Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#361

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 6:55 PM UTC

effn wrote: post #51

astrodust wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately. The Mincome experiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome ) dabbled with this idea and the results were rather surprising. Most people seemed to want to work rather than loaf around and collect benefits. Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates o…

> The idea seems to be that you can free up a lot of the money wasted on bureaucracy and pay out to everyone indiscriminately. This idea does not stand up to any scrutiny at all. The cost of administering a welfare bureaucracy is minuscule compared to the cost of a BI program. > Don't think you'd have to "tax the rich like crazy". Would returning to the tax rates of the 1990s be "crazy"? Would closing corporate looph…

[deleted]

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#362

Post by jdietrich » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #354

crazygringo wrote: post #73

> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…

> If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. This has never seemed like a strong argument or an accurate description of what actually happens to me. If it's true that businesses just pass along taxes, then: 1) I'd think businesses wouldn't be so concerned with minimizing/fighting taxes. What we see…

On point 1, tax avoidance is more strongly incentivised if the costs are passed on to customers. Higher prices are a huge competitive disadvantage. A single company avoiding their taxes can undercut their competition and dominate the market, forcing all of their competition to follow suit.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

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Post by spinachthrow » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

dannypgh wrote: post #309

spinachthrow wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think inflation is?

As you mention, inflation results in people losing real wealth proportionally to the amount of total (nominal) wealth that they have. On the whole, it's a fairly progressive form of redistribution, as long as wages are able to rise with inflation. It would seem to me that an unconditional basic income could therefore be paid in part through this mechanism, with the inflation caused by simply increasing the amount of…

Exactly - wages do rise with inflation, but as we know from intro macro, there's always a bit of a delay due to contracts etc. The problem with inflation is it drives people even further up the risk curve to find yield.

The other problem is that while inflation incentivizes moving up the risk curve, capital gains work in the opposite direction, incentivizing idle cash balances. One side of the government wants you find yield, the other punishes you for finding that yield.

At the end of the day, you're just going to make people find that yield (they have to) and you won't increase tax revenue. People can stomach _some_ risk, but not an infinite amount (especially the institutional guys).

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#364

Post by tocomment » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 6:59 PM UTC

I read this thread his morning and I'm having a really difficult time figuring out how the discussion has changed since then. Which comments are new? Which comments are valuable?

Does anyone else have this problem on HN? Any solutions?

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#365

Post by hackinthebochs » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:03 PM UTC

tocomment wrote: post #364

I read this thread his morning and I'm having a really difficult time figuring out how the discussion has changed since then. Which comments are new? Which comments are valuable? Does anyone else have this problem on HN? Any solutions?

I have that problem a lot in active discussions. I tend to comment in the good ones so I generally just look at the time of my last comment and skim the post times to see which ones came since then. This sounds like a good opportunity for an HN browser extension or greasemonkey script.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#366

Post by jsnk » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #258

crazygringo wrote: post #73

> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…

I'm not in favor of corporate taxes for practical reasons--I think they're too hard to make work in an international setting. That said, it is not necessarily the case that taxes on corporate profits are passed on to consumers through higher product prices. At always comes back to prices being the equilibrium of supply and demand. Taxes on corporate profits obviously have no impact on demand, so we must look at suppl…

I think Apple would offshore more and more businesses as every other large companies who can afford to has been doing for decades now. And that I think is always the problem with simply raising more corporate taxes in US.

As you raise more corporate tax in US, doing business in US becomes less and less attractive. As business move away from US, there will be less and less jobs in US. This already and undeniably happened with manufacturing sector. Unfortunately, people are now again arguing for increasing more taxes in US which will further lead to more business moving their business to other countries.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#367

Post by rbellio » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #337

zxcdw wrote: post #313

I don't understand how people oppose unconditional basic income without also opposing the fact that automation decreases the amount of working hours available for a person(or in other words, the amount of jobs ), and thus decreases the amount of income per person, while maintaining productivity stable if not increasing it, thus making all sorts of goods cheaper. Someone enlighten me. These discussions always seem so…

Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization. It's been happening since the cotton gin, and is a basic staple of an advancing society. We're able to sit on our butts in our chairs and make our livings punching keys on a little rectangle while staring at another little glowing rectangle because our societies are highly specialized and highly automated, making it economica…

I would just point out that from what I understand, automation isn't exactly what people outside of manufacturing/engineering believe it to be. There are still a lot of jobs that are not and will never be automated in the manufacturing industry. The cost of labor still ends up being cheaper than the design and maintenance of a machine smart enough to do fabrication and assembly.

I wish I could find a percentage of manufacturing down with automation, but I would guess that a fair number of things are still built by hand. I've taken a fair number of factory tours outside of the automotive industry and am always amazed to see skilled laborers at work.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#368

Post by thedufer » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

aneth4 wrote: post #203

I agree that a basic income may be the best solution to the decline in demand for labor. And I consider myself economically conservative. There is still much to be learned about the societal effect. Its something we need to consider as an alternative to social upheaval. However other parts of this article concern me, in particular: "Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal." Employme…

> Employment law is liberalised, as workers no longer need to fear dismissal.

I read that as "workers no longer need to fear dismissal because they can fall back on their basic income", and assumed that "liberalised" meant "doesn't protect workers from being fired". But you read that completely differently. Which does he mean? I agree with it as I read it, which is the same as what you're saying.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

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Post by pyoung » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

chiph wrote: post #237

kyllo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really heard of anyone proposing a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on I've heard of lots of people proposing a very small guaranteed payment from the state, as in, bare minimum for subsistence-level food and shelter, on the order of $10,000/year. You would not be able to "party every night for life" on such a pension. The idea is that it would lubricate the job market, re…

I strongly suspect that the Basic Income Guarantee would receive increases in excess of the rate of inflation, as politicians use it to buy votes. I think the $10k/yr figure that was quoted is unrealistic - that would cover food expenses with not much left over for housing costs. Even in a low-cost part of the nation, they'd have to perform work of some kind to earn more.

Ideally, increases would get tied to the CPI, or some other index. I also wouldn't mind a provision that would automatically adjust payments to ensure solvency.

Regarding the amount, it should be small enough to make it difficult to live off of. I don't think it would be a good idea if we created a class of BI dependents. There should still be fairly strong incentives to work. I think the main purpose of the BI would be to alleviate the need to rely on corporate america as a de facto social welfare provider. If you look at what happened to Detroit, for example, after the car industry tanked, the local economy went down with it. At the very least, BI would have provided a stabilizing force, slowing down the decline, and possibly giving residents a chance to re-build the local economy.

Re: Trends that will create demand for an Unconditional Basic Income

#370

Post by mathattack » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 7:06 PM UTC

I like this conceptually, but where you set that wage is the tricky part. If most folks don't have to work, most won't. Less people to tax too. That will in turn cause inflation, as there's less supply of goods. Then you'd have to increase the wage to follow suit.

To get any kind of equilibrium that preserves an incentive to work, you'd need that universal payment to be fairly low. This isn't to say, "Don't do it" - it's just to be careful with it.