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A Guaranteed Income for Every American

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Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#341

Post by sokoloff »

phaemon wrote: post #323
sokoloff wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with letting the work be done at a market rate lower than the current (ideally abolished) minimum wage? I'd pay someone $5/hr to pull weeds, but I won't pay them $10 or $15/hr. Now, in which system can a neighbor earn an extra $20 a week for a morning of work? In which system does my front garden look nicer from the sidewalk? Someone (probably a teen) gets some walking around money, the whole neighborhoo…

You think $40 is excessive for a morning's work? I really don't know what to say to that that won't attract the wrath of dang. Perhaps he can suggest some polite words...

I didn't say I thought $10/hr was "excessive". What I said was that that was more than I was willing to pay to have that particular problem solved.

There are all sorts of things that people will pay a handful of dollars for, but that they won't/can't pay $10/hr for. Mine was just a concrete example of a low skill required task that I don't enjoy and that someone whose basic needs were already covered might be interested in doing, much like I did when I was a kid/teen and wanted to earn some extra money.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#342

Post by 97s »

VonGuard wrote: post #23
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…

The thing is, I don't think it can happen politically. What is going on now is just the research stage so that we have some sort of data point for UBI supporters to latch onto. There are all sorts of groups inside the UBI tent, and many of them disagree with each other violently, but we're so far from a UBI that for now, everyone can agree on it in the broadest possible way. I, personally, have a completely different…

This is how I feel. A lot of people don't even think about this problem. Cost of living increasing with robots taking more and more nominal jobs that the lower class occupies the homeless rate is going to soar in the future. We are already seeing computers take lots of jobs due to the minimal pay increases in several states.

A basic income is going to be the way of life or people are going to have to deal with millions of poor and an increase in crime.

One of the things that bothers me about the saying, "I don't want to pay for all their stuff, I work hard." Is that people don't realize one of the reasons your able to work hard and not worry about your house getting robbed while your at work is that we take care of the poor and disabled. If you take away that care in the future because your too greedy to help out your fellow man, then you end up losing a lot of peace of mind as crime increases because of people having to steal for basic necessities.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#343

Post by rainy-day »

djrogers wrote: post #257
danbruc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a job that does not pay for a living, then there are two possible reasons. Customers actually value the work enough and pay enough for the product but the business owners take the money. In this case there should be a minimum wage cutting into the profits of the business owners making it a viable job. On the other hand customers may not value the work enough and the job is just not viable, there is no mar…

Why should every job provide a 'living wage'? A high school kid working through the summer at an ice cream shop is learning to work, learning responsibility, and getting a little spending money - why would you want to outlaw that?

Nobody specifically wants to outlaw that. Literally nobody. Laws have to have a tradeoff between being too general and being too specific (and having too many special cases). Being too general means catching too many edge cases where it does more harm than good. Handling too many special cases creates a moral hazard where there's more benefit in finding loopholes or plainly ignoring poorly enforced parts of the laws than honest work.

Anecdotally, I did work as a kid, didn't learn anything useful, did not learn responsibility, a bit of money I didn't really need, and it felt like a waste of time and left a bad taste overall.

I fully believe that in many, possibly most cases, work is beneficial for kids (as long as they're not from poor families in which case there will be too much pressure to overwork, affecting school/homework and taking away whatever little time they have to enjoy childhood).

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#344

Post by aianus »

prawn wrote: post #269
aianus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should people be entitled to three children they can't afford rather than a beach bum lifestyle? If anything we should incentive the latter; at least it doesn't hurt anyone else.

Because not everyone chooses to have multiple children they can't afford. Maybe their breadwinner partner died. Maybe they were going to be pushing it with two kids, but the second pregnancy was twins. Or the first was triplets. Or they had great family support that allowed them to work a couple of days, but those people moved elsewhere. I don't think people should be jumping into parenthood without knowing what it r…

But if you give people direct financial incentives to have more children, as OP wants, that's what they'll do.

Look what the birth rate was 200 years ago when children were considered retirement investments (or elsewhere in the world where that's still true).

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#345

Post by Spivak »

aoeuasdf1 wrote: post #327
zeta0134 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the punishment should be appropriate to the crime though. Leave jail for the criminally dangerous, those whose freedom would be a physical danger to others. (Murderers, rapists, etc.) Fraud? If it's money that was gained, then it should be money lost. Fine them into the dirt, but I don't think jail time is appropriate. Making money illegally doesn't make someone a murderer, it just makes then dishonest.

The problem is then the rich will do a simple expected value computation to decide whether to do fraud. A disproportionate and non monetary punishment will be far more effective at deterring them.

> The problem is then the rich will do a simple expected value computation to decide whether to do fraud.

Then write the law so that the penalty can never possibly be worth the cost.

Jail is downright inhumane, and the only reason we should tolerate it is the case when the person is violent and there is good reason to believe that in the absence of imprisonment they will be a danger to others. And they should remain in jail only as long as the threat of danger remains credible.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#346

Post by maxerickson »

ScottBurson wrote: post #267
maxerickson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, they often have no idea what services cost . This is different than not having an internal price. And there shouldn't be external factors that prevent them from measuring it. Or are you saying that they are contractually bound to avoid tracking costs?

I don't know the answer to your question, but here's an interesting anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4465845

Right, they aren't setup to bill the damn thing. It's ridiculous.

chimeracoder seems to be saying that this is because of the complexity that comes from interacting with insurance companies and the public payers. Where I don't really buy that explanation is where there is in fact a fixed capital cost associated with the machine, and a certain number of uses of the machine per year, and a pretty fixed level of complexity per use (different scans will take a different amount of time, but each type of scan will be reasonably consistent from patient to patient). So they can take a spreadsheet and put in the capital costs and the operating costs and the staffing costs and boom, they have a ballpark figure for what each scan costs. It won't be the exact number for a given scan, but it will be closer than not having any estimate at all. I don't see where complexity on the billing side prevents them from doing what I describe.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#347

Post by tmptmp »

zeta0134 wrote: post #304
mynewtb wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crime does not have to be violent to deserve drastic penalty.

I feel like the punishment should be appropriate to the crime though. Leave jail for the criminally dangerous, those whose freedom would be a physical danger to others. (Murderers, rapists, etc.) Fraud? If it's money that was gained, then it should be money lost. Fine them into the dirt, but I don't think jail time is appropriate. Making money illegally doesn't make someone a murderer, it just makes then dishonest.

>>Fraud? If it's money that was gained, then it should be money lost. Fine them into the dirt, but I don't think jail time is appropriate.

That'd acceptable if at least the following conditions hold:

a. First and foremost, the fraudster should be ashamed publicly and in a very visible manner on social media, television/radio and newspaper. e.g. The fraudster be made to wear clothes that are deemed filthy and be made to hold a placard stating "I repeat that I am a fraudster and I don't deserve to be a citizen of this nation. I also state that my relatives and my friends and my associates can be fraudsters themselves because they liked to hang out with me. They are free to disassociate themselves from me but if they continue to associate with me you know that they are also fraudsters." This video and news should be sent to all people who are associated with the fraudster.

b. the fine should be such that all assets/money belonging to the fraudster should be confiscated and along with all the assets of the relatives that have been linked to the fraudster's money; (it's very easy to game the system otherwise). The relatives should be given a notice that they should declare all such linked assets/money voluntarily and should return the same within a specified period and failing to do so they should also be declared as party to the original fraud and thus fraudsters themselves and be prosecuted.

c. The fraudster should be banned from doing any financial sector job; only physical labour jobs should be allowed.

d. The fraudster should not be allowed to leave the country

e. All the money the fraudster has spent on the legal battle (fee of the attorney) should also be confiscated from the attorneys (this is also important, as the attorneys will be forced to act more ethically not because they are honest but just because of the risk involved). I know they will find other ways to get rewarded but at least those will not be as straight forward. The attorneys also should be given a notice that they should declare all such linked assets/money voluntarily and should return the same within a specified period and failing to do so they should also be declared as party to the original fraud and thus fraudsters themselves and be prosecuted.

f. Any money not recovered from the fraudster should automatically be treated as loan-default and the fraudster be prosecuted for default in addition to the fraud charges and the applicable legal process be initiated.

In short, even the filthy rich fraudsters [1] should not be able to game the system. The punishment should be such a deterrent that even the filthy rich fraudsters should shiver at the thought of it.

>>Making money illegally doesn't make someone a murderer, it just makes then dishonest.

But they are still causing irreparable harm to the societal fabric and other people will fast lose their faith the legal system if the filthy rich fraudsters don't get punished in a big way.

[1] anyone controlling the big banks and big corporations like Goldman Sachs.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#348

Post by todd8 »

I see lots of comments that suggest that a UBI wouldn't work because the rich have their money offshore, etc. However, I'm not so pessimistic. The parent article is about a plan for the US, and in the US, the rich do pay their taxes. According to the IRS [1], the top 10% make 48% of the total adjusted gross income in the US and pay over 70% of the total income tax.

Many aspects of the tax system don't make sense to me, but overall it just isn't true that in the US the rich don't pay their taxes.

Some rich Americans choose to renounce their citizenship each year and leave for other countries. The numbers are relatively small, and it involves extremely high tax penalties. (Something like 10 years of taxes and the payment of all capital gains realized or not.) This wouldn't make any difference to a UBI plan.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/soi-a-ints-id1506.pdf

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#349

Post by passivepinetree »

rayalez wrote: post #285

I'm surprised that so many people on HN support UBI, it sounds horrifying to me. Did you learn nothing from communism? By increasing taxes you decrease incentives for making wealth, and, more importantly, infringe on individual freedoms. Infringing on human rights of the rich people is one of the worst things you can do for the economy, because they are the people with means of production, and they are the people wit…

One of the author's main points was financial: he posits that (his idea of) a UBI would be much more inexpensive (and therefore require fewer taxes). Quote: "As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper."

Also, FWIW, the author writes for a conservative think tank.

Re: A Guaranteed Income for Every American

#350

Post by anovikov »

This idea seems to be so cynical. So capitalists want to, flatten the distribution of social welfare: give more or less same money, but evenly to everyone. What will be achieved? Now it is received by the people who are deeply in need. You are not going to make much profit on them: people who are deeply in need are very frugal at spending their money, they are price-conscious by definition. Now everyone will get an even amount, and most Americans aren't poor by any standard, so the money will be spent to increase consumption of the non-essentials (increasing your profits), or to invest in stock (increasing your valuation). And then it is shown as a move to a better and more fair society.

They want 'good' consumers to consume more and multiply, and 'useless' poor people to die as quickly as possible (because $3000 is too little to pay for health insurance) and never have any children (because the UBI is not given to children, and so if you leave on UBI and have a child, you are instantly desperately poor, and no other means to support say, single moms, will exist). Social Darwinism, supply side!

What a cynicism!

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