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

It Is Time For Basic Income

hawkins.ventures

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 761 posts

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#581

Post by JoeAltmaier »

marcosdumay wrote: post #216
ekianjo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basic income is the first step to an empirically ethical society Not sure, but wouldn't basic income induce increased prices for commodities? If disposable income increases for everyone, then there is an incentive to increase prices everywhere (including accommodation which is a significant part of monthly expenses), thus negating the positive effects of basic income. Then you know what would happen next... people…

Basic income means taxing people with income, and redistributing it to everybody. Where did you get the idea that disposable income increases for everyone? How could that be even possible?

For the rich, taxes are all disposable income. For the 99%, taxes are cutting into their living wage. The rich might not be able to afford a 3rd house; the rest of us struggle to pay a mortgate/rent on the 1st one.

So for Almost everybody, disposable income rises.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#583

Post by JoeAltmaier »

growupkids wrote: post #549
dragonwriter wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you keep some demagogue from campaigning on abolishing this mechanism and just giving people more money? You don't. People can run with any platform they want. Of course, pretty much this idea has been raised against even the idea of democratic government for centuries -- that if the masses could just vote for people to give them money, they would. Strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. There'll be plenty o…

Of course it happens. Entitlement spending essentially never goes down, it always goes up or when proposals are floated to reduce it they almost always fail. People do vote to give themselves money, and they always vote to protect their entitlements.

Adjusted for inflation it can go down. And some states have reduced welfare (welfare mothers don't vote).

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#584

Post by jiggy2011 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #522
nkoren wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the immediate cost. It's about the fact that conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society. Listen to this investigation into Disability benefits.[1] Listen to how the people who receive these benefits genuinely need the stable income that they provide, but are then prohibited from working part-t…

...conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society. There are cheaper policies than BI which don't do this. One example is Basic Job - if you need a job real bad the government gives you a really bad job. This has no poverty traps, and (unlike BI) has no disincentive for work. You also get to avoid spending money…

Can you be fired from your basic job? What happens then?

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#585

Post by glomph »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #377
ahoy wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only ever heard basic income proposed as the former implementation, never the latter.

The two formulations are similar. If you just print money to give to everybody, you cause inflation, which is a tax on liquid wealth. The wealthy have ways to hedge against inflation, so it's basically a tax on the middle class.

Or you could raise taxes on the wealthy...

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#586

Post by eanzenberg »

nkoren wrote: post #559
yummyfajitas wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,... Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone. Consider a…

Actually, your math is entirely wrong. Let's use the same numbers as you: 300M people, $20k each, only 50M people who actually "need" it. In the BI scenario, 250M people are paying for the cost of program (since the 50M who actually "need" it presumably can't pay). That's $6B / 250m = $24,000 per person. However, each of those people is also receiving $20,000 worth of BI. Therefore, the cost to them is $24,000 - $20,…

How do you decide the "50M who actually 'need' it" with vastly less overhead? There is a cost to run the IRS and determine (correctly) peoples income.

Furthermore, a 4k tax on 250M of the U.S. could be crippling to a good chunk of them. If your true point is redistribution of wealth, our tax system already does that and can do it more. But that's a different discussion..

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#587

Post by Houshalter »

derefr wrote: post #47
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #25

If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended. The value and meaning of citizenship will rapidly change and tolerance for outsiders taking a slice of the pie will rapidly plunge. I think there will be a lot of ramifications like this that most people probably aren't considering.

Alaska has its Permanent Fund Dividend, which is a kind of basic income coming from state oil sales. How hard is it to get Alaskan citizenship?

As a US state, Alaska can't halt immigration to the state (at least not from US citizens.) If Alaska was it's own country, I would bet they would have pretty severe restrictions on immigration.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#588

Post by JoeAltmaier »

eanzenberg wrote: post #578
scotchmi_st wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basic Job will likely leave you little time to train in an area where you could be more productive for society. Basic Pay is designed to provide you the time to do that. Sure there has to be a bit of trust that you're going to not just sit on your arse, but very few people actually want to do that (despite what a lot of people think), and it's psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life. A lot of th…

False. BI would not provide increases to science nor art. It would dilute them. I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! There's a reason why only a tin…

But the reality is that we don't NEED everybody to work, or soon won't. The comforts of life will become a civil right. What then? Old Puritan work ethic becomes obsolete. Any thoughts on 'right behavior' in a post-work economy?

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#589

Post by TaulantRamabaja »

jes5199 wrote: post #414
kalvin wrote: post #164

I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having…

okay, I have a pitch for an MVP. It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be b…

incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance.

Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before.

To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be one centralized social network such as Facebook, simply because the cost of centralization is lower than that OF decentralization (think diaspora). However, the cost of switching to another service doesn't make sense to a single user, hence rent seeking becomes possible. Telcos are another good example. To change this paradime the cost of decentralization has to be significantly lower than the cost of centralization, even to each individual user.

So the real problem isn't that all people are not paying into such an insurance contract, rather that the rent seekers are able to seek out rent at increasing scale while contributing ever less to society. Any BI fund would logically need to be funded by taxing the rent seekers rather than normal people who's productivity gains normally don;t lead to rent seeking due to more liquid markets for employees.

Taxing land, monopolies, money (through demurrage rather than inflation) and adding all of those funds to BI would make a lot more sense. Think Norway Sovereign Fund or the Alaska Fund.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#590

Post by glomph »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #564
nkoren wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it would be cheaper to use a machine to build the bridge, give the money you save to the people, and then let them add value to society in some other way.

So direct them to do that other thing for their Basic Job and use the machine for the bridge.

Sure. That other thing is self improvement, looking for normal employment and helping their family / community or whatever else they think is important. In other words it is a basic income for the unemployed...
Post reply on HN