A Guaranteed Income for Every American • Hacker News Board

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#131

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #121

maxerickson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it won't. The $10,000 left after the mandatory health payments would be a cut for many social security recipients, and many of those same people are also probably getting more than $3,000 a year in health care out of Medicare. Similar problems with Medicaid, it's worth a lot more than $3,000 to the people that are getting it (mostly because children). This is basically taking the desire to cut entitlement progr…

> More doctors will actually lead to lower prices It might if we had a free market for healthcare and if providers were the largest healthcare expense. But we don't, and they're not. Providers' take-home pay only amounts to about 10% of healthcare spending nationally[0]. Furthermore, the reason we don't have a competitive market is entirely due to the payer situation, not the providers. Providers (particularly hospit…

I dunno, I think if there were more doctors more of them would end up working outside of hospitals.

It's certainly the case around here that doctors are moving under the hospital umbrella.

This means that providers have to make up the difference in their contracts with private insurers, which is why they can't tell you how much a particular procedure will cost you - they really don't know, because it has nothing to do with what it costs them.

Yes, this is an obnoxious tax. I don't think the hospitals are forced to keep their prices obscure though (see Massachusetts or Oklahoma), it just happens to be the best way for them to make revenue because if people could easily shop prices, they would. Another component of the problem are the many people who have a plan where they simply don't care about prices because they have a low out of pocket limit.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#132

Post by gregw134 » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

TrevorJ wrote: post #127

ten thousand dollars a year isn't going to really do anything but enable people to remain in minimum wage jobs though.

A lot of people only make 15-20k/year. It would do a lot for them.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#133

Post by amluto » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

Mz wrote: post #111

vilhelm_s wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess apartments in San Fransisco already cost more than what someone living off basic income could afford, so the prices should not be driven up at all. Indeed, people living there would presumably get a net reduction in income (from tax increases to pay for the BI), so the prices should go down.

If you read the article, the BI being proposed would drop off after you began earning more than $30k and the drop would stop at $60k in earned income. I imagine a rather high percentage of people living in San Francisco already earn well above $60k annually.

I've never understood why subsidies like this almost always come with income phaseouts. What's wrong with giving everyone a basic income? People who make a lot of money would more than repay it in taxes, and taxes would have to go up on higher earners, but that's not a real problem.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#134

Post by Mz » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:00 PM UTC

amluto wrote: post #133

Mz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, the BI being proposed would drop off after you began earning more than $30k and the drop would stop at $60k in earned income. I imagine a rather high percentage of people living in San Francisco already earn well above $60k annually.

I've never understood why subsidies like this almost always come with income phaseouts. What's wrong with giving everyone a basic income? People who make a lot of money would more than repay it in taxes, and taxes would have to go up on higher earners, but that's not a real problem.

I didn't write the article and I am not for the so called UBI. I am very much against it. I am willing to be convinced otherwise, and the start of this article sounded not crazy to me, but I stopped at reading at some point because later remarks reflected enormous cognitive dissonance in the writer, suggesting they really haven't thought it through and full of baloney.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#135

Post by Shivetya » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:01 PM UTC

While it is an interesting idea it is going to have to be crafted in such a way that politicians don't just treat it like tax law and start carving out exceptions.

another area people need to look into is changing the direction of though that has crept into society which that "you deserve this, that, and this, as its your right" and instead get back to the days where people were encouraged to strive to return more to society than society gave them.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#136

Post by vasilipupkin » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #3

Once again no answer to the main Question: What to do with people that blow their UBI by the 2nd of each month on SAAS Startups? Let them starve? Go without Shelter?

You could have a special program for those who can be shown to be mentally incapable of managing their ubi. If you don't pass the test, but accidentally waste your ubi and have no other income, there can be a loan program to be repaid at reasonably high interest rates out of your future ubi

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#137

Post by vasilipupkin » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:05 PM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #136

Roritharr wrote: post #3

Once again no answer to the main Question: What to do with people that blow their UBI by the 2nd of each month on SAAS Startups? Let them starve? Go without Shelter?

You could have a special program for those who can be shown to be mentally incapable of managing their ubi. If you don't pass the test, but accidentally waste your ubi and have no other income, there can be a loan program to be repaid at reasonably high interest rates out of your future ubi

And yes, if you are mentally capable but choose to waste your ubi, and can't repay the loan, we would let you starve. Same if you take your food stamps today and throw them in the river - we would let you starve

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#138

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:07 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…

There's a 3.8% Obamacare surtax on investment income that adds onto the top bracket starting at $250K.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#139

Post by maxaf » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:07 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #126

arbre wrote: post #73

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

If UBI was carried out as a series of one-time cash injections (such as QE), then yes it would simply lead to inflation as a large proportion of UBI recipients would have the propensity to spend that money immediately on rent, food, debt, releasing the cash into circulation and ramping up inflation. Spending would probably remain unchanged for middle/upper class folk who would view UBI income as negligible. If UBI wa…

I'm upper middle class, and I can already barely afford to live in this country. What we need isn't more taxes but a more judicious use of taxes that are already being levied. An effective and workable UBI scheme would replace all other forms of means-tested social support payments, foreign aid, and expenditures on meaningless warfare overseas. In such a perfect-world version of the United States UBI suddenly becomes feasible. One may only dream.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#140

Post by chimeracoder » Sat, Jun 04, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #131

chimeracoder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More doctors will actually lead to lower prices It might if we had a free market for healthcare and if providers were the largest healthcare expense. But we don't, and they're not. Providers' take-home pay only amounts to about 10% of healthcare spending nationally[0]. Furthermore, the reason we don't have a competitive market is entirely due to the payer situation, not the providers. Providers (particularly hospit…

I dunno, I think if there were more doctors more of them would end up working outside of hospitals. It's certainly the case around here that doctors are moving under the hospital umbrella. This means that providers have to make up the difference in their contracts with private insurers, which is why they can't tell you how much a particular procedure will cost you - they really don't know, because it has nothing to d…

> It's certainly the case around here that doctors are moving under the hospital umbrella.

That's part of a trend that's a few decades old, and which has accelerated in the last 5-10 years. It's not a function of the number of physicians; physicians are selling their practices to hospitals because they can no longer sustain themselves in private practice.

> I don't think the hospitals are forced to keep their prices obscure though (see Massachusetts or Oklahoma), it just happens to be the best way for them to make revenue because if people could easily shop prices, they would.

If anything, hospitals would prefer to be able to compete this way directly. They can't, though, because there is no single 'price', even if you're talking about a discrete, routine procedure that has no risk for complications. The way medical billing works, they don't necessarily have a set price for a given service per carrier. And even if they do, that doesn't always correlate to what the patient ends up paying (which is, of course, the thing the patient actually cares about). The reason they don't have a set price - even internally - isn't because they don't want to. It's because the contracts with public and private insurers have resulted in the amount of money they need to charge for a service being a function of so many external factors that they literally can't.

Chapter 224 is a perfect example of a feel-good law that doesn't actually do anything in practice, because it fails to address the underlying complexity that's the root of the current problem with price transparency.