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Comment by jhaglund | Hacker News Reader

I think you should reconsider the assertion that poor in the US usually don't work. Minimum wage jobs leave you just above the poverty level if you're single, below if you are supporting someone. Considering cash based, under the table, transient work that poor people accept is under reported (for fear of loosing benefits which fall off steeply as a recipient's income increases) I think even finding statistics on this would be difficult.

There are sociopaths on welfare (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013... ) as surely as there are sociopaths in power. But what this article is saying is most people who need assistance are going to do good things with the assistance.

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I stand by my claim, about 80% of the US poor choose not to work: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf You may be right that some of the poor are earning additional unreported money, but that also means some of the poor are not really poor.

Insofar as the poor are secretly employed in the grey market, poverty is also secretly not as big a problem as we think. You can't have it both ways.

The article asserts that people will do good things with the basic income, but the one statistic they mention suggests they won't.

[edit: read paragraph 1 to find the stat I cite. I've compared the numbers of poor and non-poor excluding children as well, it doesn't change the comparison much. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 ]

It is absurd to say that because someone augments their benefits with $300 a month in child care, their problems are over.

Can you point to where in that PDF you got that 80% number? Like, if you're going to cite a link, could you use a number I can ctrl+f? instead of "about 80%"? Because I suspect this number includes children and people who may be better off not working due to medical or other problems.

Why is it absurd that an extra $3600/year might tip someone across the poverty line?

Because $3600 is NOTHING. I need $15k in the bank to feel moderately safe as a bachelor. If I wanted to support a family I'd want a fallback account of $100k+.

Edit: this is a reply to yummy.

$3,600 is a little less than 25% of $15,000, and it's about 3.5% of $100,000.

If a person spent as much as they earned in a year and had no savings, $3,600 a year would accumulate $15,000 in savings after five years. A couple, spending as much as they earned, who wanted to save $100,000 before starting a family, each receiving $3,600 and investing it moderately, would save $100,000 after 10-12 years.

However, poverty is usually defined as an income level and not a level of savings.

So what you are saying is?

You said that $3,600 was nothing. I explained its relation to $15,000 and $100,000, two numbers you apparently thought were significant, and how an extra $3,600 per year can turn into those numbers.

You also quoted savings amounts in response to someone talking about income, so I explained that poverty is usually measured by income.

I am not saying anything beyond explaining those things to you.

I don't think anybody was confused about the numbers and their relations.

That being said, I think in a system where everybody has a basic income, it is probably less important to save money, versus what we do right now where you have to save up for job-hopping.

Where do you live? My parents mortgage for a 3br/1ba is under $300 a month. I know people in my hometown with rent well under that.

Are your safety numbers built on an urban cost of living?

Urban germany, so yes stuff is more expensive here. On the other hand I never see a doctor and live very efficiently. If I had any real expenses things would look differently.

I agree that in theory you don't need that much money. But you have to go the high road when estimating living expenses, people have bad luck, special requirements etc. So in practice everyone should have enough cash to fuck up a few times, even if they don't a lot of people would enjoy living longer simply because of less broke-stress. Some people can handle it, some people can't. I'd even go as far as saying that every person should have the funds to start a business.

In Melbourne, Australia rent and/or mortgage repayments are more than that in a week. Moving out to the country will save a little bit but also limits access to jobs. I don't think you could get a mortgage for a 3br house for $300 a month anywhere these days.

Paragraph 1 states 46.2 million people lived below the official poverty level, and 10.4 million of those were working, so you conclude that the remaining "choose not to work". But the next line states that that first number includes children (at least 14 million http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_912.html) and adults (including those unable to work for legitimate reasons).

Your other link doesn't show its math either. I'm feeling trolled.

You can do the (utterly simple) math to correct the figure I gave for whatever you want. I think your demand for me to compute 10.4/(46.2-14) for you is merely a desperate attempt to maintain your old view in spite of the new facts you learned today.

Call me a troll all you want, but no matter how you demand the data to be sliced and diced, the poor choose to work far less than the non-poor. They work vastly less than the non-poor or the nation as a whole (labor force participation rate, including children, is roughly 65%).

Wow. You present a severely wrong number, with a citation to back it up that actually shows it's wrong, and when someone calls you on it you accuse them of a desperate attempt to deny the facts?

(I will remark that no one demanded that you compute 10.4/(46.2-14) for them. You just made that up.)

The source you cite does not support the claim you make. Indeed, it pretty much refutes it.

1. It says there were 10.4M "working poor" in the US out of a total of 46.2M "poor", and that the latter number includes children.

2. I haven't found explicit absolute numbers for child poverty in the US, but the figure seems to be somewhere around 15M. That would mean about 30M poor people who aren't children, of whom about 10M are "working poor" and therefore about 20M are not working despite being of working age. No matter how you slice it, 2/3 is not "about 80%".

3. But there's more. You said not "don't work" but "choose not to work". Now, indeed the "working poor" as defined in that report include people who were officially classified as looking for work as well as those who were actually working. But, e.g., poor people who are unable to work because of illness or disability will not be included in that number. Would you say that they "choose not to work"?

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