We're officially launching UBI • Hacker News Board

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#181

Post by Turing_Machine » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

clay_to_n wrote: post #64

GuB-42 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is just a special case of a negative income tax where numbers cancel out. The biggest advantage of UBI is its simplicity. You just get your UBI, done, much easier for people to understand and for the government to manage.

Yup. In my guess, UBI is more overhead to run since there are literally more line items on people's tax documents (there's the UBI as well as the progressive tax that is used to pay for it). But UBI's have the perceived simplicity of "I always get this", which might help encourage more people to pay in, even though the higher earners are losing money.

Why would there be an additional line item if everyone gets the same UBI? That amount could just be built into the tax tables, right?

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#182

Post by Turing_Machine » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 3:05 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #47

Gargoyle wrote: post #34

I'd rather see someone work on the Universal part first. Get distributions, however small, into the hands of every individual. Scaling up the distributions isn't a difficult problem to solve, the universal part is.

A dollar a day to every US citizen is $114 billion a year. At that expense I would think scaling it at all once it reaches universality is nearly impossible. Even if we're theoretically giving every $10k/yr, upping that to $10,365/yr still costs well over $100 billion.

> Even if we're theoretically giving every $10k/yr, upping that to $10,365/yr still costs well over $100 billion.

Not if most of it is coming back in income taxes, it doesn't.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#183

Post by Turing_Machine » Fri, Nov 17, 2017, 3:07 PM UTC

programminggeek wrote: post #166

The math on UBI doesn't work. It simply resets $0 to some higher amount set by UBI. It's a means of inflation and hilariously, it will make the rich even richer, because it will remove some incentives to do what it takes to get rich - learn skills and information that make you wealthy. The story that comes after UBI and other forms of socialism is that humans are greedy and terrible to each other and institutionalize…

> One last thought on my silly little rant, "Do you think Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet should get UBI paid out to him?"

Of course they would. That's how it works, dude.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#184

Post by closeparen » Sat, Nov 18, 2017, 8:54 AM UTC

PeterisP wrote: post #175

closeparen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then many (the upper half of?) citizens will have tax burdens greater than their basic income payments. Is it “not means tested” because you and the IRS both mail each other checks instead of using net settlement? What makes UBI different from standard progressive taxation and welfare?

Most (all current?) welfare schemes have a disincentive for work because earning income disqualifies you from welfare, and getting a poor job can make you worse off even if the welfare amount is below the minimum wage, since going to that job often also does add extra expense (transportation, caretaker for kids and other dependents, etc). With unconditional basic income, however, all the job income is extra, which is…

>all the job income is extra

If a realistic working person's income tax liability is going to be a substantial portion of or greater than the UBI allocation, UBI is really just unemployment insurance and the disincentive to work remains.

We already have a "basic income" for working people: (personal exemption + standard deduction) * (marginal tax rate). Working people are still net taxpayers. Making them not net taxpayers is just sharply increasing the progressiveness of the progressive taxation scheme, i.e. standard liberal/Democratic politics since forever.

I'd support reframing the standard deduction, personal exemption, child tax credit, etc. as refundable credits, but this is only "income" at the bottom of the distribution.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#185

Post by johnchristopher » Sat, Nov 18, 2017, 11:01 AM UTC

chatmasta wrote: post #22

How can you meaningfully experiment with UBI if the “BI” is not even universal ? My understanding is that many of the criticisms of UBI are based on externalities that would only become manifest in a meaningfully large population. For example, price increases and inflation might arise from everyone having extra money. If you’re only testing UBI on a small population, then 1) it’s not even universal, and 2) there will…

This really does sound like FUD to my ears.