Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

Seems like effective policing and residential segregation will be a far more effective use of resources. Cops are cheap, welfare is expensive.

> Now what about the kids of undocumented workers?

What about them? Those kids are themselves either citizens or (improbably) legal permanent residents (and thus, beneficiaries) or not (and thus not). This isn't rocket surgery.

> Will people in retirement continue to get their social security?

That depends whether Social Security is a replaced program or not (IMO, it shouldn't be, since its not a means-tested social benefit program.)

> How will we pay for all this?

With new taxes plus the redirected funds from replaced programs.

> Assuming 418M people

From a few different sources, I get that the US population is 319M, about 93% citizens and 3.6% lawful permanent residents. So, assuming 418M beneficiaries of a UBI is unreasonable.

> at $13K which I typically see mentioned as basic income

$13K/capita is a just about the point at which two-person household would clear the poverty line, so its not a bad point to consider a reasonably mature UBI; OTOH, I'd prefer to identify a funding mechanism that should grow with economic growth, and have benefits scaled so as to (in the long-term, smoothing short-term variability) follow that funding mechanism, eventually reaching such a mature level (and going to even higher levels with more growth) rather than setting a benefit level and then trying to fund it out of the gate.

And I wouldn't expect a mature UBI for a generation or so.

Yes, and an obese man might speculate that he'll starve in the future. That's not a reason for him to eat 3 cheeseburgers today.

If we had a simple scarcity of labor, you'd see rapid, across the board increases in the market clearing cost of labor, you do not.

This is simply not true. The way to check for a scarcity of labor is simply to determine whether there is labor worth performing at some non-zero price. Scarcity is merely a situation where more of a good is wanted than is available.

You can disagree that either is something we ought to address, but by (earlier in the thread) presenting an alternative solution to BI, you are implicitly agreeing with the problem it is being offered to solve.

I'm proposing a solution to two completely different problems: the problem of people claiming they'll starve if others don't transfer them resources, and the problem of labor scarcity.

The great recession didn't produce a scarcity of labor, it produced a surplus of labor.

Not according to Keynesians - they believe there was productive work people people could do that wasn't getting done, simply because nominal wages were too high. That's why they proposed stimulus to inflate away the value of real wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Output_gap

I take it you believe stimulus was ill-advised?

EITC increases incentive to earn additional income within a narrow range at the bottom

And this narrow range is the place our slack labor force lives.

My comment is not an argument that access to electricity is impossible and you reiterating physical needs seems to suggest you missed my point. That last sentence was only pointing out that you happened to pick as an example the name of a particular chain that (not unlike many other coffee shops) tends to exist in more urban and more affluent neighborhoods.

> Not according to Keynesians

So? This seems to be an argument-to-people-you-don't-even-purport-are-authorities... (Not to mention that it seems to be a hostile caricature of the Keynesian argument, which I'll get to in a second.)

> they believe there was productive work people people could do that wasn't getting done, simply because nominal wages were too high.

"Work isn't getting done because forces outside of market rationality prevent prices from adjusting downward to reflect the reduced demand for good X" isn't a real "scarcity of X", its a surplus of X with non-market forces preventing existing supply and demand from connecting.

(Where it occurs, the solution is obvious, deal with the problem that prevents real prices from adjusting to the natural market clearing price, so if one perceived the problem you claimed Keynesians perceived, then the solution you claimed Keynesians preferred would be sensible.)

OTOH, that's not the problems Keynesians saw, and Keynesian stimulus isn't aimed at "inflating away the value of real wages" (nor did the actual stimulus in the great recession do that; inflation during the period remained unusually low). Keynesian stimulus (whether in the form of fiscal stimulus that Keynesians usually prefer, or monetary stimulus that Keynesians will usually complain is a poor mechanism but -- much like Keynes own example of burying banknotes and letting people dig them up -- better than doing nothing when good solutions are off the table) is aimed at increasing demand -- particularly for labor -- which is a solution directly aimed at surplus of labor, not scarcity of labor.

> I take it you believe stimulus was ill-advised?

More to the point, I disagree with your description of the Keynesian case for stimulus, and like most Keynesians, I believe that the form of stimulus was extraordinarily poorly chosen from the perspective of government-as-a-single-decision-maker, but perhaps reasonable (or at least understandable) on the part of the Fed given that the government isn't a single decisionmaker, and the key body deciding fiscal policy was nearly inert.

> And this narrow range is the place our slack labor force lives.

I suppose that this is a meaningful statement if your concern is merely maximizing the number of people doing some kind of work, rather than maximizing welfare, realization of human potential, etc. And, certainly, that seems to comport well with your preference for a permanent government army of economically-compelled labor as the main (or perhaps only, its not really clear) "social benefit" program.