A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

Remember also that people's wants are effectively unlimited in aggregate. If we could all have 100 foot yachts and spaceships and Ferraris we collectively in large majority would choose to have those things. You know, in the absence of any negative consequences for those actions.

A beef carcass might have 500 pounds of meat on it, but only 5-10lbs of that is tenderloin. If we all have enough money to buy tenderloin it doesn't immediately follow that cows are then made up of nothing but tenderloin. So the price of tenderloin will go up until the demand balances the supply again. You can take this and apply it nearly anywhere in the economy and find it'll be approximately correct for a great many situations.

Is having a child a basic or a luxury?

This idea seems to be built on a notion that there are needs and that their are wants, and that we are only going to give enough to supply needs. But there are two major underlying problems with this.

First, even if we assume that needs and wants exist, you aren't going to have agreement on what falls in what category. For starters, is having children a need or a luxury? Is a clean place to live a need or a luxury? Is having a healthy food a need or a want?

Second, I'm not sure the division between needs and wants is even real. Yes, you'll die without food in a few weeks, die without water in a few days, and die without air in a few minutes, but what about something that increases ones likelihood of dying in a few years, but not any shorter? For example, a starving person can survive off a very poor diet for a much longer time than with no diet, but if they are missing vital nutrients, they will still eventually die. Or look at loneliness and the negative effects it has on people. You won't die within a year from lack of human contact, but your overall life expectancy will drop greatly (except for infants, who will die from lack of human contact, as shown in a few experiments which scientists are ethically banned from reproducing).

Yes, India is a poor nation. Virtually everyone there - including the software engineers - is poorer than a burger flipper in the US.

I would argue that the proof of the emergence of structural unemployment is not in the current rate of unemployment, but in how long it took for us to return to this level after the housing crisis.

So your claim isn't that jobs don't exist, but merely that it takes people time to find them.

How is a massive labor force disincentive like BI a solution to this problem at all? We already know that unemployment benefits make this problem worse: https://www.nber.org/papers/w20884 Why would BI - essentially permanent unemployment benefits - help?

If anything the solution to this problem is just making labor markets more flexible. E.g., NGDP targeting, making it easier to hire/fire workers, eliminating employer mandate in Obamacare, discouraging home ownership, etc.

[edit: here is non-paywalled link: http://econweb.umd.edu/~davis/eventpapers/ManovskiiEntension... ]

>If you'd just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody

The bailouts were asset swaps, repaid with a gain for the taxpayer [1]. They were not cash giveaways. Comparing this to simply giving cash to people is ludicrous.

The most at risk was about 2T, with only 650B actually out at any time, which at your claim of 20K per person, only pays for 32 million people. You're off by an order of magnitude (completely ignoring that the bailouts were asset swaps, not giveaways).

>Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That's another 20K or so per man, woman, and child

Over the course of decades. It's not 20K in a year. It's more like 1/40th ($500) of that a year. And the only places I can find a number this large includes Medicare/SS payouts. Are you going to remove these programs (especially Mecicare/Medicaid) with your conversion to a once in a lifetime check per person?

> The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K?

That's nonsense. Adding massively more to spending via UBI is not going to balance the budget or reduce the debt, and I don't know what magic lets you take 20T of debt (the biggest holder being SS, and large amounts to the Fed and loans to US investors, such as retirement funds) and simply divide by 320M people to get 100K (actually, this is 62.5K) in a check. Nothing in this line of numerology makes any sense. These uses are nowhere near exchangeable.

>(I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It's to make a point.)

The math isn't fuzzy. It's simply wrong, from the starting values, to the calculations, to the conclusions.

>The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math.

Unfortunately this basic math is not coupled to reality, ignores very important and well tested economic ideas backed by 100+ years of empirical data, and is ignores the downsides and costs involved.

And so far, I fail to see many UBI proponents that are able to do basic math. A few can, but mostly they are full of numerology and ignoring the meaning of various amounts.

I've yet to see a UBI that doesn't either require massive tax hikes to the point of possibly destroying the economy or leave those needing assistance now in much worse shape.

>Slogans are great. Results are better.

Intellectually honest claims checking is better, and it helps avoid chasing impossible or unlikely or destructive plans.

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

"Participants who worked had their mincome supplement reduced by 50 cents for every dollar they earned by working." - that is not Universal Basic Income.

"... found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating."

And that does not sound bad at all and it rather counters the lack of supply of nannies (if there was such).

(Quotes from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome)