A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

Yes, but that includes wanting to do the job because they want to live, but not necessarily because they see it as a good use of their time beyond that.

I think especially because us programmers can get high salaries early on, divorced from both having to save and from the experience of handling money well, we can fall hard. I also speak from personal experience :)/:(

Every time universal basic income is discussed someone claims it can't be done because if we were to do this tomorrow the costs would be astronomical. That's true, but it's a bit like stating in 1950 that the world will never see personal computing because a computer costs millions and there are billions of people.

Universal basic income amounts to (providing or) paying for food, clothing and shelter. What is the cost of food when we have labgrown meat, the robots till the farm and self-driving cars deliver it everywhere?

What's the cost of shelter with industrial scale 3d-printing and robotic assembly?

What is the cost of providing everyone with basic clothing when all the factory workers are replaced with robots?

Stop worrying about the price of everything and start thinking in terms of scarcity. Will the stuff required for basic human survival still be prohibitively scarce in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years?

I did a back of the envelope calculation on this last year (so using 2013 figures) which I've pasted below. It works out not too bad; it's certainly within the realm of reason. I think it would probably be better to start it very low, around £20 a week, and slowly scale it up and let it replace welfare payments gradually.

If you think my figures are significantly out, I'd appreciate any corrections.

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[There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.]

Firstly, I prefer to refer to this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as I know for a fact that anyone on a low income would prefer to get a guaranteed £20 a week extra rather than hear a politician say, "We can't afford to pay £75 pounds a week to everyone, so we're doing nothing." Tell me if I'm wrong. But "Basic Income" if the preferred name, so I'll refer to it as that from now on.

The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion.

That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit!

Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far:

Who loves me: - Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party.

- Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle.

- Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job.

Who hates me: - Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party.

- People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage.

- Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally).

Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%.

That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week.

There is a problem: we've neglected the people who require more than that either because they're owed it (e.g pensioners) or because they have extra requirements (e.g. orphaned children), so having increased the BI up to £80, I'm now going to cut it again down to £60 a week. This will cover pensioners, people claiming benefits which are currently in excess of £60 and support for vulnerable children (note that children also receive the BI, so 'child benefit' has seen a massive boost from the regular £20 per week maximum).

I'm assuming that 20% of people fall into one of the above categories, so cutting £20 off the BI gives us £160 a week to help these people. This is more than the current basic state pension (£113.10/week) so that's a fairly big increase. I don't want to complicate the calculations any further, so the small number of people who require more than this will have to be paid out of the £50 billion we haven't borrowed.

That's us at £60 per week basic income and up to £160 per week for pensioners and vulnerable people.

And I think I'll leave it there. We might still need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls, but as long as these borrowings total less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £50 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.

France spends 600B/y in social spending. That's about 15k per citizen (minus children). 1/3 of the GDP.

So let's change it to a Basic Income of 1000+/m for everybody...

Many will loose a lot... because that's what France is already spending, for a lot less than 40ish M citizens.

I know downvoters would love this to work.

But think about it: today, the system cares for people with a handicap (for which 1000/m is not enough), for single families (for which 1000/m is not enough), etc... You just can't have everybody receive the same amount and remove help from those who need more...

So Basic Income will need much more money than what is already spent... just to take care of inequalities it will create.

If you think a country like France needs more redistribution (than 1/3 of the GDP), okay... but Basic Income will not achieve that.

Proponents often say BI will replace social spending. I think that's impossible.

If you just want more taxes, just say it. Be clear. BI is not clear at all, even if it looks easy to understand.

Source: http://www.contrepoints.org/2013/09/30/140878-france-champio...