America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich • Hacker News Board

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#221

Post by dataflow » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

eric_b wrote: post #215

dataflow wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at other (actual) UBI experiments people have carefully run and observed? Or are you just extrapolating from this one data point that hardly resembled UBI in the first place, never mind even remotely resembling a controlled experiment?

There isn't a single UBI experiment that remotely approximates what people mean when they talk about UBI. They are all small samples and all for limited time periods. The COVID stimulus was the closest thing we've seen on the scale required to get meaningful results.

How is a couple of isolated payments in the middle of a global pandemic that turned the entire world upside down the "closest thing we've seen" to an accurate UBI experiment?

It just sounds like you just don't know about what else has actually been done? Here's one link; you can find more if you Google: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/is_universal_basic_income_th...

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#222

Post by mlyle » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

geoduck14 wrote: post #178

mlyle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point do they have "enough" income? If you require public assistance for housing and food, I think you don't have enough income. But public benefits can phase out, leaving you in an awkward place where you have more income but less household resources and become unable to feed your family by virtue of making more.

>If you require public assistance for housing and food, I think you don't have enough income. Public assistance? Like UBI? By using your definition, it is BETTER if we stop giving people money. I'm pretty sure that is not the intended direction

> Public assistance? Like UBI?

I think it's important that to whatever extent we decide that some people need assistance, that we do it in a way that doesn't have a cliff and preferably doesn't have any phase-out at all, for the reasons I described.

Yes, the assistance is still economically distortive, but less so than otherwise. Everyone still has an incentive to increase their income and economic output.

This idea came to me from none other than Milton Friedman, in the form of the negative income tax.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#223

Post by zuminator » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #200

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it this way. You get a subsidized apartment that’s fixed too 30% of your income so long as you make under 150% the federal poverty level. In 21 that was $12,880 for an individual meaning they would pay $322/mo for rent. I’m virtually every area of the country an apartment at that rent is impossible to find. Should this person really make themself homeless to earn more money doing abullshit job? This is a wel…

The real problem here is a society that is brainwashed into thinking it’s “normal” for a 21 year old to move out and get a place of his own, let alone doing it at minimum wage. I don’t even know why anyone would want to live alone at that age. Everything about life is both easier and more pleasant surrounded by close family. Housing and meals have natural economies of scale. Even tasks like fetching medicine while yo…

Easier and more pleasant isn't a universal. Some people have truly horrible families. Occasionally they themselves are the horrible family member, and the others are so much better off without them around.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#224

Post by mlyle » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

wyager wrote: post #205

mlyle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now, there's welfare cliffs and other problems with benefits that make it difficult to climb out of benefit dependency. In turn, current programs incentivize people to not do things that increase their income. https://www.atlantafed.org/economic-mobility-and-resilience/... A UBI, instead, eliminates these problems and ensures there's always a reason to increase your income. This in turn removes deadweight costs…

One would have to be extremely credible to believe the claim that UBI would remove deadweight loss. Throwing any kind of massive wrench in the market can safely be expected to introduce it. If UBI proponents ran on the platform of "eliminate all welfare and replace it with UBI" I would probably support them. But they don't, and they won't, because that's not politically tenable. I don't see a patronage angle where yo…

> One would have to be extremely credible to believe the claim that UBI would remove deadweight loss. Throwing any kind of massive wrench in the market can safely be expected to introduce it.

We already have the massive wrench in the form of benefits programs and EITC, etc. I say: restructure them to be UBI instead.

Milton Friedman advocated for a negative income tax which is much like a UBI, and most economists agree that giving out welfare in this means-tested way is extremely distortive. Maybe all these economists are "extremely credible": https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom....

> If UBI proponents ran on the platform of "eliminate all welfare and replace it with UBI" I would probably support them.

I favor not quite this. I favor "eliminate most welfare and replace it with UBI". It will cost more, but it will also benefit a larger slice of people.

The proposals from the farthest left generally have UBI mutually exclusionary with receiving other benefits (from Yang et al.). So even there, we're talking about mostly eliminating other welfare.

In any case: refusing to discuss good ideas because we don't think they'll be politically tenable is a recipe for them to remain politically untenable forever.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#225

Post by eric_b » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #221

eric_b wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a single UBI experiment that remotely approximates what people mean when they talk about UBI. They are all small samples and all for limited time periods. The COVID stimulus was the closest thing we've seen on the scale required to get meaningful results.

How is a couple of isolated payments in the middle of a global pandemic that turned the entire world upside down the "closest thing we've seen" to an accurate UBI experiment? It just sounds like you just don't know about what else has actually been done? Here's one link; you can find more if you Google: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/is_universal_basic_income_th...

You have to be kidding me. This is your big experiment?

"There are 175,000 24-year-olds in Gyeonggi, and for one year, each receives the equivalent of $220 in a locally negotiable currency per quarter via a credit card."

So 1000 bucks a person for a year. COVID stimulus plus child tax credit went to millions of people... and even the smallest amounts were more than this experiment in SK.

Like... what else ya got?

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#226

Post by kingcharles » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

When I was in jail, a MAJORITY of the people in there were scamming the COVID handouts. I remember one cellmate who had obtained $25,000 in COVID funding to buy PPE for his non-existent business (he was in jail for something unrelated).

The guys in my block all had girls on the outside who would do all the paperwork for them for about 25% cut of whatever they made. The prisoners would feed them all their personal information and a few weeks later the fixers would put a substantial amount of cash onto their commissary account. It was a total production line affair. The fraud was substantial.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#227

Post by wyager » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #131

wyager wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free handouts don't "raise the floor" in a sustainable, long-term, or asymptotically effective way. Every dollar spent on UBI would yield better returns being invested in essentially any kind of R&D, unless your time preference is very high.

Don't think of it as a free handout. Think of it as a dividend on your citizenship. Every person a shareholder of the nation.

The US isn't a corporation, it doesn't own my productive output, and random UBI recipients never paid for their shares.

If you set up a country with this idea from the start (a profit-seeking corporation with transferable shares), it might be a good idea, but probably no net beneficiaries of UBI would have shareholder status.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#228

Post by lmm » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:41 AM UTC

wyager wrote: post #217

lmm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills - which could have a much higher return than the centrally-planned kind.

> Who's to say that recipients wouldn't spend their income on personal R&D - finding out what fits them or developing useful skills Common sense. Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI will use additional marginal cash to do things like smoke weed and watch cartoons. Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary). > whi…

> Half of everyone and 95% of beneficiaries of UBI

> Being a beneficiary of UBI is already extremely compelling evidence of inability to efficiently allocate capital (personal or monetary).

The whole point of UBI is that it's universal and everyone is a beneficiary.

> I guarantee that forcing me to ""invest"" my labor by giving it away to random people will have vastly lower returns (personal and social) than letting me invest it myself.

The fact that organised societies have been much more successful historically than unstructured ones suggests you're wrong.

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#229

Post by westurner » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #102

burkaman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, are you talking about tracking the money after it's been loaned out? Like for a given dollar we can see that it was loaned to Company X, then paid to an employee, then spent on rent, then spent at a restaurant, etc. If that's what you mean then I agree it would be useful for studying the impacts of stimulus policies, although I think there are a lot of other privacy impacts we'd need to consider.

You can always launder money to defeat such a trail. I'm not going to go into detail about how, just in case my ignorant ramblings have some novel techniques in there, but it's definitely possible. Like with banning encryption, the privacy impacts would be felt by the little people, and the big bad actors would be largely unaffected.

So we rely upon reports apparently generated from reconciled alternate accounting systems to determine whether the funds were appropriated impactfully?

Re: America’s Covid job-saving programme gave most of its cash to the rich

#230

Post by postpawl » Wed, Feb 02, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

eric_b wrote: post #210

postpawl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that UBI would be canceled out by demand increases sounds absolutely hyperbolic. What would you do instead? Continue existing trickle down policies? Use weird neoliberal tax breaks that require an accountant to utilize? If we continue down the path of the top 10% in the US owning 89% of stocks, we’re going to have bigger problems than slight price increases on essentials.

We already have the answer. 2019 was arguably the greatest year for the American economy on record. Real wages for the lowest quartile were rising at one of the fastest (if not the fastest) rates in history. Poverty as measured among Black families was at its lowest record since WW2. Unemployment was 3ish% and people were coming off the bench to work. Inflation was So what was the big secret? You won't want to hear i…

Saying that the tax cut and jobs act was a giveaway to the rich is accurate.

The bottom 10% barely got anything: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/1-Distri...