41–50 of 99 posts
I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping. Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level. $20m/year plus administrative costs, le…
I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping. Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level. $20m/year plus administrative costs, le…
Where true basic income differs from this experiment by Canada is that true basic income should be for every adult, regardless of income, race, marital status, sexuality, etc. Not just for poor people, as with Mincome in this Canadian town. A few arguments for: 1) It becomes a defacto emergency lifeline when a ostensibly middle class person loses their job or suffers an extremely expensive illness. In the US, it can…
I like this idea a lot, but what would stop goods/housing from rising in price to meet the influx of free money?
Nothing is in place to stop basic income from causing housing prices to raise, and is one of the reasons we have food stamps and medicare instead of basic income.
Housing is a good/service with a price that is set by income-elastic demand. If you push up the income across the entire market (as true basic income would), then the price of housing and cars and other goods with income-elastic demand will increase. People who couldn't afford housing before wouldn't be able to afford housing still.
There are plenty of income-elastic affected goods that will increase increase in price to match or even exceed the amount of basic income per individual. Once you dissect the problem that basic income is trying to solve, you can address those needs individually without raising income for the entire population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this idea a lot, but what would stop goods/housing from rising in price to meet the influx of free money?
That was my initial response when I first heard this concept a few years ago, and the answer is somewhat surprising (Note: I'm not an economist, so please someone correct me if I get anything wrong here): 3 things can alter those prices: A change in supply, a change in demand, or general inflation/deflation. The supply doesn't inherently change in this plan, nor does demand (*assuming everyone is getting these goods…
So I submit that your assumption isn't really valid.
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It seems like reducing socialism to me. Instead of the gov't hand-picking (centrally planning) benefactors of tax dollars, e.g. defense contractors or oil/ag subsidies, it's being returned to the people (and all the people - not just some according to their need or whatever).
It's probably an ever bigger problem than that. Regardless of liberal or conservative, if you want to raise taxes essentially across the board (which you'd have to do--even taking all of the wealth of "the 1%" would fund this project for maybe a year) you're going to have a really tough time convincing people that their taxes are going to be raised 500% or whatever it would end up being. Just back-of-the envelope num…
I'm not sure how'd you account for different costs of living in different areas. But I think the number would be closer to $20k.
Also, it could just be an untaxed amount, no need to muddy things up with that.
It's still a big chunk of money: $4-5T. But You could cancel out a lot of existing services if this was implemented. We're spending $1.2T for pensions ands $0.5T for welfare [1], so some of that could go towards this. But yeah, that's still a lot of money. Not sure where it'd come from. Maybe start with a low amount and scale upwards, hoping to reap some economic benefits from the improvements?
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If you think inflation's only source is 'printing money', you may not be qualified to speak on economic issues. Liquidity, the monetary supply, and the cost of exchange are quite a bit more complex than that, and far more prone to being manipulated and falling over, as both the Housing Crisis and Libor Scandal taught us.
I'm sorry but you are wrong. Inflation is nothing but the increase of money supply without an equivalent increase in production. What you are doing is being a good Keynesian and trying to make people believe that this stuff is too complicated for them to even start having an opinion on it. That strategy is condescending and not productive, and encourages helplessness in people.
Let's do some back of the envelope math here. 316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year. The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars. So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax mo…
$30,000 is a pretty big number. If you made it $8,000, a family of 4 would still be above today's poverty line (which is still arbitrary, but it seems like a better "minimal income" than one that gives everybody approximately the current median personal income). $9 trillion / (30/8) = $2.4 trillion.
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>this means that disability should be eliminated if this passes That depends whether you think the point of disability benefit is to allow disabled people to survive, or to allow them have a comparable quality of life to an able bodied person.
Which able bodied person? The idea behind some of our middle class social programs seems to be more in the nature of a climbing harness than a safety net. Why is someone who was once well off but fell on hard times entitled to more help than someone who was born into hard times?
Which able bodied person should be the ceiling on too-disabled-to-work people's income? Not sure, but I'm reasonably confident that "the most unambitious and indolent one" is not the correct answer.
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I like this idea a lot, but what would stop goods/housing from rising in price to meet the influx of free money?
Nothing. Nothing is in place to stop basic income from causing housing prices to raise, and is one of the reasons we have food stamps and medicare instead of basic income. Housing is a good/service with a price that is set by income-elastic demand. If you push up the income across the entire market (as true basic income would), then the price of housing and cars and other goods with income-elastic demand will increas…
But a basic income would not in fact raise the income of the entire population. It would lower the income of the rich and raise the income of the poor. Because it would be paid for with taxes, not deficit spending.
The rich would GET basic income, yes -- but their taxes would increase by an amount that would more-than-compensate for the higher influx of money. Their after-tax income would be lower.
Let's do some back of the envelope math here. 316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year. The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars. So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax mo…
>316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year. I'm not sure if you read the article. But the proposition in Canada was essentially a negative income tax for the lowest tax brackets. And it didn't reach nearly your $30k a year - I have no idea where you came up with that number. Current deliberation on the issue would not even consider nearly that amount. >On a large sc…
The whole point of BI is to be a low-middle class income, which is currently about $30k/year.