremely frugally so that they don't need any other job and can spend their time as they please, but there is no objection when some rich guy who inherited his wealth is permitted to do exactly the same thing and do as he pleases instead of working? Aren't we risking that society become too prosperous and then implode as everyone retires to video games and declines to do any productive work? Isn't this even more problematic in the case of people who earn their wealth, who are demonstrably capable of creating significant economic value but are then allowed to remove themselves from the workforce? If people choosing to play video games instead of working is a real problem then we need to implement Communism at once so that we can extract "from each according to his abilities," right? I want you to understand that you're challenging the efficiency of the market. There is no labor they can perform that anyone is willing to pay more to get them to do than the value they place on playing video games. In that situation, allowing them to play video games is what is supposed to happen, and that's fine because that situation is rare.

> No, I'm assuming most of the people on the BJ will be the people who are currently not in the labor force.

But why do you assume that? What stops people currently in the labor force from choosing the basic job instead of their existing job because they find it preferable in some way or another?

> It's strange how low skill workers are so lazy that they will all switch from McJobs to Basic Jobs just to avoid interviewing, while simultaneously so industrious that if you pay them to play Call of Duty they will instead go get a McJob. What kind of utility function causes this to happen?

1) Someone gets laid off, immediately takes the basic job to continue having income, now they spend 40 hours doing the basic job and have that much less time and substantially reduced incentive to seek out a real job.

2) You aren't paying them to play Call of Duty. You're just paying them. They don't have to play Call of Duty. They don't have to do anything, it's unconditional. Which means they only reason they have to play Call of Duty to the exclusion of all else is if they find nothing superior in life whatsoever, permanently. People soon find that they want more out of life: They want to go outside. They want to own a car so they don't have to schlep everywhere they go on foot. They want to take a vacation to another country, or buy a big screen TV, or live in a bigger apartment, or send their kids to college. But you can't afford those things on just the basic income, so if you want them then you have to go out and find a way to earn more money.

A person can have quite a simple utility function and prefer the basic job to a real job but also prefer a real job to playing Call of Duty all day, because the two are unrelated. If you want more from life than you can buy with the basic income (which is to say anything much more than food and shelter), you have to engage in some kind of activity that produces additional income. Which makes it easy for taking a real job and having spending money to be preferable to playing video games and remaining perpetually poor. Meanwhile you can see how taking the basic job would be preferable to taking a real job, because they're substantially similar (you do something you don't like in exchange for money) and the basic job has the further advantage that you don't need to do any work to get it. It may also have other advantages depending on what the real job would be: It may be that the real job requires you to buy something to do it which comes out of your wages (e.g. gas for a sales job that requires travel), or requires doing something you hate (e.g. putting up with unreasonable customers or bosses), or any of the long list of things that can make a job suck. People with low paying jobs of that nature can easily prefer the basic job to the even crapper private sector job, while still preferring both to the prospect of having less income.

I think the fact that there is so much tuning and adjustment by government bureaucrats in just what those jobs should be should give significant pause.

In response to (2), most would-be immigrants dream of entering the US with the intent of picking up work, and to be politically feasible in the US, the BJ would have to offer higher (PPP-adjusted) wages in better working conditions than most people expect in the developing world. BJ jobs would be very attractive to most would-be immigrants.

Since BJ labour generally provides less value per hour of work to taxpayers than it costs them to pay for the programme, taxpayers will still want the programme to be as small as possible, which means it's still going to be politically unfeasible to get much closer to open borders.

True - abolishing the welfare state entirely would be better for the cause of immigration than a BJ. I'm contrasting a BJ to a BI or the current system.

To bring your proposal into more modern times, how does it compare to the EITC?

By "proposal", I assume you mean Basic Job? If you can't find a job, you don't get EITC.

A Basic Job means the government gives you a job if you can't find one. You show up, tell them you are unemployed, and they give you a job cleaning the DMV, filling in potholes, picking up trash at the park or whatever. At the end of the day they give you 8 hours x $7.25/hour. If you find a McJob paying $8.00/hour you quit the Basic Job and go take the McJob.