Request For Research: Basic Income

Canada has demonstrated that (single payer) public health insurance works better than America's current public/private model while our taxes are comparable to living in California. Yet the US political system has yet to even be close to adopting it. Data doesn't always translate to political persuasion unfortunately.

I'd expect Canada to adopt basic income before the US does as well and possibly provide the data this study is looking for on a much larger and contextually relevant scale.

I'm very skeptical of basic income as commonly understood.

The typical basic income program I've seen goes something like this: give every person in the country $10k to live on, no strings attached. [a]

1) As defined above, this is horribly inefficient and expensive. I, a software engineer in Silicon Valley, would receive this $10k. How does this benefit society? I already make over $100k; I don't need additional income support.

2) As noted elsewhere in this thread, the US has 300M residents; naively the cost of this program would be $3T!

3) If you do start to add guidelines for poverty, etc., you just reproduce the current welfare system that exists in the US, which balances available government revenue against our desire to help poor people.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income, "all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money ... in addition to any income received from elsewhere"

My personal viewpoint is that you should be guaranteed survival and some opportunity by society, but not guaranteed income.

That is, you should get food, shelter, medical care, and education for free (this also implies free child care). But you don't get to buy a cell phone or an XBox or whatever -- you have to work for that.

In other words, I think basic income is jumping the gun a bit. Who is going to PAY for this, if we're not even willing to pay for the necessities of life?

People still die from untreated diseases, and I believe there is significant research to show that poor health CAUSES poverty (rather than poverty causing poor health). If people are healthy they will likely be more productive members of society.

What happens now if everybody is jobless, does the jobless still feel bad about it?

It's still quite a lot of money, but I think the basic assumption with a guaranteed income is that it would be accompanied by a tax increase such that net income is neutral for some percentage of the population.

Taking the extreme example where no one's net income is decreased and people below median get the full $10k net, you've already halved that number. I think most formulations of actually paying for such a guaranteed income would include some degree of reduction as you approach median and increased taxes at the high end of the income spectrum, further reducing the cost. As mentioned exhaustively, you also can subtract the cost of many of the pre-existing social programs because they get replaced by the guaranteed income.