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This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

funding.basicincome2013.eu

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Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#81

Post by sharemywin »

anoncowherd wrote: post #43
RivieraKid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's equivalent, everyone knows government gets its money from taxpayers.

That's exactly what he wanted to emphasize. People think government has some magical, limitless supply of money available to them, when in reality, it's mostly just money that's forcefully confiscated from everyone. In other words, basic income is a zero-sum game, but not without its consequences. It's alright not to go into printing or loaning money here, both of those lead to ruin too. How high would tax rates have…

People work for survial or greed. This just takes the survival part out of the equation. People will still work because they will make more money.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#82

Post by AnthonyMouse »

streptomycin wrote: post #78
weddpros wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say I'm jobless, and I make 1000/m. If I find a job that pays 1100 : - with BI I'll make 1100. That's the value of work. - without BI I'll make 100 + 1000. The value of work is 100. With BI, people will think "I don't want to work for 100/m" (you know, it's the gov that pays the other 1000/m). You'll hear people say "I'm paid 1000 just to breathe, why work for 100?". It you want to limit this problem as much as possi…

Problem is, rich countries already have welfare systems and hardly anyone would support completely eliminating them. So people are already paid to breathe. The question is how to do so while minimizing perverse incentives.

Exactly. The problem right now is that if you have no job, you get government assistance. If you get a job, you lose the government assistance, so a job that pays $1200/month only allows you to keep $200 in your pocket because you've lost $1000 in government benefits by taking the job and no longer "needing" the assistance. We've created a de facto 80+% marginal tax rate on the working class vs. being unemployed, which is economically Very Bad.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#83

Post by jiggy2011 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #79
jiggy2011 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is more than a disabled person will require a higher subsidy to attain the same standard of living. The differences can be enormous. A non-disabled person can walk or cycle around the city to pick-up groceries whereas a disabled person might need a specially modified vehicle or may require the services of another person. Subsidizing everyone to the same amount as required by the most disabled of people woul…

The "most disabled person" who is not independently wealthy is not going to achieve the same standard of living as the average person. If you need a special vehicle and you can't afford it, you can live across the street from a grocery store and get a job working there. You're basically talking about the "heart transplant problem." Suppose you have zero dollars and no job and you need a heart transplant which will co…

If you are severely disabled it's really not a case of "just live opposite the grocery store and work there". Many disabilities will mean that a person simply can't perform economically productive work at all. If you have a degree of means testing you can afford to provide for these people because they are a relatively small % of the population.

In the UK for example we have disabled people who receive more in total government assistance than many able people would when working a full time job. For example they might need full time carers. Relying on charity will favor those who can best play that game, which will by definition make things harder for people with certain disabilities, particularly mental disabilities of less "popular" ones.

> So how is that different with a basic income than it is today?

If you give people different amounts of housing based on the relative costs of housing in different areas then they will not have to move to a different area and can stay where they are more likely to find work.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#84

Post by makomk »

weddpros wrote: post #59
sz4kerto wrote: post #4

"Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, paid out to by the government to every citizen - rich or poor, old or young, employed or unemployed." Well, they should have written "Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, taken from taxpayers and paid out to every citi…

There's a logic problem with Basic Income. They want people to think either: 1- it will help me earn more (because I make less than the BI) 2- it won't change anything for me (because I already make more than the BI) But obviously, these two assertions can't be true at the same time. Instead they should think either : 1- it won't change a thing 2- it won't change a thing (so why do it?) OR 1- it will help me earn mor…

You're assuming that all that matters is the amount someone earns. If people care about more than just their on-paper income, then they can think:

1: it won't change my income now, but will save me from having to jump through ridiculous, demeaning and counter-productive requirements added to the current welfare program in an attempt to punish "undeserving" receipients.

2: it won't change my income now, but will provide a nice safety net in case I become unemployed for any reason.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#85

Post by dragonwriter »

MarcusVorenus wrote: post #40
benihana wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Combined with some progressive taxation this works out to be massively more efficient and helpful than most other forms of welfare. Is this empirically proven somewhere? Or is that what its proponents are saying? Forgive me if I'm a little cynical when someone tells me an idea they support is a much better form of welfare than what we currently have but doesn't back it up with proof.

How would you go about getting supporting evidence for something that hasn't been tried yet? At the very least we would save a ton of money on bureaucracy and corruption.

> How would you go about getting supporting evidence for something that hasn't been tried yet?

You would get supporting evidence for each of a set of propositions, from which the efficiency (however that is operationalized in context) of the particular plan being proposed follows.

The whole point of the scientific method is that it allows us to have justifiable (even if not certain) evidence-based predictions of things that haven't been tried yet.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

jaibot wrote: post #39
berrypicker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those interested, a good way to implement this was proposed by Milton Friedman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax which indeed works out to be better than government sponsored programs. Progressive taxation has nothing to do with it though, it's not required at all.

Milton Friedman proposed negative income tax _in addition to_ guaranteed income. Worth noting that the US has partially implemented negative income tax (we call it EITC) - it's working really well and should probably be expanded (probably worth taking money from other welfare programs if it comes to that).

EITC is not a negative income tax. In a negative income tax, below a certain level, each marginal dollar of reduced income produces an additional negative amount of income tax (or, equivalently, positive amount of refundable credit.)

EITC is a work incentive program that provides additional income tax credit with increasing labor income up to a certain amount -- the feature for which it is named as a tax credit for earned income -- and then tails off above a certain point. In the range from the peak to the tail off, it might be mistaken for a negative income tax, but that's true of any tax credit (or even, really, a tax deduction) that has a soft cap. But that's not really the basic design or function is, and, while the EITC may work fairly well, there's no good argument I can see that the negative-income-like portion of the top end of the EITC benefit curve is a contributor to its beneficial functioning, except perhaps if you consider it only against having a sharp cut-off where the benefit drops from the maximum to $0.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

weddpros wrote: post #59
sz4kerto wrote: post #4

"Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, paid out to by the government to every citizen - rich or poor, old or young, employed or unemployed." Well, they should have written "Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, taken from taxpayers and paid out to every citi…

There's a logic problem with Basic Income. They want people to think either: 1- it will help me earn more (because I make less than the BI) 2- it won't change anything for me (because I already make more than the BI) But obviously, these two assertions can't be true at the same time. Instead they should think either : 1- it won't change a thing 2- it won't change a thing (so why do it?) OR 1- it will help me earn mor…

> There's a logic problem with Basic Income.

No, there's not. At least, if there is, its not the one you claim.

> They want people to think either: 1- it will help me earn more (because I make less than the BI) 2- it won't change anything for me (because I already make more than the BI)

Who is "they"?

> But obviously, these two assertions can't be true at the same time.

They can both be true if the benefits plus (reduced) admin costs from BI come strictly from the benefits plus (higher) admin costs of the welfare programs it is replacing. (There are people who make less, in the short term, in that scheme, but its only some subset of the people who are making money from the admin costs of the replaced programs.)

They can't if you set BI at a level that requires more money than that, or if you do it without replacing any existing programs, but neither of those is inherent in the concept of BI (and the latter, at least, I've never seen proposed.)

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

a3n wrote: post #27
sz4kerto wrote: post #4

"Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, paid out to by the government to every citizen - rich or poor, old or young, employed or unemployed." Well, they should have written "Unconditional basic income is a new form of total social security for all citizens. It’s an unconditional monthly sum, taken from taxpayers and paid out to every citi…

A healthy and minimally secure citizenry can be a public good just as much as roads and armies, which are also paid by taxes. I want this.

> A healthy and minimally secure citizenry can be a public good just as much as roads and armies, which are also paid by taxes.

As a very narrow and specific (and not necessarily the most important) example of this, in any nation which may rely on conscription and/or mobilization of volunteer citizen militias in time of need, a healthy and minimally secure citizenry is, among other public goods, directly related to military capacity.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#89

Post by RivieraKid »

anoncowherd wrote: post #75
RivieraKid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that 90% of people (100% on HN) understand this. > How high would tax rates have to be, to collect enough money for basic income? They would need to be significantly higher, but significantly more money would get back to the taxpayers too, so the aggregate demand would remain about the same, so businesses would be ok. BI, if set up properly, can redistribute wealth in a very similar way as it's happening toda…

> I think that 90% of people (100% on HN) understand this. Really? Well, then you should understand that the feedback loop I described alone is enough to make BI unsustainable, and thus not worth pursuing. But it doesn't seem you do. There's another feedback loop too: the more people are just sitting at home, the more will want to join them, and so on. From another comment of yours: >> Do you think that wealth redist…

> Really? Well, then you should understand that the feedback loop I described alone is enough to make BI unsustainable, and thus not worth pursuing.

This was probably unclear, but I meant that people understand that goverment gets its money from the taxpayers.

> There's another feedback loop too: the more people are just sitting at home, the more will want to join them, and so on.

Perhaps, but I personally believe that this feedback loop is negligable.

> Do you think it's wrong for a mafia to extort money from you? -Yes? Well then, do you think it's wrong for the government to do the exact same thing?

It's definitely not the exact same thing, one of the differences is that it's what the society democratically decided. You can always move to a different country or convince people that they should vote for abandoning taxes.

> "Higher aggregate utility", "aggregate demand"? -Well there's Keynes again.

Higher aggregate utility is a term I created by myself (and I'm apparently not alone), it has nothing to do with Keynes.

> What makes zero redistribution of stolen loot "not optimal"? I'd say it's actually precisely the optimum.

1. Decreasing marginal utility of money. 2. Low income jobs are usually harder, less respected and less enjoyable. 3. Progressive taxes decrease inequality. This has many positive effects on society.

Re: This basic income crowdfunding campaign reached its goal in less than 48 hours

#90

Post by JanezStupar »

kfk wrote: post #61
JanezStupar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your idealism. However you forget that poor countries have high levels of corruption which makes any kinds of records they keep dubious at best. Poor countries will have to commit on working out their issues on their own. We must help them, but there is no way we can do it for them. On a positive note, global trends show that poverty is constantly decreasing and that equality is rising. Slowly but steadily.

How can you let them grow if in Europe we strongly protect things like agriculture or we make things artificially expensive with copyrights and the like. I mean, what can these people do?

First order of business is letting go of tribalism and associated cronyism. Along with that we can help them with know how and some funding.

The largest hurdle imho is that everything needs to be done from the ground up. You cannot rely on their leaders to do any good as they are all pretty messed up. Todays leaders need to be slowly replaced with more competent and ethical people. Which is obviously super hard as the talent pool is pretty shallow in this day and age.

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