Replacing welfare payments with “basic income” for all is alluring, but expensive

You are right, but only because most BI supporters advocate too high an income. Keep the equivalent down around a part-time min wage job, and it would do wonders for the economy with little disincentive.

I am going to tell a story about the state I live in: Maine.

We have many programs: HUD (to help pay rent), Food Stamps, HEAP (fuel/electricity assistance), and others.

All of these have complex forms to fill out, and offices filled with staff that don't actually understand the complex rules, and the rules seem to change all the time.

Hiring these people costs money. Due to the complexity of the rules and forms, many families that qualify for these programs do not apply for them due to the frustration they cause, and when you're poor you only have a limited amount of frustration before you curl up and cry yourself to sleep every night.

Many consider just getting any aid from the state a full time job in of itself.

Not only that, programs like food stamps issue a card, the maintenance of these cards is probably not cheap as they outsource it to some company out of state. The minimum you can get on food stamps here is $15/mo (which helps absolutely no one, I'm sorry, but $15/mo could be a day's worth of food for a couple with a kid); what is the actual cost of doing that $15/mo? I read somewhere that a quarter of a million households qualify for food stamps in Maine, how much are money are we losing administering a program like this that has such little benefit? Could we be feeding another few thousand households with that waste?

I've been advocating a basic income program for years purely because of the efficiency of it. Once people no longer have to worry about where their next meal is, or their wife's next meal, or their kids's next meal, or if they will have a roof over their head tomorrow, or will their car be stolen, I mean, repoed by the bank tomorrow, they can actually focus on being gainfully employed, or go back to school, or just not be a fucking wreck.

I live in Maine. I suspect we are the poorest and most forgotten about state in the great experiment that is our nation. A program like this would create all the jobs we don't have, would end the constant bullshit people here have to deal with, and probably save lives as well.

Life here is so bleak that, as a non-alcoholic, people have assumed that I mean that I'm just in AA, and quit drinking. "No," I tell them, "I really don't drink. Never have." They look at me like I have two heads.

What is really going to happen:

1) let me fire a bunch of low income workers, this causes the media and average to go up + stock options go up. Oh actually let me take the entire thing in stock options. Also now I work for 1 company that exclusively owns the other companies and only have one other employee who makes millions.

2) I rent everything or move to a different country

3) Same

4) Mother of 3 starved to death because government lost her address notification - read all about it in the news.

5) Only idiots want to run for the Senate.. Oh never mind

6) This will probably work, but I wonder if it will do enough to offset the cost?

7) You want to further incentivize companies to move out of the country?

If you believe that deeply in that idea, then turn it into a startup. Put your own money into it and I'm sure you'll see truly interesting results!

In the relatively near-term future it will be literally impossible to employ more than half of the population in nearly full-time positions that produce a net gain for their being filled. At that point there are essentially two choices - let some people not work, or let everybody work less. (There's actually a third choice that will probably be the default - make-work for all, so that we can be kept too busy to effect change).

The latter sounds more fair, but is inherently less efficient - specialization means that for every doctor to work half as much, we have to train twice as many doctors for the same amount of 'product' (the practicing of medicine).

The math in this article seems to also have inexplicably paired 'basic income' with 'flat tax' - while I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like both, those two systems are completely separate, and there's no good reason not to consider the effects in isolation rather than together.