Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 280 posts

Re: My own private basic income

#191

Post by kobeya »

erentz wrote: post #70

Wow I am astounded that all the comments so far are trying to tear down this person and what he is saying, and very transparently because there seems to be something threatening about this idea that he got where he has through luck. Why do people find this idea so threatening? I got where I am today due to luck. I did work hard. But I know other people who work hard too. Who are just as capable. They just didn't get…

Because outside of winning the lottery it isn't 100% luck that results in haves vs have-nots. There is a degree of luck involved, but there is also preparation and opportunism (aka making your own luck). True universal basic income completely ignores this aspect, as does absolutist critiques of the rentier system we have today. Is it fucked up that a line arbitrarily drawn in the sand resulted in the division into piss-poor and uber-wealthy? Yes, but that's a ridiculous over simplification and it's not obvious that the solution is to socialize the distribution of wealth. That is communism by another name and I don't recall that working out very well for anybody in the 20th century.

Re: My own private basic income

#192

Post by zanny »

objectivistbrit wrote: post #41

He talks about the unfairness of "our economic system" but he makes his income from Qatar's economic system. Qatar likes to spend their oil money on western professors to give themselves an air of legitimacy. As for renting out property, it's never effortless or risk-free. If it was, the rate of return would drop to that of other minimum risk assets (e.g. treasury bonds).

Our economic system is global even if our politics are not. The salaries Qatar pays are as influential in his life as any job he could have gotten stateside. The prices of oil and coffee beans are set internationally. Raising the minimum wage locally influences global capital flows away from your area, removing regulations directs global capital towards you. Zoning laws that restrict building and inflate property values will attract investors 5 time zones away on the other side of the planet.

Re: My own private basic income

#193

Post by zanny »

pavement wrote: post #92

nor is there a combination of bad choices that could conceivably put me in their position from my starting point. Guess again.

An American born citizen will (statistically) never be an indentured servant / migrant slave in oil rich countries.

Re: My own private basic income

#194

Post by harryh »

tunesmith wrote: post #73

What I got out of this was the suggestion to fund Basic Income by taxing unearned income. I'd like to read more on how the numbers would actually work out. If that were the only funding source of BI, then how much impact would that be on the rich, and how much benefit would that be for the people that could use BI?

The US collects about $1.5 trillion from income taxes per year. A bit of googling leads me to believe that about 10% of that is from capital gains so that's 150 billion. Let's say we 2x capital gains rates and (magically!) earnings from capital gains don't go down.

So we have $150B for our Basic Income. There are about 300 million Americans (I rounded down to make the math easy). $150 Billion / 300 Million = $500 each per year.

Re: My own private basic income

#195

Post by kasey_junk »

harryh wrote: post #189
edpichler wrote: post #95

The article is about something that should be obvious, capitalism: money goes to the capital owner. Of course this has a lot of problems, but it's the best we have today. On this system, the rules of the game are: we need to work and spend less than we earn, and use the money to accumulate more capital, an not buying more things.

In the US, the vast majority of gross national income goes to labor not capital. FWIW.

I believe you and my instincts agree with you, but how are you quantifying that?

Re: My own private basic income

#196

Post by ssambros »

pishpash wrote: post #136
drewcon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor. Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened throu…

Begin with fallacies and you shall conclude nonsense. As a species, once we reached apex predator status, we were already born with the entire Earth's resources as our inheritance, not nothing. Somehow those got divided up and almost never was it via the mechanisms of an open market economy -- only in exceptional circumstances did those mechanisms provide a modicum of mobility, especially during technological transit…

My guess is that a lot more people would support the redesign of how the land and natural resources are being distributed, but for some reason only redistribution of income generated from work is discussed in such conversations.

Re: My own private basic income

#197

Post by harryh »

kasey_junk wrote: post #195
harryh wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the vast majority of gross national income goes to labor not capital. FWIW.

I believe you and my instincts agree with you, but how are you quantifying that?

Scott Sumner has a great blog post that gets into this (and some other semi related topics):

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=30566

Re: My own private basic income

#198

Post by aerovistae »

erikcw wrote: post #175
aerovistae wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they took any sort of money from their business, it would be taxed as income. But if the money just stays inside the business and is used to buy more rental buildings-- what's there to tax? So the business keeps growing and growing. Case A: the owners take a paycheck of $100,000. It gets taxed at 30%, they get $70k. Case B: the owners take no paycheck but instead buy a $100,000 property through the business with t…

But in Case B, wouldn't they have to pay the corporate income tax on that $100,000 before they buy the next property (39.1% in 2017)? I thought each property is a capital expense which gets depreciated over time. So you can't buy a second property with your profits and deduct it as an expense in the current year. Am I missing something?

You're probably not missing something. I could be wrong.

Re: My own private basic income

#199

Post by kasey_junk »

brianwawok wrote: post #19

Hey, South Bend made an article on the internet and it wasn't even about our mayor! Rental income here is a bit weird because you have in general a very poor town, with a very expensive private university with old money funding houses for students. I bought my house here for a fair bit less than it would cost to rent something half the size.

I live in an area where college students cause an imbalance between the cost to rent vs buy (the purchase prices in the area are lower than you'd expect given the rents).

I'm constantly surprised that the market doesn't arbitrage this away. I suppose that is due to the fact that the real estate market is less efficient than others (both due to liquidity and transaction costs) and that being a landlord is harder than people suspect.

In either case, its always made me leery of rental real estate as an investment vehicle.

Re: My own private basic income

#200

Post by harryh »

omegaham wrote: post #68
OJFord wrote: post #26

> [in the US] people who don’t need their income are taxed less than people who do I'm not American; I don't know the tax structure. But I can't even imagine that this could possibly be true, or what is true that is meant. Without looking it up, I would assume that the USA subscribes to progressive taxation, under which the richer pay more tax in both absolute and relative terms. Even if it has a flat rate of tax, (a…

Let's look at Person A vs Person B. Person A is a football player and makes $1 million in salary per year. This is all taxed progressively, meaning that Uncle Sam takes off 39.6% of most of his income. As a result, he pays close to $400k in taxes. Person B is an investor. He invests in Applied Materials, and they have a very good year. His stock is now worth $1 million more than it was at the beginning of the year. S…

This description isn't quite right, though you're mostly in the right direction.

If you buy a share of stock (or any other asset) you don't pay any taxes until you sell it (or you die) and realize the income. That income is called a Capital Gain and is taxed either at Short Term or Long Term rates. Short Term gains (under 1 year) are (more or less) taxes just like regular income. Long Term gains (over 1 year) are taxed at a lower rate.

There are generally pretty good reasons for the different rates and the US is not at all unusual in this way. Virtually all countries have similar setups. The UK (where OP is from) does this.

It's also worth nothing since the blog author was talking about real estate that rent collected from residential real estate is NOT a capital gain, but is ordinary income.

Post reply on HN