A Guaranteed Income for Every American • Hacker News Board

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#91

Post by redthrow » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

Tycho wrote: post #44

maxerickson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A negative income tax would be one way to implement UBI. It sort of fits into the UBI umbrella.

Doesn't seem like the same thing to me. Negative income tax means you still need to find someone who will employ you, and also you don't get any benefit if you are above the threshold so it's not universal.

> you still need to find someone who will employ you

Not necessarily. Negative income tax is one way to implement means-tested basic income.

One way to implement a NIT is you have a cutoff point (e.g. $20,000/year) and a rebate rate (e.g. 50%).

So, using the above rate, if your income is...

(a) $0/year ... you get $10,000/year

(b) $10k/year ... you get ($20k-$10k) x 0.5 = $5,000/year (your total income is $15k/year)

(c) $15k/year ... you get ($20k-$15k) x 0.5 = $2,500/year (your total income is $17.5k/year)

(d) $20k/year and up ... you get nothing

---

> you don't get any benefit if you are above the threshold so it's not universal

It's not universal in the sense that not everyone gets the government check, but it's universal in the sense that the same rule is applied to everyone.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#92

Post by mac01021 » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

blazespin wrote: post #60

danbruc wrote: post #41

Several years ago I thought a universal basic income would be a good idea but the longer I thought about it the more that went away. Now I can't even tell which problem it tries to solve. There won't be enough work for everyone in the future? Well then cut down working hours instead of having half the population work full time and pay for the other half. Some jobs don't provide enough income to make a living? Then ha…

"Well then cut down working hours instead of having half the population work full time and pay for the other half" That doesn't work. The reality is, and I'm sorry to say, but the required IQ to be economically relevant is increasing every year. Your plan doesn't work because you can't spread out the work that way. Increasing minimum wages will only just accelerate automation and exacerbate the problem. My concern ab…

> My concern about UBI is that it won't properly track inflation

Have the Fed stop causing inflation?

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#93

Post by danbruc » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

dwc wrote: post #65

danbruc wrote: post #41

Several years ago I thought a universal basic income would be a good idea but the longer I thought about it the more that went away. Now I can't even tell which problem it tries to solve. There won't be enough work for everyone in the future? Well then cut down working hours instead of having half the population work full time and pay for the other half. Some jobs don't provide enough income to make a living? Then ha…

You're overthinking it a bit. What it does it remove the worry that you're going to starve or have no place to live, or take you from subsistence to a level that you can invest in the future. That's all. Perhaps that's enough. Whether this "solves" anything depends. Initial experiments are very limited, but fairly positive. Giving money to people in rural India may not translate too well to giving money to people in…

What it does it remove the worry that you're going to starve or have no place to live, or take you from subsistence to a level that you can invest in the future. That's all. Perhaps that's enough.

If your income drops below 404.00 Euro per month plus rent in Germany, you get the difference. Nobody will become homeless, nobody will starve. At least in theory. They will bug you to get a job as quickly as possible, make you do courses to improve your skills. The authorities are said to be kind of control freaks, supposedly to avoid abuse.

So it is a basic income. Universal? Well, the authorities won't just let you develop you new product idea for two years. If you don't try to get a job, they will bug you a lot. If you don't play by the rules, they can even cut some of the benefits.

So maybe we should just add a program that allows you to ask for benefits for a certain amount of time so that you can develop a business idea. Maybe there are already things like that. You certainly can get support if you want to educate yourself, attend a university and so on.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#94

Post by notahacker » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

danjoc wrote: post #45

mac01021 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this adds up. Here ( https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... ) is federal spending for 2015. It shows a total federal spending of 3.8 trillion dollars. This is all spending, including 0.5 trillion on the military, 0.2 trillion in interest on debt, and tons of other spending on things that are not welfare or social-safety-net programs. Meanwhile, $13k * 300m people, results in an…

There's another source of money not included here. The Fed creates money from nothing. That has to go somewhere. On top of the usual inflationary dollar creation of the Fed, they were doing "Quantitative Easing" for years to the tune of about $85-100 Billion per month given to banks in exchange for known worthless mortgages. So a good quarter of that $3.9 trillion could have been covered just by some "Quantitative Ea…

I'm more sympathetic to innovative monetary policies than most people that have studied the topic, but the monetary base isn't a money tree and unfortunately virtually every claim you've made is false.

The M2 growth figures are available and published by Fed sources. They're nowhere near enough to underwrite a basic income, even if none of that newly created credit was being directed towards useful economic activity https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2

M2 isn't created by the Fed anyway, it's created by private banks choosing to extend credit to entities they believe are on average productive enough to repay them at prevailing interest rates. It's possible to deter banks from making future loans of course, but I can't imagine doing that to make room for untargeted handouts being a good idea

The monetary base the Fed actually is responsible for issuing is much smaller and has actually shrunk since 2014. https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE

QE was a temporary large-scale response to financial shocks which is designed in principle to be reversible so it's about the worst way of funding the steady stream of expenditure required for BI imaginable.

It also consisted of the Fed buying up swapping the cash for existing financial assets in the form of government debt. If they're giving away the newly minted money instead, the amount the Fed can inject into the economy without generating unwanted inflation is much smaller. That might be desirable for a well targeted short term stimulus programme, but a BI certainly doesn't fall into that category (plus you don't get the fringe QE benefit of shrinking the govt debt/interest burden)

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#95

Post by shasta » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #57

dclowd9901 wrote: post #35

Not a fan of the decreasing benefits at $60k. That creates a huge donut hole for those making 59k and then get a 3% promotion. All of a sudden they've take a paycut. Make it a flat income. (Also, should be closer to $15 or $18k a year).

This proposal decreases benefits between $30k and $60k. The total delta in benefits would be $6.5k. Assuming this decrease occurs linearly, this comes out to a marginal tax of 21%. The current marginal tax rate for someone (unmarried) making between 37k and 91k is 25% [0] This means that over this $30k interval, people would be facing about a 46% effective marginal tax [1]. The current top bracket is only 39.6% and d…

> I agree that the UBI should be flat, because anything else is equivalent to changing our tax brackets; and if we want to do that, we should just change our tax brackets.

This was such a dumb sentence in an otherwise interesting post.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#96

Post by paul » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

arbre wrote: post #73

Wouldn't the price of everything raise accordingly, so that you basically can't afford anything with the basic income?

Only if the world were zero-sum, which it's not. Remember how only rich people used to have cell phones, and now billions of people have them? The price of most goods is close to the marginal cost of production, which means that giving more people money may actually lower the cost of many goods (by increasing volume). Artificially scarce goods, such as an apartment in SF, may get more expensive however since their price is set by the marginal ability to pay. The good news is, you don't have to live in SF.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#97

Post by mac01021 » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #71

blazespin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well then cut down working hours instead of having half the population work full time and pay for the other half" That doesn't work. The reality is, and I'm sorry to say, but the required IQ to be economically relevant is increasing every year. Your plan doesn't work because you can't spread out the work that way. Increasing minimum wages will only just accelerate automation and exacerbate the problem. My concern ab…

The reality is, and I'm sorry to say, but the required IQ to be economically relevant is increasing every year. Your plan doesn't work because you can't spread out the work that way. That is only a real problem if the population does not keep up with this development. I can not tell whether requirements are (now) growing faster then capabilities but both certainly grew ever since. The other thing is that it seems to…

> I meant to let no viable jobs die or automate.

Are you saying you'd outlaw self-service gas pumps and checkout stations? Robotic assembly lines and autonomous vehicles?

A large fraction of the population has no distinguishing skills. That segment of the population is going to find itself with ever fewer ways to earn a living.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#98

Post by trbvm2 » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

jkelsey wrote: post #86

trbvm2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right-wingers are mostly absent from this conversation. The question at hand is "can we give people enough to amount to a comprehensive solution and thereby save administrative costs"? I don't think any libertarian minded individuals actually believe in tossing out all safety nets and most likely don't care to reduce taxes on the wealthy either, at least not as a goal in and of itself.

Yes they do. Read the article and read up on the article's author. It's quite literally based around eliminating the costs of the social programs and instead throwing everybody a flat $10K/year.

I'm merely trying to discourage the ambiguous "they" labeling. I think the author is, indeed, a bit to on about the "you should help yourself" mentality. Some people can't or won't even if money is offered and many civilized people want to see those types cared for as well.

Even so, he's basically on your side in the sense that whatever UBI ends up being proposed for law, he would probably vote for it.

Personally, I think we can definitely eliminate the some of the costs of the social programs by giving everyone a flat $30-$40k per year.

The driving difference in thinking being that I believe that the only viable way to make basic income happen is to assess average living expenses across the board and provide that amount to everyone while retaining the former programs at a much smaller scale.

One of the big issues with the current system is that there is a lot of trouble in determining whether a person really needs the assistance of a program or not. UBI helps in that only those who can show a need beyond $30-$40k/yr need apply.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#99

Post by mac01021 » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:08 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #82

We shouldn't be talking about government paying basic income. We should talk about millionaires and billionaires paying living wage to everyone working in their home and every employee in their companies that they share ownership in. That would be a better conversation to have.

And when they stop hiring people because they no longer require the labor of people who do not have specialized skill sets?

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#100

Post by galdosdi » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:09 PM UTC

riskable wrote: post #59

teddyh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Some people will still behave irresponsibly and be in need before that deposit arrives, but the UBI will radically change the social framework within which they seek help: Everybody will know that everybody else has an income stream. It will be possible to say to the irresponsible what can’t be said now: “We won’t let you starve before you get your next deposit, but it’s time for you to get your a…

The problem here is the assumption that everyone on Medicaid, Social Security, etc is capable of spending money responsibly. Take away their benefits and hand them some cash. This will result in millions of vulnerable seniors and mentally disabled individuals being scammed out of their money each month. Whether it be "tech support" scammers or local fraudsters or even simply not being able to budget money (at a basic…

This is a solved problem (at least, it's solved about as well as you could expect we could do). Social Security has the notion of a REPY or "Representative Payee" for recipients deemed unable to spend their own money, a trustee who manages it on their behalf. It's similar to (but not the same as) the concept of a legal guardian.

All in all, the Social Security Administration has a huge amount of experience with all the details and problems involved in efficient day to day administration of a massive payments program like this, so there's no reason not to just reuse the existing bureaucratic infrastructure and just swap out the eligibility rules.