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Moving Forward on Basic Income

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#701

Post by greedo »

antisthenes wrote: post #690
greedo wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"newly issued fiat currency" is theft. Forced inflation is theft from people with savings etc etc etc.

Newly issued fiat currency is an incentive to keep more money in circulation for goods and services. You could just as easily make the argument that in a near-zero inflation economy, people who are ardent savers are also thieves of economic mobility, because they keep the vast majority of money out of circulation, which stifles economic activity (making it not just a zero-sum game, but actually a negative-sum game) I…

There's keeping the monetary supply liquid, and there's pumping $2-3 trillion dollars into it with BI. Taxes won't pay for this scale of program, short of highly confiscatory rates, so the only way to fund this is to devalue currency by printing more money.

I didn't say "inflation was theft," I said forced inflation, with the goal of paying for something unsupported by government revenues is theft.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#702

Post by H0n3sty »

I'm very curious about how the participants other income will change. Income is the best proxy we have for productivity, so if their other income changes much then we might be able to make some interesting observations about their work/leisure tradeoff.

It would also be very interesting to see how productivity changes with respect to demographic factors.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#703

Post by cbhl »

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…

A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget. Uber drivers. Servers at restaurants. General hospitality workers that are getting automated out. Ordinary white, working class Americans who lost their factory jobs to China in the last recession. People who are voting for Trump.

These people should be allowed to make the trade-off between using their BI to live in the city and use public transit, or to live in a cheaper, more rural town and having a car. Similarly, they could choose between eating chicken for dinner every night, or eating ramen all week and splurging on a box wine on the weekend. BI lets adults do this. It's embarrassing to stand behind someone at the grocery store trying to buy a bottle of wine with EBT.

It's worth noting that BI does not, by itself, solve mental illness, drug addiction, medical emergencies, or fraud. However, a homeless person that receives BI could rent themselves a small apartment somewhere -- which could reduce the number of 911 calls that person causes as a homeless person, and in turn free up cost savings for e.g. a social worker visiting them at their new apartment.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#704

Post by tsmffh »

acgourley wrote: post #123
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…

You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger. The liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. As an aside, if you pay attent…

There's no moral superiority when you're relying on the use of force to acquire funds. (i.e. theft)

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#705

Post by sampo »

chimeracoder wrote: post #628
naasking wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing everyone will not have more money then. The total money supply remains constant under UBI.

> The total money supply remains constant under UBI. Well - it doesn't, actually. A self-sufficient program would have to be self-sustaining via tax revenue, and unless the goal is to defeat the whole purpose of the program, the tax revenue will disproportionately come from the wealthy. However, the wealthy are less likely to spend every extra dollar that they have, which means that they're more likely instead to sav…

> this proposal would transfer money

In the US, probably. There are some other countries where the amount of money currently being spent on social security is already large enough that it could be reorganized to give basic income to the whole population.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#706

Post by djrogers »

I've got a question for the BI fans that I haven't seen addressed before: The U.S. is a huge country, with wildly varying costs of living. Will a UBI be adjusted for regional costs, or will it be a simple flat rate?

I can see problems with both options; with the former you'd encourage people to stay in (or move to) more costly regions, and with the latter you'd either be paying someone in Salina Kansas above the median income as UBI, or you'd have people on UBI in Chicago, Oakland, and NY still unable to pay their rent.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#707

Post by joelrunyon »

cbhl wrote: post #703
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…

A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget. Uber drivers. Servers at restaurants. General hospitality workers that are getting automated out. Ordinary white, working class Americans who lost their factory jobs to China in the last recession. People who are voting for Trump. These people should be allowe…

> A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget.

I would like to know the current % of people who live within a budget. The avg. cc debt is currently 15k - https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-cre... - I don't think BI automatically grants financial literacy.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#708

Post by gwright »

beat wrote: post #629
acgourley wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger. The liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size. As an aside, if you pay attent…

Healthcare != food. As a liberal and a libertarian, I'd like to see BI replace welfare for basic living expenses like food, shelter, and transportation. Healthcare is different. It can be very cheap, or suddenly very expensive. Part of the motivation for BI is that it's the least expensive means to the end of not having homeless people starving in the street (among other ends). Likewise, universal health care is the…

That is why we have insurance. It is a mechanism for converting individually unpredictable risk into predictable group expenses.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#709

Post by antisthenes »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #696
danielweber wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wouldn't be a problem delivering goods, because companies would still compete to deliver those goods using price signals. The problem is that a lot of goods delivered to the poor are delivered by low-skill workers, and since demand curves slope there will be significant inflation here, along with a lot of things undone.

IMO the spike in demand will cause shortrun inflation, then suppliers will scale up production/competition in response. IDK if 5 years is enough time to see this all through. Depends on what they end up demanding most of. Food seems to be in good supply so minimal inflation there. Housing is tight in bay area so likely to see inflation there.

You won't see measurable inflation from such a small scale program.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#710

Post by brandelune »

"We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs—no matter what, especially if there are enough resources to make it possible. We don’t yet know how it should look or how to pay for it, but basic income seems a promising way to do this."

The bit about "how to pay for it" is interesting considering that Uber, AirBnB and other companies that are known to not pay corporate taxes and exploit their workers have been funded by Ycombinator.

Maybe Ycombinator should fund a startup that manages to have companies pay workers a living wage and pay corporate taxes. That would be a nice contribution to the world economy.

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