Comment by kalvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalvin | Hacker News Reader

I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the vast cost (in time, energy, money) 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.)

Based on my experience in the last year working on healthcare.gov etc., I think it's become increasingly clear 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.

That said, there's no way politically a basic income is going to fly in the US 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 asked this a while back on another BI thread, trying again)

In addition, every rule to catch the "undeserving" will catch some people who really do need the help and who you were trying to help in the first place.

> 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?

Possibly a daft idea, but what if a company paid by the hour worked (or some other measure of work produced), but had a minimum that was always paid even if you didn't work.

Rules:

1. Nobody gets fired for not working.

2. You can get fired if you attack / something else normally fireable not related to your work itself.

3. No other jobs on the side? Less sure about that one. Could be interesting to support people trying something new but with the ability to do work on the side for you or come back. Paradoxically, I think that knowing you can leave but come back reduces the chance you'll leave forever. Quite a few careers allow sabbaticals of a year for this reason.

Sort of similar to:

1. Everyone gets BI

2. You don't get it if you're in prison

3. You can't go and live in another country and still receive it

There's been a few aid projects towards impoverished villages in Africa that have a BI setup. There's also Alaska and some other natural resource based payments.

In general I think BI is the social safety net equivalent of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:

Any sufficiently complicated social welfare program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Basic Income.

So getting there may be a case of slowly making existing benefits more universal, more cash based etc. I think one suggestion was to just keep lowering the retirement age as BI and state pensions are roughly analogous.

> unintentional side effects, edge cases, and bad incentives.

I'm reminded of Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Agriculture_v._Mo...). Congress passed a law refusing food stamps to people who lived in shared housing with non-relatives. Of course this was targeting hippies (which is illegitimate in itself--to quote the majority, "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest"), but it naturally hit the very poor especially hard.

Couldn't anyone just start a non-profit with an endowment like a college? All profits get proportionally distrubuted to each citizen, and anything unclaimed in reinvested to grow the pot further.

I think the toughest part of the MVP is the 'citizenship verification' or whatever method you use to make sure people don't collect more than once. Partnering with an identity theft protection company might be a good way to outsource authentication.

My MVP is to eliminate federal taxes on the first $50k a year in income.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com