81–90 of 99 posts
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It's a weird one, actually; lots of socialists like the idea, but so do lots of libertarians. Alas, conservatives hate it.
Socialists hate the idea because it's still based on capitalism.
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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? That can be debated, but I'd argue for somewhere around the median. >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? I'm not sure what you mean? I'm just suggesting we might want a supplementary income for disabled people, since they don't have the option to supplement their basic income with a job.
If the BI is too low for disabled people, then it is too low.
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…
There is was a negative income tax experiment in 70s in Seattle: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html
One point it made that had me thinking was that it would be impossible to cover enough of the population because the poverty line is so close to median income.
Well, what if we didn't cover everyone? What if we picked areas that are having a particularly rough time and used a negative income tax to prime the pump?
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?
Hope we start experimenting with this in the US also. Maybe at a state level.
It would have to be in an extremely liberal area. Socialism is still a four letter word in the US, and this is the epitome of socialist initiatives.
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It is certainly possible that some goods or services that are inelastic in supply will experience cost inflation if they are goods or services that are mostly or entirely consumed by a market segment that becomes richer from basic income. I'm not convinced that housing is generally an example of such a good, but some housing may well be. However, the same is true of targeted assistance to only the poor for only housi…
That was my point - Basic Income doesn't provide any additional benefits to targeted assistance, and would actually be a detriment in markets with income-elastic demand.
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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?
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…
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There's the Permanent Fund Dividend in Alaska, though it only hit $3269 its peak year, and that was with a bump from a budget surplus.
yeah, but that one was neither designed as a social safety net, nor is it big enough to function as one. It's neat, but it's so small that it's basically apples and oranges.
People take into account today's income and capital gains revenues, and assume that they can safely increase those rates by a wide margin causing no change in underlying behavior.
In reality a top-income earner who made eight digits or above can safely take the next 2-3 years off without driving his family into the soup kitchen situation, and as far as capital gains goes, people become more cognizant of harvesting capital losses before they sell anything that appreciated in value (or simply sell a smaller chunk of their assets, if we're talking highly liquid investments).
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…
And that's assuming everyone gets $10k without considering the 50% decrease in aid for each additional dollar earned. If we use the $360 billion number someone else threw out, you could actually reduce spending by $90 billion annually if BI replaced large federal/state welfare programs.
And none of that is counting the extra economic activity when people on SSDI -- which has stopped being a long-term disability program and become a stop-gap aid for the "systemically unemployable" until they can collect Social Security at 62 -- are allowed to openly perform some work at their ability level. Right now they have to keep up the charade that they are "disabled" even if their SSDI qualification is only because they lack the skills to find a job during the 10-15 years before Social Security eligibility.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/libertarian-charles...
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>Which able bodied person? That can be debated, but I'd argue for somewhere around the median. >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? I'm not sure what you mean? I'm just suggesting we might want a supplementary income for disabled people, since they don't have the option to supplement their basic income with a job.
The entire idea behind the basic income is to stop trying to make distinctions between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor and to get rid of the entire gate-keeping infrastructure. Keep the existing cobweb of special purpose programs and you've destroyed a major point of the exercise. If the BI is too low for disabled people, then it is too low.
Whatever level you set it at, disabled people will get less money than able-bodied people on average, though no fault of their own. I don't think that's fair however you frame it.