Moving Forward on Basic Income

I hope BI just never flies because financial problems grow out of real problems. You cannot solve human problems by cutting a check to all the poor people. Poverty grows out of very real problems like chronic health issues, learning disabilities, abusive relationships, etc. These are not going to be magically fixed by giving all poor people a check. Furthermore, I have my fears that both poor people and the rest of society will put less effort into helping people with very serious, intractable problems to actually resolve them because "Hey, you have your UBI." And I think that is likely to cause far worse problems than we have currently.

I just hope to god UBI never is real. Pilot programs often go well. People who have the proverbial rich uncle to draw upon tend to do better than folks without such a resource. These pilot programs are more like that. When you actually try to guarantee universal support (a la communism), historically, it has always failed to work out well. It is a fundamentally broken model.

It seems to me that a limited, 5-year Basic Income experiment is fundamentally flawed and will, at best, fail to predict anything important about what system-wide BI would have on society and at worst will be disastrously misleading and have an incredibly adverse effect on public policy.

What I'm reading scares me.

Oakland is a city of great social and economic diversity, and it has both concentrated wealth and considerable inequality. We think these traits make it a very good place to explore how basic income could work for our pilot.

To me this screams complete lack of any meaningful experimental controls.

If the pilot goes well, we plan to follow up with the main study. If the pilot doesn’t go well, we’ll consider different approaches.

What does this mean? If the pilot gives you the results you want? What kind of science is this?

"Expensive" is terrible when talking about programs like this. This is not military spending - it isn't money just sucked out of the economy to effectively be dumped off a cliff with no economic return on investment (yes, military spending has a tiny rate of ROI, that doesn't change how absurdly inefficient an R&D program it is compared to, say, NASA). In a zero-overhead UBI system where you used existing databases to model who to send money to, every dollar in goes immediately back out to another taxpayer to spend.

There is absolutely no associated "cost" of the program, and there is demonstrable evidence that the poorer you are, the more efficient your dollar is at stimulating growth, because you are much more likely to have real goods demand rather than capital growth demand like the rich, where inevitably the money for a UBI comes from.

Everything a government does has some rate of ROI on it, determining how much it impacts the economy and how well the dollars are spent. Infrastructure and education are known force multipliers where every dollar spent produces many times more economic growth in return, making almost any infrastructure or education worth it until you get particularly exploitative. Likewise, having a good healthcare system compared to the American one would produce significant returns in quality of life, and economic factors like time working and it would cost less to use more preventative medicine to mitigate problems before they are life threatening catastrophes that cost the state millions.

In the same vein of thinking, healthcare is certainly a net positive investment. You spend a ton on it, but the alternative is people getting sick and dying and lost potential productivity from that outweighs the money you spend preventing it. In the same way, if UBI prevents social unrest, crime, violence, despondence, and death, then it also likely offsets the money going in and then some as well, despite possible overhead, since unlike healthcare / infrastructure / etc money going in does not take years to get a return on - the people who get it predominantly will turn around and spend it immediately on goods and services to keep your consumerism strong.

You can also retire from the US military after 20 years (so as young as 38), which would be a pretty large population to study.

While I can't speak for everyone, I expect most proponents of "Basic Income" as a new social structure are advocating for "Universal Basic Income". i.e., everyone gets a check.

In addition to, ideally, providing for a basic level of needs, a Universal Basic Income also enforces a certain equality of social status - there's no stigma to getting your UBI welfare check if your rich neighbor across the street is getting the same check.

The most commonly proposed alternative to a truly Universal Basic Income is the Negative Income Tax. If implemented with a progressive tax system (like the U.S's current tax system), there's still no disincentive to work, as every marginal increase in earned income is associated with a marginal increase in real income (even as the negative income tax benefit drops off).

Actually, for what it's worth, one of the strong arguments for switching to UBI is that our current system of welfare programs actually disincentives moving up in income! In current implemented welfare programs, there are several income-tested thresholds where support drops out entirely - meaning that a marginal increase in earned income can represent a decrease in real income.