I really really support this. IMO it would make this world so much more fun to live in.
It Is Time For Basic Income
161–170 of 761 posts
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
>someone needs a job I don't know that we necessarily need to have jobs. We could fund it by taxation of revenue and wages, rather than just wages. A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. That profit could be taxed at something like 60%. The owner(s) of the business still see windfall from the cost savings of laying everyone off, and the ba…
> A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. Where is their revenue coming from?
People spending their basic income :)
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#163I haven't read much on BI, so I'm sure this has already been answered already, but: how do the numbers add up?
The US poverty line for a single person is $11k. For simplicity, let's say BI gives everyone in the US $10k per year. Times 313.9 million, that's $3.1 trillion per year. The US government spent, overall, $3.45 trillion in 2013. How would we be able to afford basic income?
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#164I 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 to jump through all the same hoops.)
This is just my experience after working for ~1000 hours on healthcare.gov w/other YC alumni (relatively nonideological-liberal-or-libertarian engineer bias), but I think 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, along with unintentional side effects, edge cases, and bad incentives.
(This isn't why healthcare.gov had major issues, it's just another problem.)
That said, there's no way politically a basic income is going to fly anytime soon. So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current mess is not only poorly implemented, it's based on false assumptions. We just need to stop pretending there's something wrong with people not being able to find a decent job, and stop punishing them.
You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return? EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% o…
Because you don't live in a vacuum. Our society makes it possible so that you can earn a living. You're just paying back for having that opportunity to those that are less fortunate.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#166I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless? Wouldn't the fixed income become the new zero income? Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage? Do they d…
It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.
"someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them"
e.g. Immigrants. I'm not sure if we should start calling them deltas or epsilons...
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return? EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% o…
Because you don't live in a vacuum. Our society makes it possible so that you can earn a living. You're just paying back for having that opportunity to those that are less fortunate.
Those that are less fortunate aren't also the ones that make it possible for me to earn a living. Police, teachers, firemen, road workers and some others do all that, work hard at it, and I appreciate their contribution. They're not the ones we're talking about here.
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#168Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today. If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guarantee…
And where will the source for the Guaranteed Income come from? It will surely be taxes - income, sales, other. All taxes in some way or the other depend on the state of the economy. What if the economy goes into a recession or has severe fluctuations from year to year? Will "Guaranteed Income" be continued if there isn't sufficient wealth and production to pay for it?
Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.
Any guaranteed entitlement scheme that does not account for the source of the funding will run into the same problems, sooner or later. (Just see the fate of a number of guaranteed pension funds in some parts of the country).
Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#169Re: It Is Time For Basic Income
#170Everything that goes against liberty is doomed to fail.
Miserably.