A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

The assumption by proponents is that if more people get their most basic needs met, they won't be making as bad choices for themselves and their families.

No one is claiming 100% perfect solution but unless you are claiming people choose to be poor you are basically saying that the current situation is better which I find quite unsubstantiated.

I'm never quite sure what to think about articles (or ideas) like this. I think of my grandfather who served in the air force for 20 years. When he needed more money, what did he do? He picked up a paper route early in the morning. What did he do when the paper route + air force income still wasn't enough? He started driving a taxi during evening hours. And when those three jobs weren't enough? He opened up a service station/gas shop to serve the other taxi drivers, which eventually morphed into a full blown auto service shop which allowed him to quite all his other jobs.

As a software developer I am doing ok. I crawled my way up the ladder though from blue collar work. But I still have plenty of friends that never really went anywhere after high school. Some work fast food, some general labor, but they all make less than $8/hr. What do they do when then need money? Get a second job? No. They get on facebook and whine about it or make a gofundme account. One of my friend's even works at a warehouse 10 hours a day only 4 days a week. On those 3 days off he has does he work another job? No. He just plays video games all day, as does everyone else I mentioned.

It seems that people nowadays seem to think they only need to work one job, and if that job doesn't pay enough, it is the job's fault.

Granted, I know working 70+ hours a week at $6hr won't get you any where... But we all have to learn the climb the ladder. The complete lack of work ethic and skill sets I see today I don't think we can blame on the public schooling or government policies. I'd like to think it is the fault of the parents who never taught their own children to work. Perhaps they don't know how to work either. Yet I go back to thinking about my Grandfather. He lived out in the sticks and didn't really go to school. The family spent the money his dad made (at a brick factory) on buying supplies for gardening so they could have food. For meat they only had chickens and wild rabbits (both of which he refuses to eat to this day). So perhaps formal education isn't the magic bullet either. But something is amiss in our world today.

Be careful of the incentives you create with these methods.

As a side note, will a poor person who is unable to have a child be allowed to adopt and receive an increase in basic income, and will the adoption process by significantly more discriminating in who is allowed to adopt compared to who is allowed to have children?

It's not about not having to work for an asshole, it's about being protected from abusive business practices. Not everyone can afford lawyers to sue bosses that made them work overtime without overtime pay, for example.

Usually the people who need worker protections the most are the ones being abused the most, for the same reason: they are poor and have no other choice. They have no union and their cases are usually too small-fry to be worth it.

>If you want to avoid bad bosses you need to learn a skill that makes you highly sought after or be self employed.

Ha! Good one. Now let's all gather around a campfire and talk about how our tech giant/startup employer had us working insane hours because "crunch time" or "demonstrate culture fit". You can even add your own! Don't forget to mention prohibitive cost of living in tech hubs and the mountain of student debt you accumulated so you could have a "skill that makes you highly sought after." :)

The only way I can see Basic Income working is if the average person has a net income change of $0. That means someone making the average income of ~$45k/yr gets a $10k check from the government every year, but also has their taxes go up by ~$10k. I believe others have referred to this as a negative income tax.

From what I can tell the average salary of a hackernews reader is above $100k. Each of us would probably end up paying ~$800+ per month in additional taxes, maybe up to $1,500/mo for those making that BigCo money. [1]

The first question is, does that sound reasonable? Do you want to subtract $400 from each paycheck for the sake of total strangers? And I guess the second question is, why aren't we doing that now? How much do each of us currently give to support other people in various ways?

I think Basic Income is a good idea. If people have more money, they'll be able to click on internet ads and buy things, and that will help the companies that many of us work for. But it won't be an even exchange and many people here will end up with less disposable income. I think that it will be worth it in the long run, to ensure that the economic engine that produces our paychecks continues to function. But I don't know if every UBI proponent is prepared to deal with the short term costs.

[1] I completely made these numbers up. Could be more, could be less.