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A Guaranteed Income for Every American

wsj.com

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Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#241

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sokoloff wrote: post #151
AJ007 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some level definitely. The whole concept of countries creating way too much currency to pay their bills is a good reflection of this -- Zimbabwe and Venezuela being two recent and current examples. The irony is that all of that "extra" money actually means the recipients become substantially poorer as the supply chains get fucked up. If it is just a little extra injection, the outcome would not be as extreme. In t…

If UBI seems possible to pass within 5 years, that will be signal to ramp up investments in low-end rental properties. You have to do it before it's certain to pass (else the purchase price runs up), but I can't see anything happening to rents other than a sharp move up.

I still don't understand this argument. The vast majority of people who would receive the UBI are not homeless. They live somewhere now. Why would the same number of people suddenly demand substantially more housing?

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#242

Post by Michael_Murray »

adevine wrote: post #233
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The $10,000 left after the mandatory health payments would be a cut for many social security recipients The easy way to do this is to give people a one-time election between social security and the basic income, so that nobody can object that they're not better off. Anybody who isn't at or close to retirement will choose the basic income because it begins paying immediately, the lifetime payments are higher and the…

> It seems like your argument is that we can't do it because there are a relatively small number of people who would be better off under the existing system. But by that logic we could never change anything, even if the net benefits are very large, as long as there is anyone who is better off under the status quo. I think this is an incredibly unfair and callous assessment of what's going on with catastrophic health…

That's actually an incredibly short-sighted risk calculation that intentionally weighs some unknowns as higher value than others.

For example, I can make the same kind of argument in the opposite direction: if UBI creates a disincentive within inner cities for fewer kids to become drug dealers, which creates less opportunities for violence, leading to significantly less deaths in the inner city, I think that you are making "an incredibly unfair and callous assessment" as well.

Saying that any plan that transfers risk from the current state to a different state that is potentially net better for all is to miss the point that we've already chosen a system that disadvantages SOMEONE... and to change it will probably disadvantage someone different.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#243

Post by adevine »

prostoalex wrote: post #207
leepowers wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under the Murray UBI plan recipients would be required to spend $3000 per year on health insurance. That would be your mother's replacement for Medicaid. However, that doesn't factor in co-pays, deductibles, balance-billing, and the myriad other costs of private insurance. A health care premium of $3000 is going to have a high deductible. My premium is close to $3000 a year, and my deductible is $5250. Under this pla…

> Under the Murray UBI plan recipients would be required to spend $3000 per year on health insurance. That would be your mother's replacement for Medicaid. "Annual premiums edged beyond $17,500 for an average family." http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-insurance-premium... And this is in the marketplace that purposefully excludes Medicare recipients, who are older and are disproportionately more likely to hav…

It seems to me the simple calculation is to see that, currently, the US spends ~$9,500 per capita annually for healthcare (that number seems so crazy to me, but therein lies the problem). The WSJ article didn't go into more detail, but I don't understand how $3k per year goes to cover that $9500 amount without huge deductibles and copays, which disabled people won't be able to pay because they will have no other assistance beyond their UBI.

I don't see how UBI works without some other form of guaranteed health insurance for the poor.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#244

Post by ars »

greedo wrote: post #155
galdosdi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

And if you retain the SSA, one of the biggest arguments for UBI (dismantling wasteful government agencies) gets defenestrated.

I would expect the SSA to be the ones administering the UBI plan.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#245

Post by analog31 »

chimeracoder wrote: post #240
analog31 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are salaries a good measure of the income of doctors? I've read that more than half of doctors are self employed, and I suspect that their ownership stake in medical businesses produces a good portion of their incomes.

It's the other way around. As of recently, the majority of doctors are salaried (employed), not in private practice. The numbers I cite correspond to the practice revenues, but as much as half of what doctors in private practice receive in reimbursements goes to practice expenses and insurance.

That's an interesting change. It wasn't too many years ago that my employer-provided health insurance was through a doctor-owned provider.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#246

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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.

Which doesn't work when jobs require uncommon abilities or highly specialized training and thus either can't be done by the other people or would be highly inefficient to train them to do and then not have them working full time.

> Some jobs don't provide enough income to make a living? Then have sufficient minimum wages, there is no point in doing any work that does not pay well enough to make a living.

And then any jobs whose economic value is below that minimum wage disappear, leading back to the first problem.

> Also universality, what is the point? Above some income you are essentially just paying yourself.

You are. Which means it has a built in phase out -- you effectively stop getting it once you've paid more taxes than you receive in basic income. Adding another phase out causes the marginal tax rate on middle income people to be unreasonably high and takes money away from them that would otherwise have come from higher income people.

A universal basic income has rich people paying poor people and middle income people paying themselves. A basic income with a phase out instead has middle income people paying poor people so the rich can have a tax cut.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#247

Post by adevine »

Michael_Murray wrote: post #242
adevine wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like your argument is that we can't do it because there are a relatively small number of people who would be better off under the existing system. But by that logic we could never change anything, even if the net benefits are very large, as long as there is anyone who is better off under the status quo. I think this is an incredibly unfair and callous assessment of what's going on with catastrophic health…

That's actually an incredibly short-sighted risk calculation that intentionally weighs some unknowns as higher value than others. For example, I can make the same kind of argument in the opposite direction: if UBI creates a disincentive within inner cities for fewer kids to become drug dealers, which creates less opportunities for violence, leading to significantly less deaths in the inner city, I think that you are…

We do not live in some Vulcan dystopia. The idea of essentially telling people, who are currently alive, "Yes, we can keep you alive, but by letting you die, there is some probability (which we don't really know and are just guessing at) that we can use the saved money to prevent 1.2 deaths" strikes me as the plot of a horror science fiction movie.

I am all for UBI, but like another poster said I don't think it works without universal health care if you get rid of all the other current transfer payments. It seems the author of the article agrees, but I don't see how the 3K for insurance makes the numbers add up.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#248

Post by AnthonyMouse »

adevine wrote: post #247
Michael_Murray wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually an incredibly short-sighted risk calculation that intentionally weighs some unknowns as higher value than others. For example, I can make the same kind of argument in the opposite direction: if UBI creates a disincentive within inner cities for fewer kids to become drug dealers, which creates less opportunities for violence, leading to significantly less deaths in the inner city, I think that you are…

We do not live in some Vulcan dystopia. The idea of essentially telling people, who are currently alive, "Yes, we can keep you alive, but by letting you die, there is some probability (which we don't really know and are just guessing at) that we can use the saved money to prevent 1.2 deaths" strikes me as the plot of a horror science fiction movie. I am all for UBI, but like another poster said I don't think it works…

> The idea of essentially telling people, who are currently alive, "Yes, we can keep you alive, but by letting you die, there is some probability (which we don't really know and are just guessing at) that we can use the saved money to prevent 1.2 deaths" strikes me as the plot of a horror science fiction movie.

People hate having to make that choice. Hate it. But that doesn't make it go away. We could make cars safer in well-known obvious ways, but they would be more expensive and use more fuel. Many, many, many lives would be saved if we immediately stopped burning coal, but electricity would be more expensive, and then maybe some people would freeze to death because they can't afford heat, or because they became unemployed and lost medical coverage. And in some cases we may even be getting it wrong, but that doesn't get you out of having to make a hard decision.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#249

Post by dredmorbius »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #4

"The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare." How the hell does that happen politically? I would love to see basic income replacing a large portion of social programs in the stat…

It doesn't.

I suspect this is poisoning the well.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#250

Post by discardorama »

> A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them.

Unfortunately, I have 2 problems with this:

1. Of the people that I see in SF who could use UBI, almost none of them seem the type who would clean up their acts with UBI. They have serious mental issues, and money means only 1 thing to them: a means to chemical substances. So what do you do when a guy blows his $2000 monthly stipend on hookers and blow and now is back on the streets? Arrest him? Send him to jail? Put him in a mental hospital? And who pays for that? And who provides him the services, if the bureaucrats who used to do it are gone?

2. What do you do about the millions who are employed in the service-providing sector (bureaucrats, non-profits, etc.) ? Right now they make decent money; you're now going to lay them off. Where will the jobs come from for them?

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