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

Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#411

Post by jessaustin »

flatline wrote: post #48
glibgil wrote: post #7

Have you given much thought to the effect of a participant taking on debt during your experiment?

Landlords and colleges are likely to gobble up as much of that free basic income as they possibly can. Payday lenders stand to make an even bigger killing than they do now. If not done carefully, it could result in an even more quickly widening wealth gap than we have now.

BI (and any assets purchased with BI?) should definitely be off-limits to debt collection, but wouldn't that solve this sort of problem?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#412

Post by MrMullen »

mikeash wrote: post #63
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…

What do we do now when people blow their Social Security or welfare check and can't afford rent or food?

Social Security is not a give away. People have paid into SSI for years and they are getting their money out of it. No one is giving them free money and they free to blow it as they see fit.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#413

Post by ShellfishMeme »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #373
ShellfishMeme wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if your washing machine breaks or your kids need new clothes or your car needs gas? It seems to me with this approach people would be stuck in perpetual poverty even more.

Wait what? How exactly would these people be OK in the current system? Why would it be worse?

This is about the tiny daily portions of money, not about BI.

It's hard to make long term plans with that, because instead of putting aside $100 at the beginning of the month, now you need to save $3 a day. With amounts that small, it's easy to accidentally overspend.

Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.

Not all poor people are poor because they're drug addicts that cannot handle money. Poverty is hard to escape. I'd rather not humiliate these people any further and make it even harder for them to lead a dignified life just because some people might waste their money in the first week.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#414

Post by robbiemitchell »

senseless wrote: post #253

Good to see steps like this being made! As a slight aside, there are strong proponents who argue, based on Ricardo's law of rent [0], that any excess income above the basic subsistence level will inevitably be swallowed up by landlords in the form of rents. I'd be very interested to hear from the folks involved in this study if they have an opinion on such an assertion, and if you have any ideas on addressing that ef…

Not enough discussion to this effect. When everyone has more money, the prices of everything will probably go up.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#415

Post by st3v3r »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #91
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…

Or we could teach them financial literacy. Kind of like how countries with socialized healthcare spend more on health education.

But then you get a bunch of people who complain that high schools shouldn't be teaching that stuff. Of course, I feel that those who espouse that viewpoint are doing so because they benefit from having a large group of people lacking these skills.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#416

Post by protomyth »

jedberg wrote: post #260
protomyth wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that one. It is probably worth it to deliver the money each day or at least each weekday. You could handle the food stamp microloan via and debit card that only is for small food purchases which deducts payment from future daily payments over a certain period of time. It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month. Handling the debt-collector issue is probably goin…

> It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month. I've never heard of this. Do you have a link or something? I assume it's like a checkpoint they set up in poor areas so they can get money from the welfare checks or something?

So, its the first of the month and people got their welfare check (or EBT these days), and need to drive into town to buy food. Amazingly, a police checkpoint appears and pulls every driver (well, not semis or high priced vehicles or well those without reservation plates) over. Of course the cars aren't well maintained (poor rural - got a grant based on those stats) so tickets fly. But I'm sure everyone feels safer now.

I am having one heck of a time finding the articles.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#417

Post by ufmace »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #278
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…

>But giving someone a months worth of rent/food/utilities/clothing in cash is going to be disastrous If the poor can destroy our society because we cut them a check, we're fucked as it is. Who knows if BI is implemented "no strings attached cash", but it's not impossible to imagine outreach groups to get people to spend their money more wisely. And despite the help, some of them will continue to buy vices. You cannot…

I mostly agree with GP, but "disastrous" as meaning destroying our society is pretty over the top all right.

People spending their BI money on vices instead of food and shelter isn't by itself an argument against BI, but it does call into question the supposed advantages of BI. We're supposed to be able to eliminate cumbersome, complex, admin-heavy welfare programs in favor of BI, thus making it an overall savings of taxpayer money. If many people spend all of their BI money on vices and are still starving on the streets at the end of the day, then we need the old programs back again to feed them, and we're just spending money on nothing.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#418

Post by throwanem »

phjesusthatguy3 wrote: post #271
eanzenberg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Michigander here. AFAIK, you can't just turn your Bridge card into cash. How does one purchase lottery tickets and drugs with welfare payments? The one way I can think of is hanging out with the high-school kids outside the liquor store and saying "I'll go buy you X if you go buy me lottery tickets and alcohol/go to your dealer and get me an O"

Here in Baltimore, the usual benefits fraud method involves small shop owners willing to claim false purchases to a given value, then disburse an equal value in cash partly to the benefits claimant and partly to themselves as a profit - so, yeah, you actually can just turn your SNAP card into cash, albeit at a sizable discount. No doubt the same is true of a Bridge card.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#419

Post by sliverstorm »

colinplamondon wrote: post #67
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…

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…

My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you. However the problem with "tough shit" can be seen with the homeless today. The safety net doesn't give out, instead they fall onto the emergency services net, which does not have the option of not helping them, and is possibly the most expensive net of them all.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#420

Post by yummyfajitas »

misja111 wrote: post #399
shkkmo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment insurance is not BI. BI goes to everyone, Unemployment insurance only goes to people who aren't working legally. Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black market labor. BI does not do that. It does (if we get replace minimum wage with basic income) allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see…

True, the very liberal Dutch unemployment insurance which I was talking about was not BI. It had some similarities, but also some differences. The liberal unemployment insurance became too expensive. So the question is: where is BI different so that it becomes sustainable for the tax payer? > Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black marke…

I did some arithmetic on this a while back. Paying BI to people who work utterly destroys any cost advantage.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi...

This is why most BI proponents are so averse to arithmetic.

Post reply on HN