from Hacker News

A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

by warrenmar on 5/3/16, 8:39 AM with 809 comments

  • by gjm11 on 5/3/16, 10:52 AM

    This article says it's talking about a universal basic income, and makes the usual point that a completely universal, no-strings-attached income is simple to administer, doesn't have poverty traps, etc.

    And then, towards the end where it starts looking at numbers, it starts saying things like

    > But by excluding 45 million retirees who already receive a basic income through Social Security, the cost falls to $2.7 trillion. And if the benefit is phased out for households earning more than $100,000 (that would be 20 percent of the U.S.'s 115 million households, or about 70 million people, assuming three to a household), the cost declines to about $2 trillion. You could confine the program to adults and shrink the price tag even more, possibly to as low as $1.5 trillion.

    Yes, you can reduce the amount paid out by making it not a universal basic income scheme any more. But that rather misses the point.

    (The correct thing to say here is: Yes, a universal basic income sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty would be really expensive. Taxes would need to go up a lot, which would leave wealthier people less well off than they are now. If you don't want a large-scale redistribution of wealth, then you don't want a BI scheme sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty. But you might still want to consider a BI scheme that's not sufficient to keep everyone out of poverty, to simplify and to reduce poverty traps. No one would have to be much worse off then. But it wouldn't be enough for anyone to live on, and would still need supplementing by other safety nets.)

  • by mcv on 5/3/16, 11:13 AM

    Interesting how this article spins Basic Income as something of particular interest to conservatives while liberals would object to it. I suppose that can help sell the concept to highly partisan anti-liberals, but I know plenty of liberals and progressives who strongly support Basic Income.

    The idea that the people employed in the bureaucracy managing the current mess of programs losing their job is a silly concern. Why should we keep paying people for unnecessary bullshit jobs? Why should we employ people to check and ensure that other people aren't secretly working? Let those people do something more productive.

    I would like Basic Income to be a bit more than $10,000 per year, though. Ideally, especially when the number of jobs available falls due to increased automation, I'd like the Basic Income to provide a comfortable income. People can and will still work to increase their income further, but when robots do more and more of the work for us, there's no reason to punish people for being unable to compete with robots.

  • by ww520 on 5/3/16, 10:46 AM

    The Fed engineers a slow inflation every year via interest rate control and gives the benefit of the newly created money to banks, the loan borrowers, and asset holders as rates lower than keeping inflation at zero. Since the money supply increases anyway, might as well give the new money as basic income to ALL people. At least the money will be spent directly by the people for economic activities, instead of indirectly via the loans and asset inflation.

    The Fed can raise interest rate to shrink the money supply for banks and borrowers while give more direct cash to expand the money supply via basic income. This can be in addition to the government's budget spending on basic income.

    An interesting outcome is the deflation of the asset bubble as rate increases. The money supply expansion via direct cash counters the deflation in economy. This should reverse the trend of the great wealth transfer to the asset holders in the last 20 years.

  • by amelius on 5/3/16, 9:46 AM

    I'm still wondering about one thing: if everybody has a basic income, then who will be doing the dirty jobs like collecting our waste? Will the price for waste collecting go up? And will there then be a kind of economic "inversion", where the intellectual people prefer to work on interesting stuff at the expense of money, while the "non-intellectual" (need a better word here) people will make all the money doing the dirty jobs?

  • by aub3bhat on 5/3/16, 9:40 AM

    I think the reason for huge support behind Basic Income is failure of government in efficient allocation of its resources. The current generation with its experience with public education, spending on unnecessary wars and other poorly run government programs no longer trusts government to effectively deliver services. Thus Basic Income seems like a natural solution. I honestly would prefer a smaller government that reallocates resources, over Bernie Sanders style big government socialism.

  • by cmdli on 5/3/16, 10:15 AM

    From the $1 trillon stated in the article, spread across 300 million people, each person would get around $3000 a year. That honestly doesn't seem like it would help a lot, considering it would replace current welfare systems. The Swiss proposal of around $2600 a month, implemented in the US, would cost nearly $10 trillion a year which doesn't really seem feasible.

    I don't think the problem with basic income is an ideological one, its a numbers one. There simply isn't enough money to implement it without massively increasing taxes.

  • by bontoJR on 5/3/16, 9:45 AM

    > Switzerland will hold a June 5 referendum on whether to give every adult citizen 2,500 Swiss francs (about $2,600) a month.

    Yeah and, for sure, it won't pass... considering how conservative we are, plus the legal side of the proposal is not so clear in where the money will come from.

  • by MicroBerto on 5/3/16, 11:57 AM

    In the early 1970s, animal behaviorist John Calhoun built a "mouse utopia" to see what would happen if he created the perfect world for mice, with unlimited food, starting with four males and four females, that could reach a population of 2500.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

    What happened next is absolutely astonishing. When the mice had nothing to do and nothing to work for, their society collapsed upon itself. Females stopped caring for their young. Betas began guarding the elite females, despite them not breeding with anyone. Fights broke out for no reason whatsoever. Mice stopped eating.

    Their population peaked at 2200, and then died off extremely quickly.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/

    It was a big, fat, giant mess. And it's exactly what will happen to us if we don't have something to work and live for. Hell, it's already happening.

    I don't think humanity survives with basic income as planned. We fall apart when we have nothing to do. We're no better than mice - we are still just animals with a larger hierarchy.

    I'd rather see unproductive humans digging and re-filling holes in the ground than getting paid to do nothing. Or something like the biking experiment in Black Mirror.

    Yet we need to do something as automation grows. Society is in for some serious decisions, and no country currently has the leadership to be able to tackle them.

  • by k-mcgrady on 5/3/16, 9:47 AM

    >> "But in the U.S., many liberals see it as naive and a distraction from more practical priorities, such as a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave."

    I can't see how they could believe this. First of all a minimum wage becomes unimportant as you should hypothetically have enough money to support the kind of lifestyle a minimum wage job would provide without working. Secondly, as it's no longer financially critical to them, people won't be as inclined to take on minimum wage type jobs - which will force the wage up anyway so that the business can attract employees. So it should take care of itself. As for paid family leave (I presume they mean maternity/paternity leave?) you won't need that as your basic income will ensure you still have money coming in. And if the company wants to retain your services after your leave they will offer it anyway. The key point in these examples is that even if you don't get a higher minimum wage or paid family leave it's no longer going to have a big effect on you as you have your UBI to rely on.

    Also, it doesn't seem to me like there is a left/right split on this elsewhere in the world. This leads me to believe that the problem is the highly partisan US political system. The right is obviously going to support UBI as it would significantly reduce government size - the left can't be seen to be agreeing with the right. I think it's a kind of childishly schoolyard thing you see a lot in US politics (he likes that so I don't).

  • by golergka on 5/3/16, 9:36 AM

    That's a little surprising — with all discussions about basic income taking place, I assumed it is more of a left-wing thing. But what is even more surprising are arguments against it: social workers being laid off and other more complicated policies like minimum wage taking a back seat. With this kind of rhetoric, it's easy to believe that the real reason is the "welfare lobby" of government officials who don't want their bloated offices to close, indeed.

  • by empressplay on 5/3/16, 10:10 AM

    Won't a basic income just increase inflation? Minimum-wage jobs would by necessity then need to pay more, which would then cause the costs of goods and services to go up, which would then make living more expensive, necessitating an increase in the basic income and so forth...?

    For example, say I'm a landlord. If everyone all of a sudden had an additional "base" income, why wouldn't I increase my rents to absorb at least a portion of that? Then, only people who had a job would still be able to afford to rent from me, while those on the basic income would be unable to afford it. I'm not out either way.

    So you would say you need to introduce legislation to stop me from doing that, but the free market would abhor that and likely accuse you of being a communist. So you can't. So I'm failing to see the point of the whole exercise?

  • by ja30278 on 5/3/16, 9:12 PM

    I really don't understand how a 'basic' income is supposed to work.

    What if I spend my basic income on drugs and hookers? are you willing to let me starve? what about my kids? If not, then the basic income can't actually replace the existing social programs.

    If nobody need to work, then if employers want employees, they have to pay more to get them, which makes prices rise, which makes your 'basic' income insufficient again.

    I don't get it.

  • by jboggan on 5/3/16, 3:57 PM

    'In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

    By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

    But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

    And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."'

        :Rudyard Kipling [0]
    0 - http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

  • by DanielBMarkham on 5/3/16, 10:04 AM

    The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math.

    Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable).

    Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That's another 20K or so per man, woman, and child. The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K? (I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It's to make a point.)

    We're reaching the point where the average person who supports helping the poor can figure out that we could have just set up an endowment for each poor person when they were born and spent less money than this. And at the same time we would get rid of a lot of folks doing useless overhead simply because the system is so complex.

    For those reasons and more I like the UBI idea.

    But ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. We need about a thousand different experiments -- ran for 10 or 20 years -- before we can begin to start saying what might work or not work. When I look at other charitable causes (aid to Africa comes to mind first), the rhetoric got way out ahead of the actual results for many, many decades. Tons of time, effort, and money were spent on strategies that didn't work but sounded pretty cool. We'd be idiots not to recognize that this is the danger here too.

    The first question we have to ask is this: What is UBI? Is it a reliable income in place of a bunch of other services? Or is it in addition to a bunch of other services? The difference matters. Once that's defined, I sure would like to see if a majority of people doing nothing "rubs off" on ambitious, driven people. Or maybe it works the other way around. Maybe a small percentage of ambitious, driven people, in a society without external pressures, can persuade more and more folks to find meaning in helping others. Beats me. Sure will be fun to learn more.

    Slogans are great. Results are better.

  • by rbcgerard on 5/3/16, 11:52 AM

    I see two basic issues:

    1. How do you implement this whithout border control - if you create a basic income that is higher than ~1/2 the world's income the amount of illegal immigration will be huge

    2. Will we really have the will to tell people who are starving because they lost their stipend to drugs or gambling "too bad"?

  • by WWKong on 5/3/16, 6:23 PM

    How does a universal basic income work from economics stand point? Let's say everyone gets $1000/mo. Currently the market knows that everyone has $10 and prices bread accordingly at $1.50. Tomorrow the market will know that everyone has $1010 and will price the bread at $100. Thus everything from food to utilities to rent gets adjusted to the new normal and the poor can't still afford the basics. Is this theory not correct?

  • by cromulent on 5/3/16, 10:05 AM

    When I think about it from a business perspective, the advantage is not just smaller government but workforce flexibility. If I only have 20 extra hours of work some weeks, there is no way I am hiring another person full time. With a basic income in place, I can hire someone at market rates just for those 20 hours without all of the stress for both parties. Still not perfect, but much better.

  • by unsigner on 5/3/16, 10:09 AM

    I don't see how the government can be shrunk, short of violent collapse. UBI will be introduced, and not a single government program will be dropped, not a single government official laid off; wars, bailouts and $500 toilet seats will continue, but we'll have to tax, borrow or print a few more billions (or trillions, in the case of US-sized economies - I live in a small country).

  • by dimino on 5/3/16, 7:22 PM

    All of this is basically moot, because while the average person's entitlements might stay the same or increase due to a basic income to cover the things entitlements currently cover (we won't need to hand out food stamps if we have a basic income, for example), every other person's entitlements they rely on will get cut as a result, and those people (and there are at least tens of millions of them) will raise unholy hell about it.

    There's the 10% for each entitlement that need the full entitlement, and there are dozens of entitlements, hundreds, so 10% of hundreds of programs will just be too many people to allow a basic blanket income to cover their entitlements.

    All that said, my favorite version of this is the "negative income tax". We have something kind of like it already, but the EITC would have to be expanded significantly before it was actually something like a negative income tax, and that means cuts to other programs.

  • by jasiek on 5/3/16, 10:22 AM

    Looks like this topic needs a serious longitudal study. This being a hot political topic virtually guarantees no one will conduct one.

  • by xiphias on 5/3/16, 12:15 PM

    The more free money printing is going on, the more I'm incentivized to buy/use Bitcoins from my hard work's money. UBI centralizes power to the money printers even more, gives a little to those who don't work (for their votes), and takes even more money away from those who work. Still, this can go on only with central banking.

  • by narrator on 5/3/16, 6:59 PM

    I think this is sort of the apotheosis of the concept that money is the universally effective solution to all problems.

    Money is not the universally effective solution to health care in this country. We already spend double, as a percent of GDP ,compared to any other country.

    I think we're going to run into some problems on the supply side with a universal basic income. Some prices will rise due to increased consumption. This will make capital investment (e.g Research and Development, New Factories, Upgrading Production Equipment) more costly. Eventually you'll burn the furniture to heat the house and then things will start to fall apart and get into an inflationary spiral. It does have the benefit going for it that it is less complex to administer though, while our health care system is enormously complex and grows ever more complex with the more money that gets spent on it.

  • by aidenn0 on 5/3/16, 10:02 PM

    > And they fear that a basic income would, in the end, be less than what many people get when all the federal government's cash and social-service programs are combined.

    Note that the poor will obviously get fewer benefits if BI is only funded from cuts to programs the benefit the poor.

    Example: lets say we eliminate program X that currently has a means test limiting it to the poorest 20% of the population. If we, as the article suggests, use that money to fond some fraction of BI for the poorest 80% of the population, then one can trivially see that we have distributed 3/4 of the money for program X away from the poorest 20%.

    Now there are significant savings from reducing overhead, but unless program X is 75% overhead, it's still a net loss in realized benefits for the poor.

    In order to make BI palatable to the US left, you will need to fund it at least partly through raising taxes.

  • by dilemma on 5/3/16, 11:51 AM

    The basic problem that makes universal basic income impossible is that it's simply not possibly to set the level of it. Have a try:

    1. What should UBI be in San Francisco? 2. What should UBI be in Detroit? 3. Should they be the same? 4. What happens if they're not the same? 5. What happens if they're the same?

  • by alexvoda on 5/3/16, 12:47 PM

    I think the issue with BI is that no matter how many things are automated and how many items become abundent there are still things that will remain scarce: land, minerals. Land will remain a scarce resource and all things that depend primarily on land will remain scarce (housing, agriculture, etc.).

    And in this situation there is nothing stopping land owners from absorbing the basic income. This means that revenue generated by land owning (not necessarily land owning itself) would have to be heavily taxed. Maybe even taxed progressively to avoid economies of scale in land owning and prevent a very few from owning all the land.

    Or we could terraform celestial bodies in the Solar system.

    It is important to note that land itself is limited, not housing. As long as we can continue building even higher and deeper housing is not actually limited.

  • by kempe on 5/3/16, 11:37 AM

    You could look at Sweden here for a reference. Everyone does not get a fixed sum of money but everyone can get social services to help out if you are unemployed thou the amount of money vary from situation to situation. This and other things like everyone has a right to schools, universities and health care does not come for free however. 25% tax on products, salary tax 30-55% on different salary ranges + ~15% on top for pension plan and state tax that the employee never sees that the company pays. So sure it can work but it's not cheap and it builds on that everyone should get a job. If people lost interest in that and unemployment would raise more, that would be bad...

  • by ComteDeLaFere on 5/3/16, 1:19 PM

    A basic income fails on the same point as increasing the minimum wage - neither provides much additional opportunity in life, both simply make being poor and disenfranchised more palatable.

  • by Animats on 5/3/16, 8:56 PM

    The next big thing, after the $15 minimum wage, should be the 8 hour day and the 40 hour week. Everybody gets overtime, unless you're in the 1%.

    The whole "exempt" thing needs to go.

  • by a_imho on 5/3/16, 11:57 AM

    Why is that ubi is considered the next big thing, while people on welfare are usually looked down upon? In the current (optimistic) horizon it might seem like a good idea, but a recession could easily spin this the wrong way imho. If you don't contribute by working and paying taxes on your income, there can be a problem when a stressed actor comes asking to justify your ubi. OTOH, if you do need to work either way, why not tweak the current distribution system and include ubi money in wages.

  • by lackingcaffeine on 5/3/16, 11:11 AM

    I think the idea of a basic income is really interesting though one aspect of it troubles me and I would be interested to hear HN's solutions to it. The trouble lies in the creative and economic relationship. If a substantial number of people reduce or stop their usual working hours and live off the income to pursue entirely creative activities, such as making a website or art, they are exempt from the usual capitalist status quo which forces a venture to be good, popular and eventually profitable (there is no standard of quality necessary as long as its overheads are not too high). This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business.

    One counter-argument is that by freeing up people to pursue their interests, there will be more good businesses opened as well, which will be profitable in the long run. The other is that a person would not pursue a project that is not well-received for a long period of time due to negative feedback.

    Neither of these fully answers the problem though of what the system would do to stop people falling off the economic grid and the impact on GDP/taxable income this would have. Any thoughts?

  • by irrational on 5/3/16, 7:58 PM

    I make more than $100,000 a year, but I'd gladly quit if I had a basic income that let me lay around at home all day and read library books.

  • by _Understated_ on 5/3/16, 12:09 PM

    There is something else to consider too: The political party that brings this in will likely be in power for a really long time!

    Think about the consequences: Even if it was proven financial suicide for the country (Governments can always print more money I suppose and let the next generation deal with the fallout), what political party would have a manifesto abolishing or reducing it? It would be political suicide.

  • by googletazer on 5/3/16, 10:01 PM

    I'm for basic income, however looking beyond it - whats really necessary is to be able to let each person discover their (productive) passion to be able to contribute and exchange their time and labor for some unit of value. 99% of people will still be competing for the same thing - food, housing, transportation, low level luxuries. With demand getting stronger, UNLESS the people receiving basic income get creative and produce the things they need, expanding the pie, the prices for them will go up.

    Overall, tastes are infinite, I'd love to drive a tesla and live in a (multi?)million dollar mansion, but I can't. They are too expensive for me - meaning my work and labor doesn't produce enough value (or may be not valued appropriately - but this a whole other topic) to exchange for those things I want. If we want more people to drive teslas and live in mansions, everybody who will be getting UBI needs to get productive to increase the amounts of teslas and mansions in existence.

  • by ascotan on 5/4/16, 4:32 AM

    This concept would simply create inflation.

    Image everyone has $10 on island A. Island B sells coconuts and the going rate for a coconut is $1. Based on other bills the islanders need to pay for, $1 fits the average budget and is what people are willing to pay for coconuts.

    Now make everyone on island A have $100. The demand for coconuts rises but people on island B soon realize they can make more money by raising prices even though they sell less units. They eventually increase the price of coconuts to $10 because that ends up being the price point at which the Island B people are making the most money.

    Therefore by increasing the income of everyone by a factor of 10, you end up increase the prices by a factor of 10. There is some lag time where prices will balance out though, so if you just kept doing this every month you might have a period of faux prosperity but you would also be creating runaway inflation.

  • by gerbilly on 5/3/16, 11:44 PM

    I would be for this but I'm afraid that once all the other programs are dismantled, food stamps, welfare etc, that the poor might end up getting less support than they did before.

    I try hard not to be cynical, but I wonder if this isn't a ruse to accomplish exactly that.

    I mean the US is known for being "frugal" when it comes to helping people. See the medical system for example, or the treatment that veterans get. Why the sudden surge in generosity, why the sudden desire to redistribute income?

    Weren't these anathema just recently, even to some democrats?

    Also the fact that it keeps coming up in the media makes me slightly suspicious.

    Why is this being promoted so much right now? I bet there are PR firms out there calling newspaper reporters and bloggers, to promote coverage of this idea on behalf of who knows which group or organization. [1]

    [1]: http://www.prwatch.org/

  • by raphaelj on 5/3/16, 10:05 AM

    A basic income could make low-pay jobs more interesting than ever, and companies could benefit from it.

    In most developed EU countries, a "social" income is given to unemployed people. In Belgium, it varies between 550€/month and 850€/month, depending on the situation. People lose this income as soon as they start to work, that means that a part-time job with an income of about 1000€/month is really unattractive. With a basic income, unemployed workers could be stimulated to accept this kind of low-pay jobs, as the pay will add up to their basic income.

    With the increase of productivity we got in the last 50 years, the hours worked by low-skilled workers must be lowered, or we will face endlessly increasing unemployment rates. An universal basic income can stimulate this.

  • by wapapaloobop on 5/3/16, 11:32 AM

    This isn't why we would do it, but only 1 in 10,000 'unemployed' citizens need make a significant contribution to open source or some kind of theoretical discovery to make Basic Income a bargain investment for society as a whole.

  • by maxxxxx on 5/3/16, 1:57 PM

    This is such a nice distraction from solving any real issues. While people are debating basic income wages will keep stagnating and big companies are hoarding money in tax shelters. But hey, let's discuss basic income.

  • by branchless on 5/3/16, 12:03 PM

    Land value tax. Basic income will raise rents. Tax land not labour.

    http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/

  • by uhtred on 5/3/16, 12:28 PM

    Surely $833 a month ($10,000 a year) still wouldn't be even close to enough for someone who is unemployed to live? Wouldn't rent and bills use that up, without leaving anything for food, clothing etc? I love the idea of universal basic income, but I feel it would need to be double the amount proposed in this article to really change society for the better. Otherwise people will still need to resort to crime to extra money, seeing as there are going to be even less jobs in the future.

  • by shams93 on 5/3/16, 8:42 PM

    10,000 isn't basic income its like slightly more than welfare for a basic income to be meaningful in a city like los angeles you're talking at least 70k if a person has even any hope of having a roommate situation. The other alternative is to give everybody everything they need in life at no cost, but 10k in los angeles is a joke, if they tax it you're talking still talking about having a choice between food and a youth hostel bed on that low an income.

  • by Animats on 5/3/16, 8:37 PM

    The Bloomberg version of basic income means a minimal payment and an end to most need-based welfare programs. The guy who drinks up his benefits can just die on the street.

  • by nxzero on 5/3/16, 11:48 AM

    One thing that strikes me as a bit off is that there are a massive amount people that are "retired" but want to work. While I get that basic income is intended for a segment of the population that's able to work, seems like including a massive segment of the population that's already receiving basic income via social security AND wants to work would provide a lot of data for just the cost of measuring it; meaning the basic income is already covered.

  • by jrcii on 5/3/16, 12:58 PM

    Abolish all welfare, phase out social security, and have the poor rely on private charities. If people don't want to donate to the charities that's their choice, it's their money. You're not entitled to money, food, a home, or a job -- you're entitled to nothing. You're entitled to starve in the gutter. If you want something more you have to earn it or have someone voluntarily agree to give it to you out of their own free will.

  • by Overtonwindow on 5/3/16, 11:16 AM

    Negative. Those with money will fight like hell to keep from giving it up. However if by some chance/miracle a guaranteed income is ever instituted, it will become a political football, as politicians and advocacy groups seek to continuously push it higher and higher. Instead of a money handout, I would rather support money in exchange for public works and service. I don't believe handouts without some kind of exchange will ever really work.

  • by yuzi on 5/3/16, 11:55 PM

    Side question: what prevents a basic income from being a driving force behind an inflation jump making the system less stable?

    For example: rent. Wouldn't landlords managing properties at the low end of the market price, raise those prices knowing people both 1. have more distribution control over their money (cash vs. coupons for things) and 2. More people in their target market have cash to pay.

  • by lmedina on 5/4/16, 2:09 AM

    Why not have repayable assistance? The government gives you money for up to 5 years until you get a job, and then you have to pay the government back. You pay the government back a small percentage of your monthly paycheck, say 0.05%, no interest. It's basically an interest free loan with a long repayment schedule. But at least the government gets something back.

  • by aminok on 5/4/16, 5:37 AM

    Entrenching authoritarianism should NOT be the next big thing.

    Compulsory basic income requires throwing people who refuse to hand over currency they receive in private trade in prison, where they are kept in small enclosures, and often develop mental illness, and suffer physical and sexual abuse. Techies should not support such a dark, authoritarian vision for the future.

  • by abhi152 on 5/3/16, 10:32 AM

    The simple answer is : A subsidy of such large proportions is not economically viable for the Govt.

  • by dools on 5/3/16, 12:13 PM

  • by zamalek on 5/3/16, 11:18 AM

    Although I advocate the empowerment of the impoverished, this looks like a very fundamentally flawed idea that would actually harm those it sets out to help. We need a different approach.

    When you give everyone in the economy a $10000 basic income you drive demand without driving supply. This graph[1] demonstrates how we estimate the relationship between the two, as well as price. As you'll notice, an increase in demand without an associated increase in supply results in an increase in prices. Essentially we might expect that over time the $10000, with market forces as the causation, will become the new N=0 point. Your basic salary becomes worthless. Any economic freedoms that you have created are fleeting in nature.

    A stricter socialist approach seems to be the better one: instead of investing that money into people's pockets, you invest it in job creation in services that assist these people. For example: aggressive funding of soup kitchens. The poorest of the poorest might not have money in their pockets, but it might be possible to provide even advanced (e.g. internet) services to them in such a way that they don't require money. This solution conveys no economic freedom - an ingredient for misery.

    Point is: I don't know and honestly, we don't know.

    Helping the impoverished is one of the most important goals of our race; but racing into poorly thought out solutions might result in the impoverished being no better off in the long run. I'd love to hear some counterarguments because the basic salary, at least superficially, has the attractive quality of being simple to implement.

    [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Su...

  • by TrevorJ on 5/4/16, 6:01 PM

    The problem is, this doesn't happen in a vacuum: how do you prevent rent-seeking and COL inflation? Not universal basic income works in a free market, you may have to control prices directly in order to do it.

  • by nazgob on 5/3/16, 2:42 PM

    Does such tests as the one made in Kenya make sense at all? Having external money injected into local economy will have a different effect that taxing that economy and then redistributing part of it in form of UBI.

  • by xufi on 5/3/16, 11:56 PM

    Let people fend off for themselves. That's what we do anyways when terror strikes. Imagine a post acolypatic world everyone fends for themselves are work hard for it.

  • by mindcrime on 5/3/16, 11:48 PM

    Find a way to do it without using force, or threat of force, and I'll be on board. Otherwise, any UBI proposal is a non-starter in my book.

  • by michaelbuddy on 5/4/16, 3:14 PM

    Problem is there's a large number of people who work hard, produce and frankly don't look too kindly on those who don't. Why is it so hard to understand that when we don't have to do something, a lot of people won't do anything but frivolous non productive activities, while unabashedly leeching off those who like to work for profit, progress and frankly to make life interesting for them, their community and the future of all.

  • by discardorama on 5/3/16, 12:57 PM

    OK, so you introduce UBI. Yay! Now what happens to all the social workers employed by the city (say, SF)? Remember: SF spends ~$35K/homeless/year. Who pays when a homeless guy ODs and needs hospitalization? Right now government housing is subsidized for the poor (some people in SF pay $35/mo for a 2BR government apartment). Do we still have these subsidies after UBI? What about food stamps? And the 10M+ illegal immigrants?

  • by heckerboy on 5/3/16, 10:36 AM

    I will say that if the US ever got a basic income, I wouldn't have a reason to kill myself anymore.

  • by saiya-jin on 5/3/16, 11:07 PM

    communism. everybody was forced to have a job, hence income. once you leave market forces driving the direction and try to force some righteous system down the throat of whole society, no exceptions taken, many bad things will happen. a lot of very unfair situations will occur in the system that aims to do the opposite.

    I mean, by all means, do it, experiment on your society, take all the risks foreseen and unforeseen. if you manage to make first 50 years in glory (or 100 to be sure), you have my attention. just please, please don't shove it down my throat in country where me or my family lives. Please. Thank you.

    where is the push for better education and more accessible healthcare? Fixing those guarantees a brighter future for mankind, period. this is roulette where you can lose a lot, gain a lot too.

  • by snomad on 5/3/16, 11:54 AM

    Will universal basic income take into account relative cost of living per geographical area? If so, why isn't the same done with income tax. If no, why then is it really a universal basic income / all that useful?

  • by coderKen on 5/3/16, 12:06 PM

    First world problems.

  • by shamus on 5/4/16, 12:44 AM

    Testing

  • by shamus on 5/4/16, 12:42 AM

    I agree

  • by idiot99 on 5/3/16, 10:12 AM

    There isn't huge support. Step out of the bubble...

    It's just the new generation of kids flirting with communism.

  • by ck2 on 5/3/16, 12:23 PM

    Millions can't even get health insurance in half of the entire USA (24 vs 26 states do not have medicaid expansion because the supreme court ruled it was okay to screw everyone over).

    Good luck with this basic income fantasy. Might as well try to negotiate reparations for slavery.

    How about you finish what was started FIRST - and don't give me this "we can do multiple things at the same time" nonsense. This is six years later. The need for health care is pretty much universally understood. Giving people free money would never get out of congress.

  • by known on 5/3/16, 11:33 AM

    1. USA could have PREVENTED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia had it initiated UBI in 1971 for rest of the world when it pegged dollar to OPEC Oil http://www.zerohedge.com/print/502779

    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_around_the_world provides impetus to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority will OPPOSE UBI because they fear you'll NOT be subservient to them

    4. UBI is prudent distribution of cash, not wealth