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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#291

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

chimeracoder wrote: post #272
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- To a large extent, it is expected to replace current programs like welfare and social security. So those budgets, in theory, would be reduced or eliminated and supplemented with Basic Income. - It will be a taxable income. So a family including two adults would have an additional $24k on which to pay taxes. Those taxes help pay for the program by effectively reducing the additional funding that needs to be raised.…

> Theoretically, it will increase wages and employment since there will be a lot more money spent, increasing economic activity. At a macroeconomic level, that money comes from somewhere (generally taxes), which means that it's also decreasing consumption and/or investment by an equivalent amount. You can make the argument that collecting the taxes to fund a program is still desirable in the end, but it's mathematica…

> "which means that it's also decreasing consumption and/or investment by an equivalent amount"

I am not sure about this, because the net amount is still new money in the economy, being spent for services, saved, or invested. Yes, a typical person is paying more taxes, but they will have net more money to spend or save: $BI - [Tax on $BI] is still > $0.

As a further example, let's say there is a salon that employs 2 beauticians before BI. After BI, they see an increase in business, and now can employ 3 beauticians, increasing employment by 1. The 3rd beautician is now paying taxes that were not paid before. Those taxes in part can help fund the BI.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#292

Post by ZenoArrow »

eanzenberg wrote: post #110
colinplamondon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…

"Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty.

The payments could be made weekly. That way if someone was irresponsible and blew their basic income on non-essentials they would only need to survive on whatever they had left for a week.

Also, there would still be a role for social services in getting kids out of harms way if their parents couldn't look after them, but basic income would be sorted out separately, without using means-based testing.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#293

Post by greedo »

prokes wrote: post #105

Can anyone explain how this can be implemented mathematically? Assume 300 million people @ $12k / year, you are spending $3.6 trillion. That is already more than current government revenue, leaving all current government services unfunded.

Debt. The government will simply pump more liquidity into the economy. Not that this will cause any side effects, right? This idea is all a non-starter anyways, at least in the US. As a "pure" form of communism, there's little to no real support once the details are actually discussed. Redistributing this amount of money is impossible; we can't even run a balanced budget in the US.

It goes against so much of the American ethos of independence and self-worth that I think we'll have self-driving flying cars before BI or UI.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#294

Post by SolarNet »

xienze wrote: post #60

So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…

Do you think our current government safety nets provide for this already? If so you are living in a dream world.

Besides we already have the answer, payday lending, while often predatory in the current system, becomes easier when you consider everyone you know will have capital to loan you, and everyone already has a basic income from which the loan can be paid.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#295

Post by coldtea »

thedevil wrote: post #226
coldtea wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am 100% for this experiment. But the assumption that technology will replace basic jobs seems naive. Throughout human history, we have seen rapid and accelerating technology improvements. Arguments from "but this is how it always have been" have a tendency to break down when significant societal/technological changes happen.

I use a different model than everyone else which I think gives insight on this. I split jobs into 3 categories (simplified here to make it easy to understand): 1) jobs that mostly create economic value (doctors, farmers, programmers): the percentage of these jobs is already small and keeps decreasing with technology. 2) jobs that mostly transfer economic value (marketers, lawyers): these jobs keep increasing. (Note:…

>In a future where wealth is concentrated and more jobs are automated, job types 2 and 3 most likely grow, not shrink. That's what happened because of past technological progress and I don't see a reason to think it will happen any differently this time.

The thing is, contrary to other eras, job types (3) (and some (2)) will be also be able to be performed by "robots"/software/technology.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#296

Post by nostrebored »

dragonwriter wrote: post #205
nostrebored wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one thing that I never actually see any of the people who tout BI answer is why it won't just cause an increase in the price of low income goods. Why won't laundry detergent just cost x% more money, etc. I think that the effective spending power low income individuals have under BI would be practically around the same that they had pre-BI if it's used a supplement to our current programs, and lower if BI is used…

> The one thing that I never actually see any of the people who tout BI answer is why it won't just cause an increase in the price of low income goods. It won't just cause that because of the way supply and demand curves for real goods tend to work. It will definitely cause an increase in the market-clearing price of many goods demanded at the low end of the income scale (because of how demand curves are shaped, and…

And things that lag with an increase in demand? Housing, etc.?

I don't doubt that it will have some benefit towards the TPP of low-income consumers in the long term -- I do doubt that in the model of replacement of current welfare systems that this is an effective approach, and I doubt that it will be effective in the short term as housing prices will skyrocket. The long term effects of the latter would be interesting if the short term shockwaves caused the policy to be repealed.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#298

Post by gedy »

ygjb-dupe wrote: post #283
DawkinsGawd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely side stepped the question. I find it absolutely amazing how naive BI supporters are. I grew up poor in a ghetto in New York. Studied, went to university, became an engineer and am no longer in that socioeconomic bracket. However it is very apparent that the people in my current bracket (the one's that support BI), have no idea about the issues of the poor. Poor people are mostly poor because of the dec…

If you are an engineer I would expect a better capability of root cause analysis than that. Your list of things there is entirely comprised of things that are largely outside of the control of individuals. "Poor people are mostly poor because of the decisions they make." * Drug addiction Yes, a person can choose to use drugs. Usually the choice is made under intense peer pressure and at a young age. We won't let chil…

Did you read about his/her background? Sounds very dismissing of that.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#299

Post by politician »

> Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity...

Ok, here's an honest question. These days we often are told that increasing diversity is the responsibility of all successful healthy organizations, end-of-discussion (see: GitHub).

Under what conditions would increasing _economic_ diversity be seen as a good outcome?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#300

Post by whamlastxmas »

ncallaway wrote: post #196
simonsarris wrote: post #141

"Basic Income that ends in 1/5/10 years" is not basic income at all. For some of the population they will literally be studying the effects of a temporary salary increase that follows a person if they change jobs. For some of the population they will be studying a don't-have-to-work sabbatical.

What are you quoting with the quotation marks? I agree with you on that a BI that ends in 1 year isn't a good test. However, from the article their goal with the sort-term pilot is "to prepare for the longer-term study by working on our methods--how to pay people, how to collect data, how to randomly choose a sample, etc". So...who cares if the short-term pilot isn't a good study on BI? That's not their goal. I disag…

The point of BI is that you wouldn't have to worry about supporting yourself for the bare necessities. If it's only 10 years long you still have to consider your career prospects after you lose BI. If you tell an employer "I've been out of a job for 10 years because I got free money and didn't need to work" they aren't exactly going to jump at the chance to hire you. Plus your skills will be out of date.
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