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Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

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Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#61

Post by cpncrunch »

jdjdmdo wrote: post #29
cpncrunch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20k is not poverty. I live in a luxury townhouse on Vancouver Island (aka paradise), paying $600/month for half the rent. My total outgoings are probably about $1200/month, so $20k would be more than enough to live on. Yes, you would pay more in Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver or Victoria, but if you're not working then you wouldn't need to live in those expensive cities. I think $15k would be a better figure, as it woul…

Wait, we should push the poor to spend at Whole Foods and dine at fine restaurants? How is making them spend a significantly higher percentage of their income on food a good thing again?

Yes, you have a good point. I think the price of everything would probably go up, so you might find that the basic income is suddenly not enough to live on.

I think it's impossible to know for sure whether basic income would be financially viable unless you actually implement it.

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#62

Post by forrestthewoods »

learc83 wrote: post #54
forrestthewoods wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may sound rude, but I literally do not care about any response that does include napkin math. The concept of basic income has been quite popular on HN and elsewhere for the past 6-12 months. I have asked for napkin math probably two dozen times. No one has ever been able to provide it. I love the concept of basic income. I've played with the numbers quite a bit myself. I've tried to make it work. I can't do it.…

US GDP ~16 trillion. Government social spending 20% of GDP[1] or about 3.2 trillion dollars. US population about 320 million. That's right at about $10k per year to every American if we capped it at current government social spending. So a family of 4 would get $40k a year. You could make that 3.2 trillion go a lot further by raising taxes gradually so that when you reach say $75k you're paying as much extra taxes ar…

Here's a good resource with more data. Including federal vs state. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending

I'm curious what that 20% of social spending covers. It certainly includes health so we can't say "eliminate medicare/medicaid, but you get a yearly check for $10,000!". That's not gonna cut it. Federal+State+Local welfare spending is only 8% of total gov. spend and only ~3.1% of GDP. A long, long, long ways from being able to cut a $10k check per person.

Edit: Why on earth would anyone downvote that? It boggles the mind.

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#63

Post by forrestthewoods »

ppereira wrote: post #55
forrestthewoods wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd genuinely like to see your numbers because I've not seen a single napkin math calculation that makes is even remotely feasible. (for the United States)

I don't see your email address in your profile. I did the calculation about 3 years ago for Canada, so it may or may not be useful. It is not so far fetched when you consider that we already provide some welfare support and a progressive income tax schedule with a complete exemption for low incomes. Most basic incomes proposals would do away with regular social assistance (while retaining special programs for the dis…

username + gmail

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#64

Post by randomdata »

jdjdmdo wrote: post #33
randomdata wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds right to me. You don't make more in a professional career because you have more kids.

Completely irrelevant. They qualify for more welfare under the current system. Why should a couple with no kids get $40K while a family with 7 kids get the same amount?

The goals are different.

Welfare is intended to provide necessities. A family with seven kids clearly has more needs, and thus needs more money.

Minimum income, on the other hand, is intended to provide a minimum income. A baseline you can rely on, no matter what kind of situation you find your life in.

Each approach has strengths and weaknesses. It would appear that you favour a welfare system, and that is fine. I'm not sure why we would want to shoehorn minimum income back into welfare though? Why not just stick with welfare if it better fits the needs of society?

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#65

Post by arg01 »

RivieraKid wrote: post #41

BI is a change of how money is redistributed in society – it would lead to some people becoming poorer and other people becoming equally richer. I'm quite sceptical about BI because I haven't seen any analysis that would answer the question who exactly would get richer / poorer and how much. Unemployed people get money from the government in Canada – will they get more or less after implementation of BI? What about t…

The New Zealand treasury actually did a preliminary impact paper on BI several years ago and it was noted that many of the people currently on welfare would likely end up with less money. (They use the term GMI, but it seems to be framed as a BI based on my general understanding of the concepts)

http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#66

Post by learc83 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #62
learc83 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US GDP ~16 trillion. Government social spending 20% of GDP[1] or about 3.2 trillion dollars. US population about 320 million. That's right at about $10k per year to every American if we capped it at current government social spending. So a family of 4 would get $40k a year. You could make that 3.2 trillion go a lot further by raising taxes gradually so that when you reach say $75k you're paying as much extra taxes ar…

Here's a good resource with more data. Including federal vs state. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/current_spending I'm curious what that 20% of social spending covers. It certainly includes health so we can't say "eliminate medicare/medicaid, but you get a yearly check for $10,000!". That's not gonna cut it. Federal+State+Local welfare spending is only 8% of total gov. spend and only ~3.1% of GDP. A long, long,…

>I'm curious what that 20% of social spending covers.

I'm sure there are plenty of things in that 20% that can't be replaced with $10k per person--things like extra equipment for poor schools. However this was just napkin math to show that it's within an order of magnitude of doable.

> "eliminate medicare/medicaid, but you get a yearly check for $10,000!".

For the vast majority of people that would be a huge net gain. The UK only spends about $3k per year on each person for health care, so I think the vast majority could get by on the insurance they could afford with $10k per person. You'd still have to account for the edge cases. This would probably work better in a country with a single payer system.

For the sake of argument, remove medicare/medicaid from the equation. That still leaves about 2.2 Trillion on other social spending. Let's subtract some other unknowns and leave it at just 1 trillion.

You can stretch that 1 trillion pretty far if you adjust it so that children don't get the full amount, and add extra graduated taxes so that households making over $45k (the national median) have a zero net benefit with only people making below the poverty line receiving the entire benefit.

I think it's very doable especially if you're willing to consider tax increases at the top. It's definitely not something outside the realm of possibility, and with demographic and labor changes in the United States over the next 50 years, I think something like a Basic Income is probable.

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#67

Post by Scoundreller »

I think a "guaranteed minimum income" can be re-phrased as "Giving everyone, at no charge, the things they'll be dead without in a week (food, water, shelter), but it's up to you to buy them on the open market".

I've never understood why one has to pay for the bare essentials, while piles of other things, like health care, transportation, parks, police, fire, etc. are highly/wholly subsidized through general taxes.

We already provide health care at no charge in most nations with reasonable efficiency, leaving one less reason for people to put up with crummy employers and removing the bureaucracy of proving that you need something that you, well, need. I like the idea of extending that path.

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#68

Post by cdcarter »

tempestn wrote: post #57
fidotron wrote: post #20

It's fairly interesting the way this idea, and similar ones, connect some of the more intelligent fringe people from both right and left ends of the spectrum. Famously Friedman's answer to what would be better than minimum wage was a negative income tax bracket, and Nixon, of all people, almost implemented it.

How exactly would a negative tax bracket work? Taken literally, this would mean that up to a certain income level, the government would pay you an amount proportional to how much you make. Presumably what it actually means is that you would be paid inversely proportional to how much you make. At first glance it seems to me that this would have one of the same problems as the current system, which a guaranteed basic i…

Negative income tax is just an implementation detail. This idea is not in competition with GMI, it's a restatement of it, showing how it can exist on the far right as well as the far left. Per the reputable wikipedia:

"Negative income taxes can implement a basic income or supplement a guaranteed minimum income system.

In a negative income tax system, people earning a certain income level would owe no taxes; those earning more than that would pay a proportion of their income above that level; and those below that level would receive a payment of a proportion of their shortfall, which is the amount their income falls below that level."

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#69

Post by grecy »

Australia already has basically this. It's called 'welfare', but anyone that doesn't have a job gets a touch over $1000AUD/mo (so just over $12kUSD/year) for life [1]. It doesn't matter if you've never had a job, or have, or whatever. They will encourage you to get a job, and you might have to work a little bit to get that money, but you'll get it.

If you've got a partner, or dependent(s), you'll get more. Likely if you're living on this, you also qualify for Rent Assistance, which means more money.

You also get paid like this while going to University.

Australia has been doing this for decades (my Goole-fu fails me for the exact number of years), and it appears to be perfectly financially viable.

Read more about Australia's policy at [2]

[1] http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits#Australia

Re: Activists push for guaranteed minimum income for Canadians

#70

Post by grecy »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #13

If an "unconditional basic income" is ever to be successful, it should be tried first in a small, wealthy country, before being implemented in bigger countries. Good candidates might be Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and so on. Big experiments have a tendency to fail catastrophically...

See my other comment, Australia already has it.
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