The Canadian Mincome Experiment of 1974-79

One potential problem is that people may never really develop an intrinsic motivation to work if they aren't given a push early on. Basic Income may eliminate that first push, which I think is crucial.

Let's say you are 16. If you get a job, the expectations are low and your needs are low, so you take the first thing to come along. That puts you in a mild discomfort that encourages you to seek better opportunities as they come along, and you are likely to develop a strong intrinsically a motivated work ethic.

With Basic Income, your needs are already met, so it's easy to rationalize it away and just say you'll get a job after you graduate from college. By then, the expectations are much higher and your needs are much higher, so you hold out for a better job that may never come because you have no experience. So, you just stay in your comfort zone forever.

So here's the heart of the BI argument:

Define "comfortably"

Why is your definition correct?

> without savings

Why bother? I'm already earning a living doing nothing?

I don't need to save anything, more money will come. I don't need to worry about retirement, more money will come when I'm too old to work.

I'm going to just throw this out there, I'm guessing if I'm getting UBI I'm probably getting free healthcare. So I don't need to save for that.

Outside of a grand assumption that UBI will somehow propel everybody to the top of Maslow's Hierarchy and enough people will just somehow "self actualize" (despite all evidence to the contrary) and continue to work and support all the lazy layabouts living off the dole, what exactly is the reason I or anybody receiving the UBI would bother working?

That's why banks offer "free checking" and other incentives to give them money.

Getting a ton of money from an outside source dumped into a region will pretty much always improve things for people there. That hardly seems worth analyzing. Exactly what you do with that money is a minor detail compared to the fact that it's coming in from the outside. This allows them to completely ignore the essential factor of how to go about taxing the population to get the money to give to those deemed in need, and what the impacts of those taxes and the mincome scheme as a whole will have on the mindset of people in the region.

[There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.]

tl;dr - About £80 a week seems roughly achievable as a starting point.

Firstly, I'd like to say I prefer thinking of this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as the latter suggests it's useless if it doesn't cover a persons cost of living. I think even a small start is better than nothing, and it can be increased up to become a Basic Income in time. I'll refer to it as BI (Basic Income) here though. So, let's see what we've got...

The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion.

That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit :-)

Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far:

Who loves me: - Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party.

- Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle.

- Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job.

Who hates me: - Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party.

- People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage.

- Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally).

Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%.

That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week.

And I think I'll leave it there. We'd need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls (such as pension payments), but as long as it's less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £70 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.

That's laughably naïve. I live in San Francisco. I have experience interacting with more than my fair share of homeless people. So let me ask you this: what happens when a person deliberately decides to be homeless? Do you just let him suffer on the streets? Or do you offer him shelter and food?

The point is: you will still need the welfare services. Things like Child Protective Services, emergency rooms, homeless shelters, etc. etc. So all that UBI does is add an additional $20K/year of taxes on top of what we already pay.

People in this country are opposed to universal health insurance, despite the fact that the beneficiaries actually pay into it. What makes you think that they will agree to just cutting $1.5K checks every month to every person?

And then: what happens to the immigrants? People will come streaming across the border in droves when word spreads that they can get 1000s of dollars per year for nothing in America! We can't even control the border now; imagine what'll happen then.

The benefit of basic income is that it does in fact incentivize you to work because you do get more money if you work part time, as opposed to current programs that decrease your benefits quickly as you get more and more hours.

But even if we assume people work less with BI, but live happier lives, what is the goal?

If we're looking at a situation where a vast, vast amount of the value created in the economy is pumped in by a handful of players who own large automated factories and most knowledge-work that we know today is done by specialized AI, then we might be in trouble on the jobs front.

So I think what a lot of people are looking at is a situation where for the average person, there is no job for them in the greater industry - the engineering and technically skilled folks required to build and maintain the machinery might be a fraction of what is required now.

So the marginal contribution of low-skilled Joe Blow is going to be very low or zero.

Now, getting to this situation without mitigating it would probably lead to violence, etc, so this line of reasoning has lead a lot of people into looking at BI.

While I think you have a very valid point, I think that setting up the right carrots and sticks inside a BI system to ensure that the right amount of development occurs is something that can be done.

One of the major effects of simply giving the poor a regular source money is reducing their cognitive load. In the past, it was seen that this stress would encourage the poor to keep working, as it was seen that poverty is caused by lack of motivation.

Today we know that this just screws them over worse. Stress inhibits brain development and constant lack of security decreases motivation to try and improve the situation. Opportunity costs make most prospects look impossible, and an awful lot of people simply don't have the time to stop and figure out what they should do.

So let's get rid of that yolk and see what happens when we give everybody a secure environment to develop themselves. I think it's worth going through the effort of figuring out how to arrange the carrots and sticks to make it work. Don't you?

I believe this is the crux of your argument, and I would say that it is a postulate that cannot be assumed. If the "basic income" were $1k, few people would find they could live on it and thus the motivation to work would remain. On the other hand, who would work if they received $1 million per year? What if it's somewhere in the middle? I would argue that the incentive for work would remain if the benefit only brought people up to the poverty line.

Who wants to at live at the poverty line? $20k for a family of 4 affords very little luxury.

> Basic income also risks devaluing money

Do foodstamps make food significantly more expensive for everybody? What is the percentage of all food revenue bought with food stamps?

If 14% of US citizens live below the poverty line, the vast amount of GDP, productivity, taxes and whatever else you want to measure are generated above that line.

I've heard some arguments that a flat livable wage, without eligibility requirements beyond income would obviate the need and overhead for a whole slew of expensive social programs, including social security, welfare, food stamps, and the minimum wage.

Then there are small scale experiments like the one in the original article, though limited in actionable data did not produce behaviors like you described.

So, to answer your question, it can be sustainable because it can replace some expensive and hard-to-administer social programs with a relatively easier to distribute system. There are tangible incentives to earn more than "basic" income, and training to do so becomes easier. Lastly, the bulk of GDP and the tax base are generated by those far above the poverty line.

Capitalist states were founded by theft and bloodshed, as if this is an argument. It's all trying to make people conform to some ideology when the words "incentive" and "prodictivity" and "other peoples labor" have no real definition, it's just vague mumbo jumbo. If you really meant that then that would mean many historical injustices would have to be undone (aka the capitalist states theft of property from the natives).

Albert einstein:

"The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future."

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/