Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

freakonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 133 posts

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#61

Post by asmithmd1 »

Retric wrote: post #3

I think we should just call it what it is a dividend. We have crossed a point where handing off 10% of everyone's income allows for a reasonable minimum standard of living. But, because progress is always going to cost some people more than others we need to align incentives. Sorry, I know your a world class doctor, but Auto Scan (TM) just does a better job. The important thing to remember is that % for a given stand…

The numbers seem to work for the US.

A 10% income tax increase redistributed to all US households would be ~$11,000 per household, which is right about what the poverty line is for 1 person. If your household makes less than $110k you get a tax cut, above $110k you will be paying more to prevent social unrest.

All numbers in Billions and for 2014

Total earned income $14,700

Total income tax $1,000

--------------------------

                    $13,700
10% = $1,370

Total US households .125

basic income per household 1370/.125 = $11,000

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#62

Post by wimagguc »

An earlier Freakonomics episode [1] discusses whether early retirement is bad for the health. According to the show it actually might be: "one additional year of early retirement causes an increase in the risk of premature death of 2.4 percentage points"

Guaranteed Basic Income sounds like an early retirement option for most people, so where it's probably a fantastic opportunity for self-starters, it might be lethal for everyone else. GBI's side effect can be weeding out non-entrepreneurs.

[1] Early Retirement: Bad For Your Health? http://freakonomics.com/2012/03/29/early-retirement-bad-for-...

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#63

Post by AlwaysRock »

vaadu wrote: post #25

Where is the incentive to get people off the couch looking for work or going to school?

Have you spend significant time unemployed or not in school? It's really depressing after a while. Sure playing video games and watching movies all day is great for a week or two during vacation but if that's all you do you will quickly find something else to supplement your free time.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#64

Post by amelius »

VincentEvans wrote: post #23

Why wouldn't all standard of living benefits of basic income get eliminated immediately by all relevant costs rising to soak it up? This happens every single time the poor get any sort of money. In poor neighborhoods the rents cost as much as people are able to pay, no more, no less. Do you know when most rental deposits are collected? Around the tax return season. If suddenly the poor had some money to spare - the r…

It sounds like you have a point, but sometimes intuition and/or anecdotal evidence can be wrong. It would be nice to see some economic models that (dis)prove this.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#65

Post by WorldMaker »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #29

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about anything. Some parents can put 850k in a account for their child when it's born that gets invested, say in the American economy (grows by say 7% over an average, long time period), which compounds until later in life, and when they grow up, they can access it. With good financial responsibility, this child won't have to work a day in their lives and can live off the returns. Wh…

Honestly, it just sounds like you've restated one of the simple versions of how basic income actually would work (and why it should be economically "easy"), and its basically the way people think Social Security works (it's subtly different, but that's a tangential discussion). MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) isn't really that far from "pretend the government had an investment account for every person and then handed them a check for the interest returns on that account", just with a lot more subtlety in what constitutes that account (because money is something the government creates in how it taxes money) and where that interest return "comes from" (because it's already there in tax credits and 0% loans to big corporations and government debt bonding and even the nature of inflation itself and weirder things). Of course, I'm oversimplifying as well, but the point is you have found the rabbit hole.

Which is to say, spot on, you've hit near the right track and aren't too far from what a lot of guaranteed basic income discussions generally start from and are basically about.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#66

Post by 1123581321 »

maxerickson wrote: post #54
branchless wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the thinking here. Rents are set by what the market can bear. Make more money available and the price will increase.

rayiner mentions mobility in a cousin comment. In a healthy housing market, rents should roughly match the price of new construction (plus some profit) rather than being set just by the existing supply.

Rents in cheaper markets need to be less than the difference in cost of living plus the cost of moving (amortized somehow.) Sadly, improved transportation infrastructure and technology seems only to concentrate people even more in dense, expensive cities. These cities have a lot of opportunity and connections that keep people there, often rationally, but people who struggle stay as well.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#67

Post by kspaans »

tgflynn wrote: post #37

It seems to me that the question of how to finance a UBI is probably the largest stumbling block. Of course it could be done through taxes but a lot of people have legitimate concerns about government taxation. For taxation to work you need a coercive government and many of us are very aware of the downsides of such an entity. Of course taxation isn't the only reason we have a coercive government there's also the war…

One potential source of revenue-neutral money for it is reducing other social and welfare programs. The theory goes that a UBI program would have less administrative overhead, so the savings can go to "the people". And arguably this is the hardest way to do it, politically, because it would reduce the number of bureaucratic jobs available.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#68

Post by VincentEvans »

strommen wrote: post #56
VincentEvans wrote: post #23

Why wouldn't all standard of living benefits of basic income get eliminated immediately by all relevant costs rising to soak it up? This happens every single time the poor get any sort of money. In poor neighborhoods the rents cost as much as people are able to pay, no more, no less. Do you know when most rental deposits are collected? Around the tax return season. If suddenly the poor had some money to spare - the r…

> In poor neighborhoods the rents cost as much as people are able to pay, no more, no less. This is a bit of a tautology. Low-rent housing is usually pretty bad, so when people can afford to pay more they just move to a nicer place. As far as I know, the first-time home buyer credit made a tiny ripple in the low-end housing market - where did prices "balloon"? College education is quite different because the "market"…

I am speaking of subprime mortgages. There was this period of time when you could get a mortgage while on disability (which is truly your "basic income" in poor neighborhoods, btw. Everyone has it. There are even specialized law firms that exist around that consumer demand.). The magic price of the house was about 40K - because that's that a person on SSI can get a mortgage for.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#69

Post by JonFish85 »

Well, the real question is, are you ready to pay for the Guaranteed Basic Income? Generously assuming that it's not indexed to inflation, probably what would happen is that costs would rise to account for the newfound money. Then, of course, there would have to be services that remain in place, because if people spend their income stupidly, we can't have them starving in the streets. Then you have the collection problem, that suddenly taxes would have to go up (and they would, of course, regardless of how many services you think you can cut).

The people who pay? In general, as with any tax increase, it's the middle class. It's the couple that went to college, saved their money, worked hard, bought a house and started a family. Regardless of how much you think you can raise tax rates on "the rich", the only way to pay for something like this is by getting to the middle class, which is where the tax revenue is.

Re: Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?

#70

Post by lghh »

prodmerc wrote: post #59
lghh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a decent basic income, I wouldn't be working.

You wouldn't? What would you be doing? If I had basic income that pays for everyday expenses, I'd be free to learn something (robotics/automation/mechanical engineering) and find a job in that industry...

I'd practice cooking, read a lot, and do some coursera/udacity/whatever courses, and see my friends and family more.

I may work as I do now, but only a day or two a week. That would only be if I got very, very bored though.

Post reply on HN