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It Is Time For Basic Income

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Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#611

Post by saraid216 »

TheLegace wrote: post #463
JoshTriplett wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold. It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.) You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in questio…

But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comca…

I can't answer the rest, but

> Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_in_the_United_State...

Googling also yields some results that ballpark in the same area.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#612

Post by thaumasiotes »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #547
thaumasiotes wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. There's a fundamental conceptual problem with it: Imagine I, for whatever reason, accept a Basic Job from the government. The job is, by design, bad. I'd rather not do it. So my dream scenario is that I officially hold a Basic Job and draw its meager salary, but instead of doing whatever work it supposedly entails I sit at home and watch TV. This…

Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. BJ is work that is not worth doing at current market prices . I.e., picking up garbage in the park might be worth $4/hour, but minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If we spend $7.25 more and get $4.00 worth of value out of it, we lost $3.25. If we are already spending $7.25 on welfare/BI and getting nothing in return, we a…

This raises a pretty interesting question. Suppose I apply for a Basic Job at your institution, where all the work is sort of worthwhile, but not worthwhile enough to happen unsubsidized. What job do you assign to me? How do you choose it? I assume you're not choosing the "most worthwhile" of the jobs, because how would you know?

If the work is digging holes one day and undigging them the next, overhead here is low. If there's some other system behind what the jobs are and how they get filled, potential for corruption seems extremely high. Say I'm a Denny's and I'd rather not pay so much for my kitchen staff. Can I list all the positions with Basic Job and kick back to the administrator when he sends me someone?

Germany has no minimum wage and extremely low unemployment. What would their Basic Jobs be?

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#613

Post by nkoren »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #562
nkoren wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it has poverty traps. I live in the UK, where I get to see how the "workfare" programme creates poverty traps all the time. If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by getting more education and practicing skills that are valuable to employers. A Basic Job often conflicts with that. If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by taking part-time and piecemeal work to build…

I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better. Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes. Back of the envelope calculation, please. Incidentally, your study merely shows there is very…

> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.

How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?

> Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.

So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.

  Job description   $/year   No. of people   Total cost
  Basic Jobber      20k      45,973,453      919.5B
  Supervisor        30k      3,831,121       114.9B
  Line Manager      40k      191,556         7.7B
  District Manager  60k      3,831           0.2B
  Regional Manager  100k     383             -
...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#614

Post by thaumasiotes »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #313
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…

...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…

There's something very striking (to me) about your back-of-the-envelope numbers here.

Are we really endorsing the idea that one person in six should be on welfare?

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#615

Post by patja »

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…

I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated work to navigate your way through the application process (I exaggerate, but not by much)

I also agree that we are decades away from sufficient public outrage to fuel the political machine to make these changes. Much like the flat tax, it makes sense to most people but will never happen due to the strong motivation of current rent-seekers to maintain the status quo.

While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#616

Post by pdonis »

whyme wrote: post #599
pdonis wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption? You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a…

I think I'll skip the debate over "the size of things" and just suggest there's a significant problem with our current rate of utilization and fair distribution. If your argument is simply that we have room for optimizing the worlds resources, then sure I can agree with that, but frankly I doubt that's going to work very well under a model that's really dog eat dog and has a hoarding, power hungry society that uses m…

a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things.

Actually, I think the problem is that we don't use money enough to manage distribution and ownership; too much distribution and ownership is controlled by factors other than money. But it's true that there is a problem with money as a control mechanism, though it isn't what you appear to think it is: the problem with money as a control mechanism is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#617

Post by pdonis »

boomlinde wrote: post #531
pdonis wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption? You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a…

The American standard of living is inherently based in part on the standard of wastefulness. Our attitude towards wastefulness in general is a prerequisite for many of our liberties worldwide. If you remove these properties from the equation you don't really have the American standard of living anymore.

What's your definition of "wastefulness"? For example, am I being "wasteful" by using a computer connected to the Internet to make this post?

If your answer to that question is yes (I don't actually think it is, but bear with me), then you are right that the only way to have an American standard of living is to be "wasteful" in this sense; but that would be true of any standard of living beyond bare subsistence. Good luck convincing people to buy into that.

If your answer to that question is no, then you're wrong that we need to be "wasteful" to have an American standard of living. The computer I'm using to make this post is considerably more efficient than the computer I would have used to do so when I first joined HN a few years ago, let alone the one I was using to make posts on CompuServe discussion groups a couple of decades ago. The new car my wife and I bought recently is considerably more efficient than the 12-year-old car I have (which we are going to replace soon for that very reason). We have a lot of room to make things more efficient without sacrificing any functionality at all--indeed, while continuing to add functionality. The computer I'm using now is not only more efficient (less power consumption, longer battery life, etc.) than older ones, it's more functional as well (faster CPU, more RAM, more hard drive).

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#618

Post by tomphoolery »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #113
tomphoolery wrote: post #64

Providing a basic income for all people, regardless of their merit to the society as a whole, is problematic. It's not enough to just hand over a couple hundred dollars to someone and say "have fun". We need to ensure everyone is getting the proper basic services, first. I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribu…

What you describe seems like the status quo system: the state distributes food and shelter to people directly (through food stamps and council housing). The idea of basic income is that it is much more efficient if the state redistributes _money_, and then everyone can buy food and shelter using money.

Given that we have no distribution system in place, it is true that if the state redistributes money, that is a more efficient way to go. However, you slightly missed my point. I'm not talking about a system that gives you vouchers. I'm talking about a system that gives you FOOD. This isn't food stamps, this is a system that lives outside of the economy. You don't pay for food, you don't have a "quota". Everything is centralized. Basically, this removes the need for brick and mortar grocery stores, and ends our dependence on large companies like Wal-Mart, et. al., to sell us our food.

We shouldn't need to buy food. That's the point.

Re: It Is Time For Basic Income

#619

Post by pdonis »

sp332 wrote: post #489
sliverstorm wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their people will consume more, but their GDP will go up as well.

There are more resources than just money. Metals are in high demand already, and the prices have increased faster than anyone's GDP.

And if that trend continues, at some point in the not too distant future, it will become profitable to mine metals from, say, automobile junkyards, instead of from the ground. Or we'll find substitutes, as we already have for many metals (an automobile junkyard a decade from now, containing mostly cars built around this time, won't have nearly as much metal in it because the car bodies will be mostly composite).
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