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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

It's funny that they pick out the part where Bill Gates says we shouldn't have a minimum wage, but skip the parts where he says we should have a basic income and a progressive consumption tax.

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That's a glaring error of selection. Because with basic income, the idea of removing the minimum wage makes complete sense. Without it, what he says sounds completely insane.

That sounds interesting. Do you have a source about him supporting basic income?

The closest I found in the transcript of the talk was this piece:

MR. BROOKS: So something like a guaranteed minimum income for people who are working full time through an expansion on the EITC or a wage subsidy seems like the right way to go.

MR. GATES: Yeah, one of my favorite AEI papers – I didn’t get time to look it up last night

Source: http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

Edit: after re-reading it, I think this has nothing to do with basic income since it's for people who are working full time.

Right, he seems to be saying that instead of a minimum wage that corporations have to pay, there should instead be something that looks like a minimum wage to employees, but where employers can pay as little as they like and the government will make up the difference between that and the minimum, but if you don't have an "employer" or they don't certify that you've "worked" sufficient hours, you don't get the subsidy, either.

So, like a basic income, except that you have to swear fealty to an employer to get it. I see one of two possibilities:

(1) Either the restrictions on qualifying employment are tight enough that it serves as a subsidy for select existing operations and a competitive disadvantage to new business with smaller scale (because of compliance costs) or new models (because of regulatory assumptions), or (2) The restrictions on qualifying employment are so loose that this is basically unconditional basic income with a whole lot more administrative costs and failure modes that exist just to satisfy the desire to create an illusion that it has something to do with "work".

On page 17 of this transcript of the interview, he states that he supports a guaranteed minimum income for people working full-time.

http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

edit: I got that link from wcarss.

Pages 16-17 of the transcript PDF linked by wcarss above has something similar. He didn't say "basic income", but it's relatively close.

Gates has never supported a basic income.

He and Buffett both however support increasing the earned income tax credit instead of raising minimum wage.

I find it quite amusing that it is described as earned income, when basically they are just living on invested money producing more money at this stage. (Not saying that founding Microsoft isn't an achievement, just that the I don't think that the disproportional wealth at the top can ever be described as earned).

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