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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#531

Post by thescriptkiddie »

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…

Our current approach is telling them "though shit", so at worst we're back where we started. Most proposals protect UBI from wage garnishment so that people don't end up homeless because they are in debt. They also typically assume the existence of universal healthcare, not just treatment but also long-term care of the disabled. So I think the worst thing that can happen is temporary homelessness due to poor money management. Hopefully homeless shelters and social workers will still exist.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#532

Post by PinguTS »

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 add to that point, how do you handle people who need more than just BI, because they have some disabilities and because of ths they can't work. Remember there are lots of people who not only have physical disabilities but also mental disabilties and as such need support. How do we handle people who are sick in terms of cancer at alike?

We exclude all those people who really need our help.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#533

Post by Namrog84 »

misja111 wrote: post #317

What amazes me in this discussion about BI is that most people don't seem to realize that systems similar to BI have already been tried in Europe, and that they didn't work. I come from the Netherlands, which has always had unemployment benefits. Nowadays you get those only if you meet a bunch of strict conditions but it hasn't always been so tough. In the early eighties, there were almost no checks whatsoever. The r…

I think you miss the point of why we actually need BI research and one of the foundational reasons for it.

I know predictions could be off. But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. What are they gonna do? Just all starve to death? BI is the inevitable step towards a post scarcity society. When majority of people not only don't want to work but that there are simply no jobs for most people yet there is plenty still to buy/consume because automation.

This has nothing to do with your 1980s example because there were still plenty of jobs to be had that needed doing.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#534

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi »

xienze wrote: post #28
siphor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 5 years. Outlined in the link below https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income

So in other words, a long enough time to make people think they can draw reasonable conclusions about the viability of BI, when in actuality it's not long enough. You have to study the generational effects of this sort of thing. People are going to behave very differently when they know this will be around for a very short time versus the rest of their lives, nevermind how people behave when they're second or third g…

Did you miss the part about this being a small pilot? I sounds like they want to figure out the administration and reporting issues more than anything.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#535

Post by protomyth »

ShellfishMeme wrote: post #333
Strilanc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delivering the money in small chunks might help. Instead of 70$ every week, make it 5$ twice a day. So no matter how broke you were yesterday, you'll have enough money to eat in a few hours. Another "make it easy to get food even if you really screwed up" option might be to give grocery stores 'first dibs' on the money. Basically, let people spend the money a couple days in advance if they do it at a grocery store. A…

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.

> What if your washing machine breaks or your kids need new clothes or your car needs gas?

paying out nightly would be better for the "car needs gas" and really no worse of the other two. Many families are going to take a hit on major repairs.

I assume we are talking about the same amount of money as the single monthly check divided up my payment days.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#536

Post by exolymph »

animeweedlord wrote: post #349
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…

What about inverting the status quo and deducting UBI for each child you have (with a grandfather clause of course)? The problem would solve itself in a few generations. You've gotta work and plan if you want to have kids. If you want to party for your entire life, go ahead, but you don't get to leave kids behind for the rest of us to deal with.

On the one hand I like the incentives of this, but on the other hand it further punishes the children of people who can't plan well.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#537

Post by SpaceCadetJones »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #518

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Great empty platitude there. Socialism is about economic democracy and worker self management + ownership, although the term has become increasingly nebulous in recent years. Classic socialism, as in what was spoken of by those like Marx and Kropotkin, had nothing to do about some redistribution of money. What is related is social democracy and conservatives using the label for any social spending they don't agree with.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#538

Post by logfromblammo »

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…

A "payday loan" usurer would be all too happy to lend someone $1000 in cash, and then take $50 out of each of the next 52 weekly BI checks.

I don't see a way to BI without significant buy in from Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of HHS to provide some of the value of benefit as actual food and as gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing. Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut. The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.

So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens. The existing food aid programs use EBT cards that act like debit cards and just leverage the same grocery stores and farms that everyone else uses. BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population. It would be like building the postal service all over again, except shipping identical 3000 kcal packages to somewhere within a 1.5 mile radius of every person in America, every day. (Then also ship the older, unclaimed packages to the pork farms.)

The upside is that those jobs would be real, actually-do-something jobs instead of the bullshit, pencil-pusher, bureaucratic jobs that typically suck up some of the welfare budgets. The post office may have a bad reputation, but at the end of the day, they do have something to show for their work. Eventually, those jobs get replaced by robots, too.

Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever. Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods. Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#539

Post by misja111 »

morgante wrote: post #472
k2enemy wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this repeated in discussions about BI, but I honestly have no idea how it would be possible. I get that everyone receives the same size check, no matter what their income, but who pays for the BI program? I assume it is funded through taxes and that people that earn more income will pay higher taxes. So once you take BI received - taxes paid , people that earn more outside income get less from the BI pr…

This is easily solved by making the personal standard deduction higher than the UBI. So your first $10k (from BI) would be tax free. If you don't work, you don't pay any taxes. Let's say you have a part-time job which pays $20k a year and the lowest marginal tax rate is 30%. You'd then pay $6k in taxes on that $20k. Thus, your overall income would be $24k, much more than you got from just BI. This works if your only…

Let's start with just calling the personal standard deduction 'income tax'. Then, I guess your tax system needs to be progressive, because just having everybody paying $6k tax wouldn't even be enough to pay for non-BI costs such as schools, infrastructure etc. So the highest incomes would probably see their BI disappear to the tax office.

Such a system looks a lot like the systems which are currently used in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. True, there are some differences: BI is called 'unemployment benefit' for those who don't work. And for those with a low income, there is no BI, but instead there are subsidies on housing, health insurance etc.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#540

Post by dragonwriter »

k2enemy wrote: post #385
cbr wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time This one doesn't apply to BI, since you get the same amount of BI money whether you work or not and regardless of how much you earn.

I keep seeing this repeated in discussions about BI, but I honestly have no idea how it would be possible. I get that everyone receives the same size check, no matter what their income, but who pays for the BI program? I assume it is funded through taxes and that people that earn more income will pay higher taxes. So once you take BI received - taxes paid , people that earn more outside income get less from the BI pr…

> So once you take BI received - taxes paid, people that earn more outside income get less from the BI program than those that don't. And we are back in the same situation where a welfare program creates disincentives for work.

If you fund a UBI program by, say, eliminating preferential rates for capital income, and adding supplemental brackets above the current maximum brackets, and tie the level of the UBI to (because the former actually simplifies reporting in a way which prevents doing this exactly rather than by estimates) an estimate of the revenue resulting from those changes, there's no actual disincentive to work compared to the status quo ante due to the UBI except for very high income workers(this isn't no additional disincentive compared to those in other welfare programs from the UBI, its no disincentive at all.)

There's a disincentive compared to the status quo ante to generating income from long-term capital gains, but the practical effect of that is probably only in the upper end of the distribution (in the lower and middle ranges, the relative comparative disincentive to earning that form of income is probably more than offset by the having more surplus income to invest.)

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