It Is Time For Basic Income | Hacker News Reader

It Is Time For Basic Income

hawkins.ventures

608 pointsmchusma728 comments

I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having to jump through all the same hoops.)

This is just my experience after working for ~1000 hours on healthcare.gov w/other YC alumni (relatively nonideological-liberal-or-libertarian engineer bias), but I think it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead, along with unintentional side effects, edge cases, and bad incentives.

(This isn't why healthcare.gov had major issues, it's just another problem.)

That said, there's no way politically a basic income is going to fly anytime soon. So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

I'm not convinced that Basic income would necessarily deal with edge cases all that much better. A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want.

But there are problems in that not everyone can live off the same amount of money. This is especially true with disabled or very ill people who are the most likely to be unable to obtain employment. They also require more money to maintain the same living standard, often much more in the case of people who require full time care etc.

In the mystical future world where a GBI has been implemented charity still exists, and much of the capital once dedicated to assisting those in poverty-absent-illness can now be directed to those who need help in addition to the GBI.

But if charity were reliable enough to rely on for livelihood wouldn't it make sense to remove any form of welfare or basic income?

I think the reliability of charity in this case would increase as the number of people who need it decrease. I don't think we can rely on charity to solve everyone's financial woes, else said woes would already be solved. But when the percentage of people in need of charity grows smaller, the impact of the same pool of charity increases for those left in need.

But isn't the point of BI that everyone has enough for their basic needs? It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).

> It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).

This is already the status quo. Less people being reliant on charity is a good thing.

There are plenty of people whose basic needs are substantially larger than the average citizen. For instance, many people need expensive motorized wheel chairs, which would be difficult to purchase on BI. Currently, the state provides motorized wheel chairs to many, but there are many stories of this program being abused. It's quite possible that a charity could step in here to supplement BI to make chairs affordable, and could do better and more efficient needs testing than the state.

And how many philanthropists practice charity by giving away money no questions asked?

That's not a philanthropist. That's a fool!

According to Maslow's Hierarchy, at least as I interpret it, charity increases as an individual is able to meet their lower needs. How you go about getting more individuals to that level is a matter of debate that is difficult to give any definitive answers to.

I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools.

For the particular example of disabled or very ill people, universal government-sponsored health care might help, although that has its own side-effects that are perhaps undesirable. (I believe that people are more incentivized to do medical research in the US than in Canada, in part because Canada's nationalized health care encourages people to stick with existing, inexpensive treatments in most cases.)

> I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools.

There's a local "maximum" in the policy evolution process here, due to the difficulty of changing umpteen things at once. I always vote against any new policy proposal that says "we're going to add this tax and remove this other one" unless both happen in the same bill, because otherwise the removal tends to not happen. (For instance, "replacing" an income tax with a sales tax in two steps can easily fail at step 2 and end up with both.)

The government assistance for these situations is often not enough to live on as it is (at least where I live), so I'm not sure how moving to this would be a negative. Also consider how difficult it is for someone with a chronic illness to actually find and access the myriad of services that provide the support they need, and at the end of they day it's still usually not enough.

It would be a shame to not move to something better for those people simply because it isn't perfect.

> A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want.

I haven't seen the reduction in services implied anywhere. It may, however, be a reality when implemented, but the intention isn't simply to change how government funds are spent on the poor. Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.

I have only ever heard basic income proposed as the former implementation, never the latter.

The two formulations are similar. If you just print money to give to everybody, you cause inflation, which is a tax on liquid wealth. The wealthy have ways to hedge against inflation, so it's basically a tax on the middle class.

What are these magical ways to hedge against inflation that wealthy have access to and middle class don't? By definition, inflation equates to higher salaries for the middle class.

Commodities, stocks, options, derivatives, and real estate are the most common. But I think they aren't limited to the wealthy per say. The wealthy just know much more about them and have higher percentages of their net worth in these types of things.

You can make money if the market goes up, you can make money if the market goes down, and you can make money if the market doesn't go anywhere.

Inflation means higher salaries, which is highly correlated with middle class net worth.

It's definitely correlated but not 1 to 1. Wealthy people will use leverage though. Effectively their r-value is > 1.0. With middle class it might be around 0.6. The middle class still loses some as their salaries do go up but not as fast. Also, you usually need to quit and go to another job. The wealthy have more control and options.

If the original argument proposes wealth distribution it would cause inflation and deflation at the same time. Inflation of lower end goods and services because the poor will have more money, and deflation in the higher end goods and services because the wealthy will have less. i.e., things get more expensive for the poor, and cheaper for the rich. ;)

If we are talking about printing money, it would be similar. The lower end goods and services would get more expensive and the higher end goods and services would stay about the same.

Or you could raise taxes on the wealthy...

"Just print money" does not cause unconditional inflation. It depends on initial conditions.

> Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.

What if they leave? Should people be punished for being rich?

They are welcome to leave. Yes, they should be punished because society needs a disincentive for gross personal hoarding.

Do you realize that the more rich people leave, the fewer rich people there'll be left to plunder?

That, in turn, means that the remaining rich people would have to be taxed even harder to compensate for some of them leaving, which would then motivate even more of them to leave, and there you have a feedback loop that leads to the Basic Income party being over.

Define hoarding.

Fair point. Obviously an easy definition would be one that's fuzzy and increases with distance above the mean... very much like we have now for income tax, but instead for assets held.

Basic income doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can supplement with targeted aid. Just should be able to get away with a lot less effort since you only need to cover the obvious extreme cases.

Additionally, the cost of living varies widely, for example, in the US. Between climate differences (it costs more to stay warm in Alaska in the winter than it does in Florida), logistical differences (fuel costs more in Hawaii than it does in Texas), to real estate costs (housing is more expensive in SF, CA than in Norfolk, VA), to transportation costs (parking in NY is more expensive than in Jacksonville, FL), etc.

So the amount of income necessary to survive is going to vary by location, sometimes substantially. So a universal income wouldn't be tenable either, as one dollar doesn't buy the same things everywhere. How would you calculate what that should be without market forces?

Well so what? If you are going to consume more of the economy's resources to choose to live in a more expensive place, then you should have to pay for it.

Conversely, why should we give less to people who live in more affordable places?

I think the difference is it may be more expensive to live in a city but may still make sense because of the availability of jobs and higher income. With basic income the income aspect of choosing a place to live is weakened.

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

> Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.)

You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in question (and it would be horribly unjust if you could). So you're talking about paying for a basic income within a city by adding a substantial tax to the residents of that city. That would result in a substantial motivation for any mobile business or person to relocate (and higher-income people are often more mobile), and for any new business to set up shop elsewhere.

Cities are small enough that it's entirely possible to relocate if your local government becomes too obtrusive. A policy like this only "works" if you have a scale large enough that the majority of people opposed to the policy are nonetheless forced into it by virtue of finding it less awful than moving.

The burden of moving to a new country is high enough to deter it for all but the most egregious issues; the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a country is far higher than the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a city or even a state. As a result, the average person will likely find themselves far less aligned with the policies of their country than their city or state.

But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast).

I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years.

The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.

I can't answer the rest, but

> Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion?

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

Googling also yields some results that ballpark in the same area.

Check out the Sea Steading Institute. They are pushing towards colonizing the ocean and allow groups to form their own nations. If we can form tons of new nations to test out new ideas of government we will quickly learn what works and what doesn't.

Mostly we'll learn what governments are better at taking over others.

"There are no governments. Only corporations." ;)

Or my favorite phrasing, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government."

I like that line. I'm stealing it.

> ...is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

I don't know, but technology like http://ethereum.org may make it possible to move some things from the realm of states into software. For example, given data feeds of births/deaths/retirements, it might be possible to implement a software contract for voluntary social security that pays contributing participants an annuity from retirement until death.

This would need an extremely robust real world identity system. If this was left to governments somehow, then the identity system itself would become the single point of failure and the main way to game the system through corruption. This is already the case in developing countries where deaths are purposely not recorded in order for the relatives to collect pensions and other contributions.

Building such an identity system algorithmically on top of a social network also doesn't seem to make sense because this can be cheated too.

One solution that might work would be to prove that you are a conscious person to a system like ethereum through a "Ghost Key" like in Ghost in the Shell. Assuming that there is a way to "fingerprint" each person's ghost, such as creating a hash of something that doesn't change, that could be like e key to such funds. I highly doubt that there is something constant in the human connectome though.

Something like this could work:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm

Actually, it couldn't, except maybe for a small population. The trick is convincing a local government with major poverty issues to take a risk it probably doesn't think it can afford.

This basic premise(MVP) exists on American Indian reservations, quasi-sovereign states. The BIA and the Tribe distributes an equal share of funds from either the government or gaming to each tribal member. As long as you can prove you are a tribe member, you get the funds.

Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live. I grew up surrounded by them in Arizona and went to school with many Native Americans in both primary & high school. It's not a great way to live and the reason so many are leaving the reservations.

I suspect that situation has more variables involved than simply a minimum basic income.

In fairness, don't most situations in life?

Most situations do not involve genocide.

> Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live.

And is this squalor & dysfunctionality entirely absent in reservations without significant revenue to distribute?

...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,...

Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone.

Consider a BI paying 300M people $20k. Cost is $6 trillion.

Consider a targeted program paying 50M people $20k, no overhead. Cost is $1 trillion.

You need an overhead cost of 500% of benefits for a basic income to be cost competitive.

Can any BI proponents provide even a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how BI could possibly be competitive?

What does "competitive" mean? Against what? More realistically, figure $20k to 15 million - much less trouble. A mere $0.3T :) But it'll go close to 100% to the Metric Formerly Known as M3 and dissipate.

My framework and Maslow-hammer is the PPST framework from Tyler Cowan by way of Arnold Kling - Patterns of Sustainable Substitution and Trade. In this, the bulls get bigger and the china shops get smaller; people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now.

I think (from interviewing) there's a strong element of laziness, narcissism and incredulous cognitive dissonance to this, but whatever. If we hire and they're good, then the story we told ourselves about how special we were fails.

The U6 gap since 2007 is real now for seven years. It harder every day to call it a blip.

If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive, the money flows back through the economy and doesn't harm anyone. The accounting, however, is horrendous. I don't have an answer for that.

"Competitive" means "against alternate policy proposals". For example, Basic Job/Employer of last resort, or the current welfare state.

...people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now.

People don't have jobs because they are unwilling to work at low wages. This is pretty well established empirically, is the foundation of Keynesian economics, and is even accepted by both Cowen and Kling.

Further evidence for this: US companies are still outsourcing and expanding overseas.

If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive...

The little data we have about BI suggests it reduces productive work hours by about 10%. For comparison, the great recession resulted in a 1% drop. As usual in articles on this topic, original sources uncited.

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

Agreed; sticky wages is also part of PSST, but the new thing is perceived fragility of potential hiring companies.

Overseas expansion could be any of a number of things besides wages, it's waning and it fails frequently. Something like the manufacturers aggregated through Alibaba seems different from setting up bespoke manufacturing overseas.

Thanks for the link.

Naturally you have to "raise taxes" (in a nominal sense) at the same time you add a basic income, so that the added income is cancelled out for middle-class and wealthy people, and the net amount of redistribution stays more or less constant.

It's still a big win, since you've taken all of the various benefits agencies and collapsed their roles into that of the IRS or equivalent tax agency, which has to exist anyway to fund other government functions.

Back of the envelope calculation please - that will clarify your vague words and reveal many arithmetic errors (if such are present).

"In 2013, the total Social Security expenditures were $1.3 trillion, 8.4% of the $16.3 trillion GNP (2013) and 37% of the Federal expenditures of $3.684 trillion" (Wikipedia). Medicare adds another half billion, rapidly increasing.

We could get between $6k and $7k annually per citizen by swapping those plans for a basic income. If children don't count, we could bump that to maybe $10k. Obviously, this change would need to be taken gradually to not cause too much disruption.

To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes. Increasing consumption taxes would be fair. Since the flat credits is very progressive, it's OK to pay for it with a regressive sales or value-added tax.

Why increase consumption taxes? Why add friction? Wouldn't it be better to tax the assets at rest -- real estate, property.

Aren't income taxes a logical fit here? You would still have graduated tax brackets, so you wouldn't have an enormous cliff once you started earning, but all tax brackets could be increased such that the middle class end up about the same, and the poor are better off. With the added efficiencies described by the parent comment, this should even be possible without reducing net income to those in the higher brackets, but it might be desirable to do that to some extent as well for greater redistribution.

It's arguably better to tax Ricardian rents - if you can.

To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes.

I'm glad we are in agreement that a BI will cost a lot more than the current targeted welfare state. (Or alternately will require a drastic cut in benefits for the current crop of non-workers.)

It costs more on a nominal basis but if implemented right nobody will have less money in their pocket even after taxes.

If you didn't earn any money before you will get what was spend on you before + the saved overhead (+ a lot of wasted time and hassle). If you made a lot of money before you will still get a free handout but you also have to pay higher taxes so in the end you should have about the same amount. Obviously it will not be exactly the same for everybody but that doesn't mean it will be less fair.

Besides the saved overhead another major advantage of a bi would be to streamline incentive. Currently it can happen that if you start earning money you will lose a lot of benefits. This can lead to an implicit tax rate of > 50% for very poor people and therefore disincentives work.

Numbers, please. And see my other comments on the disincentive to work - in the pilot projects, BI was a massive work disincentive.

Thanks for hammering this nail yummyfajitas.

I'm completely open to the idea of basic incomes but it seems that if it is possible, it should be easy enough to demonstrate the basic outline. This isn't something that can be discussed without arithmetic.

Excluding dynamic effects (more/fewer people will work), political necessities (program X must be excluded from the chopping block) is OK for a start. Picking and choosing countries is OK for a start.

The first question I would like to see answered is how much it would cost to bring every net recipient's income up to par with the biggest recipients'. Presumably the basic income needs to be set somewhere near this line or we'll have a situation where many current recipients are worse off.

Notice that work disincentive is a plus, not a minus, when there are millions of unemployed people.

Exactly how is it a plus? The goal isn't to make a nominal "unemployment" statistic go down; it's to create valuable things. Your comment makes me think "a receding tide lifts all boats".

People will create what they want to create. For some people growing a nice garden and working on cool stuff around their cheap house will mean more than creating something "more valuable" to society at large. Creation of value or productivity should not be the standard we measure societies by, but instead equity and happiness.

The market doesn't capture and represent all value created by labor. When I call a tow truck to jump start my car, that transaction is captured by the market, but when I call my friend with cables to do the same thing, it is not represented in the GDP. The same thing goes for a lot of "work" that is not done for compensation but adds a great deal of value to community. Basic income recognizes this fact that merely existing as part of a community you are providing some basic value even if you're not paid for that work. I think the critics are right that there are potential cultural problems around entitlement and an unwillingness to contribute in any form, but I'm more optimistic about human nature.

Not at all

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

In this Canadian experiment [1], initial results indicated some disincentives, but a lot of data was not analyzed, until many years later. Some of the surprising results include a reduction in medical costs.

[1] http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100

If it's really more efficient than the current system, it should be fundable from the existing entitlements. Just dismantle the programs, fire all the bureaucrats running them, and divert all these funds toward the basic income. If it requires another tax then it's not an alternative, it is an expansion of the welfare state.

No. It's not more net taxes. It's a change in the tax rate so the basic income is clawed back at the high end. Doesn't change tax out of pocket.

Its like applying plaster to an uneven wall. The dents gets filled with plaster but the bumps stays at the same level! Its much better than giving tax breaks since you need income to begin with.

Two things:

> Its much better than giving tax breaks since you need income to begin with.

1. There is a difference between refundable and non-refundable tax credits. A big misconception is that tax breaks only help those who already have income exceeding the size of the credit, which is not necessarily true.

Second,

> Its like applying plaster to an uneven wall. The dents gets filled with plaster but the bumps stays at the same level!

In this analogy, where is the plaster coming from? It can't just come from nowhere[0].

[0] ("Just print more" isn't the answer, because that increasing the money supply doesn't actually "create" money (in the colloquial sense) - it's just a redistribution method that redistributes by changing the relative value of outstanding debt.)

> A big misconception is that tax breaks only help those who already have income exceeding the size of the credit, which is not necessarily true.

Its actually always misleading, its just which way it is misleading varies.

For non-refundable credits, a credit only helps if your tax liability (not income) is greater than zero, and only provide full value if the tax liability is at least as big as the credit.

For a refundable credit, it gives full value all the time (well, independent of tax liability -- the eligibility criteria for the credit itself matter.)

>>In this analogy, where is the plaster coming from? It can't just come from nowhere[0].

Moore's Law, AI , other technological advances. Some bumps are producing way too much paster thats oozing out of the wall boundaries and into the emerging market wall of other countries.

Imagine a time in future when everyone is replaced by robots and no one is "employable" in a traditional sense. What would you do then? The economy is directly linked to the productivity of nations in producing goods and services , it has nothing to do with human effort directly.

Only about 200m people are over the age of 18 and 20k per person seems high. 200M at 10k per year is around 2 trillion. Seems doable if we are willing to scrap things like social security.

10k/year for 50m is 500b. Throw in 100% overhead and targeted welfare providing equivalent benefits is still half the price of BI.

Note that the current level of welfare is $20k/person so you are advocating a massive reduction of consumption for the welfare class. (I don't object, just pointing it out.)

It didn't say people on welfare get $20k/person. They don't get anywhere near that. That's how much the government spends to administrate giving them welfare (including managing means testing to prevent people from abusing it) as well as the welfare itself.

I'm pretty sure US welfare is somewhere around $500-900/mo, and if you get a job (thus, work towards becoming a 'productive member of society') you may lose it.

People on welfare (including section 8, food stamps, etc) do in fact get $20k/person.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs...

Consumption data agrees.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

Consumer spending will increase and therefore also tax revenues. More importantly, we can cut other programs to recover the difference.

Edit: rough calculation in other comment

I can't see any plausible way that these numbers will even approach the ballpark of $5 trillion. Back of the envelope calculation please.

Exactly how does consumer spending increase if it's just redistribution? And assuming it does, why is that good? What about consumer savings being reduced due to less net income for the earners?

I'm having trouble seeing how this could work. If gross income generated, not redistributed, doesn't change (this doesn't create more work completed, it just moves income to someone else). then how is new wealth generated? It seems like spending would likely be the same, if not be reduced due to friction and overhead which would reduce net income across the board (wealth redistribution isn't free, so if new wealth isn't generated, then net income seems like it must go down, and aggregate spending would also go down).

You're assuming that the remaining $4trillion is lost. It's not. It goes to other people who will spend it on other things worth, in total, $4tril... even though some of them may need it less.

The benefit they derive from the increased flexibility that $20k could easily exceed $20k by itself - you've probably seen the research on how people make bad decisions when they are financially unstable. And all that benefit is raw positive.

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive. Simply giving them $20k doesn't count as a 'cost' in itself - it all comes full circle.

I don't understand. Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation to explain your thoughts?

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive.

You mean like a 10% reduction in work hours? https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

It’s the redistribution that you’re missing.

300M * $20k does equal $6 trillion but it is returned to the tax payer who stumped up the $6 trillion.

The 50M who aren’t contributing tax represent an actual cost of $1 trillion. The remaining $5 trillion is redistributed.

250M people contribute $20k. 300M people receive $16.6k.

300M * $20k - $6 trillion == $0

I'm sure you didn't mean this, but let's be clear the 6T is not returned to the tax payer that stumped it. Since this isn't generated wealth, just redistributed, it's a cost to someone. Someone's getting 20k, and someone's paying for it. And some people are going to be paying a lot more than 20k, and some people won't be paying in anything.

The money does go back to the tax payers.. Its redistributed amongst the tax payers. Its pretty much the core concept.

You thought that I thought they just sent the cheques back in the post? That would be bizarre indeed!

"250M people contribute $20k. 300M people receive $16.6k."

No, more work hours != more productivity. The very article you linked to illustrates that.

It's not about the immediate cost. It's about the fact that conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

Listen to this investigation into Disability benefits.[1] Listen to how the people who receive these benefits genuinely need the stable income that they provide, but are then prohibited from working part-time, tutoring, even volunteering for their community, for fear of losing the only available form of security. Listen to how trapped they become by the system. For them, being trapped by a conditional benefits program is better than the alternative -- anything is better than starvation -- but it is still a dehumanising and self-perpetuating institution.

The flipside to making benefits conditional is that we require employers to provide social support (eg., via minimum wage, etc). By setting an expensive threshold below which employers cannot create jobs, we impose enormous costs on industry and minimize job creation. A basic income should go hand-in-hand with the elimination of minimum wage. By removing the requirement that jobs must provide base-level income support, we would enable the creation of more jobs.

Between eliminating the steep marginal tax rates on the poor, and removing the steep threshold to job creation due to minimum wage, we would eliminate the two biggest factors in chronic poverty traps. So if you want to do a real calculation on the costs of our current policies, be sure to include the cost to industry of the minimum wage, as well as the Net Present Value of the future costs of letting the current poverty-trap system continue to grow.

1: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...

...conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

There are cheaper policies than BI which don't do this. One example is Basic Job - if you need a job real bad the government gives you a really bad job.

This has no poverty traps, and (unlike BI) has no disincentive for work. You also get to avoid spending money on people who don't need it, and additionally society can derive some marginal benefit from the work people do (e.g. public spaces can be cleaner).

Exactly so.

I don't understand why the 'Basic Job' idea doesn't get more traction. For all of the talk about a 'post work' world, I still see plenty of work that needs doing, every day.

I think it's a sort of taboo idea because of Victorian work houses.

Basic Job is stupid because it leads to silliness like building bridges with hand labor instead of machines.

If labor is abundant and machines are scarce, why is this stupid?

Because it would be cheaper to use a machine to build the bridge, give the money you save to the people, and then let them add value to society in some other way.

So direct them to do that other thing for their Basic Job and use the machine for the bridge.

Again you should really do some research with the countries who tried or is trying this. It helps no one and cost more than it helps.

Sure. That other thing is self improvement, looking for normal employment and helping their family / community or whatever else they think is important. In other words it is a basic income for the unemployed...

But the economy doesn't want them, or is unable to utilize them under present conditions. Eating what you have in front of you is still more filling than waiting (or letting someone wait) for that next, bigger meal.

Of course, that also doesn't mean we shouldn't eliminate the incentives that contribute to inefficiencies being preferable. There are plenty of scenarios where people are employed to dig a proverbial hole and others are paid to fill it (patents and copyright enforcing intellectual poverty; interest on public debt, etc), even if each side spares no expense and might use the best tools available. If we were actually solving problems, prices would be going down and people would be happily unemployed (because there were less problems to resolve and less to need money to buy) at the same time as quality of life were going up. That is not what is happening.

He said "let them add value to society", not the economy. The two are not synonymous. If the economy is unable to make use of them under present conditions, then giving them a job is useless. Giving them a basic income lets them make non-economic contributions to society.

But the economy doesn't want them, or is unable to utilize them under present conditions.

Capitalist corporations don't want/are unable to utilize them. Don't confuse them with the economy which is far more grandiose and inclusive than that. There are millions of ways for humans to create value for other people, most of which would be unprofitable for capitalist corporations to pursue.

You're assuming the value of a person's time to themselves is zero. If it's positive, and if the economic value we're deriving from the make-work is less than it, then the make-work program is actually destroying value.

Exactly and better yet - don't take the money you ultimately "save" from the people in the first place.

Because people would rather pay a small fraction of their wages to buy a machine to do their job for them. And they should. Basic income basically allows that to happen - you're employer gets the extra profit from automating you away, but the money is taxed and given back.

Because it means it's harder for me to get a job building those machines, which is how we make genuine progress.

Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. There's a fundamental conceptual problem with it:

Imagine I, for whatever reason, accept a Basic Job from the government. The job is, by design, bad. I'd rather not do it. So my dream scenario is that I officially hold a Basic Job and draw its meager salary, but instead of doing whatever work it supposedly entails I sit at home and watch TV.

This scenario isn't just an improvement in my life -- it's also an improvement for everyone handling me! The work doesn't need to get done; it's only there as a penalty for me, to encourage me not to draw the Basic Salary if I don't really, truly need it. So when I save myself some effort by not showing up for work, I also save my handlers effort that might have gone into overseeing me. Just as it's easier for me to stay home, it's easier for them to pretend I didn't than to track whether or not I did anything. So overseeing Basic Job is conceptually pretty difficult.

I don't claim that this is more or less difficult to deal with than the problems of any other welfare system, but it is an obvious and fundamental flaw in the concept, and might help explain why it's hard for Basic Job to get traction. On a shallower level, the concept of "pay someone to dig a hole today and fill it in tomorrow" (a.k.a. The Basic Job Concept), has been the go-to example for exactly what we don't want government to do for a long, long time. That can also make it difficult to get traction.

Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. BJ is work that is not worth doing at current market prices. I.e., picking up garbage in the park might be worth $4/hour, but minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If we spend $7.25 more and get $4.00 worth of value out of it, we lost $3.25.

If we are already spending $7.25 on welfare/BI and getting nothing in return, we are losing $7.25. If we demand that recipients work for their money we lose only $3.25. As long as the BJ workers are not destructive, we lose less money than we otherwise would with welfare or a BI.

Also, the jobs need not be "dig a hole and fill it in" - they can also be "walk around town and find potholes to fill tomorrow" or "there is garbage on the streets, go clean it up". It's not as if we have a shortage of things that would be beneficial if we did them. They just might not be worth doing at current prices.

This raises a pretty interesting question. Suppose I apply for a Basic Job at your institution, where all the work is sort of worthwhile, but not worthwhile enough to happen unsubsidized. What job do you assign to me? How do you choose it? I assume you're not choosing the "most worthwhile" of the jobs, because how would you know?

If the work is digging holes one day and undigging them the next, overhead here is low. If there's some other system behind what the jobs are and how they get filled, potential for corruption seems extremely high. Say I'm a Denny's and I'd rather not pay so much for my kitchen staff. Can I list all the positions with Basic Job and kick back to the administrator when he sends me someone?

Germany has no minimum wage and extremely low unemployment. What would their Basic Jobs be?

And how is that different than eliminating a minimum wage and providing a basic income, other that the basic job is much more complex?

I think the idea is that if you already have a basic income, then you probably would not be motivated to work for such low wages.

The basic income goes towards making sure the worthless jobs don't get done anyway. It's more like eliminating the minimum wage and then using the existing welfare state mechanisms to float everyone's consumption up to a floor of $20k / year as long as they have a job.

"Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing."

Not at all. There are things that provide economic value that is hard to capture. Determining what those things are and how to value them is going to be messy, though.

This has been done in the German Democratic Republic. They had a "right to work" article in their constitution that was basically fully implemented. Almost everyone who could work except for older pupils and university students had a job. In fact, not working despite being able to do so was an offence punishable with up to two years in prison.

Arguably the only good thing that came of this was that equal pay for men and women was also assured by their constitution.

Excellent! Give everyone a shovel. Half the people can dig the hole, the other half will fill it in again!

Seriously, make-work is a horrible idea and a gigantic waste of resources. Basic income frees people to live their lives and contribute to society in ways that are undervalued by the labour market such as writing, creating art and music or caring for children, the elderly or chronically ill.

How many people might choose to start a small business if they have the security of a basic income? It seems to me like a potentially staggering number of people.

Basic Job will likely leave you little time to train in an area where you could be more productive for society. Basic Pay is designed to provide you the time to do that. Sure there has to be a bit of trust that you're going to not just sit on your arse, but very few people actually want to do that (despite what a lot of people think), and it's psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life.

A lot of the comments here also ignore a lot of the factors that Basic Pay would provide which aren't directly measurable- increases to areas such as science and the arts which, while not tied to anything concrete like GDP or a country's economy, are indisputedly important to society.

False.

BI would not provide increases to science nor art. It would dilute them. I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! There's a reason why only a tiny fraction of actors, musicians, and artists earn a living. That living is what society thinks of their art.

Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Note: A few years ago I was a graduate student (24k/yr living) in Boston who made time to play drums. You can express your art (or science) without a handout.

But the reality is that we don't NEED everybody to work, or soon won't. The comforts of life will become a civil right. What then? Old Puritan work ethic becomes obsolete. Any thoughts on 'right behavior' in a post-work economy?

We're not anywhere close to this. For this to even happen we need everyone who can work, to work, right now. Implementing BI will delay your utopia.

Close in America. Its rapidly becoming obvious that big business doesn't want/need even a fraction of the available workers. Folks resort to entropic work, where they sort out fad and fashion for one another while producing no useful product. A way to keep everybody busy in pursuit of the fantasy of 'full employment'.

Not. Even. Close. Call me when shelter, food, and water costs are so low that any able person can attain each for minimal work. The fact that electricians and construction workers are still in high demand and get paid 80k+ shows how far away we are.

5 million Americans receive housing for free or substantially federally assisted right now :https://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/methodology/supplemental...

How can that be? What direction is this going? How soon until everybody is subsidized in some way? (There are 2000+ federal housing assistance programs right now).

Market value for construction workers is misleading when the market is skewed. Because we currently play a game where people who want houses, have to hand over green coupons to people who build houses, isn't the whole story. Consider that all this money-trading is by the 99%, who own a small fraction of the money. What if the 1% threw their money into the game? It would skew the prices and wages until some equilibrium was reached, maybe have no real effect on housing at all.

So the real question is, how do we motivate our workforce to create wealth (housing, food etc) for everyone? We have excess capacity to do this (Iowa creates enough food alone, to feed 2 USAs). Why aren't we doing it? Automation will make it not even take people at some point to accomplish it.

The money game will run out of steam at some point. Whether the robot overlords just give us all what we need, or let us starve, is up to our choices in the next couple of decades.

This is all tounge in cheek (sort of); but because today we use money to guide resource doesn't mean it will continue to be useful to do that.

I don't think you understand how money works. Remove money, and people will trade items for items. Money is the intermediate unit of your effort and time. "We" motivate our workforce in a natural way by choosing how we trade our (effort and time) for items they have. The value of those items changes as supply and demand changes anyways. The reason "we" are not letting Iowa feed us is because we don't want to eat 3 meals of corn all day every day. How would you "motivate" them to? Force? Which single entity would decide all these things? You, our new overlord? Sorry, I'll take my chances with the current, awesome, system ^_^

That misses the point of the discussion again. People trade for things because of scarcity. This new 'post-scarcity' economy won't/can't/shouldn't work like that, at least for the necessities of life. The whole question is what to do when folks DONT trade for things.

>I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition!

If you can't differentiate between capitalism and scientific peer-review as separate processes for separating wheat and chaff, why should I take your word on the ethics underlying fundamental economics, ie: that "he who does not work deserves not to eat"?

Competition underlies capitalism.

Why do you think scientists want to publish in the best journals like science and nature? There is a healthy amount of competition in science too. It's what drives people to get into the academy, or get awards like the Nobel. It's what creates great science, but it also creates politics in research.

There's a number of parallels between capitalism and academic research.

So there has to be a requisite degree of suffering on the bottom-end to motivate the population to compete to better their station? Is that the society-scale version of "The beatings will continue until morale improves?"

Well, on a more serious note, it would be, "The subtle resource starvation will continue until you become more valuable and productive."

Would the "lower classes" in academia lacking health care result in more academic productivity? Actually, no one really disagrees about these things in an absolute sense. It's more where people want to draw the lines.

The lines are set by supply and demand. It's the reason why I got paid doing a STEM graduate degree, while someone in the arts or history would not.

"The subtle resource starvation will continue until you become more valuable and productive."

Yes, and this is the reason society improves over time. Drastically so.

In other words, it is little value to me if you decide to pursue art history because there are enough art historians in supply. You would need to out-compete ones with greater experience than you to make a living. It doesn't help society to add +1 to that pool. On the other hand, it is quite valuable to pursue a STEM degree because the skills, research, and knowledge you attain are in demand.

The system, works. Society improves over time, and everyone is rewarded. Everyone is(should be) thankful.

>The lines are set by supply and demand. It's the reason why I got paid doing a STEM graduate degree, while someone in the arts or history would not.

Bull. The funding for your "STEM" (come on, tell us what field you actually did) grad degree didn't come from supply and demand on an open market; it came from government research funding.

>"The subtle resource starvation will continue until you become more valuable and productive." > >Yes, and this is the reason society improves over time. Drastically so.

The fact that you have noticed an optimization process acting on society optimizes society is not a great insight. The fact that you failed to notice the current optimization process profoundly mismatches our values and intentions is a major misstep of yours.

>"The funding for your "STEM" (come on, tell us what field you actually did) grad degree didn't come from supply and demand on an open market; it came from government research funding."

Which is driven by the market. If art historians were all of a sudden extremely profitable then you bet your ass there will be a massive increase in gov't funding at their graduate level, due to market demands. Grant applications have to stress the importance of their research (and often times potential for profit) to society. The fact that you fail to see immense competition in gov't research funding shows how high your blinders are.

>"The fact that you have noticed an optimization process acting on society optimizes society is not a great insight. The fact that you failed to notice the current optimization process profoundly mismatches our values and intentions is a major misstep of yours."

Don't shove your values on me. Un-targeted welfare steals limited resources from those who truly need it. Swallow those values whole.

Funny, that $24k a year that allowed you to play drums (along side your graduate studies) is about in the range of what people generally propose for a basic income

Indeed, it's quite a bit more than I'd propose for a basic income.

> Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Trust me when I say that the truly deserving individuals with true disabilities do not want to sit on their asses, deservedly or not.

The part where it's "psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life" holds just as much for them as for everybody (and it's arguably even more important for them). It doesn't take a very long time of sitting on your ass to realize this, either.

Addition, it's too late to edit now, but reading back my comment, there should be scare quotes around the words "truly" and "true". I very clearly don't want to mean to imply I have the position to decide who is "truly deserving" or "truly disabled".

Just wanted to point out that a lot of people who can't work, generally want to, very badly.

Of course it has poverty traps. I live in the UK, where I get to see how the "workfare" programme creates poverty traps all the time.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by getting more education and practicing skills that are valuable to employers. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by taking part-time and piecemeal work to build up your experience. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

A government study of workfare programmes in the UK, Canada, and US[1] concluded that: "There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers."

Oftentimes the poor are those who most need to spend time taking care of children or the elderly -- types of work which are tremendously valuable to society despite not being part of the wage labour system. A basic job conflicts with that.

Furthermore, Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes. What you consistently miss in your argument against Basic Income is that it is something which everybody receives. Most people contribute to it, but all people receive a benefit from it. The "cost" is not the total cost of the programme, but the difference between what you pay and what you receive.

1: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130128102031/htt...

I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes.

Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Incidentally, your study merely shows there is very little evidence of anything due to workfare being poorly implemented and rapidly abandoned. For example, NYC had only 2800 people on workfare in 2003. Additionally, it claims that about half of people on workfare don't actually work and merely loaf about the work site (but presumably continue receiving benefits).

Obviously a BJ won't work if you turn it into a de-facto BI or welfare system.

You cant live from a job that the government doesnt already consider worhthy of paying a salary for.

It doesnt work and never have. Denmark tried this too it does nothing cause it doesnt solve the basic problem.

There is not enough jobs for all of us and will increasingly be so.

BI is the best solution we know of and we should try it.

> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.

How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?

> Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.

So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.

  Job description   $/year   No. of people   Total cost
  Basic Jobber      20k      45,973,453      919.5B
  Supervisor        30k      3,831,121       114.9B
  Line Manager      40k      191,556         7.7B
  District Manager  60k      3,831           0.2B
  Regional Manager  100k     383             -

...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.

Going with your numbers, if a basic jobber costs $7.25/hour and they produce $0.30 worth of value, the Basic Job pays for it's own overhead. And of course, $1T < $6T.

I must commend you on actually thinking things through carefully and checking if, numerically, a policy is remotely plausible. It's so rare to see on threads like this.

You don't actually need all $6T, because most people will be paying taxes that equal or exceed what they receive from BI.

You mentioned earlier that BI disincentivizes work. How so? It seems to me that it would not, because the basic income doesn't disappear the instant you start working even a little bit.

This one is pretty straightforward. BI disincentivizes work because it stays with you if you stop working. On the common assumption that people are working for the money, not for the joy of showing up, this reduces the penalty for not working, which will cause a rise in... not working.

The arguments for BI that I've read here on HN assert that this isn't a problem, because people who don't want to be working are a net drain on the systems in which they work, and/or they will be replaced by people who want to work a little bit but can't because they will lose disability.

The incentive to continue working even if you receive BI is that BI won't be enough to have a luxurious lifestyle, just enough to meet basic needs and educate oneself.

With BI it always is beneficial to work. Even if you only work for a couple of months a year (for instance picking strawberries) you will make more money than not doing anything.

So if anything BI incentives people to work even if only for once in a while.

All this shows is that BI doesn't entirely eliminate existing incentives to work. That's uncontroversial. It could still very well be that BI provides a disincentive relative to an identical system without BI.

No that is actually one of the major claims from opponents of BI and thus controversial. That it removes the incentive for someone to work.

But there is nothing that indicates this at all. In fact the Canadian experiment mincome although not conclusive did not show people in general stopping to work.

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

You think a major claim of BI opponents is that there is zero remaining incentive to work, as opposed to simply a substantially reduced incentive? Show me anyone (who understands that BI isn't lost when someone works) making that claim anywhere.

I agree with you that the evidence shows there is not even substantially reduced incentive. In the case of Mincome in particular, it did show a decrease in hours worked, which is consistent with the claim that you were objecting to - that BI reduces the incentives for work (relative to the same system with no BI). Asserting that the global disincentive is small and that conditional assistance provides far more disincentive would have been entirely appropriate. Asserting that there is zero disincentive - without an explanation for why we saw one in Mincome - is not, and your earlier comment was arguing that by asserting remaining incentive was not zero which just doesn't make sense as an argument.

I think you should read what I wrote again and perhaps you will realize that i did not make any claims about zero disincentive.

What I said was that it always will pay off to work and therefore incentives people to work.

Thats a very different argument than the one you are arguing against.

So your assertion is that you were making a true statement that was utterly unrelated to the subthread you were replying in?

I was replying to this:

"...This one is pretty straightforward. BI disincentivizes work because it stays with you if you stop working. On the common assumption that people are working for the money, not for the joy of showing up, this reduces the penalty for not working, which will cause a rise in... not working..."

More specifically this sentence:

"...On the common assumption that people are working for the money..."

I think you need to re-read what you wrote in response to that.

No you just need to understand what I am actually saying.

Then please clarify, because it still reads like you were arguing past the post entirely.

You said:

"With BI it always is beneficial to work."

As an aside, this is not quite true - if I value my time more than the wages offered, or if working has associated costs that exceed my wages, it might not be beneficial - but it is certainly the case that you don't wind up with less money because you worked because of BI.

However, more importantly, this doesn't disagree with thaumasiotes's comment and I don't see how it's relevant to the parent discussion.

"Even if you only work for a couple of months a year (for instance picking strawberries) you will make more money than not doing anything."

This is true, and a great advantage that BI has over conditional transfers or assistance. It's still not actually relevant to the parent's point. Absent BI, this is still the case, and the incentive will be higher.

"So if anything BI incentives people to work even if only for once in a while."

This seems entirely false, in terms of anything that was presented here. It is the case that people remain incentivized, but it is not the BI that 8provides* that incentive. The change due to introducing BI is that paid work is less incentivized, which is the same as saying "BI disincentivizes work."

It's certainly true that BI will reduce incentives to work, 1) on paid projects, 2) first order, 3) amongst those who are not currently receiving assistance.

Regarding each of these caveats in turn:

1) There are plenty of projects that we individually may deem socially worthwhile that we don't pay for. Parents raising their children being probably the strongest example, but there are other places where value is simply hard to capture. Incentive to work on these is not decreased by BI.

2) Incentive to work depends on what people are willing to pay you for your labor. If BI ultimately means people are willing/able to pay for more things then the total incentive to work may rise. So far as I'm aware, this is not a settled question (it seems a probable second-order consequence but possibly drowned by inflation, &c...)

3) Anyone currently receiving disability or welfare payments is not merely being paid despite not working, they're effectively being paid not to work. Transitioning to unconditional support will clearly increase their incentive to work.

What all this does in aggregate is not at all clear to me.

You will cause entrepreneurs and job-creaters to leave the country. The U.S. isn't in a bubble. Why would someone making 6 or more figures want to be taxed 60%+ for their work?

> of course, $1T < $6T

Your $6T number is false. Even in your strawman, the cost of the Basic Income would be $1T: $6T less $5T as a "cash-back rebate", due to the fact that every single person paying for the BI is also receiving the BI. This has been explained to you many times on this thread, but you keep ignoring it.

> if a basic jobber costs $7.25/hour and they produce $0.30 worth of value, the Basic Job pays for it's own overhead.

But a Basic Income would have $0/hr worth of overhead -- and it can be assumed that a person who is able to seek work and education will produce more than $0.30/hr of value anyway.

> I must commend you on actually thinking things through carefully and checking if, numerically, a policy is remotely plausible.

Thank you. I have an MBA from Oxford and run two businesses. I am very comfortable with numbers.

But a Basic Income would have $0/hr worth of overhead

This doesn't sound plausible to me. People are devilishly clever when it comes to bilking large bureaucracies out of free money. It's going to take a bit of work to prevent that from happening. Organized Crime is going to get in on something like this.

Where's the calculation for how much it costs to give the $20K/person to the employed? Unless unemployment is above 96%, it will be more than the 4.2% overhead you hypothesize here.

Can you be fired from your basic job? What happens then?

You are basically out of a job.

That's not the cost of the program. The net cost of a BI is actually much lower than the net cost of the targeted program. The actual cost of the program is the expense of administration, how much resources are used by the government in running the program.

Actually, your math is entirely wrong.

Let's use the same numbers as you: 300M people, $20k each, only 50M people who actually "need" it.

In the BI scenario, 250M people are paying for the cost of program (since the 50M who actually "need" it presumably can't pay). That's $6B / 250m = $24,000 per person. However, each of those people is also receiving $20,000 worth of BI. Therefore, the cost to them is $24,000 - $20,000 = $4,000 per person. $4000 * 250M = $1B -- exactly the same as your conditional benefits program, except now there's vastly less overhead and no poverty trap.

How do you decide the "50M who actually 'need' it" with vastly less overhead? There is a cost to run the IRS and determine (correctly) peoples income.

Furthermore, a 4k tax on 250M of the U.S. could be crippling to a good chunk of them. If your true point is redistribution of wealth, our tax system already does that and can do it more. But that's a different discussion..

How do you decide the "50M who actually 'need' it" with vastly less overhead?

We already do this with income tax forms.

That's what this is. It's very similar to Milton Friedman's negative income tax bracket.

You don't decide. The point of Basic Income is that it's unconditional and universal. If somebody can prove they're a citizen, they get the BI, no need to determine their income.

As for a $4k tax being "crippling to a good chunk of them" -- no, you misunderstand the nature of BI. If we're paying $20k worth of BI in this scenario, then the mean income should be about $40k (since a good level for BI -- in basically any economy -- is about 50% of the mean). We could then support a flat $20k/person BI with a flat 50% earned-income tax. This means that the payments and receipts, per person would look like this:

  Income    Tax   +BI    Net    Effective tax rate
  $0       -$0    $20k   $20k   N/A
  $10k     -$5k   $20k   $15k   N/A
  $20k     -$10k  $20k   $10k   N/A
  $30k     -$15k  $20k   $5k    N/A
  $40k     -$20k  $20k   $0     N/A
  $50k     -$25k  $20k  -$5k    10%
  $60k     -$30k  $20k  -$10k   15%
  ...
  $100k    -$50k  $20k  -$30k   30%
  ...
  $1,000k  -$500k $20k  -$490k  49%

As you can see, people making the mean income or less would make nothing at all. People making moderately more than the mean income would pay a little bit, but no more than they currently pay to support benefits programs. The only people paying a lot would be the people who could afford it.

Someone needs to turn this into an animated chart. It looks like you are taking away someones first dollar earned?

"It looks like you are taking away someones first dollar earned?"

I don't see where you're getting that. Presuming the numbers haven't changed since you commented, it looks to me like taking away half of every dollar earned.

I guess I don't understand what 'Net' is. Is it the cost of the government, so if I earn 20k on the open market, are given 20k and taxed 10k (I have 30k in my pocket, and the gov has spent 10k)?

Net here is the amount received by the individual in basic income, less the portion of their taxes going to pay for the basic income, assuming it is funded with a 50% flat tax. So yes, if you earn $20k, are given $20k, and are taxed (for the purposes of funding the BI) $10k, the net (direct) effect of the basic income program on your bottom line is $10k.

No.

Explain why after spending 10 years in school my tax burden should increase by 30k (making it an effective 60% rate not counting 10% sales tax in CA) to give to able bodied people who choose not to get off their ass. I guarantee you society is better off letting me keep what I earned rather than giving it to a completely untested individual. I didn't work my ass off for you.

It's called "paying it forward". Assuming, of course, that some form of BI would be in place, you would have spent those 10 years in school supported by a BI. So paying those taxes, you're making sure that people just like you can afford to spend 10 years in school and become great and awesome too.

PS: I hardly ever meet any of those "able bodied people who choose not to get off their ass" - they mostly show up in discussions like these - and I suspect they're a tiny minority. Let's not adjust policies to punish that tiny minority if, in the process, everybody else gets punished too.

"(since a good level for BI -- in basically any economy -- is about 50% of the mean)."

How do you arrive at this?

You have to factor a multitude of other things in.

Such as capital gains, tax deductions, very low corporate taxes, the actual control etc.

The overhead is many times more than you seem to indicate when it comes to targeted programs.

There's something very striking (to me) about your back-of-the-envelope numbers here.

Are we really endorsing the idea that one person in six should be on welfare?

The number of deserving people isn't small, it's large. It is very nearly everyone.

Unemployed people get something, disabled people get something, old people get something, and working get salary, pay taxes on them, get deductions or lower tax brackets, etc. All of that would be replaced by BI.

It's not just about saving overhead costs, it's also about making sure people always get ahead by working. Suppose you're on wellfare, but you might be able to work part-time against minimum income. That added income gets deducted from your wellfare and if it doesn't work out, you might not get it back. So you stand nothing to gain, and a lot to lose. Why even try? With BI, every additional hour you work, increases your income.

So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

Generally, any communal institution either develops rules and mechanisms to prevent freeloading, or has an authority who acts to prevent such. Almost all of them succumb to a "Tragedy of the Commons" dynamic in terms of some aspect of quality of life.

That said, there are some institutions that are identified as being communal that last and even prosper somehow.

Many also cite things like the Cabrini Green projects as an example of how removing the stake someone has in society by guaranteeing their rent/income is somehow inherently dehumanizing. To fully address such a hypothesis, one would have to control for factors such as social class and social stigma attached to such benefits.

The Sea Steading Institute aims to lower the barrier of entry to creating your own sovereign nation. One of the core ideas is that if we have lots of small nations people can do these experiments and find out.

How close are they to a "demo version"?

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

Seasteading might be an answer to your question.

okay, I have a pitch for an MVP.

It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be bigger.

That's the whole algorithm.

I think it's self-balancing - if I, as a software developer, have the opportunity to withdraw a small sum, I won't bother - I don't need an extra $5 or $50 or $500, really. But to someone in a lower income bracket, that might be a significant amount of money.

This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.

I like this idea, it certainly makes it fair. If you support the idea, you pay for it. I suspect this would likely fail though, if you didn't have some disincentive for withdrawals then it only takes a tipping point of free loaders to bankrupt the system.

Still, I love the idea of making it's voluntary. It certainly would allow the BI proponents to put their money where the mouth is. I suspect what makes BI unlikely to succeed is when it's proposed as mandatory wealth redistribution, since it's never as far as I know been done successfully and the consequences of failure are potentially massive, the risks would seem to outweigh the hypothetical rewards.

Would a voluntary pay in system, you could prove it works or doesn't work without forcing anyone else to take the risk. I wonder if a local community could do this for it's residents?

incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance.

Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before.

To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be one centralized social network such as Facebook, simply because the cost of centralization is lower than that OF decentralization (think diaspora). However, the cost of switching to another service doesn't make sense to a single user, hence rent seeking becomes possible. Telcos are another good example. To change this paradime the cost of decentralization has to be significantly lower than the cost of centralization, even to each individual user.

So the real problem isn't that all people are not paying into such an insurance contract, rather that the rent seekers are able to seek out rent at increasing scale while contributing ever less to society. Any BI fund would logically need to be funded by taxing the rent seekers rather than normal people who's productivity gains normally don;t lead to rent seeking due to more liquid markets for employees.

Taxing land, monopolies, money (through demurrage rather than inflation) and adding all of those funds to BI would make a lot more sense. Think Norway Sovereign Fund or the Alaska Fund.

While I agree with you that rent-seekers have more concentrated wealth than us merely overpaid people, I don't know how to voluntarily separate those people from their money.

Tax wealth and capital rather than income. You want to tax gain in capital rather than direct income (just reverse the capital gains and income tax rates, and gains are realised when stock prices go up, rather than when you sell if your stock values are above a certain small number).

Sounds like 'vat' or something. Very European.

Tax codes don't make sense, because they get diddled every year to meet some Senator's (Lobbyist's) pet purpose. Stir and bake for 100 years, and we have the baroque mess we're in.

As somebody famous said, taxation is the art of 'getting the most feathers from the goose, with the least squawking'. Noting in there about making sense or being fair.

Taxing wealth is similar to the old idea of the property tax, used 100's of years ago to encourage working idle lands in the hands of useless absentee-landlord lords and ladies. Worked pretty good. Maybe its time to do the same for bank accounts, investments etc.

Land and money are most likely more efficiently taxable than almost anything else. Land doesn't move and property rights toward land are anyway only virtual claims within some sort of state ledger/database. Money as we know it exists only exclusively in the banking system which ultimately depends on central banking and centralized databases which can be taxed through demurrage. Demurrage has strong theoretical and practical support (1). So does Land value tax (2). Both have very positive anti-inflationary second order effects.

Other monopolies which can easily be taxed are natural resource extraction businesses.

Taxing modern monopolies such as Facebook or IP/Patent based businesses is a lot more tricky.

However, once you tax money, land, and monopolies, there is no sense in VAT, income tax, corporate tax or any of the other net-negative taxes. Minimum wage, to some extend even pregnancy leave would become obsolete. Laws protecting workers from getting fired could become more lose. This combined with some sort of UBI would extremely streamline the entire state apparatus and cut out the potential for power grabs by politicians. It would make business a lot more dynamic.

This scheme would also make business formation and entrepreneurship incredibly easy. Imagine 3 guys who have this great idea but can't just barricade themselves in a basement and built a product atm, with UBI they can. Once they have an actual company going they have easier access to capital because large capital holders have pressure to put it back into the economy and hold stocks rather than cash or land/property. Due to UBI more people have cash to actually buy their widget. The 3 founders could hire a lot easier because people can easily switch employers without the fear of red tape such as losing healthcare or some other nonsense. Hiring freelancers/consultants to help should also be a lot easier because there is going to be plenty of people out there who do it just for the projects and who don't have the pressure to get the next gig. Firing people would be easy because of the presumably easier employment laws. You might even be more competitive in the global marketplace because you just got rid of almost all taxes for the startup. You might only have to pay capital gains taxes on your stock gains, but you got a lot faster to that point without ANY risk. That's pretty much the wet dream of any VC, fast generation of companies, fast traction, access to further capital, easy hiring, super fast closure and multiples. Then the cycle begins again.

(1) http://www.lietaer.com/2010/03/the-worgl-experiment/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

In Australia we have a single system, where the test for qualifying for welfare is almost entirely based on (1) total assets and (2) income. This disproves the theory that excessive complexity is inherent in welfare systems.

Is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

My proposal is an e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee pay outs would be equivalent to a basic income. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments.

Why would businesses accept such a currency? In the future wealth inequality will probably cause economic demand to shrink. By accepting these types of currencies, businesses could grow while remaining profitable.

There's an altcoin based on time-based demurrage fee called Freicoin[1].

[1] http://freico.in/

I did see this. However, with Freicoin the demurrage fee is only used to pay the miners. In my proposal the fees would be paid back to all consumers.

some MVPs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome in Canada

http://www.socialjustice.ie/content/basic-income-schemes-28-... report on all kinds of experiments in Africa

> a sovereign state to experiment with?

some scandinavian countries are close to this, in some respects. some oil countries too

some native peoples, within nations, also (tho other issues complicate it)

The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims (outside of records associated to a constantly used unique identifier) and the entitlements are significant. It works rather well there, but it generally comes with a pre-existing massive social pressure that prevents any abuse; Finland might be the exception to that social monitor (people really do anything and no one would care) but still has an administration with strong ‘socialist’ or equalitarian concerns. I’m embroiled myself in a weird administration imbroglio, and they have shined so far, but I’ll let you know.

More important than an isolated case in a jar, what you need to care about is immigration: any Southern European nationalist will decry your policy as a potential tsunami from Africa. The lack of tension between the oil-money-infused Norway and its neighbours are striking when you compare that to Irak and Kuwait; at best, they associate the higher-priced-better-quality Statoil gas station with Norwegian snobism (I didn’t notice any snobism).

The significant economic success of Finland seems to favor the model. It helps that their chosen field of specialty, video games, is a complex, creative endeavour where success is fleeting and hard to reproduce, revenues are spectacularly unbalanced and business models a constant struggle. This means that most of the ‘idle’ youngsters are actually creating something: playing and learning what makes games cool, or starting their own fan-art, mods, league, reprise… the stepping stones of creativity.

Same thing in more Southern countries: it seems to cost roughly the same to pay someone to stay at home and grow their garden rather than to pay an industrial conglomerate to stay and keep on hiring them. Job insurance is regularly described as the largest Angel fund.

The closest to an MVP you’ll get might be a small state, say Iceland, that has something similar already. The real issue is not product, but interoperability: what happens when you have migrants, double-nationals, and is it safe to end up with a generation that grew up not knowing anyone who works at all?

You might consider a different form of it, with some voluntary civil service to teach basic skills (say, open to elderly and handicapped, substitutable with pregnancy or child-rearing) and make that life revenue a retirement from service, or stipend.

The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims

Late last year I was in Denmark, where ATMs are rare and plastic is king. I was reliably informed that the government didn't like people using cash and that as a business owner if you used more than a few thousand kroner per year you were audited. Furthermore, when you put in tax returns the government would cross-reference it routinely with your mobile phone location .. without a warrant.

The upshot is this: sure, you can have a nanny-state utopia, but it means totalitarianism.

Use a few [hundred dollars] -- for what?

I dunno, something liberating and non government approved, like binge recreational drug consumption or anonymous object/service acquisition?

Oh, for unjustified expenses? I pass those as personal expenses, and get they out of my corporate accounts.

Sounds tight, but Denmark has a history of corporate corruption in the 70-80s they are trying to curb.

More importantly, not sure how that is related to individual benefits; on the contrary: seems like they are focusing on tax dodging.

It's related because if the price you pay for fuzzy utopian governance with near-total compliance is totalitarianism, it's not worth it. Further, if you're setting up paralegal business flows in corporations to avoid personal tracking, then it's but an illustration of the same.

It sounds like we agree to disagree.

I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated work to navigate your way through the application process (I exaggerate, but not by much)

I also agree that we are decades away from sufficient public outrage to fuel the political machine to make these changes. Much like the flat tax, it makes sense to most people but will never happen due to the strong motivation of current rent-seekers to maintain the status quo.

While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"

> While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"

You could grant basic income only to people who are employed, similar to how the EITC is administered. This kills some of the administrative overhead advantages, but not all of it, as verification of employment is still less of an overhead than need verification (it's basically built into the income tax system by default). It's also more likely to fly politically.

Incidentally, this also suggests a feasible political path forward for implementing true basic income -- start with EITC expansion, then slowly roll back the employment verification.

We could start be removing the complexity that is payouts and incentives from the government from taxation. The IRS should only be in charge of collecting taxes. Some other office, the Office of Government Payments would handle all monetary disbursements from the GOV. Getting money back for painting your garage white? Bought a solar powered riding lawn mower? All that stuff from the person to the biggest corporation would have to file the proper paperwork outlining why they deserve or qualify for a disbursement. As it currently stands taxation and disbursements / incentivization is conflated and thus hidden from view its breadth and complexity.

I'm reading the comments, and surprised at what's missing. What happened to the business approach?

The US government is delivering a large number of products with wildly varying costs, efficiencies, and price points. e.g. unemployment, welfare, food stamps, etc. There is a proposal is to replace those products with only one.

The new product fills (mostly) the same need as the existing ones. It will do so at less cost, with more efficiency (less bureaucracy, administration, fraud, etc.). Previous market studies show that it works.

So... what's the problem?

As a non-US person, this looks a lot like previous discussions on health care. France pays about $10 per person per day for universal health care. The UK pays about $10. Japan pays about $10. Canada pays about $10.

The US (before Obomacare) ? About $20, for care that isn't universal.

You guys are getting ripped off. Yet the bulk of the population sticks their fingers in their ears, and complains about people who may not "deserve" it. Or they complain about fraud.

Who the hell cares about random welfare guy ripping off the system? If you're making over $40K per year, you're getting ripped of by the system. By your system, that you demand to keep in place.

You can get rid of the checks and balances, and just absorb the cost of fraud. And as a bonus, a simpler system is harder to game, which leads to more detectable fraud, and therefore less of it.

This won't happen in the US for a number of reasons. One of which is that the bureaucracy won't voluntarily reduce. Another (as seen here) an unwillingness to deal with these issues in a business-like manner.

Yes, I'm from a socialist country advocating for more capitalism. Not unfettered, but more.

It's worth noting that Ontario spent a lot of money to introduce photo health ID, because of the fraud under the old system (including people who would border-hop to take advantage of OHIP while living primarily in the US).

> bureaucracy won't voluntarily reduce

I think that's one of the big ones. Bureaucracies tend to become living, breathing organisms who's sole purpose is to self-preserve and grow. A basic income in the US would threaten so many different agencies and organizations within (and without) the government, that the response would be fierce, assuming you could even get it anywhere near the government. With people's anti-communist attitude here, it's hard to get any ideas out there that don't fall in line with the current capitalist-imperialist system. Even if something isn't anywhere near communism, you get fox news calling it communism and in a few short minutes half the country hates it.

I think the only way this will ever happen in the US is if a bunch of other countries do it first, successfully. Then, after maybe 20 years, the US will implement a shittier, watered down version that accomplishes 1/10 of the original idea but with staggering overhead.

>>Who the hell cares about random welfare guy ripping off the system? If you're making over $40K per year, you're getting ripped of by the system. By your system, that you demand to keep in place.

The USA is a deeply individualistic society. For most people, the default mindset is "me vs. those other people," and your average American will do anything (including tolerating a grossly inefficient system) to make sure "those other people" don't steal from "me."

Oddly, you've also just summed up the reasons behind many of our copyright and patent issues.

If anything many people are pushing harder in this direction. For instance, consider the push for mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients even though the places have tried it have discovered that:

1) Almost no one fails them 2) They cost more money than they save (in cancelled benefits)

Let us not delude ourselves into thinking any healthcare system is self-contained and self-sustaining, equipped to deal with all the needs of its citizenry.

Most European nations ( and Canada, Australia & New Zealand ) are great at dispensing - what can be termed as - "subsistence medicine." Most ailments, procedures and surgeries are handled quite well, although - it has to be said - a tad frugally. ( It is not uncommon for the doctor to under-prescribe medications or opt for a less cost-prohibitive option over another even when the situation could be better dealt with, with a more exhaustive course of prophylaxis)

Plenty of Canadians including the Premier of New Foundland have opted and continue to opt for minimally invasive procedures ( as well as convoluted surgeries ) to be done in the United States, simply because the U.S. is better equipped with the resources and the doctors to deal with such cases.

  "This is my heart, it's my health, it's my choice."
  With these words, Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams
  defended his decision to hop the border and go under the 
  knife for heart surgery in Florida.
  The minimally invasive mitral valve surgery he needed is not 
  available in Newfoundland, he told his province's NTV News channel
  in the first part of an interview aired last night.[1]

  For instance, some Canadian patients who are tired of waiting 
  for procedures in their country's national health system come
  to Michigan hospitals. [2]

Even the richest of the rich pick the United States over say European destinations for their medical treatments.

  The king (Abdullah of Saudi Arabia), who is 86 years old, was in town
  for surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Nov. 24.[3]

[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/its-my-health-i...

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/reverse-medical-tourism-points-u...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/business/14road.html?_r=0

So let's charge these rich people coming over here for premium care a bit extra and redistribute subsistence care to those traditionally not covered.

This is so appalling. If your wife is in labor and needs to rush to the hospital, the cab driver ought to charge you outrageously because you're richer than him?

The cab driver is a really bad example because the cab driver isn't providing a service that people argue is a human right. In terms of healthcare I think that it's reasonable that those who can should pay more to cover for those who can only afford to be grateful. That is usually how the cost of public services is distributed using taxes.

Ok, so make the example "your wife is bleeding out". Should the can driver charge you outrageously because you are richer than he is?

If you read my post again I am sure that you will understand that the predicament of my wife is irrelevant to my argument. Economically rationally the taxi driver will charge according to the perceived value of his service, which in terms of money means more to a rich person. Of course other factors weigh into this equation, especially competition and the fact that people aren't economically rational.

Should the can driver charge you outrageously because you are richer than he is?

Only if you are outrageously rich and the driver did an excellent job of emergency transportation and only by billing you after the fact. The first priority should be on saving lives, then sort the logistics out later.

Having the best hospitals in the world doesn't matter if only a tiny subset of your population can actually use them.

The wait times for life threatening issues in Canada really isn't that bad as someone who spent last year with my mother going through Cancer treatments and has a few friends here going through the same at the moment. Less urgent procedures due tend to take a long time though.

So while Canadians may wait up to 6 weeks for non-essential/urgent surgeries, 45,000 americans die each year because they lack the insurance to pay for their medical treatments.

I think you need to see what Dr. Danielle Martin[1] a Canadian doctor had to say when she testified to the U.S. Senate defending the Canadian system.

The reference was to Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams’ controversial 2010 decision to undergo heart surgery at a Miami hospital.

“It’s actually interesting,” replied Dr. Martin, “because in fact the people who are the pioneers of that particular surgery … are in Toronto, at the Peter Munk Cardiac Center, just down the street from where I work.”

She then hinted that Mr. Williams was of the mistaken belief that simply paying more for something “necessarily makes it better.”[2]

[1] http://youtu.be/iYOf6hXGx6M?t=1m22s

[2] http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/03/12/toronto-doctor-smack...

As a Canadian in the healthcare field perhaps I can chime in as well.

When you talk about Canadian healthcare, it is a provincially run program (not federal) so let's talk about it at the provincial level. As I am an Ontario resident I'll be discussing this from an Ontario perspective, talking about all of the provinces and their differences would entail several posts.

Ontaio is currently going to institute (or plans to at least) pay freezes on physicians due to the rising cost of healthcare in a non-booming economy. However it is currently one of the best provinces in wait times. The provincial median is 6.7 weeks to see a specialist after being referred and another 7.1 weeks to being treated. This has increased 3 years compared to last year and about doubled from 20 years ago. For some specialties like orthopaedics the total duration is ~40 weeks. This is in contrast to the US where ~90% see the specialist within 4 weeks. Internationally we are considered to be amongst the worst nations when it comes to wait times.

Another big problem with the Ontario system is unemployment. 1/3 specialists, especially surgeons, are unemployed due to a lack of operating rooms and jobs available - even in rural areas. There is a definite need but with the single payer system we have, the aging population pyramid, and increasing healthcare costs we have there is no money left to pay physicians - who make less on average (at least in the surgical specialties) than the US physicians. So we're graduating surgeons who can't work and are forced to go the US to find jobs.

To address one of Dr. Martin's comments btw, someone jwo develops a surgery/technique/game isn't always the best person at solving it. Developing a mitral valve replacement survey using MIS techniques doesn't mean you're the best person to technically achieve it (you could be, but it's not a given as she phrases it). The US has a system that rewards exceptionalism and excellence, the Canadian system generally rewards mediocrity (this is even evidence in other fields such as law and even academia). The US is famous for having premier surgeons and state of the art equipment. A prominent example I know is in the field of limb lengthening, where until very recently there was not a single surgeon in Canada who could do internal limb lengthening, they all used the external fixator pioneered in the USSR. Even in medical education you are seeing prominent US schools teaching the use of hand held ultrasound devices which are supposed to one day replace stethoscopes. The US also has far more specialized medical fellowships focused on advanced techniques and tools such as using tne da Vinci robot system.

I can provide references if necessary (I typed this up on my phone) but most of these facts are readily google-able.

TLDR: Our system isn't as perfect as you might think and is actually teetering on financial instability at the moment with up to 1/3 new physicians unable to find a job in the country due to funding issues.

>The US has a system that rewards exceptionalism and excellence, the Canadian system generally rewards mediocrity (this is even evidence in other fields such as law and even academia).

That sounds like a Polandball-grade national stereotype, and I'd really prefer to hear some justification.

Interesting, how she did not have numbers, when asked, for Canadian fatalaties owing to protracted wait times and instead slyly diverted the discussion to the wait times at the security line to enter the Senate building. She seemed a tad petulant and more than a tad eager to please Sen. Sanders and offer a markedly animated and rosy account of her country's system than the rest of the representatives from Taiwan, Denmark and France.

Anyway here are some unvarnished facts about the share of things that plague the Canadian system.

  "In 2011, a significant number of Canadians—an estimated 
  46,159—received treatment outside of the country."
  ...
  "At the same time, the national median wait time for 
  treatment after consultation with a specialist increased from 
  9.3 weeks in 2010 to 9.5 weeks in 2011. Among the provinces, 
  wait times from consultation with a specialist to treatment 
  decreased in six provinces, rising only in Manitoba, Ontario, 
  New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia." 
  ...
  "In some cases, these patients needed to leave Canada due to 
  a lack of available resources or a lack of appropriate 
  procedure/technology. In others, their departure will have 
  been driven by a desire to return more quickly to their lives,
  to seek out superior quality care, or perhaps to save their 
  own lives or avoid the risk of disability. Clearly, the 
  number of Canadians who ultimately receive their
  medical care in other countries is not insignificant."[1]

  "Wait times for health care in Canada have stalled at historically
  high levels, in spite of current government strategies aimed at 
  improved timeliness. Canadians wait longer than citizens of many 
  other OECD countries with universal access health care systems, 
  from emergency room visits to physician consultations to elective
   surgeries, despite Canada’s relatively large health expenditures."
   ...
  "Failing to fix wait times has affected the economic well-being of 
   Canadians in a number of important ways. One estimate, from the  
   Centre for Spatial Economics assessing just four procedures – 
   total joint replacement surgery, cataract surgery, coronary 
   artery bypass graft surgery, and MRI scans – found that excessive
   waits were costing Canadians $14.8 billion, plus another $4.4 billion
  ($19.2 billion,together) in lost government revenues from reduced 
   economic activity."[2]

I dislike offering anecdotal evidence because it appeals to emotion and not reason.

All I can say is I'm acutely familiar with the Canadian system on more than one level.

All of this is not to put too fine a point on how single payer systems are terrible in their own way.

It is to indicate that no matter which system we side with we are confronted with a more or less equally (depending on who you ask) dreadful trade-off of horrors.

I'm not going to dump links here to the scores of Daily Mail reports, to offer as proof of how "efficiently", the British system under the auspices of the NHS, works. You can Google it yourself "NHS site:dailymail.co.uk" )

The point is that vested interests on either side always make the other option look barbaric.

Some prefer a system where every manner of medical malady can be treated skillfully and expediently, right here within our shores without extended wait times, by distinguished medical experts with a tremendous case experience in a given line of treatment, be it Hodgkin lymphoma or Parkinson's or Multiple Sclerosis.

Some prefer that everyone last person in the country has an "on-paper" access to free and need-based healthcare.

Some like David Goldhill want to entirely scrap the insurance model in favor of a radical direct pay model - where everyone pays out of pocket for most common procedures and office visits and thereby largely expunging the role of insurance companies. In 2007, David Goldhill's father was admitted to a New York City hospital with pneumonia, and five weeks later he died there from multiple hospital-acquired infections. [3]

Your outlook is shaped by how healthy you are or how diseased you are. How your family coped with various medical hardships in the past or how everyone you know has always been blessed with bountiful health. How a certain system excludes things that you think should be offered by any self-respecting medical system, for the well-being of its public.

At the end of the day, most sensible people anywhere in the world would want to pay for a system that they see some utility out of, without adverse consequences.

A sick person's utility is different from a hale one's.

A salaryman's utility (with his cautious life choices and lifestyle) is structurally different from a freewheeling thrill seeker's.

After all how is it fair that you are admitted into a ward for a routine fracture and contract some deadly MRSA bacterium from a guy who just returned from a safari in Belize? (This is quite a charitable example and is intentional. There are much worse examples that I could use, that will immediately invite censure and rebuke. Funny how just earlier today I was reading one of the comments to PG's "What You Can't Say" piece - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7443715 and how it strikes a resemblance to what I'm saying here.)

These are some - JUST A TINY TINY FRACTION - of the vast number of things that go UNSAID during a national debate concerning healthcare systems.

Because no politician, policy expert, insurance company executive, medical professional or even an electorate would want to be seen holding borderline prejudicial views, in this context.

Hence they find other ways to verbalize their opposition to a single-payer system, using societally acceptable narratives and scenarios.

[1] http://www.fraserinstitute.org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Conte...

[2] http://www.fraserinstitute.org/research-news/news/display.as...

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...

"I'm not going to dump links here to the scores of Daily Mail reports, to offer as proof of how "efficiently""

Good, because the Daily Mail is laughed at in the UK as being gutter press. It is our version of what the Americans have in TMZ, basically.

Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society, which accounts for inherent human limitations and behaviors. Evolution is an extremely feckless game, and thus far we've been trapped by its whims, endlessly struggling in a free-for-all battle for survival.

In order to transcend and escape our evolutionary origins, we will first and foremost need to understand ourselves. How we came to be, what behaviors we're prone to, and what impact these have on our societies.

Second, we will need technology which allows us to liberate ourselves from extreme labor, giving us free time to engage our societies in a calm, rational matter without our survival on the line.

If these two conditions are met, then I believe humanity will transcend into a new golden age. As of this writing, I think we're made incredible progress on the second point, but are very far behind on the first.

Furthermore, the US is an extremely complex nation, with a history that makes unity almost impossible except against foreign entities. The US needs to make an incredible amount of progress on the first point in order to even consider radical ideas like basic income. In fact, it is currently dialing back its SNAP (food stamps), which is part of its social assistance program. This is in the context of an already weak social safety net, by far the weakest of any western nation.

Sadly, the US has a very long way to go. The commonwealth and Nordic countries, by comparison, are much further along.

> Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society

Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities? If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income.

Then you know what would happen next... people asking for an increased basic income, and the thing would spiral to the end.

Whether or not that's true, that doesn't actually respond to the part you're quoting.

Unless you're arguing that an empirically ethical society is not possible?

Well if it causes inflation then it calls into question whether it really is a "first step."

Free from wage slavery, citizens receiving basic income could spend time producing their own commodities. They could learn trades not to use in a career, but to reduce their dependency on others.

I also think the premise that prices would rise and create a GBI death-spiral is far from guaranteed. With a GBI behind them, citizens could potentially be more likely to start their own businesses, increasing competition and productivity and keeping prices well within reasonable range.

Free from wage slavery? Technology is so much further along than it was 1000 years ago people barely have to work to have the same living standard as they had then.

People generally only work for 8 hours a day. They can't spend the rest of their time doing that right now? Everyone is free to start a business. Tons of people do it while working a full time job. Tons of people go to college while they have a full time job. Those who are lazy won't and I see no reason why I should reward such behavior with my tax dollars.

This is the type of attitude that hinders progress, and for no apparent reason. News flash: you're already rewarding people who sit around doing nothing with your tax dollars. GBI does the same, but at reduced overhead.

Starting a business is hard. Starting a business while working full time is near impossible. It's not about laziness or incompetence. You just don't get the same business opportunities you do when working a full time job as you do when you're able to network and market yourself during regular hours. It can be done but it's really, really fucking hard. Also, working a full time job while in college isn't a good thing. Our country needs to provide education more universally if it wants to stay ahead of the curve. Saying "you can either live in indentured servitude to your student loans, work a full time job while in college, or be born with rich parents" doesn't really cut it. Sure, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and all that bullshit, but let's get serious here...the country doesn't work like it did in the 50s.

GBI makes it possible for your average person to take an idea from conception to reality a lot easier. I'd say for all the companies I've started, the largest overhead was by far salaries and making sure the founders were able to put food on the table. With GBI, our businesses would have been 10x more successful, because investment capital would last 10x longer! This is good for business.

Yes, you'll have lazy people who take advantage. But I'm willing to bet for every lazy person who just wants to sit around all day eating Little Debbies cake rolls, there are 100 who get bored and decide to actually do something with their lives.

Let's also take art into account. Sure it's useless and stupid because the free market doesn't approve, but imagine a world without it. GBI would provide for those who thanklessly and actively make our country a more beautiful place.

I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system.

Yes, starting a business is hard. So? All I'm hearing is excuses.

I'm not saying do things that put you in indentured servitude. Debt is a tool that can be used to great effect but used unwisely it can make life harder. Unless it makes sense financially people are better not incurring college loans and educating themselves or working for less pay. They will actually come out ahead financially even though they may make less in wages. Alas, financial education is rarely taught in school, parents, or society.

Those who start out with less resources need to work harder but it is possible. Why should those who have worked harder or whose parents' have worked harder so their kids have better opportunity have to sacrifice for those unwilling to put in the hard work and make the difficult sacrifices?

The majority of bored people engage in escapism and only a small percentage engage in creative endeavors. People have more disposable time now than they did 100 years but instead of using those hours to work on their own stuff and better themselves the majority engage in escapism (facebook, movies, tv, video games,, etc).

The free market definitely approves of art. What are you talking about? Increasingly larger portions of disposable income are being spent of various forms of content (music, movies, books, etc) than on actual physical goods.

> I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system.

So what's wrong with a system that still rewards laziness (because it can't be stopped no matter what system is in place) but benefits the country a lot more?

> All I'm hearing is excuses.

Excuses from someone who's started a number of companies (successful and failed), been through acquisitions, all without going to college. And it has been hard. And I would have really appreciated a GBI =]. If your society requires people to work 16 hours a day to provide for themselves, your society is broken.

> That's a straw man argument there.

No, it's not. Overused term, especially on this forum, doesn't apply here. People do live in indentured servitude to their student loans as an alternative to working full-time in college. It's a detriment to society.

> Bored people creating? Then why aren't they doing that now instead of watching reality tv?

I know a lot of creative people who actively work to make art in various forms who get jack shit in return. They don't watch a lot of reality TV either. You seem really out of touch with a lot of the general population.

> The free market definitely approves of art. What are you talking about?

Once again, I feel you're out of touch. How many artists do you know? Painters? Musicians? Performers? Most of them (if not all) have side jobs to allow them to do their art (while still living in poverty). The free market accepts art in a pop-culture sense, but people who are pushing the boundaries in art are usually lacking in capital. Not because what they're doing is wrong or useless, but because the general population doesn't approve. Which is a big part of art in the first place.

The problem with rewarding laziness is that you get more laziness. Rewards by definition are meant to encourage behavior. I disagree that it can't be stopped. Don't give them money. Stopped.

I'm not arguing that it isn't hard. You don't need to work 16 hours a day to provide for themselves. But you do need to work more than 8 hours a day if you don't have resources and want to get ahead. Once you start having some resources it gets easier and easier.

That's nice that you would have liked a free lunch. I would really appreciate not paying so many taxes; it would make it much easier for me to get ahead.

I agree with you that people can incur debt in the form of student loans that becomes extremely difficult to get out from. It's a conscious choice to incur that debt. Nobody is forcing them into that situation. If they weren't brainwashed by society they would see that the debt/equity ratio of modern college degrees is, for the most part, a bad investment.

I personally have lived with a song-writer who has had his work reach the #1 most popular music video on youtube for a short time period. We were also dirt poor and living in a warehouse with rooms that we built from scratch ourselves with hammers and nails because we couldn't afford anything more. I had to pay for the drywall, lumber, nails, and tools with my credit card because I had no money. I studied framing because it was too expensive for me to hire a contractor (and we weren't exactly following city codes).

When I was working at a modeling agency in LA I knew more than a dozen actresses and models that have made more than $10K a month consistently. They pursued their careers full time not part-time.

People on HN will generally know more people who are creatively engaged. That's not the majority of society though.

Pushing the boundaries in art? Well, if people aren't interested in it then that's their own fault for being stupid. That fact that other people won't buy their work is not a problem of other people. It's their problem. If you aren't going to provide value that someone else wants then why should you be compensated for it. I certainly won't compensate someone for something I don't value.

In my own case, I quit my day job because I decided it would be more fun to travel the world and photograph beautiful women. I tried to make a business out of it but I was never really successful at it financially despite being published in several major magazines. I racked up over $30K in credit card debt. Did I expect a handout from others so I could continue doing it? Absolutely not. It was my own choice and one that did not pay off financially. I took responsibility for my situation. I switched back to programming, paid off all my debt, and am now still pursuing my interests part time as a hobby. My pay wasn't that great in the beginning but through personal study and experience I have greatly increased my salary.

People don't always get to do what they want. But if they make the right decisions they can definitely prosper.

Just because someone can't support themselves doing whatever they find the most interesting or the easiest path doesn't mean others should be forced to provide them that opportunity.

> Don't give them money. Stopped.

How would you go about doing this? Who gets money and who doesn't? Is a single mother raising 3 kids lazy? Is an artist who works night and day and gets pennies in return lazy? There's a lot of overhead in deciding this. A lot.

> That fact that other people won't buy their work is not a problem of other people. It's their problem.

So, my point that art is only worth it's value to the general population stands. That makes it more entertainment than art. Please note the distinction.

> Just because someone can't support themselves doing whatever they find the most interesting or the easiest path doesn't mean others should be forced to provide them that opportunity.

Valid point. However, I do think there's something to be said for giving people more of an opportunity to do what they like. After all, we all tend to do better work when we're doing something we want to be doing =].

> How would you go about doing this? Who gets money and who doesn't? Is a single mother raising 3 kids lazy? Is an artist who works night and day and gets pennies in return lazy? There's a lot of overhead in deciding this. A lot.

You get money if someone agrees to pay you for goods or services rendered. Period. No overhead.

There will always be unfortunately situations. Charity and family can help. Knowing there will be consequences for your actions and that you can't ask people to bail you out is another.

They definitely aren't lazy. I greatly respect those people. I'm still not going to pay for their lifestyle though.

In the case of the artist, I was in that situation. Minimum wage would have been an order of magnitude more than I was making. When it didn't work out, I took responsibility for my situation and changed what I was doing to something that society would pay for.

I got a day job and it sucked. I hated it. I moved into a warehouse with a friend to save money and so I could pay off my $30K of credit card debt faster, I built myself a room with lumber purchased on credit card, built in the evenings after I got off of work, hands numb from all the hammering I was doing when framing (which I had to teach myself how to do), getting woken up at 6 AM every morning to the sound of industrial saws and compressors from the unit next door, trying to work on the weekends when it was 100 degrees in my room because there was no AC, paying $500/mo in credit card interest, buying food on credit card, having my friend pay down my credit card with checks I would endorse to him because any checks I deposited in my bank account would be seized by the IRS because I didn't have enough money to pay my taxes. Then to make matters worse my friend and I got laid off. So, we decided to try to make our own startup and worked our asses off. When the finances couldn't bare I decided to give in and find a normal day job again.

Yeah, it sucked. But I didn't whine about how I'm a victim and how others need to give me their hard earned money. I manned up, took responsibility, changed what I was doing, and slowly over the course of many years dug myself out of the situation. I wasn't doing what I wanted to but I was digging myself out of the hole I dug from my failed ventures. Eventually I completely paid off my credit cards, and car loan. I even got a motorcycle to make the commute easier and paid that off completely as well. Now I'm making decent money at a place I enjoy doing programming, saving up and trying to figure out how to invest in real estate. I had to go through some lousy programming jobs before I found the good ones.

I went from a really horrible situation, deeply in debt, no college degree, and now I'm doing well for myself. I don't see why I should be forced to pay so others don't have to work as hard and/or make the hard decisions to grind through what needs to be done.

So yeah, people may be in some really crappy situations. So what? They need to stop whining, stop expecting handouts, and do something about it.

> So, my point that art is only worth it's value to the general population stands. That makes it more entertainment than art. Please note the distinction.

Noted. I see the difference. But that begs the question, what is the value of something that society doesn't value? lol

I'm not changing my mind that people should get to do whatever they find interesting at other people's expense though.

> However, I do think there's something to be said for giving people more of an opportunity to do what they like. After all, we all tend to do better work when we're doing something we want to be doing.

Ideally yes. As technology grows people need to work less and less and they will have more time to pursue their own interests. Also, if you want to pursue your own interests, go through the grind first. Once you have resources you will have more time and money to pursue your interests. It's much easier to work hard first and then enjoy things, than to dig yourself into a hole because you don't have the resources. Trust me. I know. lol

I actually saved up for years at a job I hated before I felt I had enough money to do the photography. I failed miserably, but then I did what any toddler would do. Get back up and try again.

Congrats on your ability to climb out of a desperate situation. A distinction needs to be made between a situation that has a solution and one that doesn't. Consider refractory cancer, or a severe neuralgia. Such persons cannot simply "do something about it" in the same way that someone who is in financial trouble can.

>Who gets money and who doesn't?

Easy question. Nobody. Stop all government welfare and redistribution. Sever the dependence of unproductive citizens on the productive. Return to each citizen their natural right to freely distribute their resources. End all perverse incentives. And force each citizen to provide for themselves through the value they can offer to other freely-choosing citizens in consensual trade relationships, rather than through wielding populist political pressures to enforce coercive redistribution.

Great, so just let people die if they can't afford health insurance and get bronchitis. Let people starve if the economy tanks. Ability/desire to work does not equal production. Sometimes there is a willing worker and no job to do.

Are you aware of the purpose of society in the first place? It's the idea that as a whole, we all do better when we're looking out for each other. So far it has worked surprisingly well. This whole notion of FREE MARKET EVERYTHING, PRODUCE OR DIE needs to go back to the stink hole it came out of. People, and society as a whole, are much more than their market value.

Also, there needs to be a distinction between productive and needy. They are not mutually exclusive, and not everything in this world that's worth producing can have a price tag slapped on it.

The libertarian utopia you describe is a pathetic excuse for a society.

Mate we will have a communist "utopia" well before that ever happens.

Why would we want to live in a dog-eat-dog survivalist dystopia straight out of an '80s cyberpunk novel?

> I'm opposed to rewarding those who sit around and do nothing period, including the current system.

Excellent! Welcome to the Socialist Party! Time to put the lazy, nonworking ownership class up against the wall!

> the country doesn't work like it did in the 50s.

No, in the 50s (in the US) basically every working age man who survived fighting in the war had been given the opportunity to get a free education and probably even a discount mortgage[1] on a house while the government was building what might have been the biggest and most extensive road system[2] since the roman empire.

And then was born one of the most productive eras in American history. Funny that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GI_Bill

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

We had a 20 year advantage after WWII though, we were one of the Allies on the winning side that took the least amount of damage. We were able to do these because everyone owed us money then and we just won the war. All of our competitor companies even on the Allies were battered and their industries took decades to rebuild on top of owing us lots of money.

So we had massive infusion from '45 to the mid-70's. Germany in fact just finished paying off the WW debt in 2010. After winning WWII we had a much different structure and trusted the government doing things, we couldn't do anything like that today with our divided team-based political climate that mimics the WWE.

>Yes, you'll have lazy people who take advantage. But I'm willing to bet for every lazy person who just wants to sit around all day eating Little Debbies cake rolls, there are 100 who get bored and decide to actually do something with their lives.

I'd take that bet and put my entire personal wealth behind it.

Have you ever lived in the ghetto? I grew up in a poor area, not even that horrible compared to many others. Since this is a site for nerds, you are probably familiar with the 80/20 rule. Applies here as well. 80% of the people I grew up around were worthless, and the only reason they did anything at all was if they had a base need to fulfill. If they had enough income from sitting on the couch all day to pay for their home, food, sex, and basic entertainment most of them would have not done a single iota of work in their lifetimes. Some didn't as they were able to game the SSI and/or welfare systems.

The other 20% either "got out" through sheer personal effort or became entrepreneurs of the only sort they knew how - generally drug dealers or other illegal means of enterprise (and yes, some of these guys were absolutely impressive and could have easily run legit companies). This group would benefit from a basic income, but the vast majority I see simply soaking up the system to the point where it would be untenable. I'd also expect far more "abuse" of the system if the lifestyle was that of a minimum wage job or better.

I think you might have a slightly optimistic view on the average human - probably from associating yourself with high performers on a daily basis. I tend to forget this too sometimes, but then I go home for a visit and very quickly re-learn my hatred of humanity :)

The tragedy of the commons exists. This entire discussion seems to forget this fact.

> wage slavery

Having a wage, is by definition, not being treated like a slave. Plus, in most countries you get a wage AND you are free to look for jobs everywhere around you, and to get them. Unless you mean that the concept of having to do something to earn a living is actually akin to slavery, but I'd rather say it's common sense. Even from a personal standpoint, most people would not really feel good to be paid to do nothing. At least where I come from.

Debt slavery is probably a more accurate description of the citizens of developed countries with high house price to income ratios.

(Or large student loans. Will the basic income be enough to cover student loan repayments?)

Unfortunately many people think that having to work for a living is somehow inhumane. I think the best solution is to let them form their own country and live amongst themselves so that those who value hard work and think it is a virtue can enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

I think wage slavery refers more correctly to the condition many people find themselves in, where they cannot afford the switching costs to find another employer or educate themselves for another career. Perhaps they have a family to support or have basic needs, thus through market discipline they are forced to work in the same conditions.

In other words, although they are getting paid, they are getting paid just enough to live paycheck-to-paycheck, and they can no more be a free labor market participant than a slave.

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

> in most countries you get a wage AND you are free to look for jobs everywhere around you, and to get them

At some point, there will not be enough jobs to keep everyone gainfully employed doing meaningful work (in even the loosest sense of the word). With a basic income, rather than having immense swaths of poverty, each person would have the freedom of any pursuit they desire. For many, this would be some form of productive work.

> Even from a personal standpoint, most people would not really feel good to be paid to do nothing.

This is a thought process very much a product of our current socio-economic environment, where you are told that you are worth the work you put in. But when there is nothing to do, how can you argue with being paid to do nothing?

Furthermore, it is disingenuous to call it being "paid to do nothing". You are being paid a wage directly, unconditionally, but there is nothing forcing you to do nothing. You are free to do anything the law affords.

You raise an interesting and valid point. As technology increases the amount of time it takes to produce a certain effect goes down though. This means people need to work less. It's not that visible to most though because the definition of surviving has gone from not being eaten by a tiger and not knowing when your next meal will be to having a large screen TV with 5000 channels, air conditioning, and free food. If we have the same expectations in the future in terms of standard of living then we will do fine and people won't need to work as much. But people don't really compare themselves in terms of absolutes, they compare themselves to their neighbors. So yes, they will not be satisfied, but I believe they will still be better off than before in absolute terms.

>the definition of surviving has gone from not being eaten by a tiger and not knowing when your next meal will be to having a large screen TV with 5000 channels, air conditioning, and free food.

It really hasn't. I don't know anyone my age (24-ish) who considers air conditioning or cable TV to be surviving. They're considered luxuries. Food is a necessity, but most of us, you know, pay for it.

Basic income means taxing people with income, and redistributing it to everybody.

Where did you get the idea that disposable income increases for everyone? How could that be even possible?

> Where did you get the idea that disposable income increases for everyone? How could that be even possible?

The government could be printing money to make that possible, as well, instead of financing it through taxes only.

Printing money causes inflation, which is effectively a wealth tax.

A liquid wealth tax. The actually wealthy have many vehicles for hedging against inflation, from owning durable property, to complex financial instruments.

Inflation in a currency is not a wealth tax, its a (inflating currency)-denominated-asset tax. There's a substantial difference.

It depends on how that wealth is stored. Most wealthy people invest in things that are resilient or that even perform better under inflation. It's really the middle class that gets hit and the poor the worst because minimum wage doesn't go up that fast but prices definitely do.

It's more complicated than that. As a first approximation inflation is a transfer of wealth from from savers to debtors. However, there are many under-appreciated details based on tax implications of such things as paying real taxes on illusory income. (nominal gains which result in an real-after-tax loss) I learned a lot about this from this guy: http://danielamerman.com/

Taxes remove money from the economy and also create the demand for the fiat currency.

A government that didn't spend any money while collecting taxes would create massive deflation and markets wouldn't clear. On the other hand, a government that didn't collect any taxes and simply spent the money would create inflation.

If for the increase in money supply there is a corresponding increase in GDP, there is no real inflation since the money is chasing more goods and services.

The increase in demand would happen mainly because the MPC multiplier of poor people is higher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume

Guess what - that means more poor people getting what they need, before rich people get to fund golden toilets or something. And yes, I will think this way even when I am a billionaire.

For the rich, taxes are all disposable income. For the 99%, taxes are cutting into their living wage. The rich might not be able to afford a 3rd house; the rest of us struggle to pay a mortgate/rent on the 1st one.

So for Almost everybody, disposable income rises.

> Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities?

Yes, it would be expected to shift the demand curve somewhat, because you'd be redistributing income to people with a higher propensity to spend, increasing demand.

> If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income.

Reducing, not negating: the normal effect of more money in the hands of people with a given desire to buy a product is that the price goes up somewhat and the market clearing volume traded goes up somewhat, not that the whole increase in income is reflected in price increases.

> Then you know what would happen next... people asking for an increased basic income, and the thing would spiral to the end.

If you tie it to a dedicated revenue stream and set the benefit amount based on the revenue divided among the eligible population, you establish a control mechanism.

If you tie it to a dedicated revenue stream and set the benefit amount based on the revenue divided among the eligible population, you establish a control mechanism.

How do you keep some demagogue from campaigning on abolishing this mechanism and just giving people more money?

> How do you keep some demagogue from campaigning on abolishing this mechanism and just giving people more money?

You don't. People can run with any platform they want.

Of course, pretty much this idea has been raised against even the idea of democratic government for centuries -- that if the masses could just vote for people to give them money, they would. Strangely, that doesn't seem to happen.

There'll be plenty of people that understand the problems with that idea and have self-interest in communicating those problems -- and they will be disproportionately the people with the resources to effectively sell the idea. Frankly, I'd be more worried about the system being eroded by people campaigning to limit the dedicated revenue stream than by abandoning limiting controls. (Not that I necessary think that method of control is necessary in the first place, just that its an available option.)

Of course it happens. Entitlement spending essentially never goes down, it always goes up or when proposals are floated to reduce it they almost always fail. People do vote to give themselves money, and they always vote to protect their entitlements.

Adjusted for inflation it can go down. And some states have reduced welfare (welfare mothers don't vote).

You'd have to add in lobbying for corporate tax breaks, subsidies, and all manner of sweetheart deals.

>> Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities?

>Yes, it would be expected to shift the demand curve somewhat, because you'd be redistributing income to people with a higher propensity to spend, increasing demand.

Which also has the happy effect of raising money velocity int he system. By substantially reducing demand constraints you increase overall economic activity, push money through the system faster and grow the overall economy significantly. The economy doesn't work like a household budget; the affordability of this sort of measure is rather different from what one might otherwise expect.

yes, if it increased income. but it still reduces admin cost

The same amount of money would exist, it would just be distributed differently. Poor people would be able to buy more things, so the things that are disproportionately bought by poor people would go up slightly. Conversely rich people might buy fewer yachts, lowering the price.

Despite the slight price increase, it would still be a net benefit for poor people.

Worse, there used to be a concern that, given food and housing, people would stop trying. Once the comforts of life are a civil right, the great majority might stop making any effort at all.

Its bound to be a major disruption. McD's will have to automate; you'll need a Roomba for your lawn; everybody in the world will want to come here regardless of the job situation.

Maybe that's all right; maybe we can sustain it. But it will be a rough couple of years.

It's not that easy to escape from Evolution. We can delay it for a time, if we keep our exponential growth going. Unfortunately, not for a really long time, unless we discover some way to grow beyond our galaxy.

Anyway, basic income is important for this century we are on. For our lifetime. Things will get very ugly very fast if we automate everything and don't have some functional redistributing program before.

The centralizing power of automation is much more pronounced now than it has been in the past. This stems from the current focus on knowledge work tasks rather than repetitious, small problem-space labor. IBM's watson will price out radiologists and their pattern finding ilk. I found Martin Ford's [lights in the tunnel](http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/) enlightening and concerning. He too suggests a basic income.

>...I believe humanity will transcend into a new golden age.

I was amused by my brain which, perhaps inevitably, read "golden age" with a distinct Alpha Centauri voice.

> empirically ethical society

Did you mean "ethics informed by empirics" or something like that? "Empirically ethical" is a logical contradiction.

Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today.

If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).

I could list out the many benefits and the nay-sayer objections with counter arguments, but after twenty years I've come to realize money distribution is not the problem. The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.

The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together. But quite frankly we as a society are not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime.

Surely the only society that could stably operate as a "resource managed economy that eliminates money all together" would be a post-scarcity society.

> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together

So, rationing? I wonder if that's been tried before.

Money is a repesentation of resources. And resources cannot be allocated efficiently by central authority, because of the calculation problem[1]. But maybe some college dorm discussions will bear some other solution.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

"Resource-managed economy" does not imply a centralized authority, which is where your snide rejoinder comes off the rails.

How the hell do you allocate resources with maximal efficiency, without either a central authority or trade?

Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but those two are "I tell you what you want" and "You tell me what you want", and I don't see the third option.

You could manage (distribute) the resource of money, and allow people to spend it how they like within a free market.

Of course, I'm aware that whyme said "eliminates money all together" so this might not be what he meant.

I don't think it matters which. We are potentially going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people. At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do, so where does that leave us is a few decades while the poorer nations are evolving at such a rapid pace? Ideally we get engineers and scientists to start with x amount of resources and x number of people then learn along the way.

At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do

You're assuming that we are already making maximal use of all available resources. We aren't; we're not even close. The reason the "poorer nations" are poor is politics, not lack of resources.

What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption?

I didn't make any claim to suggest why poor nations are poor, did I? I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more.

What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption?

You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a lot of what we do produce gets wasted for political reasons. If we got rid of that waste, we might well be able to support everyone at an American standard of living with just one planet's worth of resources, not 5.

I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more

That's part of what you suggested, but it isn't all of it. See above.

The American standard of living is inherently based in part on the standard of wastefulness. Our attitude towards wastefulness in general is a prerequisite for many of our liberties worldwide. If you remove these properties from the equation you don't really have the American standard of living anymore.

What's your definition of "wastefulness"? For example, am I being "wasteful" by using a computer connected to the Internet to make this post?

If your answer to that question is yes (I don't actually think it is, but bear with me), then you are right that the only way to have an American standard of living is to be "wasteful" in this sense; but that would be true of any standard of living beyond bare subsistence. Good luck convincing people to buy into that.

If your answer to that question is no, then you're wrong that we need to be "wasteful" to have an American standard of living. The computer I'm using to make this post is considerably more efficient than the computer I would have used to do so when I first joined HN a few years ago, let alone the one I was using to make posts on CompuServe discussion groups a couple of decades ago. The new car my wife and I bought recently is considerably more efficient than the 12-year-old car I have (which we are going to replace soon for that very reason). We have a lot of room to make things more efficient without sacrificing any functionality at all--indeed, while continuing to add functionality. The computer I'm using now is not only more efficient (less power consumption, longer battery life, etc.) than older ones, it's more functional as well (faster CPU, more RAM, more hard drive).

Being wasteful, in my mind, is wasting resources, energy, effort etc. for slight conveniences and superficial benefits. Most of the things people do are wasteful, but I think what's important is a matter of degree. And no, not being able to convince people to buy into that is completely irrelevant to the argument.

Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it, which more than cancels out any perceived efficiency gain. Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use. Maybe it's just collecting dust in your attic, where it will stay useless until any of the above two scenarios happen.

More importantly, I'd like to propose that what drives innovation in computer hardware is largely our attitude towards wastefulness. You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced. I'm arguing that the whole process is wasteful, never mind that your machine performs better per Watt. Your old laptop probably had a greater cost to the environment in its manufacturing process and after you got rid of it than whatever energy you spent using it during its lifetime, and even more definitely the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.

Let's get into farming, food production and food packaging if you still aren't convinced.

Being wasteful, in my mind, is wasting resources, energy, effort etc. for slight conveniences and superficial benefits.

And who gets to decide which conveniences are "slight" and which benefits are "superficial"? Sounds like nice work if you can get it.

Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it

Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.

Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use.

If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.

You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced.

This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?

For example, when you say:

the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.

You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.

> And who gets to decide which conveniences are "slight" and which benefits are "superficial"? Sounds like nice work if you can get it.

By that I did not mean to suggest that there's is or should be a universally enforced definition of what is "slight" or "superficial". I meant to point out that no matter how you define those words the definition of wastefulness depends on it. How you choose to implement it is a matter of values.

> Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.

There are various ways to go about recycling computers. Even if your computer was sent straight to a manufacturer to have its raw materials extracted, it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.

> If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.

"Throwing away" was admittedly not very carefully worded, try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use". Never mind that millions of tons of electronics go into landfills every year.

> This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?

Why anyone is throwing their stuff away in favor of new stuff is besides my point. Perhaps they don't realize the consequences, or they ignore them on the basis that they won't personally have to face them.

> You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.

I am not ignoring that there is a benefit to you having a new laptop, and I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do. All I am saying is that the shape of our society largely depends on our general lack of interest in the consequences of what we do with discarded products.

I did not mean to suggest that there's is or should be a universally enforced definition of what is "slight" or "superficial".

Perhaps not, but you did appear to be suggesting that some people should be able to tell other people what is "slight" or "superficial", instead of everyone getting to decide that for themselves. If everyone gets to decide for themselves what is "slight" or "superficial", then we basically have the situation we have now; but you don't seem satisfied with the situation we have now.

it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.

Not necessarily; there would have to be sufficient benefit to the person re-using it. You keep on ignoring that part of the equation.

try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use"

Same comment here: you're assuming that continued use is actually a benefit for whoever is using the item. What if it isn't?

I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do.

Huh? Saying that people are not taking proper account of the consequences of their actions is telling people what they should do--it's saying they should take proper account of the consequences. If you're not willing to own that statement, then you should stop harping about the consequences.

I think I'll skip the debate over "the size of things" and just suggest there's a significant problem with our current rate of utilization and fair distribution. If your argument is simply that we have room for optimizing the worlds resources, then sure I can agree with that, but frankly I doubt that's going to work very well under a model that's really dog eat dog and has a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things.

a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things.

Actually, I think the problem is that we don't use money enough to manage distribution and ownership; too much distribution and ownership is controlled by factors other than money. But it's true that there is a problem with money as a control mechanism, though it isn't what you appear to think it is: the problem with money as a control mechanism is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons.

"...is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons."

That's the power hungry part I'm talking about. The government is not some machine that is broken, it's a select group of people within our society running around trying to balance appeasing the public horde while trying to amass as much power as possible. The behaviour of the people within government is a reflection of the state and quality of our society as a whole.

So how would you fix this problem?

How is not relevant. What's relevant is that society has to change to the point where it becomes possible and also a priority. I do believe, unfortunately[1], that the money system has to collapse first.

1. unfortunately in the sense that some hardship will follow suit.

How is not relevant.

In other words, you're punting. You say "society has to change" but you refuse to give any information about how it has to change. Other than saying you think the money system has to collapse first, which doesn't inspire confidence; to say that "some hardship will follow suit" is a massive understatement.

I don't see the how part as something worth getting into. It's also dependant on the technological advancements and makeup of society at the time change starts to happen.

It took centuries for the monetary systems to develop with many bumps a long the way. That will also need to happen in a resource managed economy.

I don't see the how part as something worth getting into.

In other words, you advocate a "resource managed economy" but you conveniently exempt yourself from having to explain how you are going to avoid having it suck the way the Soviet Union sucked. Pardon me for not getting all excited about society spending centuries in that quagmire. For all the problems our current money economies have, they are still way better than the Soviet Union.

Their people will consume more, but their GDP will go up as well.

There are more resources than just money. Metals are in high demand already, and the prices have increased faster than anyone's GDP.

And if that trend continues, at some point in the not too distant future, it will become profitable to mine metals from, say, automobile junkyards, instead of from the ground. Or we'll find substitutes, as we already have for many metals (an automobile junkyard a decade from now, containing mostly cars built around this time, won't have nearly as much metal in it because the car bodies will be mostly composite).

You can't make more aluminum just by wanting it. If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.

You can't make more aluminum just by wanting it.

No, but if the price goes up enough, you can mine it, as I said, from places like auto junkyards where people have thrown it away.

If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.

No, if our usage of aluminum increases, assuming the supply is constant, its price will go up, so people will have incentives to find substitutes. (I already gave one example: using composites instead of metal for car bodies; that mostly substitutes for steel, not aluminum, but it does substitute for some aluminum usage, and the general point is the same.) So the increasing price of aluminum will regulate its usage so that we never run out; we just keep shifting certain uses to substitutes so that aluminum is only needed for uses that are valuable enough to make it worth paying the market price.

This is not just theoretical, by the way; it has happened many, many times. Aluminum itself is an example: most of its uses are uses in which it displaced other metals, like iron and steel (a good example is car engines: most of them are made of aluminum now because it's cheaper than cast iron).

GDP does not mean your country produced $3B money. Notice it stands for gross domestic product. It's just measured in dollars.

Distributed resource-managed economy sounds a lot like a barter economy. IMHO, money-based trade is almost always better than bartering.

I agree with this sentiment, and money is without a doubt a huge obstacle in properly reassigning and redistributing resources. It allows hoarding more than any other asset, being so abstract and thats a fundamental flaw in its mechanics.

Negative karma? how come

Because your comment was very stupid.

> The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.

A major source of trouble now is that money is tightly coupled with politics. It boggles the mind how it's not universally understood that politics should be entirely de-coupled from private money. All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.

Unless this is done, very few things of true substance will be fixed.

> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together.

I don't think that's doable unless we've made work entirely optional. When AI and robots could do any job we don't want to do, then you could instate some form of basic income, or even your more radical idea.

But until then, it's going to be very, very hard to change things in a fundamental way.

100% on a public fund? So I should be paying for the elections of Republicans and Democrats even though they are private parties that may for no reason exclude me?

Or.... you could still run, but not as a Republican or a Democrat?

And lose, like everyone else who tried. When was the last time a president wasn't a Republican or a Democrat? That's right, when he was a Whig.

>And lose, like everyone else who tried.

You mean like everyone else who's tried before moving to public funded elections, with restrictions on campaign donations?

Of course I can't guarantee that one change will result in a third-party getting meaningful representation, but it's at least a start.

It's done this way in many other countries. For example, in Canada, each party receives $2 per vote received in the last election to campaign in the next election. Corporate donations are banned, although small donations by individuals are still allowed.

You're paying now through the distortion of the electoral process and the indirect increase in your cost of goods and services (the hundreds of billions spent on elections comes from somewhere). Don't you think it's worth it for your taxes to go up $2 to eliminate those costs?

We can ban corporate donations without raising taxes, and without giving people's money to parties they don't support.

>All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.

That's a horrible idea. The dominate parties would become even more dominate with the backing of the government. I do not approve of my tax money being spent on ridiculous political commercials either.

...that eliminates money all together

You can't eliminate money. It's a natural creation of human interaction. Even prisoners have money.

If we can create , then we can destroy just as easily.

Markets are powerful.

Idiotic equivalence. There are very few processes that can be reversed just as easily.

Radiation, waste heat, carbon dioxide - the list goes on and on.

It's not enough to 'destroy' money, you'd have to prevent it from reappearing. Since it's easy for communities to create 'money', destroying it won't bring any freedom or radical change; just disruption.

It's just as with anarchy - you can destroy government, but you can't prevent "government"(s) from springing up to replace them, and usually worse than the ones before.

It's not enough to 'destroy' money, you'd have to prevent it from reappearing.

If you can't get rid of drugs and prostitution, you won't be able to get rid of money.

History has shown that black markets are extremely resilient. Those two are great examples.

This "natural instinct to truck and barter" only showed up about 200 to 300 years ago. Before then there was feudalism, chieftains, etc. Humans have had other technologies for distributing social assets.

I think I'm missing what you're saying, can you expound on this? There are records of mercantile law going back to Hammurabi; there's been paper fiat currency in China since the 7th century or so. Coinage and trade has plenty of historical record in Phoenician and Roman era.

It is a powerful assertion to say you cant do something ever. There are many "natural creations of human interaction" to be discovered, and many that died or we definitely wish they died with a really strong consensus.

And prisons having currency could be a model example of how money is an arbitrary and unfair element of trade and distribution.

I support the basic income, but I have also thought about alternatives that do not require government support. Consider e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee plays the same role as a job in the current economy by circulating currency from producers to consumers. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments. The good news is that if in the future wealth inequality causes economic output to shrink, businesses might be forced to accept these types of currencies in order to grow.

And where will the source for the Guaranteed Income come from? It will surely be taxes - income, sales, other. All taxes in some way or the other depend on the state of the economy. What if the economy goes into a recession or has severe fluctuations from year to year? Will "Guaranteed Income" be continued if there isn't sufficient wealth and production to pay for it?

Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.

Any guaranteed entitlement scheme that does not account for the source of the funding will run into the same problems, sooner or later. (Just see the fate of a number of guaranteed pension funds in some parts of the country).

Yet, somehow, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, social security, etc etc etc still keep writing checks when the economy is down. Ok, so wipe all those out (including the significant overhead of running each one by its own, separate organization), and send the checks to everyone who's a citizen.

> Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.

This is already happening. See above. It doesn't run out if you have a functioning economy. I'd also argue that GBI would make the economy function a lot better by opening up business opportunities to those who don't have access currently.

Most could come from the money diverted from existing anti-poverty programs. The rest could be made up by the increased taxes collected on the jump in spending by those receiving the BI. (Those at or below the poverty line spend more then 100% of every dollar they receive.)

So let's assume this was implemented.

Some citizens, with their guaranteed basic income, will spend it wisely to cover their needs...as envisioned by proponents of this approach.

Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.

What then? Simply increase the amount of basic income awarded, and hope that by throwing more money at the symptoms of poverty, the cause will be addressed?

And where does this money come from? Not immediately, of course, but 5-10 years down the road once society has been changed by this policy's implementation? Why would the financial engines of today, which could theoretically fund such an endeavor, continue to run as efficiently in the future?

They will get jobs to supplement their income, if they living expenses are higher than the BI. And if they always spend more, they definitely have the same problem today.

When talking about public policy, it's important to get away from words like "some" and talk about actual statistics, because this will impact real people, not just a philosophical position.

If some is 10% of the population, and poverty is resolved for 90% of the population, the system would be much much better than the current system for eliminating poverty.

In Canada, we have actual statistics for both Old Age Security and the Mincome experiment.

Statistics on OAS (includes stats on the US). http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/elderly-po...

And quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

"Dr. Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals."

I think in that case you would be justified in telling the irresponsible person tough luck and maybe they would spend it more wisely the next time around. If they die of starvation that's their problem. I have a hard time believing that would be a wide spread problem though.

Exactly, and it isn't like this is the ONLY form of income. This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line. If you are living below the poverty line and go out and buy yourself a car you can't afford, guess what, you'll have to sell the car, and you'll have learned your lesson that next year, you can't go waste your BI.

> This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line

Now that's just silly. If it were meant to subsidize people living below the poverty line it would target people living below the poverty line, not households making over 50k a year who would likely sock away the money or spend it on a bathroom renovation.

>Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.

You can do this now at least under the UK system.

Actually the basic income creates new business models. If you can't take care of yourself you can sign up with a company that takes your basic income and provides 3 hots, a cot and an allowance. Can't image it will be the nicest accomidations but it will be there if you need it...

As a side note, businesses, in general, could significantly reduce their labor costs if a BI was in place.

This might not work out the way you think. With more money in everyone's pocket, for example, people in subsistence circumstances working minimum-wage second jobs while their children sit alone at home would no longer be compelled as strongly to take or keep such jobs. Some would stick with them, but surely there would be a cohort for whom it's no longer necessary, or who could now afford to be pickier about the nature of that second job. And the movement of this margin, however slightly, in favor of the employee, would place upward pressure on the wages at those types of jobs.

There are businesses whose profitability and business model assume a steady supply of takers of these sorts of jobs at the lowest possible wage. How would basic income affect that supply?

We would then have come full circle. Robots/AI remove jobs, which causes basic income legislation to take root, which cause people to stop working the jobs the Robots/AI took away in the first place!

You could limit the damage a person could do to themselves by paying more frequently. In my experience, even very irresponsible people are able to manage weekly paychecks so that they don't starve before the next check arrives.

It would be very tough to prevent people from borrowing against their future BI money, though. An irresponsible person could dig themselves quite a hole that way, and lenders would be eager to make that loan.

If someone is unable to meet their needs when provided with the resources to do so, they probably have bigger problems (mental illness, substance abuse) that should be themselves addressed. Making sure everyone has access to some resources they can build upon, and making sure everyone is sufficiently well off, are not the same problem. Throwing money at people substantially addresses the former. Some of the latter is likely to remain, and that portion is not likely to be addressed by throwing more money.

I am always wary of supporting a basic income guarantee. Although it sounds much better than the current welfare mess we have, the actual implementation will probably be an addition rather than a replacement.

Yeah, somehow I don't see the IRS and the various other federal institutions than have grown up around revenue collection closing their doors any time soon.

The good thing about guaranteed basic income is that it has the positives of welfare without the negative incentives (i.e. if I make over X amount, my check stops coming). If you implement minimum income without replacing the current provisioning system, then you haven't really solved any problems.

It was successful when trialed in Canada so I'd say its viable. But ya, I don't trust our politicians to be sensible and cut spending to pay for a new program. [e.g. Use this to remove the most inefficient $ for $ welfare related programs so more of it ends up in the hands of the people that need it]

It's important to note that the "Mincome" experiment provided a Guaranteed Minimum income, not a Basic Income. The distinction being that the former started to drop off if the recipients earned more than some threshold (at a rate of $0.50 less per $1 earned, so as not to serve as a disincentive).

This is similar to most basic income or negative income tax proposals. Most finance themselves through progressive income taxes, generally scaled so that those of average income see their taxes increase the same amount as what they receive from BI.

The current mess is not only poorly implemented, it's based on false assumptions. We just need to stop pretending there's something wrong with people not being able to find a decent job, and stop punishing them.

You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return?

EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% of my income to government, to give it to others. If I were unemployed, I'd be "punished" by receiving welfare, food stamps and a bunch of other stuff, without having to contribute in any way to society.

Because you don't live in a vacuum. Our society makes it possible so that you can earn a living. You're just paying back for having that opportunity to those that are less fortunate.

Those that are less fortunate aren't also the ones that make it possible for me to earn a living. Police, teachers, firemen, road workers and some others do all that, work hard at it, and I appreciate their contribution. They're not the ones we're talking about here.

As soon as a policeman gets fired, he becomes worthless to you?

That's an excessive over-simplification of my point. And to answer you: no, he doesn't become "worthless" to me (whatever that may mean), but I will stop paying him for his services.

The fact is that the healthiest situation for any society is for every member to be able to afford to meet their basic needs with a little extra income. This is clearly not possible through a purely free job market. 'Sacrificing' some of your income to maintain this society and permit mobility is in your best interests. Who's to say you won't be the next one fired, or your child?

>Because you don't live in a vacuum. Our society makes it possible so that you can earn a living.

This argument doesn't hold water for me. Society makes it possible for everyone to earn a living, so people who aren't doing it should start.

except for kids, seniors, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, et cetera.

> so people who aren't doing it should start

But they won't. It's safe to say that lazy people are good at being lazy and will find a way to be lazy no matter what system they're in.

Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. It's better to accept the fact that a fixed percentage of people are only going to take while most others give (and take), and stop wasting the enormous overhead trying to figure out which is which.

>Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility.

Not at all. You know what eradicates laziness? Hunger.

I'd argue hunger promotes stealing more than eradicates laziness.

> Society makes it possible for everyone to earn a living

Do you have evidence of the size and nature of job vacancies compared to the skills and number of the unemployed?

Well then, I'm confused. OP said society made it possible for me to make a living.

Ah, I think I see what you mean.

While I can't speak for OP:

Without a society there'd be no education system, no legal tender, no laws protecting employees, no laws protecting companies, no infrastructure supporting it - and so on. So society makes it possible for people to have jobs. There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, which tends to indicate that the group has had a lot of input to the success of the individual for a long time.

I can't even imagine how something as complex as the prerequisites for programming would work without a society. State of nature economies. I suppose you could have small family groups at some point on the hunter-gatherer to farming spectrum, but the minute those families come together into groups and start to develop more complex interactions... that looks mightily like a society to me.

But it doesn't follow from that that society makes it possible for everyone to have a job. Just that those who do could not without one.

It's very close to being the same underlying logical form that goes:

'All cats are four-legged mammals. Buts not all four-legged animals are cats.'

All employees are enabled by a society. But not all people in a society are so enabled.

So the people who don't work... what are they providing me?

To say that it makes it possible for everyone is unrealistic. Not everyone can find a job right now, and not necessarily for lack of trying.

you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you...

in the same vein, your job only exist because there's people with enough buying power to keep the business you're at existing, so again you depend on people, and you could be punished or rewarded depending on how society as a entire organism does...

> you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you...

I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.

EDIT: Paying people so they don't steal from me is called a protection racket. If that's what you're arguing for, let's call it what it is.

People like you scare me. I can't even understand that point of view, and I don't think we can have a productive argument if we don't share a basic understanding of what a society is. Saying that taxes are theft is as absurd to me as saying that private property is imoral.

It's easier to understand people like this if you study how religious fundamentalism works. The key is in understanding that everything in the world, in their point of view, boils down to a basic set of axioms. This simplified reality allows them to extrapolate claims outwards that are otherwise absurd if approached from another direction, because contrary facts have already been discarded as irrelevant; it gives them the comfort of feeling that their beliefs are "holy" or "logical", which reinforces it in an infinite loop.

> Saying that taxes are theft is as absurd to me as saying that private property is imoral.

I'm not arguing that "taxes are theft". I'm arguing that giving money to poor people so they don't attack me is theft. buzaga was saying that if I/we don't "take care of the unfortunate", they'll decide to take our money/stuff by force. Sounds like a veiled threat to "give them money, or else..." That is theft, in my opinion.

I'm perfectly fine with taxes as long as they go to things that benefit everyone equally, including me (like roads, schools, police and courthouses).

EDIT: Also, please point out where I said (or implied) that "taxes are theft". You completely misread what I wrote, therefore I have to agree that we can't have a productive argument.

+misery = +violence -misery = -violence +people participating in the economy = +business, +salaries better society = better society for everyone

You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.

Misery breeds violence, there's no "or else", there's no "they", it's reality, I could resort to violence to survive and so could you.

By that logic (extending it a bit), we could fire all the cops, and just give our money over to criminals who ask for it. There's a point at which I draw the line, and prefer to fight instead.

You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.

What box is that? I can't contradict or agree with you unless you're actually making an argument.

The discussion, and the topic, talks about a change that isn't so radical but that could improve things in society as a whole. But you're still talking in 'me' vs 'they' terms, and 'the criminals' and 'threats', mocking 'the unfortunate'...

This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it

Society is made of many individuals, you can't disconnect a discussion about society from one about individuals, including "me". If you make high-level society-wide decisions that trample on individuals' rights, that also has society-wide implications (even if it's just a minority of individuals). What you're proposing is a tyranny of the majority, where the opinion of a single individual is discounted "for the greater good".

On the other hand, I believe society is just a big group of individuals, so "what about me?" does matter (in fact, it's maybe the most important question in all of society).

We are proposing a public funded program. That program is funded by taxes. This is what you said:

> why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.

The implications are obvious. Taxes don't have different natures depending on the use we as society give to the money we collect. In fact, the very economic definition of taxes is that you aren't promised anything specific in return[1].

Regarding the tyranny of the majority argument, that would only apply if we were proposing a ridulous amount of taxation. We are not. It's been pointed out that this program could be funded by replacing it with current expenses, and by a minimal raise in taxes. That's not oppression, that'a a choice that we as society are well within our rights to make.

In short: spending taxpayers money can't be theft, and taxes aren't a service you pay if you like how the money is spent.

[1] > From the view of economists, a tax is a non-penal, yet compulsory transfer of resources from the private to the public sector levied on a basis of predetermined criteria and without reference to specific benefit received (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax)

Of course it's acceptable. Depending on the circumstances, killing can be acceptable, eating human flesh can be acceptable, why wouldn't stealing be?

It's not taken from you, if everybody receives basic income, how can it be taking from you? You're missing the point.

> Depending on the circumstances, killing can be acceptable, eating human flesh can be acceptable, why wouldn't stealing be?

Maybe you find those acceptable, but I find all of them horrible. Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense (in which case someone else is trying to kill you first), while cannibalism is just sick.

"Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense"

How is that not "depending on the circumstances"? Is not "killing is needed to defend myself" a circumstance?

"while cannibalism is just sick."

So, if someone is genuinely in a situation where their options are 1) starve to death, or 2) eat the other guy who just starved to death, you think it's clear that they should choose 1?

The only reason that you can make the money you do is because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Tesla, Von Nuemann, et cetera. Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day. If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society. Your income taxes are only about a third of that. Who's the thief now?

> Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day.

That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.

> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.

So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?

Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.

"There are differences in productivity even among farmers."

Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.

"So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%"

Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work. Not to mention that society provides the source of your inspiration, provided your education, an outlet for your talents, et cetera.

Obviously my argument is a little bit of reductio ad absurdum. But much less so than "taxation is theft".

> Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.

I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.

> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.

Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.

> But much less so than "taxation is theft".

Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).

Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.

The correct answer here is that you are not valuing your opportunity costs highly enough. If you are working 8-10 hours a day, you should be making an incredible surplus. People in ancient societies worked less, and managed to survive just fine. With the technology available today, you could be making millions of dollars of surplus value, if given the opportunity. All you would need is the time to experiment with your skill set, until you found a niche where your work generates a very large surplus.

Paradoxically, you would gain much more from a BI than someone who is currently living in poverty, because you would be free to extract the maximum potential from your hard work and talent.

Actually, I was arguing against the idea that society is punishing people who can't find a job.

Personally, I'd love to get BI. That would free me to work only on what I like, or not work at all when I don't want to.

But what's stopping you from just working hard, saving your money, and then taking extended time off of work to do what you want to? Why does that money need to come from other people? Maybe if the government just let you keep the majority of your earnings you could use that money to "work on what (you) like or not work at all when (you) don't want to".

Actually, nothing's stopping me from doing all of that. I'm also not asking for BI (it sounds like a bad idea long term), I'd take it if it was offered though.

If people can improve their economic performance so much with just a small cash grant then, why haven't businesses jumped in on this apparently incredible opportunity? Seems like a great chance for businesses to make some money in tandem with people reaching their potential.

Naturally it would be much better for businesses to do this than the government. Businesses have much higher motivations to use their money wisely (i.e. give the right amount to the right people and create the right incentives to ensure people are motivated to use the funds wisely, go bankrupt or get sued by investors if they spend poorly) than a government (which just gets to shrug or inflate the currency or embark on a fresh round of vilifying productive citizens).

Oh wait, don't we already have that? Bank loans or something, I don't know, lol.

> You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return?

The question itself is incorrect. Low-paid workers or the unemployed are not parasites on highly-paid workers; the capitalist class is a parasite on all workers, no matter the salary, and through their control over government they continually engineer a level of unemployment that can suppress wages.

(If you don't believe me about the government, look up how inflation targeting works. Central banks are supposed to target both low unemployment and low inflation, but for the past several decades, the deliberate policy choice has been to consistently sacrifice wage growth (ie: exploit workers harder) in order to maintain both low inflation and economic growth at the same time.)

I agree there are immense benefits but it fails to recognize that markets rule the world. Once there would be a Basic Income, that is when market prices would go up to cancel out the benefit. You underestimate the rulers of the world (wealthy) to hold onto their advantage.

I see it as many times better than welfare or unemployment since it is distributed equally to everyone. If there is a limit it will eventually be too low, so even rich people would get it, they would have to or it would be destroyed.

Social security is an insurance policy really that doesn't hit wealthy wallets much beyond what everyone pays, but people still want to destroy it and this is against workers directly paying in their whole lives for a subpar investment, yes small businesses pay the full 15%ish and social security returns 2% annually and also props up our dollar big time with investment in t-bills. So even benefits like that are too social for many.

But a Basic Income distributed to everyone would lose the current perception of welfare/unemployment being bad when really these are helpful to keep the low end propped up and in the end I believe it saves money. You'd have to keep moving it up like minimum wage as the effects are normalized, it really is a travesty that minimum wage hasn't gone up as well.

People in America really don't like helping one another so this and other programs with even a hint of social aspects will not catch on. But if someone gets a benefit that the complainer also gets, they would probably be ok with it. However this does not redistribute and would eventually be cancelled out in pricing.

Why would prices go up? It's a money redistribution scheme, not a money creation scheme. The poor have more money, the rich have slightly less, the middle class have about the same, and the bureaucrats and parasitical corporations that live off administering the welfare system have a lot less.

Goods generally purchased by the poor might go up slightly, but BI should shift the poor into the low end of lower middle class. In other words, putting them in a situation comparable to that of the majority of the American population, so the effect on the demand curve should not be large.

> Why would prices go up?

Because the propensity to consume is not equal across the economic spectrum; downward redistribution increases expected consumption and, therefore, overall price levels.

The idea that this would eat up the beneficial effects of BI is hard to justify, but the idea that some increase in overall price level is likely is pretty easy to justify.

Because the value of a dollar will shrink for one with more money in the system, unless it is a direct take from wealthy which just won't happen since they are closer to legislation. It would have to be equal to work and that would only last for a while, hence my comment that it would have to re-adjust frequently.

Just like salaries have gone up over time yet the value of a dollar has shrunk, there would only be a momentary boom from the extra money and then the market, as markets purpose is, will find the value and adjust. It would keep things in more of a wave though like when minimum wage goes up, there is a temporary boom to low end markets but it always makes it back to the current distribution (I think minimum wage is a good thing). The money given would always find the way back up through pricing with a basic income though. Apartments suddenly would be x% higher and price increases because there is more money out there and if more actual printed then pricing has to come up. It is a forever balance and the only way to break it I can see is to ramp up the ladder individually.

Markets run everything and they are good, we would still all be farming and dumb if there weren't markets to trade goods for services. Markets and exchanges created conditions for the need for mathematics and allowed people have more free time as they could make products and sell them. This led to more time to think and create/innovate and the reason we have mathematics and technology today. But markets do find fair product to market/user value. Markets are as key to innovation and the evolution of human intelligence as anything. But they will always normalize after infusion, just recently we infused it from the top to banks, which may have kept us from the brink of destruction but only to get it back to 'balanced'. Why didn't they instead just give everyone 6k? Monetary distribution, unless we go away from markets/currency as value, will be pretty close to what we have now always (doesn't mean individuals can't climb it).

It could be proven that we all think like the wealthy on this, once a human gets ahead, they don't want to lose that ground or progress. Case in point the US, if you live in the US like I do, we might have a higher quality of life and currency status than many parts of the world. Would you give that up to allow all countries in the world to be equal in monetary value? If you aren't in the US how about where you live? The people above the fold want to keep it that way, the people below will want it another way, the people above the fold create the game rules, repeat until entropy.

I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless? Wouldn't the fixed income become the new zero income?

Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage? Do they double it? Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?

It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.

Or alternatively, it could cause the wage to increase, as people won't be as desperate for just any job, driving down the demand for such jobs.

It would start to make financial sense for McDonalds to invest in automating several tasks which are currently cheaper for McDonalds to hire someone for. Imagine if you order and pay through a machine (I saw one of these at Jack in the Box already).

The person behind the counter could instead be working on their dreams of being a musician, artist, studying for college, etc.

And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...

> And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...

I think you missed the "worth it" part, which substitutes for the "fulfilling" part. Unattractive but low-skill jobs would see higher wages (and, thus, greater incentives to find labor-saving alternatives) until the utility people doing those jobs provided to others was reflected in the reward people doing those jobs received.

Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there. Obviously, McDonalds wants to stay in business, so it has to offer up some incentive to get people to work for them. If they offer enough money, there will certainly be people who would work to flip burgers.

The jobs' salaries match what they are actually worth, and can't be offered as minimum-wage jobs that people take because they don't have any money and can't get a job elsewhere.

not to mention mc donalds business would probably boost since now everybody can afford to have some junk food if they feel like it, paying some more wouldn't be a problem, I imagine.

> Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there.

Which means burgers will cost much more than they currently do.

The same will be true for all domestic products/services where a significant part of the work force currently has low wages.

Which means that you and I will pay more for goods/services than previously. The effect will be similar to a significant sales tax, might as well try funding BI that way (at least imported goods will carry some of the tax burden) and look at published studies on the effects of sales taxes...

On BI, it would be very difficult to afford the latest iPhone. If you have no skills but you want an iPhone you can either skip a few hundred meals or you can flip burgers and clean toilets for a few hours.

Don't worry, the hedonistic urge is stronger than laziness in most people. Especially since lazy usually implies watching TV which continuously bombards you with advertisements to buy things...

How does this all interact with debt? Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage? Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?

I doubt lump-sums-in-advance would be permitted. I'm sure that predatory payday loan places would jump at the chance to fill the gap, though. I hope that if BI is ever implemented, that kind of stuff will be regulated.

> Child support

Presumably, Child Support would no longer exist for anyone.

Children are people, with no income, they would essentially get a child-version of basic income, paid to their parents, to raise them, regardless of all other circumstances.

(Similar to US taxes today, where the government effectively pays you some a small amount of money simply for having a child)

If a couple conceives a child, and one parent abandons the other, the single parent keeps the whole state-provided income for that child, and uses it to raise the child.

It eliminates the whole "penalty" system for distant parents, and if those people eventually get jobs, they pay into the basic income system just as anyone else does (so they aren't dis-incentivized to work).

That seems like it would create a perverse incentive to breed unnecessarily.

Government workers in Sweden get 13 months paid maternity leave. That's a pretty good incentive. But they rank 187th in the world by birth rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.

No, that's a pretty shitty incentive since I can't raise the kid for 18 years on my fond memories of paternity leave.

A recurring cash payment meeting or exceeding the costs of raising the kid on the other hand...

> I can't raise the kid for 18 years on my fond memories of paternity leave.

How does that make it less of an incentive, though? It's better than no paternal leave.

In the end, though, people usually don't get children on a purely economically rational basis. Sweden also has daycare prices that scale with income, free and relatively high quality public and private schools, child benefits and free dental and healthcare for children.

> How does this all interact with debt?

Other than "you can use it to pay debt", not at all.

> Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage?

If you mean "will someone loan me money in return for me pledging an amount equal to my future basic income for some period", maybe, but it would be a really bad idea to let it be redirected.

> Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?

Probably not -- there is already, AIUI, a "first $X" (which may vary under specific local rules depending on context) of income which is protected against garnishments, etc., and BI probably ought to fall within that (at least until the economy advances enough to support a more than pedestrian lifestyle on BI alone, at which point it might only be part of the BI that is within that protection.)

> However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income)

Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.

>someone needs a job

I don't know that we necessarily need to have jobs.

We could fund it by taxation of revenue and wages, rather than just wages.

A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. That profit could be taxed at something like 60%.

The owner(s) of the business still see windfall from the cost savings of laying everyone off, and the basic income now rises for everyone and can now cover the lost wages of the newly unemployed, using the companies new profits as a funding source

> A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead.

Where is their revenue coming from?

People spending their basic income :)

so..redistribution of income? This isn't anything new. I find it interesting that so many people on a forum about technology and business would suggest punishing businesses for using technology to make their business so efficient.

When the music and movie industry wanted more protection for their IP, many people here made comments about the horse and buggy/automobile and they just needed to "change with the times".

Why should employment be any different? If your job is being taken by a robot..maybe you should think about learning another skill.

>so..redistribution of income? This isn't anything new. I find it interesting that so many people on a forum about technology and business would suggest punishing businesses for using technology to make their business so efficient.

You may find that this is because not all of us value technology solely for what increased productivity it can provide over our current, but that we create and use technology to work /for/ us so that we can spend more time doing what we would rather.

It could balance itself out. If not enough people work, BI will drop and some of the people on BI will decide it's worth getting a job to live more comfortably.

I the think that we should add a single requirement to the basic income. logging on into a national library 5 days a week for a minimum of 1 hour a day. do vr classes. force them to complete and pass standard mathematics and physics. it might take them 10 years to reach calc 2 but at that point we'll have someone who can contribute. you could even teach material from patent applications.

what if I want to be an artist? or write the greatest epic ever?

Everybody can contribute or not, in their terms, I guess that's the magic.

> Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation.

Someone needs income that is taxed. That doesn't require a job, though in the short term (e.g., until we've reached a very advanced level of automation where most market income goes to capitalists who own completely automated firms), yes, it relies on lots of people still working -- its a replacement for poverty support programs which removes the disincentive for work that many of those contain in the eligibility criteria, and the administrative overhead that enforcing eligibility rules creates, not a replacement for work.

Most people, even if they aren't starving in the street, are willing to work more to get more. That certainly tails off at some level of combined work and income (as work has an increasing marginal cost and income a decreasing marginal value), but for the vast majority of the population, that's far above the level BI could conceivably be set at without vast technological progress.

"someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them"

e.g. Immigrants. I'm not sure if we should start calling them deltas or epsilons...

One reason the current welfare system is so broken relates to your point about McDonald's. Oftentimes someone on welfare can lose money by getting a job.

Minimum income is enough for a room and some food. If you want anything better such work either full or part time.

There are a lot of things people could do without: car, cell phone, internet, restaurants...

A car is necessary in some parts of the country. Good luck walking 10 miles to work in the subzero cold. A cell is not exactly necessary, but some form of communication is. A cell happens to be the most convenient. Cell phones and the current infrastructure can mostly eliminate the need for an internet line. Restaurants are, of course, not necessary.

To make things simple let's assume a flat tax of 20% pays a 10k per year basic income.

  Someone making   0k ends up with .8 *   0k + 10k =  10k.
  Someone making  10k ends up with .8 *  10k + 10k =  18k.
  Someone making  50k ends up with .8 *  50k + 10k =  50k.
  Someone making 100k ends up with .8 * 100k + 10k =  90k.
  Someone making 200k ends up with .8 * 200k + 10k = 170k.

Thus the only people that get the full amount are those who would otherwise get zero income. It has little effect on someone making around the median income and it's paid for by the top of the scale.

Note: The government still needs to do other stuff so actual taxes would end up being higher. The assumption is because you have lower administrative costs than SS, unemployment, and other social programs the net effect is a smaller government and possibly lower taxes. (EX: Social Security is 12.4% for someone making 50k where basic income is 0 the disability and retirement payment can be much higher than 10k/year.)

In US people around median income and above see immediate tax reduction by quite a significant margin.

check your copy/pasted numbers

US Personal income is about $13tn, so a 20% flat tax would currently provide about $8500/yr basic income. And that, of course, is on top of our current government spending.

Also I'm not sure what you'd do w/ payroll taxes.

You're just grossly understating what tax rates would have to be to accommodate this. You think there will be economies of scale that SS today doesn't already achieve that could somehow offset this in a meaningful way? I disagree.

I personally believe in "basic income" in a very elastic sense to increase demand in the economy when it's weak. It's something different than what's discussed here. And I'm not against it strongly, it's just I'm not able to see how we would accomplish that without tax rates similar to what you see in Europe and I don't relish that thought.

So then to lift everyone out of poverty, we just need a 40% flat tax on top of the current federal taxes (so that we can continue to fund everything else). Hooray, 70% tax rate!

First off children don't get the full amount only 1/2 which reduces costs by ~13%. $8500 / (1-.13) = 9770 / year which is rather close to 10k/year. A single person living on 10k after taxes is about the same as a single mother living on 15k hard but hardly impossible. If you add 10k per kid it creates a rather strong incentive to have a few kids.

Also, the assumption is you cut a lot of government spending not just social security. So unemployment insurance, HUD, food stamps, etc. While writing a SS check has vary low overhead handling disability is a huge part of the SS administration that goes away. And those programs are not all paid for by personal income so assuming all the other taxes stay the same you free up a fair amount of spending for the basic income.

Even just eliminating social security reduces taxes by 12.5%. And, presumably that $3,900 exemption for each qualifying child goes away along with the home mortgage tax deduction as do a lot of other deductions which can lower taxes for the rich who would otherwise be getting most of the additional tax burden. I would also suggest removing the deduction for charitable giving. (The only difference between deductions and spending is accounting the math is identical.)

PS: Actually finding the correct tax rate takes quite a bit of economic modeling 20% is reasonable ballpark, but you need to figure out what's cut to get a good idea of how that actually impacts people.

The government currently spends almost $10K per child on public schools, so you can also shuffle in and out of that budget to make the BI cost for children "disappear" in your models.

Spending on welfare programs is a tiny share of our budget. Add up everything -- state and federal -- and it's about 600bn from the data I've seen -- and before the recession it was half that.

Your comment about the 12.5% you save from social security should tell you what you need to know: In order to provide a "basic income" for JUST SENIORS we have to have a 12.5% tax. Now, nominally it's less, because social security taxes cap out at like $110k/yr so there are a lot of income dollars in the US above that amount that aren't paying Fica. Regardless, it's still a tax somewhere near 10% to provide about $15k/year to mostly just seniors. Disability and survivior benefits only make up 20% of social security.

I obviously looked up some facts here to test my assumptions -- everything is just on the social security website and usgovernmentspending.com

We give a lot more money than just 600bn to low income people though the tax code. (aka 10% income tax vs 39.6% income tax) Still 600bn / what amounts to ~275 million people = ~2,200$/person or 22% of a 10k basic income. Not to mention stipends for collage students etc.

  ~23.5% of the population under 18 get 1/2
  prisoners get nothing or close to it.

Also people can get close to 40,000$ from social security not just 10k.

PS: Only 65.5% of Social security goes to retired workers. Well over 63 million people get paid from social security but less than 40 million of them get traditional retirement benefits. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/

He only means it effectively replaces minimum wage, in that we no longer have to require a minimum wage in order to ensure that people have enough money to eat (setting aside the question of whether that actually works).

McDonald's would obviously have to pay something in order to get people to work there. It could certainly get away with paying less if there were no minimum wage and people had a basic income.

All basic income does is create a floor. Depending on flavors of basic income, some have suggested lowering or entirely abolishing the minimum wage. This way, labor would be done at the true (or closer to true) market value. If you're not willing to work at Mickey D's for a dollar an hour, you would have a basic income to fall back on.

I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.

> I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.

The short term effects of redistribution downward on the income scale (and thus generally from those with a lower marginal propensity to consume to those with a higher propensity) would seem pretty clearly to be some degree of demand-pull inflation.

I was thinking about this the other day. I'm not trained in economics or anything, but since UBI is universal, and amount of money in people's checkbooks is simultaneously and predictably increased, the inflation wouldn't have any of the consequences of usual inflation (For citizens).

> I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there would be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless?

Not necessarily. You'd expect some inflation, but if the level of basic income was set at a low enough level (what that is depends on the overall productivity of the economy) it wouldn't be "continual" (well, if you exclude all other effects on price level but the basic income and its effect on price and the effect of that price change on wages, and the effect of those wage changes on price, etc., the effect might be "continual", but it would be asymptotically approaching a finite limit, so not unbounded, which is really where there would be a problem.)

> Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage?

Yes.

> Do they double it?

They pay whatever the work is worth to them.

> Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?

Nothing, so they don't pay zero.

This question comes up every time - here is a great explanation of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

> How does MacDonalds work?

I'm not an economist either, but here's how I'd like to see the McDonalds example play out :

Presumably, McD's pay folks on top of their basic income to entice people to work for them.

Eventually, these wages get high enough (and robots become cheap enough / advanced enough) that it becomes cheaper to automate away those jobs. The gained productivity allows McDonald's prices to drop, and a (properly configured) tax eats a healthy portion of McDonald's new profits. That tax goes directly into the basic income fund, lifting all citizens basic income by some amount.

People are still incentives to do icky jobs now (because they get more than basic income) and as they disappear, those efficiencies become profit, which is taxed and dumped into basic income which then goes up (so we lift everyone to higher standards of living as we destroy jobs people no longer need to do)

Eventually, that process repeats in every business and every industry, until we live in a Star Trek style post-currency economy, where people only work for exercise / interest / fun, and all necessities are covered by machines for some amount near free.

It's not an overnight thing, it's a "spread out over the next century" type change, where basic income started at the US minimum wage, but (over 100 years) eventually gives folks the 100-year-from-now equivalent of 100k/year salary as basic income.

What s great vision for the future.

Time will only tell.

To your first point: not necessarily. Most serious suggestions of a basic income don't involve just printing a huge amount of cash and mailing it out. They're about taxing high earners more, saving a bunch of money on other social programs (and probably police and stuff as well), and then distributing that money to everyone. If you balance that out instead of just increasing the money supply, it might not cause crazy inflation.

To the second - they pay whatever they need to pay to get the workers they need. Everyone is already getting $X a week from the basic income. Fast food workers will make a total of $X+Y a week, and doctors will earn $X+Z, where Z is probably a lot more than Y.

Also, remember basic incomes are typically suggested to be enough to live on and no more - so if you want some luxury items (whatever we decide those are) you'll probably need to get a job somewhere. So there's still incentive to get a job.

The inflation theory assumes that everyone will go out and spend exactly as much more as they are now getting in fixed income. Obviously, that is not the case. Some people will save more. Others, above a certain threshold, will have marginally less money, because we would need to pay for a fixed income with taxes. I did the math a while ago, but can't find it now. My recollection was that at about $70,000 of income per year, an individual would break even between the extra income and extra taxes. People making over $70,000 would actually pay more in taxes than they receive.

Also, just because it replaces minimum wages doesn't mean McDonald's doesn't pay its employees. It means that both sides, employees and employers are working in an elastic, free market, so the wages will be set depending on labor supply and demand.

I'm also not an economist. I think, though, that basic income breaks a lot of assumptions that hold for economics today, but wouldn't hold in such a scenario.

Basic income might lead to inflation. It's impossible for the basic income to become worthless, though, unless all money becomes worthless. Even if everyone gets $X a month, any other amount of money can be expressed as a multiple of X.

McDonalds in this situation could pay zero wage, if anyone wanted to work at this price. I doubt many would, though. Instead, they would pay $Y in addition to the $X that everyone already gets.

Ideally, no one works at McDonalds, because it's automated. If it can't be automated, then McDonalds has to pay people enough to make it worth working at McDonalds, not just enough to survive. This increases the price of things that aren't automated, which increases the reward for those who can figure out how to automate it.

(Objecting to this automation by pointing out how far away we are from AI / useful robots is like objecting to flight by pointing out how many joints are in a bird's wing. An automated McDonalds will look different than what we have today. Perhaps insisting on human hands preparing and serving their food will become an affection of the wealthy.)

If the fixed income came from newly-printed money then yes, it would cause inflation. If it came from taxes then no, it would not cause inflation in and of itself.

In both cases, it would increase the purchasing power of the poor and reduce the purchasing power of the rich, because $5000 means more to somebody making $10000 than it does to somebody making $1000000.

There are many huge cultural and socioeconomic implication of Basic Income.

Inflation is dependent on money supply, you don't need to print new money to apply basic income. You would worry as much of its inflation impact as you would for bailing out banks, if its the same printing. Its not a BI specific concern. Pricing, on the other hand, would probably change drastically, as there would probably be a solid market of goods for people that want to get by with BI alone, so essentials will probably be priced to fit perfectly with BI.

On the second point: Basic Income is guaranteed, regardless of other jobs. So you would work at McDonalds if you wanted more money. Otherwise it creates the perverse incentive not to work which you described.

BI could be nefarious or the savior socioeconomic rule, and it deserves experimentation.

Personally, I find its socio-economic impacts the most interesting and important in shaping a society. With BI, the jobs nobody wants to do will experience a reverse Supply/Demand.

Cleaning toilets today is cheap because you have enough people that need it to survive: when they dont need it anymore, the supply for those jobs will plummet, and suddenly they will start earning way more money. I find this to be such a strong positive force that this alone justifies doing BI to me.

Also, it will very quickly destroy crime. Petty theft and small crimes have no reason to exist anymore, since you dont need to steal to eat or to try to get out of a desperate situation. Specially if being in Jail means you dont get your BI (because its used for prison budgets) it creates a magnificent economical incentive not to do crime and to get out of jail as fast as you can. Organized crime like drug dealers would likely plummet as well: as most organizations they are heavily pyramidal and require a vast number of poor people to work for peanuts and take all the risk. Take them away, and they have no supply chain, so even large organizations will get wrecked quickly. Suddenly, White-collar crime goes way higher in the scale of important.

In terms of society education, you will prevent and help millions of people to be able to pursue education without having to sacrifice it to make ends meet.

Another strongly positive force is to eliminate government "fat". Firing government employees that are useless or provide little value is a very politically expensive move no-one makes, because nobody wants to throw people on the street. Now, this is not the street anymore, they have a strong safety net so we can stop worrying about politics and focus on making things productive.

I clearly see a lot of potential on BI, and I also appreciate it could have devastating downsides. But thats what experimentation is all about finding out.

Do you assume people would be spending their BI rationally? Spending everything on gambling and drugs would still be possible, having more than the least possible income by shady means would still appeal to some. It seems to me reasons for crime wouldn't be exactly destroyed.

If BI was disbursed bi-weekly, then "Spending everything" wouldn't be a catastrophic failure. It's not like you'd be sitting on a pot of gold. What if BI was disbursed daily, even? You would never amass enough money to "spend everything" on gambling on drugs...

It could be distributed by the second. Hopefully it just drips into your bank and you can use a chargecard.

I can't decide, whether to consider this a nanny or police state...

Irrational spending of BI is not relevant. One could have irrational spending of your own salary as well. Thats not the problem BI tries to solve.

Theres always going to be money crimes as long as there is money, but its very different to take a risk on your monthly stipend to get 200 bucks. Its just a huge economical incentive not to do it, particularly in the lowest class, where violent crime is concentrated.

Gangs, Mafia's and drug organizations are based on a worker class that is super cheap to them, those out of poverty and desperation. It would deal a major blow to everyday regular crime.

The desired end-game here is that no one needs to work at McDonalds at all. Basic income goes hand in hand with the massive productivity gains that technology has and will bring. We somehow have to match up nobody needing to work anymore (to produce) with nobody having to (to live).

Money is a sign of poverty so I wouldn't expect basic income to really fix the welfare problem either. It would alleviate some issues for some people but I agree inflation would just eat any benefit the income offered. The same way inflation ate any benefit minimum wage offered.

I don't think anything other than an economic and social Ragnarök is going to fix the poverty problem. Both capitalism and socialism don't seem to have the answers.

During boom times, yes. During those times I think we would reduce it -- but not eliminate it -- or severely means-test it. But when the economy is not performing efficiently -- the way things are now for example -- this will do nothing but increase aggregate demand.

Think about inflation like this: More bidders for the same goods and services. Well, right now there are goods and services on the sidelines.

severely means-test it

Means-testing is where a lot of the cost of social welfare systems comes into play, and where nearly all of the moral hazard starts (making it more expensive to work than to not work). It's best to keep means-testing out of it altogether.

I haven't read much on BI, so I'm sure this has already been answered already, but: how do the numbers add up?

The US poverty line for a single person is $11k. For simplicity, let's say BI gives everyone in the US $10k per year. Times 313.9 million, that's $3.1 trillion per year. The US government spent, overall, $3.45 trillion in 2013. How would we be able to afford basic income?

Same way we pay for anything else, cutting spending and increasing taxes.

I'm not sure you could to do straight math like that as it does depend on the implementation. I presume there would be corporate tax laws introduced that would re-coupe most dollars associated with employees. So a govt could craft whatever policies they want in order to make it work out.

I can think of three sane approaches. First, BI does not necessarily need to be above the poverty line. We can also go to a progressive BI, which may better be describe as a negative income tax, where the poor get more than the rich. And we can increase taxes.

> We can also go to a progressive BI, which may better be describe as a negative income tax, where the poor get more than the rich.

That's called a "means-tested social benefit program", and is one of the thing BI advocates see it as replacing (we have plenty of those now) -- one of the main problems they see is that such programs create perverse incentives, since they reduce the marginal value of additional income to the poor, since the additional income reduces the benefit from the social benefit program. That perverse incentive is one of the things BI is proposed to cure.

That is the same problem we have with a progressive income tax. The major problem I have with current programs is not that they increase the marginal tax rate, but that, at certain points, they increase the marginal taxrate to over 100%. Having a single program, that is also denoted entirely in dollars, will let us explicitly control the effective marginal tax rate.

I don't know much about BI or the numbers either, but I'm guessing that BI would replace some existing spending.

Social security, unemployment, food stamps, etc seem to account for 1/3rd of the total federal budget in 2013 [1].

[1] http://nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2012/presidents-budge...

More tax. More specifically, an amount of extra tax that for a typical person would roughly balance out the extra (say) $10k/year in basic income, so that the net effect on government finances would be small.

The US social security budget is 1.3trillion, so diverting all of it to BI would get people 30% of the way towards the goal of reaching the poverty line.

It may be that getting everyone above the poverty line is infeasible. It may be that the poverty line may be sidestepped, say, by relocating to a poorer (less costly) region of the country.

Food for thought. I haven't really formed an opinion on it, really. The numbers don't look that off, at first inspection.

Reference: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_State...

Most implementations I've read lean towards it being similar to a negative tax (there are other possible implementations out there). So if you file $0 income, you get a $10,000 credit/refund. If you make $200,000 income, you pay $20,000 in taxes.

So taxes on the top brackets pay for basic income on the lowest brackets, with the understanding that the impact isn't changing much for most people because we already have a progressive tax system and this is just a simpler/more efficient way to distribute.

Negative income tax and basic income are best seen, imo, as separate concepts. Basic income is simply giving everyone the same amount of money and then probably taxing it as income in itself, with the base level personal exemption being at least the amount given out.

I'm of the opinion that a negative income tax is a bad idea simply because it really does create the situation where the next dollar you earn on the low end can make things worse for you (or at least not improve them). Why even bother working at a low level job if what they pay you just comes out of your stipend? This is a problem mentioned with the current programs as well, where getting a job can get you cut off from the things that were saving your life, even if the job pays shit.

Pure basic income, on the other hand, means that every dollar you earn increases your income.

Huh? Nobody's suggesting a 100% rate. Every dollar you earn increases your income with a negative income tax, it just doesn't increase it by a full dollar. It might be 90 cents. Still a fairly strong incentive to work.

Fair enough, but at the lowest income levels every cent counts. I don't see any benefit in it. It seems like people prefer it because of a similar misunderstanding about the alternative (that the basic income isn't taxed for people who earn significantly more, thus its price tag is exactly N people * N dollars).

Fair enough, but at the lowest income levels every cent counts. I don't see any benefit in it.

Isn't that directly contradicting the point you made earlier? If every cent counts at the lower level, then even earning 90 cents on the dollar extra is still plenty incentive to attempt to earn more.

You increase the taxes by an average of $10K which means nothing at the low end (people below the poverty line) and more than that at the high end

but ideally the middle class breaks even on the idea, they pay $10K to the basic income fund and get about $10K at the start of the year as a prebate on the next year's basic income tax

Think "working-age adult" (perhaps even "household") not "individual". Also, assume that taxes will reclaim that basic income from folks making significantly more than the poverty line.

According to Wikipedia, only the bottom quartile of the US population earns less than $22500 per household; if you assume that BI isn't simply added on tax-free to higher-earning households' net income, that makes it more like 1/4 of the 80% of the population over age 14 would be eligible for full BI benefits. So, call it 20% of your original population estimate.

That makes it roughly $600 billion, with the potential chance of largely replacing welfare ($532 billion* in 2013) and federal disability ($166 billion), not to mention some portion of Social Security and other programs.

Sounds like a reasonable idea to at least explore IMHO.

* per charts at usgovernmentspending.com

So take from the rich and give to the poor.

No, take from everyone and give to everyone. In a non-biased way. Hey, the rich get their $1k check every month too.

But that's only getting back part of the $1000+ that was taken from them

So what? You've never heard of taxes before? It's how a society functions.

Not if its funded by a land value tax instead of an income tax.

Some good points. That does seem to get us to the right ballpark. However:

- Can you really exclude kids? They still need someone to support them. They may not get their 10k, but their parents need extra (presumably around 10k for each child) to support them.

- If you switch to a means-tested system (the article actually advocates for everyone gets 10k, not just the poor), don’t you lose many of the benefits the article advocates? Eg, you go back to the complexity of having to determine who’s eligible, rather than gaining the efficiency of just saying “everyone”.

- A means-tested system also creates the perverse incentive that the article’s BI would bypass: people near the threshold for BI have a weakened incentive to work extra for fear of losing or lessening their BI.

Edit: Actually, a comment lower down points out that our social security expenditures were $1.3 trillion in 2013[0], so that's our lower bound. "Income derived from Social Security is currently estimated to keep roughly 20% of all Americans, age 65 or older, above the Federally defined poverty level." Since BI would replace SS, we'll be paying at least that amount to start with.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)

The idea of BI is generally to give everyone the money and reclaim it through taxes from those who "aren't eligible", where several models are proposed (land, consumption, or income).

Take income taxes (I like that model for its simplicity because both sides are income):

You get your $10k, but there's a progressive income tax. To invent some random figures: for the first $10k (on top of BI) you pay nothing, at $50k you pay $10k, at $100k you pay $30k. For example: for every dollar between $10k and $50k: $0.25, for every dollar beyond $50k: $0.40.

Once you earn $50k, your BI cancels out, anything higher and you contribute to the BI of others. (simplifying some more: income tax contributes to BI, all other public expenditures are paid through other taxes, like land or consumption).

Progressive taxes are well understood, relatively abuse-free (it can only be gamed by not declaring income), and at no point create a >100% marginal tax rate: tax grows faster than before, but never faster than your income.

That way the complexity of welfare, its abuse and people falling through its cracks is eliminated (or so proponents hope), while still "effectively paying" the $10k in BI only to those who really need them.

(Disclaimer: the tax brackets above probably break down easily when applied to reality, so only use them to discuss the model ;-) )

I'm guessing we would only need to divert a fraction of the money currently being used on weaponry and military to cover the difference.

You'd guess wrong. In 2012 the entire defense budget was $689 Billion.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258

Good point. I don't know that I favor basic income when the enormity of the funding required is put in perspective. I'd rather see some kind of allotment for bill-pay for lower-income/no-income individuals, whereby things like their rent, health costs, cell phone bill, & transportation costs would be provided for up to a certain amount. Something like $5000 annually would go a long way towards helping out low-income people, and the paperwork necessary to receive benefits would serve as a disincentive for people who don't need the assistance to try to receive it.

Does that count health care for wounded veterans and other "side effects" that last far longer than any single war or Presidential term?

I didn't RTFA, but if you instead assume it just goes to adults (~221M) then that's $2.2T. I think BI gets rid of SS/Medicare/Medicaid/etc, which gets you back roughly $2T.

In 2012 Medicare, Medicaid, and Children's health funding was $732 billion. And I don't know how you get rid of SS since the government would still need to make payments that are higher than any typical basic income level.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258

You could transitionally subsume SS by making SS benefits, as a special transitional case, non-cumulative with BI -- how this works:

(1) eliminate separate SS tax when you establish BI (probably keep a tax of about the same level overall rolled into general income tax, you probably need it to fund BI, but you no longer have dedicated SS contributions)

(2) The SS eligibility you have earned from your past contributions remains, except any time when you would get SS, your BI is deducted from your SS benefits (so you never get less benefits from BI+SS than you would have gotten from the worst of the two, but also never more than you would get from the best of the two.)

So, over time SS withers, and to the extent its duplicative its effectively eliminated immediately, but no one loses the minimum guarantee they had already secured from SS.

(1) The primary sources of funding usually suggested for BI are cutting existing means-tested benefit programs and increasing high-end income taxes. (Note that many of these existing programs are currently joint federal/state funded programs, so unless BI was done the same way, this would also involve shifting some spending from the states to the federal government.)

(2) The full single-person household federal poverty line is a very high target to aim for per person for BI in an initial implementation. Half of the two-person household FPL per adult citizen and permanent resident (about $7500/each), and, if BI is going to paid to children (or, rather, guardians on their behalf) the full marginal amount for an additional family member (about $4000/each) per child (again citizens and permanent residents) is probably a more reasonable target to aim for, but I'd expect an initial implementation to start out below that and work up.

Some adjustments:

People under 18, 25%

Felons/criminals, probably 3%

Removing social security, medicare, and most other government social welfare programs should remove a giant chunk of the federal budget. I think if you re-do these numbers that will appear a lot more affordable.

Proponents of BI say it can't exclude anyone. That is silly. Things we consider the most basic fundamental rights: voting, free speech, are restricted for large groups such as convicted felons. It would be reasonable that anyone who fails to conform with government rules of accepted social behavior should also be excluded from BI.

The more serious problem with BI is how the dollars flow toward prices. If you make a blanket distribution of money to a large group of money the end result may just be price inflation in the goods that exist in a limited quantity, most specifically real estate.

I think BI is a fairly poor idea. But, being realistic I am trying to imagine what it would look like in use. All I see is a tool for governments to control large segments of lower middle class citizens. That may well be the goal.

>Felons/criminals, probably 3%

You imply that they shouldn't get BI. Perhaps, though, the incentive for criminality would be less with BI? Especially if good drugs (particularly pot) are legal and cheap.

Isn't excluding criminals likely to reduce what is often touted as a positive effect of BI: reducing crime by giving people what they need to survive?

> If you make a blanket distribution of money to a large group of money the end result may just be price inflation in the goods that exist in a limited quantity, most specifically real estate.

Land may exist in reasonably fixed quality, but real estate in the relevant sense (e.g., housing units) do not exist "in fixed quantity", and more money chasing them around causes more of them to be available, just like most goods. You'd expect some increase in market clearing price, sure, but also an increase in units of housing "sold" in the market (including rentals). Which is rather the point.

There are many effective ways to limit real estate speculation and thus price inflation. Land taxes, un-restrictive planning regimes, capital gains taxes on real estate sales, strong tenant protection laws, loan to value and loan to disposable income ratios, margin calls on mortgages for investment properties.

Society has to make a fundamental choice about whether they want shelter to be primarily shelter or primarily an asset for speculation.

Actually rather than dock prisoners' basic income, confiscate it as part of their sentencing to fund their internment. That makes prisons a lot more self-sufficieny.

Because income taxes would go up as well. The poor would benefit but the rich might actually end up with a net loss. A basic income is nothing more than a redistribution of wealth, and in theory, might not cost anything more.

Every time a post like this comes up it gets hundreds of people supporting the idea. The problem is that most of the readers of HN have been in the Upper Middle Class or higher their entire lives. Friends, family, co-workers, all UMC, and so you don't know, you've never experienced, the pathologies typical of poorer people. Or, you pretend those pathologies can be solved with a new variation on welfare.

Giving out checks is going to create millions of people who do nothing but 1) Watch television and eat potato chips or 2) Spend the checks on drugs/alcohol, and steal whatever they need until the first of the next month. Worse, many of those people are the same who used to clean your toilets and take out your garbage. Not mine--yours.

That's just reality. I'm guessing that the main reason why conservatives like Charles Murray support basic income is because it focuses the menagerie of handouts into one policy, which will allow for easier metrics into how increases are harmful.

What's wrong with 1)?

I'd rather have robots clean the toilets and free these people to watch TV and eat chips or get high or whatever they would prefer to spend their lives doing.

I have a proposal. Those who favor basic income should pick one or two recipients who are deserving of assistance, and open their own pockets and provide the money. The recipients will be glad and thankful, the donors will feel they have moved society toward utopia, and the rest of us can just get on with our lives without suffering the burdens that an additional entitlement would impose.

I say this not to incite a flame war or partisan jibes. I just feel that it's the most honest and ethical way to provide basic income; those who believe in this approach are free to contribute, while those who don't are free not to.

Seems fair to me.

That would only seem workable if the donors could offset the amount of donation from their tax liabilities. Also, most BI discussions I've seen are about how to replace the existing benefits delivery infrastructure with BI, and not as an additional entitlement.

Blisterpeanutes: "People who support blind charity should put their money where their mouth if they think it's such a great idea."

Yourapostasy: "Hey great idea, even better why don't we give them all the money they give back so they don't actually have to make a sacrifice at all for their beliefs!"

If you want a bifurcated benefits distribution program, where BI and "conventional" taxes exist side-by-side, to see which program is more effective in an open competition, then telling supporters of BI "you not only have to pay the taxes you already pay, but you also then pay beyond that for BI" would handicap the results in favor of the existing "conventional" taxation system. I personally think advocates of BI are committing the Soros reflexivity mistake, which pretty much most of the field of economics sins against as well. Without a near-free energy source, I doubt BI works over the long-haul. But that doesn't mean when someone advocates testing BI by telling supporters to dig into their pockets even deeper after they have paid taxes they currently are liable for, that I will idly stand by and let that pass for a fair challenge. Operationally, unless there is some strong way (like via DNA) to identify benefits recipients of one system over another to avoid double-dipping and similar negative externality behavior, I don't think side-by-side systems are actually feasible.

Macro-economic policies are not accurately represented at a small scale.

I do this. The main problem I've found is that the individuals are overly grateful and ashamed of having needed the assistance. It frays the friendship more than a little bit; it's not so much that it becomes the breaking point, but it weakens our ability to treat each other as equals, because, and this is the important point:

Because I know they needed the help, and they know I know. This makes a significant difference to how people interact. One of the nice things about basic income is that, if I were depending on it for my livelihood, I would not have to tell anyone.

I would be allowed to keep my dignity.

What?!? Suggesting people use their own money to support their own beliefs, rather than expecting the rest of society to pay up while they make no sacrifice?? Heretic!!

> While people could theoretically survive off the charity of others, advanced artificial intelligence and robotics are likely to increase the portion of the population who are unemployable.

We've been hearing this kind of arguments for literally centuries (the steam engine is going to put people out of work, cars and trucks will create unemployment, oh no Silicon valley is going to kill all manual work out there through automation, and then robots will take over the world and there will be no more jobs for people). This is really, really old and tiring. If anything, technologies increase the amount of economic growth through increased opportunities, and so far the market has clearly demonstrated that it's providing a lot more jobs to way more people than when we were still 1 billion on this planet.

Let assume that these kinds of investments actually lead to something: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/21/zuckerberg-musk-inves...

Maybe not immediately, but 10, 20, 50 years? Good luck.

1) When people don't need to produce value to live in the world, they will cease to produce value.

2) Ultimately it is not income that is needed to survive but resources properly organized. The cost of survival is getting cheaper and cheaper at an exponential rate. You wouldn't know that though because they keep raising the bar on what it means to "survive"—big screen tv, air conditioning, car, etc. The amount of work required to live according to living standards 100 years ago is rather minimal.

3) Where does this "basic income" come from? If you are taking it from others who produce value then how are you any better than a slave owner? The only difference is that instead of owning and taking the livelihood of an individual you are taking it from everyone collectively in smaller amounts. The moral principle is the same.

4) Why would people work if they can just take from others? Everyone will do the least amount possible because everyone else is just going to take their profits so why bother. Communism didn't work so why are you proposing it now?

5) You can't protect people from being stupid. Unless you are physically handicapped or retarded, in which case there is charity and family, it's really pathetically easy to survive in today's world. You aren't being chased by tigers. Agricultural yields are 100x than they were just a short time ago. The Internet provides a vast amount of resources to better yourself. There are greater abundances than ever before and people are generally charitable towards others. If you can't survive under those conditions there is something wrong with you.

6) I find it offensive and an attack on my personal liberty that you would demand that I sacrifice my livelihood so that another doesn't have to work hard and make wise decisions.

Well, it's the only way to be able to dissuade people from programs like welfare and food stamps. Practically, it's the only program that can succeed in doing so in the US. You don't think it would be a better system than we have now where making past a certain amount has a NEGATIVE effect on your income if you're a single mother?

It's better to make closer to $30,000 as a single mother rather than $50,000 - you'll get to keep more of it because you qualify for more government programs.

I think it's easier to disassemble these really perverse incentives if you replace it with something simpler. Then you can reduce social security benefits because of this, then turn to alimony and child support (no longer needed), etc.

You can't do that without first giving an alternative to the status quo

I agree that the current system rewards people for consuming welfare and provides disincentives for them to work, but I don't think making the rest of the working population their slaves through taxes is a moral solution.

I think a better solution would be along the lines of "How can we reduce the barriers of entry so that people can create their own success?" and "How can we shift the cultural motif of society from entitlement mentality to valuing hard work and the benefits that come from it?"

Thanks for being one of the least insane and retarded people on this comment thread.

> Everyone will do the least amount possible because everyone else is just going to take their profits so why bother

Perhaps you're describing yourself? I know I'd be a lot more actively working on business ventures with a GBI.

> Communism didn't work so why are you proposing it now?

How is this communism? It's still promoting free market, but making it easier to start competing businesses and contribute to society. Yes some people will sit around collecting their check. That happens already. Most others will take the money and do something with it other than working at McDonalds.

> Unless you are physically handicapped or retarded, in which case there is charity and family

Yes, the free market has no use for these people. Let them rot.

> I find it offensive and an attack on my personal liberty that you would demand that I sacrifice my livelihood so that another doesn't have to work hard and make wise decisions.

I'm getting kind of sick of people throwing "liberty" around whenever GBI is brought up. You know what? You pay GBI taxes already. It's just that most of it goes into government overhead instead of the hands of the needy.

What's more, there's a difference between your personal liberty (ie, the ability to buy a stupidly large car, the ability to go for a walk in the park, the ability to speak your mind without fear of government persecution) and your debt to society. We all have to pay into society, because society provides for us. It provides opportunities and protects those who are in need.

You owe society. Not because it's stealing from you, but because it gave you everything you have. Everything in your life that you think you've built with your own blood and sweat? Maybe 10% of it was actually your doing if that. The other 90% of it was provided by society: the roads you drive on, the computer you type on, the phones you talk over, the doctor you go to when you're sick, the police keeping bullets from flying through your windows at night, ETC ETC. None of what any of us do would be possible without the infrastructure set up for us by others.

The distinction between producers and non-producers is not your distinction to make. You owe society as a whole. Not just the producers.

So let's stop pretending that everything we accomplish in life was completely our doing, because it's not. Let's also stop pretending that everything can have a price tag put on it and the free market will solve all our problems and make lazy, handicapped, insane, elderly people vanish (somewhere?).

Part of your job as a citizen is to help provide for others because the same is done for you. So quit your whining and pony up.

Providing a basic income for all people, regardless of their merit to the society as a whole, is problematic. It's not enough to just hand over a couple hundred dollars to someone and say "have fun". We need to ensure everyone is getting the proper basic services, first.

I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribution infrastructure. Money should be something you spend purely on things you want, not things you need.

Given that we built a distribution infrastructure of some kind to automatically and evenly distribute the total food resources of the country, we would see a dramatic change in how money is looked upon and how we use it. No longer will we require money, instead, money is something you earn and use for things you wish to do. We can focus all of our time and energy on furthering our technology, our minds, and the human race in general.

I agree. Meeting basic human needs through other means seems to be a necessary prerequisite to basic income.

I kindly disagree. I would prefer a system where a basic income is distributed (simply for the efficiency) and those that receive it are educated on how to spend it to meet their basic needs. This could be integrated into school curriculum, online courses, etc.

That makes sense, though I keep thinking about people who are (for various reasons) fundamentally non-rational actors. Those with mental illnesses or drug abuse issues, etc.

I think you'd find that drug abusers are much less likely to commit crimes once they have a steady flow of money. "Well now we're paying people to do drugs!" But we're doing that in the first place, through welfare and food stamps, etc. And if we don't pay enough, they steal. So in one instance we ignore the problem and it ends up costing us, in another instance we accept that there are people who are going to withhold contributing to society and we give them their check anyway because they'd just end up taking it.

As far as mental illness goes, that is an interesting problem I don't think GBI would solve. Sure you can give a schizophrenic person a check, but are they going to cash it? Or would you still have some sort of public facility for mentally disabled people? I would hope so.

Those are fair concerns. Mental illness is a serious problem as an estimated 1 in 4 adults suffers from some form of mental illness in a given year. Perhaps, those problems could be solved with conservatorships, better healthcare, and private services built around providing basic needs. The latter is done for free by volunteers in many cities already; Meals on Wheels, for example.

It is absolutely reasonable, but its way easier to provide BI than to provide that infrastructure. Its cheaper, and allows people to have more freedom to pick between options.

What you describe seems like the status quo system: the state distributes food and shelter to people directly (through food stamps and council housing). The idea of basic income is that it is much more efficient if the state redistributes _money_, and then everyone can buy food and shelter using money.

Given that we have no distribution system in place, it is true that if the state redistributes money, that is a more efficient way to go. However, you slightly missed my point. I'm not talking about a system that gives you vouchers. I'm talking about a system that gives you FOOD. This isn't food stamps, this is a system that lives outside of the economy. You don't pay for food, you don't have a "quota". Everything is centralized. Basically, this removes the need for brick and mortar grocery stores, and ends our dependence on large companies like Wal-Mart, et. al., to sell us our food.

We shouldn't need to buy food. That's the point.

There's some cases where basic services provided centrally at no cost make sense (though in many cases there is room for fairly endless debate over whether a basic services model or a basic income model where the services are purchased makes more sense.)

I think that you overstate the scope of things for which a basic services model is better; really, I think all of the things on your list are things where BI works better than basic services.

There are three major advantages of unconditional basic income.

1) It will always be beneficial to work. I.e. even for a couple of hours.

2) Society wont have to waste money controlling whether someone should have the money or not. The frees millions of people and billions of not trillions of control.

3) It removes most argument around inequality and it makes sure there always is customers.

You can't have wealth without creating it through labor. You can see this when you isolate the abstractions society has and go to the core semantics.

Take a population of people. Stick them on a remote island. Then institute this measure. Where does this income come from? If you just print money, what is there to buy if nobody has produced it? If it is from taxation, then if you produce something and others just take it why would you bother producing when it is much easier just to take from others like everyone else?

I would argue, and history seems to show this. That a society prospers as a whole the more they reward hard work and allow the people to enjoy the fruits of their own labors.

I once stumbled upon a YouTube video consisting of a woman who received ~$1,400/mo entirely supplied by Government Assistance Programs.

I once saw a job posting for a Web Developer/Python position where the client stated: "$1,000/mo is enough in Belarus."

I stopped to think for a bit: "I hardly made $800/mo when I was freelancing, and I was happiest when I was not working."

I think the biggest argument for Basic Income is to normalize what is already an existing systemic exploitation of a broken system. Professional exploiters and accidental/system-justifier exploiters need to be cut off, which might motivate professionals and invalids to assess our system as more just. I'm sure a positive network effect will follow.

Why not just try it? Why not stop arguing these speculative points and just try it?

It only works if you test.

You actually raise a good point about testing it. If you have heard of the Sea Steading Institute they are proposing that we establish a bunch of "startup" style countries to examine which policies and solutions will work and which won't. The problem with basic income though is that it relies on captive individuals (value producers who pay tax) and given the choice they are most likely going to move to somewhere that doesn't force them to pay as much tax. I can't see how socialism can survive without forcing people against their will.

This assumes that a basic income is funded through income taxation. Instead, fund it through a land value tax (a rent on land ownership paid to society). The LVT is just the cost of investment, like any business owner renting space to run their business on.

$1,000/wk* is enough in Belarus.

I support the idea, but there are other things that have to go with it in order to really work and not end up like the broken economy that Argentina had to put up with when doing something similar.

It would need serious tax reform, changes to how business are treated locally and internationally.

One suggestion for tax reform is to apply taxes strictly on only sales tax, not income tax. Certain property taxes may still be effectful, but it's really a huge mess that will really function if not taken all together.

I suppose an analogy is when it comes to extreme programming, you can't just take what you like and get all the benefits--not that basic income specifies these other things, but I believe there is a bigger package that has to be considered.

Can you explain what you see as the problem and why the solution to that problem is not to tax income?

I am not stating that it is _the_ solution, but here are some thoughts as to why it would help.

We spend billions just paying accountants to fool around wit millions of rules that most people do not understand. Sales tax is very simple. Rich people get out of paying taxes by doing inefficient things like tax shelters.

Now, the sales tax would need to be refunded for those in the basic income bracket, especially on food, housing, etc..

Remember that HN article about "We'll not incorporate in the US" by some Danish group? What needs to happen is to encourage businesses to run locally, and part of that is simplifying the entire structure to represent what the economy is closest to--consumption.

Replace income tax with land value tax. Then it's not redistribution of income. The argument for a land value tax is Georgist: land is not property because it is not the product of one's own labor. Therefore land 'owners' should pay rent to society in the form of the land value tax (though not on the property built on the land). That rent is then paid to society as a universal basic income.

(And to preempt those who might question why anyone would both owning land: because like any investment there is a cost that can be exceeded by profit.)

I didn't know it was called that. I was actually thinking along the same lines. Make that the only tax. Everything else could be optional fees for services or premiums for insurance products.

How does a lands tax comport with the fact that some acres are hugely more productive (or extractive) than others?

It's not in the US, but the First Oil Well in Bahrain, which has been providing oil since June 2, 1932. For much of its life at 70,000 bbl/day, more recently at about half that rate, 35,000 bbl/day.

That's roughly $3.5 million per day in productivity.

There was a time, and Henry George came well after it, when the agricultural productivity of land was in fact the basis of virtually all wealth (some contributions from the sea, as well as water and wind power). Since the large-scale exploitation of coal, oil, and gas, starting in the mid 18th century, that hasn't been the case.

It eventually likely will be again, but I've not read enough of the Georgist view to see how the huge variances in land productivity would be addressed. Even if mere ag output is considered.

If it's not a "lands tax" but a "land value" tax, if some acres are hugely more productive they are also hugely more valuable, and at best they are taxed accordingly.

Thanks. I've heard a bit about Georgism but haven't looked into it in depth.

but then if you choose not to interact with the market economy you cannot subsist off your own land, especially if everyone is buying up land and making it private so that there is no public access to nature

I don't consider myself very liberal but basic income makes sense to me just from a simplicity perspective. The amount of complexity right now in the welfare state almost certainly introduces all kinds of bizarre unintended effects. With basic income, you push all that onto the (hopefully fairly efficient) market. It would also let me sleep well at night knowing that nobody could game the system, since everyone, from the rich down to the poor, get their basic income.

I guess the biggest question with it is what is the differential in outcomes for people. What % of people who work now out of fear of living on the street would stop working if they could be sure they would have the bare minimum to survive. I can't imagine many. Everyone always wants more for themselves and their children. If people choose to not work, basic income puts a cap on how much of a "drain" they are on society.

There are a lot of nice properties to this concept and it would be interesting to hear well-founded opposition arguments. Unfortunately I have to assume that almost all of the arguments are going to be along the lines of "doing this will encourage people to be lazy" without any real evidence that this is the case.

Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items (inheritance is the biggest game breaker in a fair system), another very practical and fair idea would be no VAT/sales tax (disproportionately affects the poor) and vastly reduced business taxes; however Progressive personal income taxation that works like the effects of relativity on the speed of light (no tiny group of bands that end at a middling percent and allow capital gains but rather a direct calculation from the income; the more non-charitably allocated income, the even higher the tax rate approaching 90+% in the stratospheric levels, encouraging investment in business, employment, public good projects etc, just like the old rich guys in the early 20th century building all those public libaries. All of these resources held in the public trust (as well as complete citizen ownership of natural resources and most land; nobody should have rights to important earth resources because their daddy had a piece of paper they got from their slave plantation) used for basic income & investment in automation as well as myriad other public good projects.

100% inheritance tax is a bit ridiculous - if I'd die today in a car accident, my family already would lose it's main income and suffer; and you'd suggest taking away my savings from my widow&toddlers at that point?

And even if you'd really want this, it's feasible only if you also have a 100% tax on gifting stuff - otherwise any old/sick person would simply gift their wealth to whoever he wants to leave (generally taxed at the normal income tax rate) or buy/sell stuff at very advantageous terms for the same effect; or take an expensive life insurance policy that'd pay out as much as he'd like to his relatives.

The amount of revenue gained in a near 100% system would guarantee basic income for all, including children. This is my point. Take away gifting and nepotism and automatically assign an equal amount of potential resources to each child from birth.

You can't take away gifting unless you take away private property - how you can prevent me spending my resources (no matter how much/little of them I may have) on rising my kids instead of myself?

The natural unit of the economy isn't a person, it's the household - all the legislation and market theory is about resource flows between households, we've never had societies that were able (or even intending) to control resource flows within a household. The only way to ensure equal resources to each child from birth would involve also fully centralizing childcare - i.e., taking them away from parents and raising them all equally by some single anonymous system; but I'd call that a dystopia.

I do want my children to have an advantage in resources if I can help it, it's a natural property of homo sapiens and most other mammals to care about their offspring.

You can take away 'nepotism' in that sense as soon as you're able to genetically modify our species to have a different psychology than homo sapiens - and while we're at it, this could also solve wars, greed and a bunch of other problems.

Implementing what you propose might be possible, but it would require to apply violent force on a mass scale, as almost all people would naturally want to circumvent the system at some point and need to be forcibly prevented from that - or it all goes back to the "communism" where in theory everybody is equal but in practice it's just empty words and everybody cheats the system.

> Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items

A more plausible (less confiscatory, but recognizing that inheritance is income and that untaxed inheritances fail to reflect this) alternative would probably be taxing inheritances as income to the recipient and allowing them to be split over a set period of years (say, 5-10) for tax purposes.

I'm in favor of this.

Do we have any examples where this has worked before?

You could argue the system in the UK provides similar payments and could be called a basic income system if you rebrand it. Basically the system comes out roughly as:

Zero earned income. You get about £60-200 from the state per week so lets call this a £60 basic income. Typical unemployed.

Annual income £12K. No tax and no subsidies. We could rebrand as £60/wk basic income = 3K/yr and and 25% tax on the 12K. Typical minimum wage earner.

Income £50k. Roughly £35K in your pocket, £15K tax. Rebrand as 18K tax less 3K minimum income.

The system kind of works. One of the main problems is that there is a very steep effective marginal between zero income and minimum wage - a lot of people end up about equally well off in the short term whether they do nothing or flip burgers. This would be better under a straight basic income system.

I think you could improve the basic income set up by something like karma points where you get a bit more money if you are productive even if it's doing something unpaid like charity work or writing poems and less if you are criminal etc.

Sorry, you must have misread Belleruches' post. He asked for examples where this has worked.

Last I heard the UK was a depressed shithole with a stagnant economy. Hardly a glorious example of the success of such policies.

> The system kind of works.

Isn't it actually radically different in that you are not allowed to choose to stay unemployed, i.e. you have to be at least trying to look for work in order to be eligible for such benefits?

In other countries there are similar systems but before you get "basic income" like benefits, your property will have to be used up / sold.

This would be akin to dumping a load of cash into the economy, driving inflation to the point where the extra cash had absolutely no difference to anyone especially the poor.

It's a lovely idea but the working wage is a much better one!

I think everyone should go first debate what Milton Friedman proposed: the negative income tax.

The negative income tax has the virtue of at least restart the debate on how much taxes should companies pay. Why aren't taxes progressive ? Why are there still oil subsidies ? Why are many companies still able to dodge taxes ?

The basic income cannot happen if the government cannot pay for it. Maybe s very low basic income at something like $3000 or $5000 per year would be nice to experiment, but until then, politically with that congress, and considering the electorate and how hated the poor are, it's just impossible.

If a basic income was implemented, would we also be comfortable getting rid of minimum wage?

And, if we attempted to go for this in the US, how much struggle would there be to both implement the minimum wage and also remove all of the other programs such as welfare, food stamps, disability?

The system is very well established and you couldn't just remove each part in a single step. Each program that gets removed would need to be eliminated one by one.

Overall, I think that a basic income is the cleanest, fairest, least game-able way to help the lower class. I just don't see it happening in our current political climate.

I have been thinking about the long term effects of automation (as in self driving car/trucks etc) and I think such a scheme will become necessary in the near future. How many job losses will be there in near future if all the vehicles become self-driven. Number of truckers is estimated at In 2006, the U.S. trucking industry as a whole employed 3.4 million drivers. Another 233,900 cab driver. Maybe 2X number in supporting jobs, like waiters etc. Can a society survive with so many jobless people with the current unemployment schemes?

Edit: spelling

This sounds kind of like the earned income tax credit, which is basically a reverse tax (if you don't make enough to pay taxes, you get a subsidy instead): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

Expanding EITC substantially would be politically easier than attempting to do this, since it already exists and has bipartisan support (as opposed to raising the minimum wage). You need some sort of job for the EITC, though.

I want to live in a society of people who are working together to make human existence meaningful. What I don't want is the pseudo-free market designed to further despotism and self-interested behavior which we have today.

That said, I'm not for giving someone food, shelter, water, and health care for falling out of a uterus. You have to contribute in some measurable way. Also I believe that we should provide, specifically these things...NOT currency/income.

I've seen too many examples of people having children for well-fare checks.

Here's the thing: I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.

Further, I think we need to bad times to help us recognize the good times and a basic income would do much to soften those bad times...

I worry that Basic Income is in the long term practically unavoidable, but at the same time will create new levels of depravity in mankind.

> I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.

I think there is a difference between "work" that fulfills our desire to dedicate time and effort toward challenging endeavors and "work" that creates sufficient net value to keep oneself alive (or in the case of a redistributive society, to keep society as a whole alive).

And yes, I think this even applies to people who do jobs that align very closely with their passions, like many computer programmers. My argument isn't that passionate programmers wouldn't continue programming if they had no need for a wage, but rather that they would do precisely the parts of programming they enjoy.

It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.

Also, given hedonic adaptation, humans are rarely content with any given level of luxury. While there are certainly negatives to that, it does mean that most (or at least many) people would continue to attempt to earn as much as possible even with a basic income.

Finally, the money does have to come from somewhere. I expect that the system would be designed so that it begins net neutral for the middle class. And I can't see most middle class people suddenly deciding to give up half their income just because there's suddenly a softer landing. For the rich, the effect would obviously be even less pronounced.

>It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.

Curiously, I think Basic Income would drive creativity in some people to acquire luxuries without working for someone else (building their own stuff, or unfortunately, stealing). I think many would wear that as a badge of pride. We already worship business leaders and entrepreneurs. Imagine the praise of successful entrepreneurship of one's life and possessions and not just his business.

1. I think you underestimate the daily hell of the lives of workers who hate their jobs. There are millions of people out there who are homeless because they'd rather sleep outside than perform the jobs available to them.

2. People who are forced to work two (or more) jobs to stay afloat are struggling way more than could conceivably be incentivized by evolution. I can't imagine how miserable and downtrodden people must be who have no weekend to look forward to in which to pursue their interests.

3. I don't believe that doing something meaningless like sweeping floors or checking groceries fills any kind of psychological need. I've personally gone a few months before without doing any kind of work, and it was glorious.

4. What about all of those psychological needs (family, relationships, hobbies) which people compromise for the sake of work?

Furthermore, we expect others to work and respect them based on what they do.

I believe that a basic income may make life easier, but it will make it all that much harder to reach equality of respect, equality of dignity.

There's no dignity in being homeless, or even working 2-3 jobs without weekends just to keep your family from starving.

Hard work is a recent invention. It arrived with the farming revolution a mere 10-12k years ago.

Before that, humans as foragers are believed to have worked about 20hrs per week, if they so chose.

Yeah, and early vertebrate species in the Cambrian just swam around singing happy songs and smooching anemones all day while they enjoyed a universe free of those horrible constraints of energy and matter that nasty humans invented to oppress each other.

Get a fucking grip. Hunter gatherers lived in shitty conditions with unbelievably poor material wealth, and had no protections against disease, injury, starvation, attack by animals, attack by other humans, old age, death in childbirth, etc etc. Average lifespan was 20.

All of which is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.

Hard work came with farming. Before farming people worked very few hours.

Oh, and you're also wrong about much of the rest of it as well. There is a reason that anthropologists consider farming "the worst mistake in human history":

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...

From an evolutionary standpoint, I disagree with your first statement. Work involves using energy. When an animal does not need food, it is often better served by not working so as to conserve its energy.

So what should the basic income be? $10k/yr? 20k? 50k? 100k?

It should be tied to some indexes that reflect the cost of living. If it's impossible to actually live a very minimal life on the basic income, there's not much point, as you'll still have to work and be under stress about making ends meet.

So basic income is the minimum living cost? What if minimum cost of living increase every year as it does? What if you live in San Francisco where the standard of living is crazy high? Do the citizens of S.F get a higher basic income than say Milwaukee?

This is an issue with the concept of basic income. Likely the most equitable solution would be for government to step in and provide housing directly or limit rents in some areas.

The federal basic income level would likely be based off of a national averages for cost of living, with state/city governments stepping in to provide greater subsidies if they feel it's needed. People may still need to pay more for convenience, but should have other options available, even if it means moving an hour or two away from the trendy metro areas.

The point of a universal/general basic income is that it's the same for everyone. SF's cost of living is significantly higher, but nobody's stopping you from getting a job there still on top of your GBI.

If on top of having a job and getting GBI you still can't live in San Francisco, then you'd move to a cheaper area of the state/country.

What's interesting is that a lot of people flock to urban areas for the increased opportunity, but with a GBI, this may not be the case as much because there's less of a strain to make ends meet. This could reduce the cost of living in urban areas.

People becoming "unemployable" because of robots is one of the most common arguments in favor of this, and that argument is nonsense because actual skilled jobs are not going away.

Will a robot fix your car when it breaks? Will it be designing new and better cars? Will it even design the automation systems that let those new cars be built more efficiently?

Will those robots provide legal advice to the companies that operate them? Will they provide medical care to your kid when he breaks a bone? Will they provide him with counseling when he's struggling emotionally? Will they give him a lesson on algebra, and then work with him one-on-one to make sure he understands it?

Will robots patrol the streets and keep you safe from crime? Will they prosecute people who hurt others, or preside over those trials to make sure everyone's rights are protected?

Will robots invent the next Google or Facebook, and will they code it up and design a nice-looking and intuitive interface for it? Will they entertain you from a stage or a movie set? Will they write new jokes for a stand-up act, write an original novel, or provide an author with advice on how to make his characters more lifelike?

Maybe McDonald's fry cooks will eventually be replaced with robots, but "labor" isn't going anywhere.

But the number of people that want / need to do those visionary / human-centric jobs (though I would not consider all of those jobs as necessarily human) is lower than the number of people that would be seeking employment without a system for basic income; and, as long as it's pennies to get a person to do those low-income jobs, they're not likely to be automated away

> Will robots patrol the streets and keep you safe from crime? Will they prosecute people who hurt others, or preside over those trials to make sure everyone's rights are protected?

Hah, that's exactly Robocop (in Detroit 2029).

"Will they prosecute people who hurt others, or preside over those trials to make sure everyone's rights are protected?"

We don't even do that now, with people. Might as well try robots.

I do not agree that "Combining income redistribution and decentralizing spending would solve poverty today. "

I would argue more individual wealth that's based on

a) cumulative and legal earnings b) penalty-free inheritance c) a system that rewards individual greed d) a system that rewards equal opportunity

would solve poverty today.

For that to work, though -- those have to be world wide rules. Making an individual country as a test ground will not produce repeatable results.

The above also has one more built in assumption -- vast majority of the people are 'good to other human beings' and act 'rationally'.

The definition of 'legal' is of course vague, but must be uniform across the world (not in individual country) and would include things like

a) equivalence of genders/race/religions/ethnic/disability/political/financial/marital/law-enforcement status in the eyes of a law and competitive bidding

b) law of contract

c) uniformly standardized legal language around contracts that does not require legal council to initiate and resolve disputes

e) criminal penalty system that treats qualified threat of a physical or financial harm, with 80% of equivalence to posterior event

(this it to prevent wide spread racketeering )

f) criminal system that requires non-cirmustantial/independently verifiable evidence to result in conviction

g) largely uniform across country criminal law

Real questions because I'm not an economist.

If I have money does that mean I am assured that the goods required to fulfill my basic needs exist and can be purchased by that money?

No. Simply having money means nothing. This is true for all economies. It's entirely up to society accepting the currency you have to produce the goods you desire.

In a basic income society, the amount received should be based off of indexes for items/services deemed necessary to meet some basic quality-of-life thresholds. If the private sector cannot provide items/services to meet those thresholds, then the government should step in to provide them, until the private sector can provide it more efficiently(if possible).

Wouldn't businesses just raise prices to offset the basic income, rendering it useless?

Only if they were colluding with one another. Lower prices remain attractive to consumers even when they have extra cash to spend. Reasonably priced goods would still win out in volume of sales over unnecessarily high-priced goods.

"Only if they were colluding with one another"

If everyone knows they can get basic income for doing nothing, the majority will not choose a job that pays less than or equal to the basic income.

This means businesses will have to increase wages (and costs of goods and services). No colluding necessary..just economics.

You don't lose your basic income just because you get a job. Everyone gets it.

> Wouldn't businesses just raise prices to offset the basic income, rendering it useless?

Assuming a competitive market, which is a decent assumption overall though clearly there are good for which it doesn't work, an increase in demand (which is what more money going to people more likely to spend it does) should result in an increase in price smaller in proportion than the increase in income and an increase in the quantity of goods sold. So, yes, you'd expect some inflation, but not so much (at any level) as to render the increased income useless.

The real problem is all the tax loopholes that almost exclusively benefit the upper/upper end of the income spectrum.

I am looking at you carried interest loophole.

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

And the low rate dividends are taxed at. Dividends should be deducted at the corporate level as a cost, and taxed at the shareholder level as regular income.

Hey! This thread isn't meant for ideas that are sane and would actually improve things. Please move on to another thread.

b/c making the tax code more fair/logical would not improve things? your comment does not make sense.

I agreed with your statements. Since they are sane and would improve things, you are in the wrong comment thread.

sorry, I misunderstood. It's very difficult to detect sarcasm on message boards.

It Is Time For Basic Economic Literacy

It's been time for a while, unfortunately.

I don't know whether you're saying "supporting a Basic Income is entailed by basic economic literacy" or "basic economic literacy precludes a Basic Income".

sorry. basic economic literacy precludes a Basic Income

see Ludwig von Mises

'k, well, I'm going to go with "Milton Friedman was not economically illiterate", whether or not he was actually correct...

My position: Milton Friedman had basic economic literacy but chose to ignore it at times, caring more about some other things (like moral and social issues – an area where he made some serious mistakes).

Many other people don't have economic literacy in the first place – and if they did have it, some of them would change their minds about Basic Income and other issues, rather than ignore economics to focus on their social-moral philosophy. One reason that would happen is plenty of people don't have a very strong social-moral philosophy in the first place, don't care about it much. And some would even change their social-moral philosophy itself, for the better, if they understood basic economics.

Spreading basic economics isn't a total cure-all alone, but it's a great step. Many people would notice the conflicts between economics and some of their other ideas. Some of those people would then have some success resolving the conflicts and reaching reasonable economically-informed conclusions.

US specific:

* 2014 total US gov't spending: $6.3T (36.4% of GDP)

* # of Americans: 314m (2012)

* Cost to provide $10,000 per year to everyone: $3.14T

* Current US military spending: $0.8T

* Current US education spending: $1T

* Basic income + education + mil = $4.94T

* $4.94T vs $6.3T

[1]http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

> Basic income + education + mil = $4.94T

What's the point of this? Do you think all government spending except military and education is obsoleted by basic income?

Basic income (replacing pensions, welfare, healthcare), military, education are the three most expensive government functions.

What about Medicare/Medicaid? Those are pretty much essential at this point and the $10k will not even begin to cover insurance premiums for the elderly.

Also don't forget that a huge number of the people work for the federal government and the budget you are citing includes their salaries. For a large percentage of the population, your proposal would mean poverty.

Simple math like this does not work on a system as complex as this. While I agree with the premise, your calculation is off.

1. Firing government workers in droves does not in fact lead to poverty.

Example: Release of hundreds of thousands of conscript soldiers after WWII. Many economists predicted catastrophe. This did not happen.

2. Elderly health care: You legalize private cheap insurance for the elderly. The poor elderly can use that. The non-poor elderly can get fancier coverage should they so choose.

Is cheap private insurance illegal now? Is that why my premiums are so outrageous? </sarcasm>

Insurance is not like a car: there are no luxury and budget brands. Either you can afford premiums + costs not covered or you cannot. Not going to the doctor is not an option: the physiology of a poor person is the same as that of a rich person. The treatment therefore is the same. Thus what you are proposing is basically legalizing leaving the poor behind. That was in fact how things used to work up until roughly 35-40 years ago. We then decided that it was a bad idea because the quality of care for those who had the "budget" care was so terrible that we would all be willing to pay more and not risk ending up in their shoes.

Look, I don't disagree with everything you are saying. We need to reign in spending, streamline the government, reduce the size of the military, fund more social programs and education. I do disagree with the tiered approach. Healthcare is a basic human necessity. Lots of first world governments provide it and do it better and cheap than the "free market" in the US. One day people will realize this and we will have sane care for sane prices. Until then we need the hybrid approach like the Affordable Care Act, Medicare/Medicaid, and private insurance.

An alternative would be to increase the money from $10k to $15k at some age.

>Is cheap private insurance illegal now? Is that why my premiums are so outrageous?

Yes and yes.

It seems to me it's just a matter or priority. The line share of US Gov spending is Healthcare (+ medicare / medicare) covert that to a BI + take a bit out of defines and "income protection / veteran benefits" and you wouldn't have to raise taxes at all.

The question is would it be more effective than "specialised" programs, and all the literature I have read seems to say yes (although, it's all based on educated guesses). So switch all the "specialised" programs to BI plus take a bit extra from defense and your there.

What's more important? Total domination of all oceans in the world, or peoples happiness? (Assuming that BI actually works as described in the article)

Basic income already exist for some people, it's extended unemployment checks + food-stamps.

If a person were getting 10x the amount a person gets on unemployment + food stamps, you might be able to call that basic income.

Please show us all how a person living in a US city could survive on food stamps, ethana.

this guy: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2568109/Unemployed-b...

anecdotes != data

The 47 millions food-stamp recipients disagree with you.

I am glad that someone is speaking up on their behalf, but I don't get your point. Have you spoken to each of these 47 million individuals? Are you one of them? Are you just letting your butt do the talking? We'll never know.

Aside from the fact that the Daily Mail is a tabloid which makes its money primarily from inflaming right-wing sensibilities while misreporting or fabricating stories, this seems like a particularly ludicrous assertion considering that it would imply a far higher rate of welfare fraud than actually happens.

Could you tell us how much money it's possible to claim from the system, and how much a realistic minimal standard of living might actually be? If you do your research honestly, you might find it illuminating.

One problem with BI is the potential future overpopulation problem making it unsustainable even for rich countries. The solution is quite simple though, but I don't guess people would accept it: if you have more than two children per family, you loose the BI (forever, for live, you are never eligible for it again, even if your children die).

A bigger one is the global context: the retoric in poorer countries could very easily get to "those rich smucks with their strong army and everything have so much money they can even pay the slackers who do nothing! while we are milked by their corporations and can't even afford clean water for all!" and then you know what happens next...

I've read this thread; and I think my biggest hope here is the realization in the bureaucrats that are afraid of losing their job ... that they'll be getting money anyway because the basic income will provide their money now.

The only means by which corruption can fought and reduced all involve bureaucracy by definition.

just an aside - this is the first time I've seen a TLD this long actually being used...

interesting.

I think we are severely overestimating the panacea that is the future. When we run out of gas to fuel automobiles and natural gas to make fertilizer from, it will make us all poorer. Our problem is not just that we need to transition to electric automobiles or sustainable agriculture, rather it's that we have no replacement for the free portable liquid and gas energy that we take out of the ground every day.

We'd be better off planning for the reduction in carrying capacity of the human race that will ensue as fossil fuels wane, instead of trying to find more efficient ways to distribute all of our newfound wealth and production.

Thomas Paine makes a good point for citizen's dividend in his pamphlet "Agrarian Justice". http://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

Now that we live in a civilized state and people own all the property, it makes it impossible for one to live in a natural state. So, he argues property owners owe a tax to everyone reaching maturity. That way everyone has a chance to acquire property, education, or what not to live successfully in a civilized state.

Tom Streithorsts excellent piece also was published yesterday:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/road-to-recovery

This is actually a very current topic right now in Switzerland. There will a national vote to decide if every Swiss citizen should get a basic income of 2500 swiss francs (approximately 2700$) a month. Some interesting details can be read in this (kind of) recent article (most other ones are in German) http://themindunleashed.org/2014/03/swiss-pay-basic-income-2...

Aside: I don't know how I feel about all these new TLDs...

http://fucking.domains/

<3 that the Google Analytic script (in-page, not even counting the download) is larger than the content.

I'm baffled by the logic of people who recoil at the idea of a basic income because it's "socialist", but if you were to ask many of them if lowering taxes for nearly everyone by X% is a good idea, they'd scream "YEAH! Money is much more efficient in people's hands!"

Maybe if you don't call it a basic income and call it a guaranteed tax rebate instead we'd get everyone on board.

If the incentive to work at McDonald’s decreases to a point where they either need to raise the wages or automate large parts of their process, won't that lead to a possibility where McDonald’s ceases to exist or becomes a luxury item?

It's not very unlikely that they won't be able to automate their business and the only option is to raise the wages. With raised wages they will need to increase their prices.

They won't need to raise their wages though. BI takes care of the minimum amount to survive, and McDonalds wages provides "extra" money. BI essentially takes over as the "minimum" part of the minimum wage, and low wage jobs become a lot more attractive (than they are currently).

I'd love the idea of a basic income as a replacement for all the bureaucratic nightmare of various state subsidies and benefits, but we all know this is not what is going to happen.

They'll give basic income but soon they'll establish exceptions for some categories of people that will receive something more. Then an othe category, then an other.

In the end it will be exactly like before, except it will cost much more.

This will not break, for example, because everyone know that everyone must be able to pay higher rents? Where I live (Colombia) if the basic income become 5% at the start of the year then everything is 5-10% more costly.

If I get (fixed) 100/month and everyone else too, then the rent will be (surely) X+100. This is happening now, the economy is accelerating and everything is rising up.

No, it's time for something proven: Australian style welfare. Maybe in 50 years time, it will be time for basic income.

The problem with giving people free money, is it reduces the incentive to work. Australia, and other countries, have introduced systems with minimal requirements for receiving welfare: making an effort to find a job, based on simple objective criteria.

Links / details?

"Australia, and other countries, have introduced systems with minimal requirements for receiving welfare: making an effort to find a job, based on simple objective criteria."

That's more or less the situation in the US at present, as I understand it. We all want people doing useful things, but this kind of system 1) means that the benefit of finding that job (for those at the bottom) is substantially less than it is under BI, and 2) we're requiring people focus not on their job search or on preparing themselves for work but on documenting their job search and jumping through bureaucratic hoops - hopefully there is substantial overlap but when do we ever measure exactly what we intend to?

Question for the liberals who support this. Would you honestly be willing to get rid of social security, welfare, unemployment, earned income tax credit, food stamps, student loans, pell grants, and all the other entitlement programs? If so, I might support it, even if it cost more, just to get rid of all the government social engineering.

If the end result made access to jobs, education, medical care and basic utilities more equitably distributed, then yes.

Since when did "liberal" mean someone who supports coercive redistribution by states?

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

NB: Social Security is arguably fairly close to how a basic income system might work:

• It's not means-tested. It's available to (nearly all) citizens. Exceptions include some workers classified under the Railroad Retirement Act, and the self-employed.

• It's funded from taxes assessed over your working life. Actually, BI would likely take this one step further, as there's an income cap to SSI contributions. Lifting that cap would make SSI more BI-like.

As to the rest of your points: with universal healthcare, you'd eliminate the need for means-tested medical assistance. With universal higher education, you'd eliminate PELL Grants (already pretty limited -- most college financial aid is now in the form of loans, with their own class of problems). BI would directly address the goals of welfare and food stamps, and EITC is effectively BI in limited dress.

I'd be open for programs which do address specific remaining needs: say, treating drug addiction as a public health, not a criminal, problem (though drugs trafficking might still fall under the latter in cases), and other programs addressing those with specific needs (health, disability, etc.). But yes, you'd be wiping out a large class of present means-tested programs.

Pardon my ignorance, but how does this differ from an earned income tax credit?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/03/buffett-minimum-wag...

The EITC and a basic income are actually very similar in effect. The difference is largely in the mechanism of distribution. With a basic income, every citizen gets a check every month. With an EITC you get it in a lump with your tax refund, if you qualify for it.

I wonder why none of the calls for basic income considers how inflation and prices would be affected.

If you have a hard time overcoming your gut reaction to this proposal, I'd recommend the book Debt: the first 5000 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_first_5000_Years

>>It is the most efficient possible form of wealth redistribution because there is no bureaucratic overhead needed. More money reaches the poor directly.

Unfortunately, the exact opposite will occur with an entirely new three letter agency being responsible for the distribution.

If this were the case, many people would just not work, and rely on the monthly checks.

I really really support this. IMO it would make this world so much more fun to live in.

I agree.

Unemployment runs no lower that 70% among disabled people in the best of times.

Anyone that is not literally perfect (beautiful, slim, brilliant, healthy, emotionally well centered) faces huge obstacles from the powers that be in our society.

Don't forget, in some cases, young.

> What are the definite benefits of Basic Income?

> It is the most efficient possible form of wealth redistribution

So it is just another deceptive label for outright communism, directly out of Marx/Mao/Stalin's playbook. Nice.

Another missed advantage: it moves the job market from demand/supply type of market to easy/difficult type of market: the highest paid jobs will be the ones nobody wants to do.

That would mean the CEO would be the lowest paid employee at every company.

I'm not sure if this is intended as snark at CEOs, criticism of the notion that a shift would occur, criticism of the notion that a shift should occur, or just general extrapolation.

Personally, I expect we would see unpleasant jobs become more expensive than they currently are, and pleasant jobs become less expensive than they currently are. I think it's tremendously unlikely that this effect would be so dramatic that "the CEO would be the lowest paid employee at every company", even accepting the implicit assumption that CEO is the least unpleasant job (which seems false).

It would be fun to start this with an epsilon per year per person basic income (maybe global, and higher ones per nation or other group). Add to it as you wish.

I'm curious: has there been any study done on how much money is spent on the bureaucracy surrounding the myriad social programs?

http://www.georgeoughttohelp.com

"What are people for?" - Kurt Vonnegut, "Player Piano", 1952. 1952, people.

Sigh

off topic but by far the most interesting comment thread I've read on HN in a long time.

Basic Income the only way to prevent the black market from taking over for many people.

bureaucratic overhead with proper tech is close to zero. Basic Icome is too a big leap in social and political context. I am very much in favour of Minimal Activity proposition. It's way more easier to implement.

There is no way to reduce corruption in society without regulations and bureaucracy.

"I am very much in favour of Minimal Activity proposition."

Could you define this?

I would like it if my children could peruse poetry... If you know the quote.

Get a job.

Let's just discourage people from earning a living even more....

For those at the margin currently receiving conditional support, a transition to unconditional support discourages people from earning a living substantially less.

BI is required if we ever went to a flat tax, which I firmly support.

I encourage fans of this idea to experiment with it. Find a complete stranger and give him a guaranteed income if he abstains from government programs. Come back in five years and share your results.

As for me, I don't wish to be forced into running your experiment.

Experiments have been done, and have shown good results. I've no objection to further experimentation, but at some point we should implement the policy that looks best. There is, mathematically speaking, clearly some non-empty set of optimal values for a Basic Income. How confident are you that $0 is in that set, even in the face of argument (from not just the modern left, but also Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman and some modern Libertarians) and experiment?

Go for it then. Hope its worth your money.

Yeah, I think you're aware of why you're full of it, here...

I think that digital currencies is the way to go to test this idea.

Perhaps, but I'm not convinced they help as much as it appears. The biggest difficulty is the need to establish uniqueness of an individual to the network, which is really difficult without some centralization.

Instead of a basic income, let's have a guaranteed minimum wage job, where people can pick up trash and do landscaping on public property. You can have your basic income, but you have to work for it.

There aren't enough jobs for EVERYONE to be employed though. The number of unskilled jobs is going to shrink as automation and efficiency increases. Also, not everyone is capable of working, like the disabled etc.

There will always be enough jobs if the government is paying. It may not be something that's worth what the recipient is getting paid, but there's always something to do. Picking up trash, road work, landscaping, sorting trash for recycling, etc.

Also, most of the disabled are capable of doing something. A guy in a wheelchair can man the desk at a library, for instance.

Make economic inheritance tax 100% with allowances for personal, sentimental items etc. Distribute the resources amongst public works projects and personal resource funds for each citizen.

Totally off-topic: What a domain name...

It is time for basic government.

I may be missing something important, but at a glance there are about 140M jobs in the US. If we gave each of the ~320M US citizens $20k/yr, that comes out to roughly $6.4T/year as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

If there are roughly 140M jobs, presumably there are 140M people working those jobs, meaning that there are approximately 140M people who must cover that $6.4T, which works out to be ~$46k/yr for each working person.

If we assume we can completely wipe the following off the books: Social Security ($773M), Income Security ($541M) and Medicare ($471M), the net cost per year drops to $4.6T/yr, which works out to be ~$33k/yr for each working person.

Total federal income tax[1] in 2013 was around $1.3T (Individual) + $273B (Corporate) = $1.59T. An increase from $1.59T to $6.2T is about a 290% net increase.

I did some very rough spreadsheet-math with [2] and [3] and came up with the following. If we didn't tax the $20k at all, and left everything the same as last year, the bottom 77% would be a net negative of ~$1.2T assuming all of their income tax went directly to pay for the $20k.

I assumed that the number of people in the top 2% made the same average salary as the top 1% in [4], and came up with the top 2% of income tax payers as being a net positive of $1.4T. I made that assumption just to make the math easy and to err on the side of optimism.

The 78-98 percentile come out to be a net positive of approximately $350B.

Looking back at the $1.3T federal income tax total for individuals, this would mean that after the $20k/person was paid for, the total federal income tax dollars would be roughly $600B (Individual income tax) + $273B (Corporate income tax) = $873B.

Looking at [5], it seems that there was a $3.803T - $2.902T = $901B deficit last year. If we knock off the difference in income tax revenues ($1.59T - $873B = $717B), then suddenly we have a $901B + $717B = $1.618T deficit again.

This all assumes that jobs stay constant, of course. I realize that all of these numbers are very rough, but I had some fun doing spreadsheet math so I figured I would share!

[1] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_schedule_(federal_income_t... [4] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg...

Thank you for making detailed calculation. None of the country that has significant social coverage (comparable to what you describe) has kept a significant Army, or significant social unrest that needs too heavy a Police force. I’m assuming that social quiet is where the equation start to add up.

The number of variables to account for are far greater than the number of ideas coming from within comments here.

I'll give you just one to try and add to your spreadsheet: When you add a saftey net and provide money to those that, otherwise, would not have it to spend you obviously increase government revenue through new employment and taxation. How would you quantify that increase? I don't think anyone can say, but it would happen and it would be significant.

see georgeoughttohelp.com

If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended. The value and meaning of citizenship will rapidly change and tolerance for outsiders taking a slice of the pie will rapidly plunge. I think there will be a lot of ramifications like this that most people probably aren't considering.

But the pie grows larger as more people enter the economy (though it may be sublinear).

Definitely true, it's just that people don't know that or want to believe it.

Every attempt at analyzing this for the US economy I have seen concludes that immigration is at best a wash for the people who were already US citizens. It does, however, have the effect of worsening income disparity. Capital benefits while low income wages are driven down. Of course one also has to consider environmental costs.

The pie grows larger as people enter the economy who were brought there by the desire to get a free income? I support the proposal, but come on

Really?.. I think BI per se might change the landscape somewhat - and that depends on its scale - but "rapidly change" - no, you don't principally differentiate strangers with passports from strangers without.

Alaska has its Permanent Fund Dividend, which is a kind of basic income coming from state oil sales. How hard is it to get Alaskan citizenship?

You have to live here for a full calendar year before you can apply for the dividend. Even then, the dividend is only $800-$1200 per year, hardly enough to offset the higher cost of living in AK.

Um, one small difference, you have to be a resident of Alaska for at least a year, intend to remain a permanent resident and not be absent more than 180 days without a valid reason. [1]

[1]: http://pfd.alaska.gov/Eligibility/EligibilityRequirements

All reasonable restrictions to apply to a national Basic Income program.

In what way is that a difference?

Living in Alaska for a year is a steeper obstacle than living most places.

I think there are sufficient disincentives for living in Alaska to cancel that out.

As a US state, Alaska can't halt immigration to the state (at least not from US citizens.) If Alaska was it's own country, I would bet they would have pretty severe restrictions on immigration.

> If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended.

Why? Doesn't make a lot of sense. To the extent that immigration might strain a BI system, there are much smaller changes that would allow managing the impacts, while still maintaining the basic high-level structure of the existing citizen and immigration system.

There is an underlying premise that only the US will have a basic income. If robots/AI do most of the labor there is no (long term) reason why all countries can't offer basic income to their citizens.

> If robots/AI do most of the labor

Exactly. But we're not there yet, and possibly not very close.

The swiss referendum for basic income also referred to "citizen" income as well, knowing full well that 20% of their population has immigrant status. Steal from the poor to feed the middle.

Steal from the poor to feed the middle.

Has served Europe well for the past fifty years or so.

May be not, other countries may move in that direction. Furthermore, they may even move faster. For example, Mexico already passed a universal income law for people over 65.

I just spent a year living in South Western France which is the most socialist part of France. (I'm a US citizen based here most of the time and I'm a CEO).

If you want to see the result of wealth redistribution, go check it out yourself. You'll meet young men and women in the prime of their lives who spend their entire day in a coffee shop and later a bar, sipping a beverage discussing art, culture, poetry, how business - all business exploits the proletariat, and how government owes them even more than the roughly $25K per year they get for doing nothing. Then go talk to the entrepreneurs in the same district and learn where those wages originate and what it costs business both in taxes and their ability to find and retain staff.

I can assure you that the restful classes are alive and well and are waiting for this idea to take root and flower into contempt for innovation, entrepreneurship and hard work with a massive drain on those who do contribute.

I realize I'm supposed to be horrified, but that actually sounds better than the current situation in America.

Can you give more details? What are rates of childhood malnutrition like? How hard is it for the sub-middle-class (or, God forbid, the unemployed) to get medical care?

I agree with you. So don't tax the innovators and entrepreneurs. Leave their income alone. Tax the land owners who generate wealth for themselves while contributing nothing to society. Tax the unproductive rent-seeking wealth of those who attain their position not through innovation but through dependence on and manipulation of the political class. Institute a land value tax and leave productive incomes free from taxation. Let the landlords pay rent to society in the form of a basic income for all.

Also, ban French.

Tax the unproductive rent-seeking

Underlying your position is the assumption that society can properly arbitrate what is "unproductive rent-seeking" versus "socially destructive entitlement culture." Depending on your circumstances, your opinion on what these things are will differ, and in a democracy, the whims of the majority will win out, regardless of economic reality.

> the roughly $25K per year they get for doing nothing

If you think that you can get that amount of money from doing nothing in France, you must have spent that year on crack. Do you have any idea how the french welfare state works? The minimum income (if you're eligible) is currently about €6000 per year. And that's not even enough to pay rent in most french cities (I'm paying €700/m for a 35 m², one bedroom, apartment in one of the poorest suburbs of Paris).

The idea that you absolutely must work hard in exchange for the necessities of your life, is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness, like a fundamental law of conservation, that it seems a lot of people cannot conceive otherwise.

Twenty years ago a lot of people couldn't see themselves using a cellphone or an Internet.

I think this is different, though. They did not have any moral objections to cellphones or Internet. They simply lacked imagination.

What if said moral objections stem from a lack of imagination?

Cellphones and the Internet were adopted on a person by person basis. It became easy to imagine yourself with them once the neighbour got it.

Basic Income takes much more buy in from more people to get off the ground.

I like the idea of it being attempted on the city level though, I'd never thought of that. It's likely the smallest scale that would work with the least amount of individual buy in required.

It has been: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/1970s-manitoba-povert...

I seem to remember that in 1994 most people understood the usefulness of both technologies, especially cell phones. Cost was the real hinderance. Though if we go one more year, by 1995, internet access was starting to become common in the home.

I think the real fallacy beneath the surface is that if we do something like this people will just totally stop working.

A few will, but most will use their newfound flexibility to shift what they work on: explore other career options, create art and culture, etc. Overall there will likely be a lot more entrepreneurship, invention, science, art, literature, and music.

It's tied into the far right's religious-based doctrine of original sin view of humanity: we are miserable evil disgusting monsters who must be beaten and cudgeled into exhibiting any form of virtue. If it weren't for life-or-death struggle we would all sit around, drink beer, play video games, and probably screw goats. It's the same mentality behind strict physical discipline of children... if you spare the rod, the kid will grow up to be lazy or a monster.

Besides, the people who would completely stop working are the lazy people nobody would want to hire in the first place. You're not losing much by taking those folks out of the work force.

You have heard of communism, right?

This is much more like capitalism, with the government investing in you every month.

That's not why communism didn't work. Communism didn't work because they tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy. It was central planning that failed, not guaranteed minimums.

A guaranteed minimum income without economic micromanagement or other central planning is what I'd like to see tried.

>Communism didn't work because they tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy.

No, sorry, you're completely wrong. Communism didn't work because it destroyed every incentive for industrious, honest labour, supplanting healthy competitive free-market economics with a landscape of scheming and parasitism as people scrambled to exploit one another.

Communism failed (and will fail every single time another stupid generation which hasn't even bothered to pay attention to the past implements its ideas again) because, under Communism, there is no economy.

Communism is a terrible, terrible idea. Just like all coercive redistribution, which, proportional to the degree of redistribution, destroys economic growth. It's no accident that, other than a handful of tight-knit low-population nation cum communities with large oil stakes, the number of socialist policies enacted by a legislature correlates directly with poor economic performance.

The tragedy is that populations suffering from the negative effects of these policies delude themselves into thinking that an expansion of the policies will fix their woes, rather than hard work and smart investment. It's a vicious circle.

I look forward to the day when this ideology goes the way of Communism.

Great, I look forward to the day when you read The Gulag Archipelago and a first-year economics textbook and realise that you're talking out your ass. Maybe throw in some Hayek while you're at it. Good luck!

I lived in Russia for several years. Communism didn't work because people didn't have a strong incentive to work. They also lost sight of how to efficiently organize resources.

I can't tell you how many times I walked into a store and the clerk was reading a book and when I tried to ask a question they just ignored me or shrugged me off without bothering to even try to help. Sometimes they will flat out lie about whether they have something in stock to get you out of the store.

Another example, I can go to a market and there are 5 old ladies in a row all selling potatoes. I can't find any carrots or onions and so I have to walk another mile to a different market to get them. Instead, one of them could sell carrots at a premium so I don't have to walk so far, and another onions.

That's communism.

As long as people are eating, I don't care. People shouldn't have so much power over each other's lives and attitudes.

>I can't tell you how many times I walked into a store and the clerk was reading a book and when I tried to ask a question they just ignored me or shrugged me off without bothering to even try to help.

They do that plenty in capitalist Israel.

This might be true in the US, where both political parties are right-wing and flaunt "socialist" as a curse-word every day.

I think BI is something that cant and shouldnt happen country-wide one day to the other. Cities should start doing it first. Cities like.. SF? which have a ridicolous surplus of money the city squanders, while still having a lower class without medical care.

SF already tried giving homeless people a stipend.

Which has what to do with basic income?

Like a limited-scope version of it

How so? I can't see any less superficial connection than that they are both about giving away money.

So you view a program that gives away money to some people and a program that gives away money to all people, as so completely unrelated as to be utterly incomparable?

Not utterly incomparable, but you seemed dismissive of implementing a BI program in SF on the basis of another social program, seemingly without regard to what is different about it.

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

Everything that goes against liberty is doomed to fail.

Miserably.

Are you equating liberty to redistribution of wealth, or liberty to "I'M NOT PAYING MORE TAXES SO FREELOADERS CAN SIT AROUND WATCHING TV?"

I don't see what you're trying to add.

Liberty means allowing people to make their own decisions about how they live and use their resources, as long as they're not infringing on the liberty of others. It's a universal concept, not just tied to your vilification of wealthy conservative people.

Thanks for the nasty stereotype though.

> Thanks for the nasty stereotype though.

Sure, anytime.

Seems like a good idea to me, lets do it. We can always change it back if it doesn't work out.

A truly insane and stupid idea befitting an insane and stupid political culture.

And lo and behold! Embraced with open arms by the Hacker News community. What a surprise.

As a owner of shares in the stock market, all I can say is that hopefully the first politician who will try to pass such a law will get a bullet in the head.

That is a horrific sentiment and you are a bad person.

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