As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI.

Personally I believe the liberal position has both moral and practical superiority. It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later.

I'd definitely say I look at it from a liberal (non-libertarian perspective) but I don't agree with your statement. I believe universal, free health care should be available but not a food program. The money you get as your BI should cover basic living requirements - rent, food, clothing, heat. I come from a country which has free health care (NHS) which I think should remain in place. If citizens had no choice but to pay for health care then the BI should be higher to cover that cost (although I think cost of health care would rise and people would end up screwed - hence why we should have a free system). So put simply your BI should be enough for you to live 'comfortably'. That doesn't mean with a nice TV and steak for dinner every night - it means clean, warm shelter, healthy home cooked meals, adequate health care etc. The essentials for living. If you want anything more you can work. We're putting more trust in people by giving them the money without any conditions on it but I believe if there aren't extra safety nets and BI is equal to or greater than current welfare payments people will learn quickly. Their financial position doesn't change, just the trust put in them.

Healthcare is a lottery. If you're 30 years old, your healthcare needs for the year might be $0 or $1,000,000. Trying to make basic income cover that doesn't make sense.

The common complaint I've seen against this (aside from general complaints against redistribution) is that it forces the general populace to pay for the poor health choices of smokers and other such bad habits. I think this is a relatively minor issue, but if necessary, penalty taxes/fees can alleviate the concerns of people legitimately bothered by this.

The NHS doesn't seem to incentivize prevention of diabetes in the UK. To quote 'UK Diabetes': "Diabetes is the fastest growing health threat of our times and an urgent public health issue. Since 1996, the number of people living with diabetes has more than doubled. If nothing changes, it is estimated that over five million people in the UK will have diabetes.". This disease largely results from personal choices often made on the basis of misleading information.

It is not minor at all. Depending on how you look at it, smoking either costs the health care industry billions (in treatment of the living) or saves them billions (on premature death). Compound this by: diet, exercise, stress, and socialization problems and you see that the lottery has a lot of knobs and buttons, most of which will only be effective if people get effective health care their entire life.

Smokers don't die healthy. The "saving money" bullshit is literal propaganda from the smoking industry.

Here's an actual meta study on the costs: http://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/17...

>Third, Collins and Lapsley estimate the net costs of smoking, taking into account both those costs that are made greater and those that are reduced because of current and past tobacco use. For example, smoking increases some health care costs because of the higher prevalence of diseases caused by smoking (in smokers and ex-smokers who are still alive). These are the gross health care costs attributable to smoking. However, certain other health care costs are lower than they otherwise would be because of the premature deaths of many people who smoked over the past 40 years. These people did not live to use health care that they otherwise would have, so Collins and Lapsley subtract the costs that would have been incurred from the gross health care costs attributable to smoking in order to estimate the net cost. Similarly, in terms of labour (production) costs first costs that are made greater by smoking are estimated. For example, the time spent undertaking domestic duties because a home-maker is ill or has died prematurely is costed assuming domestic help will be hired. Then, savings due to reduced consumption—for example, household spending on food and clothing—are subtracted because these costs will be lower when there are fewer people in the household as a result of smokers dying earlier.

>Collins and Lapsley estimated that in 2004–05 the total cost of smoking in Australia was $31.5 billion

[1] Considering killing someone before they're born saves the cost of them and any children they would statistically have. So if we wiped out everyone we'd save all the money ever spent on healthcare.

[1]https://fullfact.org/economy/does-smoking-cost-much-it-makes...

[1] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/state-cigarette-tax-rates-2014

For health issues I think this type of pressure is a positive social force.

So really, those who multiply the fastest win the resource war of the future? Or having kids is somehow constrained now through other hoops, like a "procreation license."

Possibly, though better educated and better off people tend to have fewer children so there are other ways to limit population beyond strict China or Ender's Game style limits.

Or maybe asteroid mining will finally break and crash the whole materials economy making everything but space, food, and water extremely cheap.

Universal BI leads to universal resource control.

If you want your 21st century healthcare, you also gotta let go of outdated notions such as that addiction is a "poor health choice" (seriously kind of makes me angry typing that).

The one does not follow from the other. Just because it's predictable does not mean it's stable: you can modulate demand by, for example, making people jump through bureaucratic hoops or wait in long queues to get care.

...as we have seen in far too many countries with universal healthcare (leading those with the means to seek healthcare from other, more market-driven systems...which in turn leads to those without the means to receiving sub-standard care, or quality care subject to bureaucracy and long queues.)

In short, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. (But this is quite the tangent from the BI discussion - wherever your opinion falls on the matter, universal healthcare is an entirely different thing indeed.)

The kicker is, health insurance companies will use any pre-existing condition to get out of paying for just about everything. So, for example, if I wound up getting poly-cystic kidney disease, my insurance company would use the fact that I donated a kidney as a pre-existing condition to get out of paying for it. Even though it's completely unrelated and can't cause PKD. It's an out in their mind and they're going to take it.

Health insurance and medical care in the US is absurdly corrupt. That's why I wasn't allowed to leave the hospital without buying a walking boot from their provider. And their provider billed my insurance company $700. And the insurance company paid them $400. And then the provider billed me $100 and threatened to send me to collections if I didn't pay them. All for a walking boot that didn't fit, that I didn't use, and that I could have purchased from Amazon.com for $53 with free shipping.

Only if they are below the maximum premium profit-to-cost ratio (20/80), otherwise, they are going to have to refund the excess anyway, due to other provisions of the ACA.

That 30 year old individual with the $1m healthcare bill for the year in a for-profit system might well have only cost a public system (e.g. in Canada) $200k for the same standard of care, but with less additional financial stress impacting their ability to recover from their illness, and with no bills, phone calls, rejections, negotiations, and arguments after the fact.

It's just another example of how a uniform, public system works better.

After reading on the experiences of people from European countries and Canada in the 'OMG I had a valve replaced' forum (yes, there's a site just for that -- valvereplacement.org), the level of care that I received was significantly better than what is typical of public health systems.

Oh, and last week I needed to see the doc for a sore throat, and I was in the same day. Queues are a regular thing in public systems.

What do you pay for health insurance? How many people in the lower levels of society could afford to pay what you pay for healthcare? Do you have an employer that provides you with healthcare benefits?

I agree that healthcare in many countries could be greatly improved, but at least in many of those systems you could just walk into an hospital to start the process.

The reality is that you're in a privileged position, and it may not seem like it to you but there are a huge number of people out there for whom your situation would be effectively a bankruptcy trigger. And that's even assuming that their company lets them off work long enough to get treatment and recovery, which, in at-will states, doesn't seem like a thing that's likely to happen for a lot of the working-class.

For rich people/folks with wonderful insurances the other countries with public healthcare have private care in private hospitals, and it's of the same class — with one-on-one nurses and good food.

(Which is not to say that I disagree with you, though I do think that there are actually three different cost categories of health care:

1. Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs.

2. One-time catastrophes, like "I broke my arm" or "I got pneumonia." Probably best dealt with as insurance.

3. Long-term or lifelong large expenses, like "I have HIV" or "I have MS." Probably best dealt with as a government program.

But then you'll have a lot of problems with the boundary cases.)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-preventive-economics-idUSB...

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2015012/article/14295-...

http://www.thehoopsnews.com/effectiveness-of-mammograms-vast...

It's a complex subject, and a few articles aren't the final word one way or the other. My opinion is based on various things I've read over the past couple of decades (most of which I can't summon up right now) and conversations with various medical professionals in my family and social circle, and my overall worldview (as anyone's must be).

It seems there are preventative measures that are cost effective, and there are others that are not. So really, this indicates a need to determine a threshold. Perhaps we determine that we can afford to pay up to $50,000 per QALY, and cover any care that falls within that limit. So, we'd have coverage based on its efficiency rather than whether it is considered preventative or treatment or maintenance. The idea being to get the maximum amount of healthy years of life out of whatever amount of money we as society are willing to put toward healthcare. This could also be extended to programs outside of direct care, like some of those articles suggest, which encourage and support healthy activity in a way that still falls within the $/QALY target.

Of course, I expect it would be a bear to fairly study every possible treatment and program to determine its efficiency, especially factoring in a changing environment which is bound to change the efficiency of any given treatment from year to year.

Still, at a minimum, we should be grabbing those low-hanging fruits, where we can gain healthy years for a very low cost.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime...

But being unsure where my next meal will come from, I can't even visit a clinic to get a test done.

I keep praying to get some money so I can go check myself before I leave my young family without a caregiver.

So yes, whatever you guys argue here today. Make sure people like me in future can be cared for. And that they don't have to worry about food, shelter, Healthcare.

Like you said, you absolutely don't want to leave your family without a caregiver.

When you live in Africa, you have different problems.

Either way, I was buttressing this point

> even a small personal cost can encourage people to ignore warning signs and not seek aid until the problem has become severe and expensive

Free-as-in-beer health care ensure more people going to the doctor for more crap, reducing availability and quality for the average person.

Yeah, it is called brainwashing. I worked in insurance and was all tickled to see them offering "wellness" benefits. I was all "Oh, yay, the world is turning into a better and more clued place!" Then I went to the meetings. These were purely a sales gimmick. That's it.

You encourage people to go to their annual check up and they feel like you actually care. It breeds employee loyalty. It mostly does very little for actual health outcomes. If you actually want better health, you are better off promoting exercise, healthy eating, sanitation, etc. in place of preventive medical screenings.

This is a pretty terrible idea. Even programs in the current day that are trying to make consumers feel their healthcare costs (like HSAs and their required high-deductible PPO plans) often or always cover preventative care at 100%.

Preventative care is precisely the kind of care that people are most likely to skip to save on some money, and at the system-level this just means much more costly healthcare. Regardless of how you structure your healthcare system, increasing the cost of the actual care itself is a horrible idea.

We already have a national individual mandate for health insurance with specific coverage rules which has made decisions about this; essentially, a mature BI would cover expected out-of-pocket costs plus insurance premiums in that system.

(That's not to say further reform of that system isn't possible or desirable, with or without BI, just that, given the existing system, there seems to be a fairly natural way that healthcare within that system fits into BI.)

(Not sure why I jumped to that conclusion, except that perhaps a basic income system appeals to the same economic minimalism that an out-of-pocket health cost system does.)

This seems like a terrible idea. If someone, for example, notices a new mole, they are much less likely to get it checked out if it is an out-of-pocket expense. Obviously, most of the time it'll be fine, but it could also be skin cancer that was easily treatable but has now metastasised and will be hugely expensive to treat.

With a competitive insurance market, you charge people a premium related to their expected healthcare costs. Some people have chronic diseases, and their expected healthcare costs are way beyond what they can likely afford.

However you regulate, insurance companies will always try to find a way to cream off the lowest risk customers to offer them the cheapest deal, progressively chipping away at the idea of collective insurance until it breaks.

Private health insurance is broken not only in practice but also in theory.

With car and home insurance, the products can go their entire lifecycle without burning down, being robbed, or smashing into a tree.

With healthcare, a person is going to need it, and it incapacitates them when they don't get it. Personally I'm for treating healthcare as we treat most regional monopolies that everyone needs - make it a public utility. You'll need healthcare just like you'll need water and electricity.

Not really, at least not at the current stage of technology.

During most of your life, healthcare is more like a lottery, ie you might never need it.

When you are old, something will eventually get you. And a lot of health care costs are spend on these end-of-life conditions. Alas, our massive spending at the end doesn't actually help very much: they mostly give you a few more month of suffering. (For things like cancer etc.)

For a lot of people hospice care is both cheaper and provides a better quality of life. (Some in-law of mine went from hospital care to hospice care when the cancer treatments got worse than the disease.)

See eg http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medi... for a similar argument.

That's like saying you don't really need electricity until later in the day, when it's more in demand for everyone. Should we treat electricity use as a lottery?

In fact, people should be using healthcare more, as a preventative measure (for reasons you just said), but because we treat it like car accidents and house fires and lotteries it's stuck in remedial mode.

See eg http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/feb/08/how-doctors-c...:

> How doctors choose to die

>When faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals, who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment. An American doctor explains why the best death can be the least medicated – and the art of dying peacefully, at home

To be clear, there are a few different kinds of health care along multiple dimensions, like

- price

- expected mean utility (as measured in quality adjusted life-years gained)

- variance of utility (which I am ignoring here)

I am saying that at current state of technology, if we exclude the expensive stuff with near zero or even negative utility, the remaining demand for big items fits an insurance model rather well.

Yes, I agree that we should probably do more preventive interventions---like exercise, decent nutrition, vaccinations, etc. These are mostly cheap.

And even though they are good for people already, the insurance company might very well decide to just pay for them (and perhaps even pay people extra on top with discounts etcs to nudge them even more) to save itself money in the long run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

EDIT: There's of course also expensive treatments that provide a lot of quality adjusted life years, but the need for these are more like a lottery. (Eg treatment after a car accident or massive burn, or certain treatable cancers.)

The proper way to make these sorts of decisions is by passing laws that make the transfer payments explicit, not disguising them in byzantine insurance regulations.

Alas, politics is the art of the possible, and hypocrisy is a valuable tool.

How, specifically, would it do so compared to the actual system that exists now in the US?

Those with money pay too much for insurance because those without insurance are only covered at the last stages, when it becomes inhumane (by anyone's definition) to deny them care (which is also the most drastic and expensive level of care for a problem) which is then 'written off' and padded in to the 'prices' asked for other services.

A LOT of medical costs are actually sunk fixed op-ex. Big expensive machines that cost deferentially little to use or not (but always coast a lot to have the option of using), drugs and other supplies that have shelf lifes, etc.

Labwork presently requires a lot of humans, but much of it could also be converted to automation and human review, lowering the per unit cost; if there were incentive to make such technology.

It's also a major bit of administrative overhead to have to haggle with different insurance companies, hound patients for billing, and in general worry IF someone will pay and how much.

I suppose the closest parallel is what I recall hearing happened to auto-insurance rates when those became mandatory.

Another close parallel would be what would happen if everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area were to suddenly receive an additional 500 USD/month housing allowance for living in the area. I would expect occupancy prices to go up by ~500 USD and the general quality of housing anyone current has to remain the same otherwise.

(And incidentally, that's a great argument for replacing almost all taxes with taxes on land rent: any extra money people have left over after paying taxes etc goes to bid up housing costs. Lower taxes and you get higher housing costs. A land tax can recover the lost revenue---and it's really hard to hide land and evade the tax.)

For example, using the data from: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/...

and looking at the After-tax Lease & R&D adjusted margin, The software industry is at 24% (8th place) and the Insurance industry is at 11.51% (37th place).

Just like Hollywood never makes a profit, you can't use profit margin to measure what the cost savings would be in moving to national healthcare system.

Presenting, perhaps, a different take: basic income can cover insurance which does account for the 0-1mil total distribution via actuarial science.

Either, because insurance companies charge them more.

Or, if insurance companies are not allowed to charge them a special price, healthy people will be reluctant to pay for (now) overpriced (for them) insurance.

One clever technical way out is to have your parents buy insurance for you before you are even conceived. This way, because neither the buyer nor the seller of insurance knows what's coming, it's not a market for lemons. (And if the parents genes make this kind of insurance too expensive, because it's expected that you inherit some defects, perhaps they should rethink their decision to procreate with each other. (Just like couples with sickle-cell-anemia on both sides are already advised.))

But of course, people will not be that farsighted, and we don't want to penalize people for their parents making stupid decisions, like not to buy insurance, more than necessary.

So in actual life, a basic version of an NHS like system plus optional extra insurance you can buy seems like the most sensible policy.

I have lived in a country with universal healthcare. Its not that cheap, my portion of taxes that went to healthcare was about the same as the highest cost Kaiser plan. But Kaiser (thus far) is leaps and bounds better than the care received.

Where I am from you make an appointment with a doctor, and they will almost certainly be 30-60 minutes late for it. Then when you do get in the room with them, they will give you 15 minutes max because thats all the government pays for. Similarly every person I know who needed something done is on a waiting list. For months and a small number for years.

People complain about the cost of US healthcare, but if you can pay for it then it does seem excellent.

If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI.

The same options should be available for all the necessities (clothes, food, water, shelter, communications, and savings). The sum of these government services should sum to your total BI grant, so if you opt-in to all government services you have the basics of survival totally covered but receive no direct BI.

As an example, I once had a homeless guy ask me for money outside a grocery store. I suggested that we go inside and get him whatever food he wanted, and he said he'd wait for me outside. Sure enough he was gone by the time I returned. I'm fairly certain he only wanted the money for alcohol or drugs. That kind of person doesn't save money for food, they beg for food and use the money for other purposes.

If you made the program automatically adjust your BI down when you started accepting food from government programs, that would basically act as the government stepping in for people who just aren't able to handle money.

I've had other experiences with homeless men turning down food when I offered it. I know that my father-in-law would be (and has been, in the past) happy on the street, using his money for cigarettes and gambling with his friends. There are a lot of different kinds of people that would need to be accounted for and different motivations.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-01/ezard-homelessness-and...

Further, I don't have much money. I cannot afford a lot of stuff for myself. So I can only help with necessities. And I don't want to judge whether any given person is lying.

In conclusion, I never hand out money. But I've bought quite a few bags of groceries for strangers.

Freedom isn't freedom without the option to fuck up.

The problem is that the US system has such incredibly low social mobility that it prevents any alternative to fucking up.

The mythology of personal choice applied to situations over which hardly anyone has actual personal control is perniciously misleading.

The "undeserving poor" - feckless, addicted, irresponsible - is just as much of a cliche as the opposite.

In fact, BI research shows that most people don't waste the money. They use it to improve their lives - sometimes by starting small businesses that wouldn't be possible without BI.

I believe that the concept of "deserving" or "undeserving" poverty is not just unhelpful but actually misleading, and creates a great deal of unnecessary confusion. It is more useful to ignore the personal details and look at the systems. We can't change other people; we can rarely change ourselves; but we can certainly change systems, because they are human creations in the first place. So that's how we should approach poverty.

I am in favor of basic income as an improvement on and replacement for other forms of social support, for a variety of reasons: it seems like a more efficient way to move money around, it seems like a more effective way to distribute resources to people in need of them, and it seems overall like a more egalitarian, less judgemental way of dealing with a whole complex of problems which currently create a great deal of suffering. It is simple enough to feel like good engineering. It is fair enough to feel sustainable. It is non-ideological enough that I feel reasonably sure it would be difficult to use it as a mechanism of social control against weirdo outliers, like I am, but who aren't fortunate enough to have access to the same resources I do.

By "option to fuck up" I mean simply the freedom to do something other than mainstream opinion thinks you should. In these examples, people clearly believe it would be a bad idea for someone begging on the street to use the money they earn to buy alcohol. Well, on average, that's probably true. But just because someone is in a desperate way, I don't believe that gives me (or you, or anyone) the right to tell them what choices they should make. It's still their life. If I am willing to hand the guy on the street corner my spare $5, I have to be willing to accept that he's going to do whatever he thinks best with that money. If I can't be happy with that I shouldn't give him the money. But I believe that each person generally is the best judge of what is best for themself; I'd like it if the society around me would leave me free to make my own choices, not because I'm successful enough not to have to beg for money on the street, but because that's how I think we should all treat each other all the time, regardless of circumstances.

And that's without even getting into the problem of perverse incentives involved in giving money to people for asking for it.

If someone asks me for money, and I give them money, it becomes their money, and it is none of my business what they choose to do with it, any more than it is any of their business (or yours!) what I would have done with it if I kept it.

Otherwise, you're not really giving them help, you're taking some amount of control over their life.

It isn't if your idea of help is unconditional donation. But is there anything wrong if I see donations as investments (in society) with expected returns on the same? Would I be wrong in trying to maximize my returns?

The point is, just giving money does not absolve us of our moral responsibility. If I donate with an objective of social good, not just with the idea of dispensing my spare wealth, it is my right and duty to see that my investments give the maximal return, i.e. maximal social good.

Of course I can be wrong/ suboptimal in my investment strategies but then I can improve.

I think this depends on what you mean by "rely on". I could see many people who are very capable of managing their money relying on BI to allow them to take behaviors that would be risky in the absence of BI. For example, a college student who is choosing between starting a small business or interviewing at larger companies may significantly rely on the BI when deciding to start their business.

However I agree that, when viewing BI as a safety net, those who would need it are disproportionately likely to also need help managing the money.

This belief is the underpinning for most current welfare systems, but is there any evidence supporting it?

Some citations to studies indicating the opposite is true:

https://givedirectly.org/research-on-cash-transfers

The richer the society you live in, the more it becomes lbhe snhyg[1] that you are poor. Imagine how hard you would have to work to be homeless in the world of Star Trek TNG, for example.

[1] I rot13'd that text because it's not the best expression, and it might knock some people off, but I don't have time to euphemize things for adults.

Anything other than focusing on the core drives and desires of man is superficial at best and wasted at worst.

We live in a world now where we get half the porridge our parents did, and he's teaching us how to starve and hide porridge in our pockets for rainy days. He's part of the problem and a distraction.

Of course he did. Never, never, never, ever give money to panhandlers.

Not being flippant; there's a reason this sign exists:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/86/70/85/86708570f...

and many more alike.

"MY WIFE IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE AND I NEED $10 MORE FOR THE RANSOM!"

Essentially, allow people to pre-commit to paying for a specific expense to a private organization which has to provide that service. They can opt out later on, but only before their next basic income check.

Also, I think there should be some sort of auto-enrollment system. So if you're found homeless, having blown all your BI check on booze, you'd be automatically enrolled in the top housing provider.

I think many people would need a BI deposit weekly.

In a few years, we could even make it daily so it's as close to a continuous stream as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld#Grails

Printing and mailing checks can be done almost fully automated and would close down millions of welfare buildings, and give people back dignity.

There's a stigma that you get when you're on public assistance or welfare. It creates a feeling of less self-worth. This causes you to believe that the best job you'll ever get is McDonald's - so why even try to better your circumstance.

GBI on the other hand goes to everyone - even the wealthy. The message is that we're all equal and it's basically a reverse citizen tax on the government to ensure everyone can live and grow in nurtured environments.

The world I see in the next 20 years - there will be no more truck drivers. Fast food restaurants will be run by 1 manager alone. Gas stations will be ran by self-serve kiosks, and be fully automated, as will be grocery stores - including re-stocking. Other jobs that will be gone: Surgeons / Doctors (probably not fully but the need will be a lot less because of AI like Watson, where you once needed 30+ doctors in a hospital you might need only 3 or 4.), construction workers, trash trucks, oil rig workers, fishing, pilots, military (replaced by drones / droids), manufacturing, etc...

We will move from a society where it's expected that everyone work 40+ hours and sometimes two jobs to meet basic needs to a society where work is optional, and 20 hours is the norm. More focus and time is spent with family and having experiences that truly enrich one's life. GBI gives people the freedom to also pursue entrepreneurism, startup ideas, music, art, writing, and any other number of hobbies and past times that could enrich society in general. Studies have shown that truly happy people aren't the ones who have the most 'stuff' it's the people who experience the most that life has to offer (i.e. traveling, events, concerts, etc...)

For us to get to GBI we need to hurry up the automation revolution -- I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and progressive democrat who's FOR robots at Wendy's and McDonald's as well as a $15+min wage... I see it coming. 40% of jobs will be gone by 2030 and never replaced. The faster we tip the scale and hit the dirt the faster government will need to respond or there will be riots when people are starving and losing jobs left and right. It needs to get worse before it can get better essentially.

This fantasy that AI/robotics/self-driving vehicles is just around the corner is like fusion power - perpetually 15 years in the future. It'll happen, eventually Moore's law will make it possible, but it's not as close as people think.

And your comment about "The faster we tip the scale" is almost inhumane considering the impact. It needs to get worse before it can get better? I suppose that goes with "Never let a crisis go to waste..."

But that aside, if all that's left is basic cleaning then McDonalds could simply contract a cleaning service. I'd guess that a single team could service at least 10 fast food restaurants a day. And then how many years before running the cleaning service only requires one person?

Watson is not AI. Its just a marketing buzzword. Doctors will be replaced right after tenured professors and software developers... (not in 20 years).

millions?

<We will move from a society where it's expected that everyone work 40+ hours and sometimes two jobs to meet basic needs to a society where work is optional, and 20 hours is the norm.>

"We'll lose a bundle on each recipient, but we'll make it up in volume."

i guess if someone is on basic income then he will not be able to afford a family of his own; raising kids is quite expensive. A basic income receiver will also be out of luck if he has to support a member of his family who got into trouble, if your family is unable to be a potential source of security and everyone is alone on his own then the concept of family will become more brittle.

To me basic income sounds like a way to create a dependent underclass - very dependent on the state for that matter (and will probably vote for the party that is most likely to continue with the basic income policy - so it will likely be a politically agitated group). And that's not quite conductive to the idea of personal happiness...

Basic income is an attempt to deal with a growing number of people who are unemployable in the modern economy. I think a better way would be to find meaningful work for these people - maybe in such areas as caring for disabled and elderly or in education (i think we are out of luck with automating these tasks). This approach would be harder and costs more to implement than just dealing out the welfare checks, so it will probably not be adopted...

We already have that - and it's currently very hard for people on welfare and/or disability to ever pull themselves out of it. With basic income it becomes possible to start working 1 hour a week, then 2, then 3..., without having to worry about losing your benefits or getting in tax trouble.

> Basic income is an attempt to deal with a growing number of people who are unemployable in the modern economy. I think a better way would be to find meaningful work for these people - maybe in such areas as caring for disabled and elderly or in education (i think we are out of luck with automating these tasks).

If people find those things fulfilling to do themselves, they will do them (and basic income allows them to do it unpaid). If other people want them to do those things, they will pay for it. If no-one wants them to do those things, there's no value in them doing it.

So it will bring down salaries - why bother with paying a salary when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?

Unpaid work by basic income receivers is an interesting question on its own - on the side of the employee there would be the question of motivation; on the side of the employer there would be questions of reliability - can one trust an unpaid employee to appear at work reliably and in time ?

I'd expect it to bring down salaries for fulfilling or enjoyable work (or "work"), while pushing up salaries for less pleasant jobs.

Not unlikely scenario: some department is created to handle these necessities, they hire a bunch of people for terrible admin jobs, and they still sub-contract a bunch of the specific work to private companies.

It probably isn't, but one possibility is that the government would be such a huge customer, that they have significant negotiating power. Per-unit costs would consequently be much lower.

The government is notoriously bad at this.

That having been said, I personally like this idea a lot. Maybe the balance between the two can be adjusted by cutting out (the market rate + agency cost) out of your BI – i.e. If a month's cheap food is $200 at cost, if you participate in a food stamp program, it takes $250 out of your BI (since a bunch of people have to be employed to verify things about it).

That way, people will be more motivated to not use the government agencies since they get a better deal by just saving that amount out of their BI.

In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front! (there are other similar scenarios, where poor people are penalized because they haven't a positive credit report)

I don't know the answer though; I think what ncallaway suggested was to provide it at-cost which seems fair (also, the bulk-buying power of a food kitchen means that it should not really cost any more - in fact it may cost less than doing it yourself)

On the other hand, being able to 'sign over' a portion of one's basic income might open up all sorts of other abuses. (e.g. some sort of payday loan company that says, sign over your Basic Income for a year and I'll give you a lump sum right now...)

[1] IRS Publication 590, "Prohibited Transactions", https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p590a.pdf

> In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front!

Given this information, I don't see how it is similar. It seems more like stupidity of the part of British Gas or whoever. Are the prepay meters used by poorer families who get subsidies paid directly into those meters or something?

The electricity supplier gets more for the same electricity at no risk. Thats not actually stupid.. but in my opinion, it is in some way evil.

Yeah, I meant stupid as in, 'No person would take that "deal" if they could help it.' I guess the people who are taking this deal are forced to take it, and that does make it pretty bad (especially if you are a brand-new tenant who isn't actually connected to the previous one who had trouble paying).

Doesn't this already exist? You can exchange $X for food at stores, restaurants, etc. Why make a program that just turns the government into a grocery store?

That is, if my monthly BI payment is $800 I can opt to receive a monthly BI payment of $600 and also be guaranteed to receive enough basic foodstuffs to survive for the month.

I would also set these up to draw off the next month's BI payment, effectively allowing you access to short-term credit for groceries. If we are in mid-june and I've run-out of money, I can start the government foods program immediately, taking the funding out of my July BI check.

These services would be intended for people who are having a hard-time managing their finances in a responsible-way. Grocery stores neither help people manage their money or provide short-term credit solutions.

This is not necessary. Just distribute the money weekly (or daily) and let people figure out what to spend it on. If they would rather buy cigarettes than food, let them. When they're hungry they'll buy food.

For the small percent of people who have serial problems managing their capital, giving them capital is the worst thing you can do. This causes people to get trapped in a cycle.

The key difference here is you replace future-capital with the goods or services directly. It's much harder to turn food and/or rent back into capital, and then mismanage it.

...if Something Happens and you run out of cash this month, why would you expect to a) not have Something Happen next month or b) have enough surplus next month to repay the "loan"?

Well, I guess you'd want to peg the BI at "average cost of living plus buffer", so that the person always has enough liquidity to cover, say, a standard deviation of Oh Shit over the course of N months. Or, keep safety nets as nets (rather than traps) so that Oh Shit, Something Happened events don't cause this issue.

Hmmm.

With current safety nets, we have perhaps 15% [1] of Americans that for whatever reason lack the capital to have an adequate supply of food.

With Basic Income, perhaps we reduce that number down to 1%, but we still need to take care of that 1%.

With the government services program that I suggested (and there are many other models, and I'd be happy to discuss other models), maybe you get that number down to 0.3%. Yet, as a country, we still need to take care of those people.

Personally, when it comes to feeding and housing people, my answer to "At what point do we stop" is: Never.

[1] 48.1 million Americans lived in Food Insecure Households (http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu... 317.3 million Americans in 2014 (http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2013/...) = 15.1%

To use your idea though, you could join a voluntary mutualized/cooperative consumer union that buys food in bulk discounts to distribute to members, or pools 5-20 peoples UBI to buy a very large house.

That's part of the problem. Government programs don't need to fix or eliminate problems. Once they've been launched, it's virtually impossible to get rid of them. We're stuck with the War On Drugs, the TSA, ethanol subsidies, and on and on and on.

Fixing bad programs is very difficult, and once we've set something in motion, even if it was a really bad idea, it's all but impossible to pull it back.

EDIT: freudian slip - I typed "government problems" in my first para, where I should have written (and have changed to) "government programs".

There are notable exceptions, like senior citizens - which is why we haven't done anything about the unfunded expediture on the Medicare prescription coverage.

Most of the "failures" you see are the result of a dysfunctional political system. For example, the Post Office was looking to branch out into services like bill payments, identity verification, banking, etc but Congress forbid them from doing it. Not to mention the crazy requirements Congress set for pre-funding their retirees. No private company has to do that - most of them are pushing their funding obligations off to the future. Underfunding retirement isn't a good idea by any means, but the playing field is most definitely not level here, both in terms of responsibilities or ability to pivot.

It's wildly unfair to blast government agencies for not innovating. They don't have a CEO or a board, they have Congress calling the shots. Of course they aren't agile. And even worse, half of Congress thinks the entire concept of government services is illegitimate and is actively engaged in sabotaging and defunding those services. There's not really a parallel in the private world where a CEO is destroying a company because he thinks it shouldn't exist.

If one sees protection of life as a moral imperative - because without life there can't be any liberty - then allowing someone to purchase priority over those who need healthcare most is already morally dicey; allowing them to do so without ensuring there is a well funded alternative a big problem (and no, doctors etc. are not an infinite supply that just grows to handle an increased demand).

To me, the right libertarian property centric view does not maximise liberty because it guarantees a resource distribution that deprives a lot of people of essential means. BI could help somewhat with that, but it would likely always be a bandaid - the bare minimum that keeps people quiet.

Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts.

If you are given liberty you can still make foolish choices that lead to a loss of life or shortening of your life.

Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person.

A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views.

The right to life is a moral imperative, but the protection of life is something completely different and is a slippery slope.

They are different, but closely related. The lack of security, health and life drastically reduce your choices. It is meaningless to have the right to make a choice, if the means and abilities to make that choice is inaccessible to you.

We can not give everyone the means and ability to be able to make every choice, but that does not mean there are not certain choices that are so basic that they are essential if we are to not make a mockery of claiming to want to ensure liberty.

> Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person.

I would fuly support your ability to "secede", so to speak, from society. As long as you then were to accept that society can choose not to deal with you, as forcing rest of society to deal with you would equally deprive them of liberty, and as long as you control no more than an even proportion of land and other scarce resources.

Ultimately, if you truly want to maximise liberty for yourself as well as others, it means choosing to give up some of your own to integrate into wider society.

> A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views.

It's compatible with some left libertarian views. More widely, it is compatible with the views of many left libertarians that even so see it as undesirable because it's basically a repeat of Bismark's "state socialism": Bismark created the first relatively modern welfare system explicitly as an attempt at pulling the rug from under the revolutionary movements in Germany at the time (at the same time as he outlawed dozens of parties and newspapers). His goal was to reduce the appetite for revolution, to prevent the socialists from going much further.

Basic income, similarly, is a half-assed measure at guaranteeing a bare minimum in the face of mounting fears that automation will in the coming years sooner or later make demands for larger reforms grow stronger (basically we're seeing mounting fears that Marx description of end-stage capitalism was correct when he assumed that capitalists will essentially run out of new markets to expand into and find that ultimately their only way of driving down prices is to drive down employment costs, and thus at the same time reduce their markets).

As such, it is "compatible" in the sense that it is - subject to issues about provisioning of scarce resources, such as healthcare provisioning - not worse than most current systems. But it is also not all that much better.

This is the reason why you tend to see far more support for basic income coming out of classical liberal groups than left libertarian / socialist groups.

Actually, I think the two main groups are both libertarian, though there's a left-libertarian and a right-libertarian viewpoint, with the libertarians that aren't strongly left- or right- splitting between them.

I personally prefer keeping the existing means-tested programs but counting UBI as income when considering eligibility, such that with growing UBI [0] you eventually reach the point where the income floor is above the eligibility level for the means-tested programs, allowing them to be discontinued.

[0] I also prefer basically tying UBI to a tax stream that should grow with economic growth, with mechanisms to provide reserves so that you don't have UBI drop with cyclical recessions.

Perhaps we could keep those reserves in some kind of locked box, so that it can't be abused ;)

Seriously, I think that expecting the bureaucrats to keep their hands off any funds left sitting around is way too optimistic.

Its a not-uncommon libertarian view that's probably more common the farther right you go (but you'll also find some left-libertarians who believe it; heck, you'll find left-libertarians that are almost completely opposed to the existence of the state as such)

"left", "right", and "libertarian" are all pretty broad groups within which there is lots of individual variation.

Fewer desperate people means you have the liberty to walk streets at night without the fear of being mugged. You are less likely to be panhandled by homeless people missing body parts because they couldn't afford their medical bills. Assuming BI suffices for the myriad of society's problems and replaces government solutions, it is an effective way to contain the state's scope and ambitions, since any "deserved" welfare scheme rests on the ideas that there are "correct" ways to live and "incorrect" ways that require welfare to fix. Basic income does away with that idea by providing what people need as the basis for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while not mandating a particular way to live (such as drug testing for food stamps or work/-searching requirements for the unemployed who would be shown the door if they preferred to live as an unpaid community volunteer). This is why BI is often attributed as a conservative idea.

You think that desires for nonessentials (or even luxuries) magically go away in such an environment?

Heck, a guy who was playing in the NBA a year ago was shot dead while pulling a home-invasion robbery this week. NBA minimum salary was $507K.

It is often modernly invoked in the exclusive context of when taxes or state programs harm people enough to put them into financial insecurity, but it applies to private finance as well, and is principally rooted in the hierarchy of needs, which can also be considered a growing degree of freedom - if you are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, you are prisoner to it.

http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic...

However I don't doubt that some will accept it on a pragmatic basis, with the hope or expectation that it will lead to an overall reduction in violations of the NAP.

It might be better to directly subtract the benefits from any such program from the UBI. Then the only people who will even bother signing up for the other programs are the people whose total benefits from the existing programs exceed the UBI, which should be almost nobody. Then having demonstrated that fact in practice, those programs can be discontinued for lack of any real use and the savings can be used to provide slightly more UBI.

That's an interesting distinction, I think of myself as pretty liberal but maybe I'm more of a left-libertarian after all.

I generally support UBI (at least for now, I'll certainly re-evaluate my position as more studies like this one are done). And there are other traditionally "liberal" ideas that don't sit right with me, like supporting the old guard of e.g. taxi medallion owners, hotel owners, landlords & property owners (by opposing market-rate housing development), etc. even when the new alternative is actually better for the average lower/middle class citizen.

Part of the motivation for BI is that it's the least expensive means to the end of not having homeless people starving in the street (among other ends). Likewise, universal health care is the least expensive way to keep working-age adults from dying or being crippled by treatable health conditions.

The current American system is completely idiotic. It's incredibly expensive, it's inconsistent and unreliable, and it undermines the basic American value of working where you want or starting your own business.

Now, such behavior is illegal.

We don't need no liberty.

The limited research so far seems to show people generally make good decisions when given money without stipulation, and the idea we need to tell them how to spend their money "despite themselves" is probably very misguided.

Of course, more research is needed, which is exactly what the YCombinator program is planning to do.

Specifically, the American system is flawed because 'shopping around' between different providers whose sole purpose for existing is to make and maximize profits just results in you picking someone who's taking the least advantage of you. A single payer, for example in Canada, you go to any doctor, clinic, hospital, pharmacy, etc. and you get the thing. The health authority pays a fixed amount to the provider (and they make a good living, make no mistake), and the health authority attempts to maximize the value it gets from every dollar without compromising patient care, and following the mandate that everyone should have the same access to care.

I don't think so, replacing one with the other sure, but adding a basic income atop all the other programs is a no-go for most libertarians. Otherwise you're just feeding the beast.

Why? Because some people will succumb to bad decisions and I'd rather the consequences be softened by a set of minimums.

I dont think all libertarians are partisans of BI.

Not from the US though (not sure if it matters).

Fully private provision of insurance for any events that follow a non-normal distribution (as most, but not all healthcare costs do) simply does not work, has never worked and will never work.

This is completely false.

Both 'longevity' and 'infant mortality' are absolutely not measures if the quality of the healthcare system.

I've lived in Canada, US, Germany, France.

The best healthcare system is by far the US - however - it's very expensive, and it doesn't cover everyone, which are both big problems.

The quality of care for those who are covered in the US is unrivalled.

Of course, don't get the wrong insurance, you could be out o luck, and out on the street ...

1) My aunt is an oncology nurse in a major city. A high percentage of her patients are from Canada, because they can get treated here for their cancer, and are unable to get those treatments in Canada (or can't get them in a timely manner). Of course, these are only the patients who can afford to pay it out of pocket or have supplemental health insurance.

2) My dad developed a rare lung disease and was treated by the VA (which is government run healthcare for veterans of the US Armed Forces). They determined he needed a lung transplant to survive. It took them 18 months to run the tests necessary to determine if he was a candidate for a transplant, and due to the progressive nature of the disease, by the time they were done running their tests, a panel in DC determined he was no longer a viable candidate for a transplant, and sent him off to die[1]. As a last-ditch effort, he reached out to Mayo Clinic, who agreed to see him. They ran the same tests in 3 days, and determined that he was a candidate for a transplant. He got a new lung, and lived for three more years. I strongly suspect the delay in treatment cut his life short, but I'm not a doctor.

I do not want universal healthcare.

[1] People make fun of Sarah Palin and her "death panels", but they're a very real thing no matter what they're called.

Also, I don't think a person on the face of the planet has suggested that the VA would be a good system to model nationalized health care on.

I would be interested in more specifics about this. It's hard to find statistics that provide a clear comparison of quality between healthcare systems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...

The US usually does quite well: often times somewhat better than some countries with socialized health care, usually somewhat worse than some others; it's rare that there's a dramatic difference between it and other first world countries. But, of course, where there is a dramatic difference is in costs: the US often spends twice as much per capita [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

Moreover, the way those costs are distributed is socially destructive in the US in a way that they simply aren't in any other country. No one in Canada goes bankrupt due to medical bills; in the US, roughly 2 million people do a year, and another 56 million struggle to pay their bills [2].

[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148

And again, all this is for what is, in aggregate, roughly the same quality of care.

This is misinterpreting the data. The vast majority of this is the problems caused by lost income - an inability to work while ill, not because of the medical bills themselves.

EDIT: remove repeated phrase

"NerdWallet Health chose to include only bankruptcy explicitly tied to medical bills, excluding indirect reasons like lost work opportunities." [0]

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bill...

To measure the number of bankruptcies due to medical causes, you compute P(bankruptcy|medical cause) - P(bankruptcy|no medical cause). The study measures P(medical cause|bankruptcy).

Here, "medical cause" = "spent $1001 or more on medicine out of pocket". The classic example of a medical bankruptcy is Michael Vick, the NFL quarterback who went bankrupt after going to jail for dogfighting (due I'm sure to his medical bills).

See also McCardle's deeper debunking of it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabet...

Without getting into it here, I don't think McCardle's "debunking" is very persuasive, but you're right that the PNHP study (and thus at least the bankruptcy numbers in the NerdWallet Health report) has serious problems; I hadn't read it, and just as you point out, the PNHP authors conflate numbers to get them as high as possible: around 62%, whereas "when asked about problems that contributed very much or somewhat to their bankruptcy [...] 54.9% cited medical or drug costs". But while 54.9% is lower, it's...not a whole lot lower. Even if the numbers were halved, say, by taking the 29% of people who wholly attributed their bankruptcy to their own medical bills (not their family's), that's nowhere near an order of magnitude different: a million people going through bankruptcy due to medical bills is better than two million but is just as disgraceful, and simply not going to happen in countries with socialized medicine...so I think my original point still stands.

[0] http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bill...

whereas "when asked about problems that contributed very much or somewhat to their bankruptcy [...] 54.9% cited medical or drug costs". But while 54.9% is lower, it's...not a whole lot lower.

So what? This number is again not the true figure. The true figure is #bankruptcies in real life - #bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes. The study doesn't compute this.

Nearly 100% of people who went bankrupt could cite that they paid at least $1001 in taxes and could attribute their bankruptcy to that in a subjective survey if they wanted. Does this mean that it's a "damning statistic" and "disgraceful" that most people pay $1001 in taxes?

Furthermore, bankruptcy for medical reasons (like being unable to work - which the study does include) does happen in countries with socialized medicine. These numbers - and the implications innumerate reporters drew from them - are simply indefensible.

It's impossible to determine "#bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes", because it's impossible to determine a number that only exists in a counterfactual. Absent this, subjective surveys give us an approximation that's broadly useful; literally anyone can lie or misattribute just about anything on any subjective survey, but that hardly makes them useless. There's no sense in being interested in "the true figure" exactly unless we have reason to believe that it varies dramatically (say, by an order of magnitude) from our best approximations, and outliers like a criminal millionaire football player are hardly that; what matters is an idea of the impact of medical costs on people's financial security, and the study absolutely provides that.

Exactly what realistically obtainable data could persuade you that medical bills contribute to financial instability and bankruptcy in the US?

The PNHS study showed that among medical bankruptcies, people on average paid ~$17k out-of-pocket on medical bills. Would those people have gone bankrupt even without having to drop that much money on bills? Maybe! It's impossible to know for sure. But here's a study that says 76% of Americans live paycheque to paycheque [0]; what happens when you drop an unexpected $17000 bill on them? You're fighting an uphill battle against common sense, here.

And from the other direction: a blog post with some numbers showing that people do indeed go bankrupt in countries with single-payer or socialized medicine [1]. Based on the blog title and the writing, this is, I suppose, is supposed to be a rebuttal against arguments for the public system, but the actual numbers - exactly as imprecise and subjective as the American PNHS numbers, mind - are 5%-15% instead of 30%-60%. That's still too high and still disgraceful, but a dramatic improvement nevertheless.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/

[1] http://www.conservativeblog.org/amyridenour/2013/5/28/yes-pe...

It's impossible to determine "#bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes", because it's impossible to determine a number that only exists in a counterfactual.

If you were correct that calculating counterfactuals is impossible, then the study in question would be trivially wrong. So would all claims of global warming (earth warmed relative to a counterfactual), all macroeconomic claims about alternate policy proposals (bigger stimulus would have been better), VAM for teacher evaluation, pollution impact studies, etc.

Exactly what realistically obtainable data could persuade you that medical bills contribute to financial instability and bankruptcy in the US?

I'd like a model that accurately predicts bankruptcy probabilities in people who had no "major medical cause" (i.e. medical expenses under $1001). Then I'd apply that model to people with major medical cause and compute #actual bankruptcies - #predicted bankruptcies for the group that did have medical expenses in excess of $1001. This is basic science.

You are right that causality is hard to measure. That doesn't mean we take a totally wrong quantity and pretend it's the right thing. We just admit ignorance.

Now your turn. What evidence (if any) would cause you to believe that taxes in excess of $1001 cause at least 90% of bankruptcies and that this is "too high" and "disgraceful"?

Anyway: if you showed me a study that interviewed a statistically appropriate number and distribution of bankrupt debtors and found that over 50% claimed that a high tax bill was the cause of or contributed to their bankruptcy, I'd agree that taxes probably needed to come down.

Still, a tax bill is fundamentally different from a medical bill, in that your tax bill is ultimately a fact of life: it's something you're aware of ahead of time, and the assumption that you have to pay it is baked into the salary you take, and, in principle, into the rate chosen by legislators. You can plan for it and account for it in a way that you can't catastrophe, and outside of extenuating factors, failure to do so likely indicates pretty severe financial irresponsibility if tax rates are at all reasonable. That's probably why people wouldn't be too likely to claim that tax (or groceries, or rent...) caused their bankruptcy - even if a person is living paycheque to paycheque, they might be scraping by, and then wham: suddenly they get diagnosed with cancer or get struck by lightning and half their annual salary goes to the hospital in one moment, they're going to say that those medical bills caused the bankruptcy, not the expenses that they'd already accounted and planned for. Which I don't think is necessarily wrong: if I knock a glass off a table, in terms of blame, my action is what caused it to fall and drop, and chalking it up to gravity or the glass being in the way is somehow wrong, in terms of our understanding of the idea of fault.

A better comparison might be a tax hike causing bankruptcy. And yeah, if the federal government declared that a person with an annual income of 45k (the average of the people in the PNHS study) suddenly owed 17k more in taxes and people went bankrupt trying to pay it and blamed it on the hike, I would 100% be on their side (and yours, I'm guessing). You wouldn't even need to show me a study, to be honest. I would probably also say that instead of taxing these people just scraping by, they should tax the rich instead, who can easily afford it, and use that to subsidize for the poor, which is incidentally how I think health care should work.

No, but they may be a good approximation. P(B|A) is not a good approximation to P(A|B) - P(A|!B), no matter how much you wish it were.

Anyway: if you showed me a study that interviewed a statistically appropriate number and distribution of bankrupt debtors and found that over 50% claimed that a high tax bill was the cause of or contributed to their bankruptcy, I'd agree that taxes probably needed to come down.

So subjective preferences matter more than objective figures (like costs in excess of $1001)? Interesting.

That's probably why people wouldn't be too likely to claim that tax (or groceries, or rent...) caused their bankruptcy - even if a person is living paycheque to paycheque,...

Yes. The person doesn't want to admit that their spendthrift ways are cause of their problems. They instead choose something that they can nominally pretend is not their fault.

I've seen this in action. I know a guy with a $100-200k/year income, gigantic home, second home, third investment property, spendthrift wife, 2 cars, and living "paycheck to paycheck". He's in serious financial trouble, hundreds of thousands in debt. He also blames unexpected medical expenses (probably under $20k) for his troubles - certainly easier than blaming himself.

You seem to be defending this claim, by saying that Warren's criteria are reasonable.

The fact an expense of 40% of your annual compensation should be easy to handle - a 10% savings rate will get you there in 4 years. Americans prefer a risky financial position in order to have high consumption. That's a choice.

I suppose it is disgraceful that so many Americans behave irresponsibly and then expect others to pick up the tab.

5-year survival rate is an extremely misleading statistic. Much of the increase in the US is simply attributable to the fact that we detect the cancers earlier, so that patients pass out of the 5-year window before they die.

This does not make sense. The earlier you detect cancer, the higher is the likelihood that treatment is effective.

5-year survival rate absolutely correlates with 10-year survival rate and 30-year survival rate.

Though it is undoubtedly true that in the long term, we're all dead. That is however not a meaningful indicator of health care system effectiveness.

I meant what I said about AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE but experience tells me I have to repeat it. Merely detecting it earlier, BUT DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT, will improve your cancer survival stats.

That is a meaningless population unless you are suggesting that providers are working hard to detect cancer and then, having found cancer, choose to not treat it at all.

Here, let me put it into a story.

We're comparing the health care of two countries, A & B. The survival rates of cancer are better in country A.

So researchers study what country A does to get better results. They find that it has a system of early detection followed by slathering people with chicken blood.

Well, you aren't sure if the chicken blood is the right thing, but surely the early detection means people are healthier, right?

No, because . . . ahem, "if you detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE you cancer survival rates will look better."

In fact, country A and country B may be exactly the same when it comes to treating cancer. But because of very real statistical artifacts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon, it leads to statistics showing the country A is better when people have the exact same outcomes.

Perhaps you think that rubbing with chicken blood is an unfair comparison of the US health care system, because it uses science-y stuff. But measuring outcomes is hard. Lots of things that people naturally assume improve health outcomes (see other discussion on this page about annual checkups) don't. Some things that we assume improve health care outcomes actually worsen outcomes. Radical chemotherapy is the go-to example. And insurance companies were required to pay for it, too, following expensive court cases. (Health care costs were held nearly flat in the US under HMOs, which put a lid of costs but had no noticeable negative impact on outcomes. This pretty much broke their cost containment. They were also unpopular because they said no a lot.)

So figuring out if the US has better cancer outcomes is hard, because the US really puts a big emphasis on early detection, but it might be just early detection which makes the stats look good.

I'm not trying to push a narrative right here. There are a bunch of different health care systems in the world, and the one thing we know about the US system is that it costs more. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it's possible we are getting more benefit (by pushing new treatments) but it's also something that the US has not explicitly decided to do, neither by policy nor by the invisible hand of a bunch of individual actors in the market.

If you don't detect cancers, that will not stop people from dying to cancer.

The U.S. health system is expensive because it uses a lot of money for some cases that would receive less attention somewhere else. Some of these are difficult cases that other health systems even cannot treat; others are trivial things where the private insurance system spends a lot for some people while there are uninsured people who get no attention for things that could be cured or prevented relatively easily.

The priorities are not necessarily right; at least they are not producing optimal "bang for the buck" in national health - U.S. spends a lot but still people suffer from preventable diseases.

But early cancer detection is one of the undoubtedly good things.

(Infant mortality rate in the USA was lower than in my country in 1950; now it is more than double. Cuba is better than United States, if we can trust the statistics. However, I'm surprised that Canada is not that much better either.)

No it isn't. I'm trying to ram home the statistical point with a counter-factual. I have to say this extreme because some people Just Don't Get It and keep on trying to talk about something else.

A system that ONLY detects cancers earlier will show better cancer survival numbers even if actual outcomes don't change at all. No, seriously.

Let's lay out an actual example.

Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David exist. Charlie has a minor cancer he won't die if. David has a major cancer he will die of.

In Country B, since detection is heavily correlated with the seriousness of cancer, they detect David has cancer, and David dies. Cancer survival rate = 0 of 1, or 0%.

In Country A, they detect Charlie and David have cancer. David dies, Charlie doesn't. Cancer survival rate = 1 of 2, of 50%.

> If you don't detect cancers, that will not stop people from dying to cancer.

No one said this.

> But early cancer detection is one of the undoubtedly good things.

This is wrong. I know your gut tells you this is true. Your gut is wrong.

Increased detection sometimes helps and sometimes hurts. There are a lot of people, like Charlie in the above example, who would never die of cancer, but because of increased detection they now undergo risky cancer treatment. All treatment involves risk, and for cancer treatment this is particularly true. Again, look up the history of radical chemotherapy. The people who underwent it had worse outcomes than people who had nothing at all done to them.

Researchers usually find that people in palliative care do better than people in active treatment. This isn't enough to say that no treatment is always better, but it is enough to say that some treatment is often worse.

Because so many people have your gut reaction, though, "early detection" is a popular way of throwing money at the problem in America.

> Infant mortality rate in the USA was lower than in my country in 1950; now it is more than double. Cuba is better than United States, if we can trust the statistics.

Here's good questions to ask yourself when looking at infant mortality.

1. What's the difference between a miscarriage, a stillbirth, and a dead newborn? Particularly, what does it mean when this answer changes between countries, and even within countries?

2. How do the numbers change if you compare white Americans to white Canadians and black Americans to black Canadians?

There isn't such a system, anywhere. Even if you could have a public health care that detects and tries not to treat, you still cannot effectively forbid people from getting treatment themselves - if you make a law against it, people will try to escape the country to get treatment. So if you have a better detection rate, there will be actions to treat.

>Increased detection sometimes helps and sometimes hurts.

Perhaps the fallacy here is the belief that the helps/hurts ratio of treatment is 50/50? It isn't.

Of course there are cases where the treatment actually made things worse. There are more cases where the treatment has no significant effect.

But it is rather silly to assume that cancer treatments would have a net negative of zero effect.

Regarding the infant mortality rate, the definitions of miscarriage, stillbirth and dead newborn are not so different between developed nations that it would change this. Where IMR is lower, also stillbirth rate is lower, so it's not really about moving the boundary between these.

Good God, man.

The short answer: Whenever death rates plateau for the 99th (or whatever) percentile, relative to progression of the illness. If you wait XX years until the effect of moving around the diagnosis date is largely mitigated statistically, then the error begins to fade.

The long answer: This isn't quite the right question to ask at all, because it assumes away the possibility that the naive "years from diagnosis" is a flawed metric in the first place. The point of the comment you're responding to is that "n-year survival rate (from diagnosis)" as measured is a flawed statistic in general, because the baseline from which the counting starts can be different for people with the exact same outcomes. An illustrative _reductio ad absurdum_ thought experiment here is that of taking two people with the exact same cancer, detecting one earlier, and giving both exactly no treatment (or treatment on the exact same schedule). Despite having identical quality of care and outcome, the person whose cancer was detected earlier will show up as having a better 5-year survival rate, simply because we started counting earlier and her 5-year mark came earlier in the progression of the disease.

This can be mitigated to an extent by controlling for stage of cancer or whatever, and that's probably a good idea, but this is necessarily brittle and hard to scale and study.

Congratulations I guess, but you've just put a bunch of medical researchers out of a job. They had to study a long time to do that job!

I won't hazard a guess as to which argument you're imagining I made, but I'm not seeing how you jumped to this conclusion at all. As Dylan16807 points out below, "deciding which drugs or lifestyle choices make death due to longterm illness more likely" has approximately nothing to do with an apples to oranges comparison of time intervals starting at different points.

In fact, to the extent that attempts to figure this out do involve comparing intervals, they tend to be ages, which by definition are measured from birth. That's pretty much the highest standard for having a reasonable, stable beginning point when comparing time intervals across people's lives, in a way that "years after diagnosis" doesn't approach by a long shot.

> Congratulations I guess, but you've just put a bunch of medical researchers out of a job. They had to study a long time to do that job!

I'm assuming the juvenile tone is an attempt to cover up your lack of comprehension with bluster. "Congratulations I guess"

If I've misunderstood this complex and sophisticated argument and we're all ready to admit that detecting cancer later is worse, then the original point that USA is better than UK in this one tiny respect stands.

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I'll lay out a particular scenario where this happens:

Currently we detect a cancer moderately far along, and aggressively treat it. The five year survival rate is 50%.

We figure out how to detect it two years earlier. We use the same aggressive treatments, and the five year survival rate is now 70%. Hooray! But looking closer, if we wait another two years to correct for the early detection, the survival rate is only 45%. Only some of those tumors would have continued growing. Of those, attacking early is only marginally helpful. In others, the tumor wouldn't have killed the patient, but the radio/chemotherapy killed a quarter of them.

In this case, we magically know we detected everything two years earlier, so we could look at the seven year survival rate instead of five year. But the real world is not so clean. It's very hard to figure out a timescale and normalize everyone to it.

-

Catching cancer earlier screws up your ability to measure survival. A naive analysis will see higher survival rates when smaller/earlier tumors are detected. A sophisticated analysis that corrects for this is actually hard to do.

Even when you do save lives by treating earlier, it's very hard to figure out how many lives are saved, and how much of a confounding factor your detection method is.

I suspect it would be easier to improve the 5-year cancer survival rates in the UK than it would be to eliminate healthcare-related bankruptcies in the US.

The NHS has also become increasingly inefficient over the last couple of decades, as managerialisation and stealth privatisation have diverted funds away from front-line patient care towards administration costs and third-party profits.

Anarcho-Capitalists are not in the business of advocating that we take money, in the form of taxes, from one group to give it to another.

But "anarcho-capitalists do not..." is not a basis for any generalization about libertarians.

If you're worried about the public good, there are nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation that I believe would make all of us far more prosperous than today.

If a parent can't function when the basics are provided, then teachers, neighbours, and family members will be less inclined to use the excuse "but times are tough, and that person is trying hard to be a good parent".

IDK - I am inclined to think, having come from a broken home and having done community service for shoplifting food for me and my brother, if $parent (father in my case) can't get their shit together, the children would have been better off without them.

Context, I see arguing over the cost of various food programs that public schools provide. I come down on the side of "Yes, you should be guaranteeing kids are fed (minimally breakfast & lunch and if I had my way dinner too). Otherwise there's no way they're going to be able to focus on school." While the counter argument exists and is usually made from a financial standpoint, "Why should I have to pay taxes for other people's kids to get fed?" Which is, in my opinion, a short sighted viewpoint.

The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them, when we may or may not have macroeconomic desire to have more children at any given time (and that desire changes, at the society level, all the time).

It is much more important to fix the actual problem - providing sufficient adoption and relocation systems to get kids out of dysfunctional households than to give them awful school cafeteria food and hope the problem goes away while ignoring it. Hunger is just a symptom of broader abuses that we should not just use state dollars to make go away temporarily. Having mentally and emotionally healthy fresh generations is probably the most valuable investment anyone can make.

I agree that the solution you presented has the potential to help "break the cycle" so to speak. But inherently the cost of a program the magnitude of which was described is likely to be a large investment. Which, would suffer from the same perspective of economic unfairness as society would end up paying even more than now to raise other people's children. Due to the economic impact, those opposed would likely spin it as a government program to "Steal away and indoctrinate your children with agenda of the state." A subset of the population gets angry when any mention of taking their guns away occurs. How do you think people would act if it was their children? It doesn't matter if you're a responsible guardian, any talk of the state increasing its power to "remove your children from your home" is bound to strike an instinctual part of your brain.

Proposing "free breakfast and lunch" to solve the immediate small term problem of hunger within the school system to help reduce behavioral problems has a direct positive impact. The only real negative is the cost.

If they cannot, then they should be helped to be able to. If they can but do not, then I'd agree that they should lose them. You're describing two problems with different solutions: Extreme poverty and outright abuse.

Adoption beyond infancy is rare, and I've never heard good things about the foster system, and I'd be loath to put kids into it, except as a last resort.

> The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them

Financial conditions for families change all the time. A parent looses a job and has difficulty getting a new one. The bread-winner in the family gets hurt, and the family has to limp along on a lesser income. You can't just ascribe unfairness to selfishness. Things aren't that simple.

I feel like I'm reading the beginning of one of those hunger game teen dystopia novels

Seems to me that with a universal unconditional benefit that is sufficient for adequate support of both parents and children (which, incidentally, I don't see as likely in any early-phase UBI, though over time it would hopefully grow to that level), failure to provide adequate support for children is, without exception, culpable neglect; interventions to address such neglect exist and are outside of the scope of the public benefit programs UBI would replace (though, if children are counted as beneficiaries with the benefits flowing to their legal guardian, you've dramatically simplified some aspects of the administration of those programs, as well, with a UBI.)

So the question is a good one, and can't be answered with 'tough shit' quite that easily.

With a mature UBI, there's still certainly room for cases where there is ambiguity over whether culpability of the form represented by a criminal prosecution for abuse/neglect exists, but a lot less room for ambiguity (at least, compared to now) over whether there is a sufficient failure of basic parental duty to justify intervention to ensure the material adequacy of care for children.

> In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need.

That's definitely true in the US as well. I don't disagree that these services need to be reformed and reprioritized, independently of the nature of the public benefit system.

But the problem with beneficiaries (parents or otherwise) blowing or trading their benefits without meeting their and/or dependents material needs exists independently of the nature of the public benefit system -- its quite clearly a feature of the status quo system -- so its not really an argument for or against any particular public benefit structure.

I don't propose that, both because I think the size of the problem that would be addressed this way is no larger under a mature UBI than it is today (even if UBI makes the responsibilities more clear), and because I think a mature UBI would reduce other sources of children entering the system (both by reducing the social problems which result in children ending up in the system, and making it more likely that alternate, extended-family placements which are generally preferred could be found to keep children experiencing the kinds of problems which could result in them entering the system out of the system.)

If children are not being cared for, the state will still intervene.

Most proponents of UBI see it as, at least eventually, replacing some range of existing government means- and/or behavior-tested benefit programs and, possibly, some age- or disability-tested ones (in the US, most advocates would probably include, at a minimum, EITC, General Assistance programs, SNAP, TANF, Section 8 housing subsidies; some would also include Child Tax Credit, Tuition and Student Loan related credits and deductions, Medicaid, Medicare, and/or Social Security.)

I've never heard any advocate argue that it would replace all social services.

Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich.

What welfare programs for the rich? The rich pay for everything. The bottom 60% net a negative ten thousand dollars. The next 20% break even (~$1000/year paid), and the top 20% pay out the nose.

ETA: Go read the report for yourselves: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49440

Anyway, if people really are proposing that the state should give money away because then there is no need to protect children from bad parents, that's pretty stupid.

People sublease housing units without permission (and even outright illegally, even before considering rental contract limits) all the time. This includes units that are subject to one form or another of public support, whether its rent control or section 8. So, yes, you absolutely can sell (as for Food Stamp benefits, usually at a value less than the subsidy) the benefit you receive from a housing voucher.

After-school programs only work if the kid actually goes to them.

Also, there would still be a role for social services in getting kids out of harms way if their parents couldn't look after them, but basic income would be sorted out separately, without using means-based testing.

I think you would be quite surprised - it's a very well developed shadow economy that has pretty well known "rule of thumb" exchange rates, money changers, runners, etc.

This will pop up in any market that offers non-cash items of value.

EDIT: I'm not trying to call you out, I just want to know how these things are done. Being on HN, I've seen stolen credit card marketplaces and things like that. Do people put their welfare payments on something like that? Do you have resources like that?

It happens, but it's only about 1%. How much time and effort should we spend trying to eradicate that last 1% of fraud?

[1] http://www.ktnv.com/news/busted-black-market-food-stamps

[2] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/19/food-stamp-b...

[3] http://thoughtfulwomen.org/2012/10/16/black-market-for-food-...

[4] http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/02/16/investigation-unco...

[5] http://articles.philly.com/1994-06-02/news/25833443_1_food-s...

"sales of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program vouchers brought in $858 million in cash in the 2009-2011 period"

That's almost $300M/year just for SNAP benefits. $300M here, $300M there, and pretty soon, you're talking real money.

Sometimes, yes, people sell EBT cards online (a quick googling finds numerous reports of this being done on Craigslist and Facebook.)

Othertimes, they convert benefits to concrete goods, which are then sold at below-market prices to convert into cash to by things that would not be allowed by the benefit program (or traded directly for other goods, with the seller of the other goods either using the traded goods or selling them for cash.)

http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2015/06/fraud_ri...

what part of the fact that money was handed out changes things?

Giving kids lump sums and then convincing them to part ways with it for questionable ROI is already a massive problem.

Anyway, there does seem to be a problem with loaning kids lots of money and then parting them from it, but that's a different issue.

I see no reason such parents should keep their children.

If they have the means (thanks to basic income) to provide for their children and still choose not to, how can you possibly argue that person is a fit parent?

On the other hand, there's the darwinist approach...

Seems like basic income allows for this issue to be resolved by private organizations easier since cash is much more liquid than welfare/other government benefits.

So basically what I'm getting at, is if you can't manage your own life, there will be a corporation that provides shelter, food, and basic necessities for you in exchange for 100% of your BI (cue comparisons with the for-profit prison industry).

Those that are unfit for even this model (their special needs require more service than their BI can possibly cover) would be a small minority (assuming BI could cover basic but adequate care for the majority of the elderly) and I suspect they would need to be institutionalized if there were no family or charity organizations that could support them.

Well that's my off-the-cuff zero-research opinion anyways.

So the more vulnerable you are, the more likely the system should fail? A critical system is poorly designed when it is more likely to fail when its function becomes more critical.

Most people don't have problems because they are lazy, but because they have serious problems. Consider people with mental health issues, costly diseases (e.g., alcoholism), disabilities, people who are old and not functioning well, etc. If an elderly person is scammed out of their money, I don't feel 'tough shit' is a good response.

I don't see a way to BI without significant buy in from Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of HHS to provide some of the value of benefit as actual food and as gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing. Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut. The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.

So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens. The existing food aid programs use EBT cards that act like debit cards and just leverage the same grocery stores and farms that everyone else uses. BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population. It would be like building the postal service all over again, except shipping identical 3000 kcal packages to somewhere within a 1.5 mile radius of every person in America, every day. (Then also ship the older, unclaimed packages to the pork farms.)

The upside is that those jobs would be real, actually-do-something jobs instead of the bullshit, pencil-pusher, bureaucratic jobs that typically suck up some of the welfare budgets. The post office may have a bad reputation, but at the end of the day, they do have something to show for their work. Eventually, those jobs get replaced by robots, too.

Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever. Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods. Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.

HHS doesn't provide gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing without BI. Section 8 is subsidized-rent (and even so has long waiting lists and behavioral controls, so that many people that are income qualified for it don't receive it.)

> Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut.

Actually, it eliminates lots of the opportunities for middle men to take cuts (starting with government bureaucrats and government contractors.)

> The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit

So, just make contracts to secure loans by UBI benefit void as contrary to public policy. You can pay people from the benefit, you can contract to pay people from the benefit, you can't provide a lien on the benefit to secure a loan, because the benefit cannot legally be seized from you.

> to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.

Price increases are an expected market effect that drive increased quantity supplied. It's not a bad thing.

> So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens.

Yes, in a phase-in approach that phases out other programs using eligibility calculations (where UBI counts as part of income) rather than a slash-and-burn implementation where UBI immediately replaces other programs, in the short term you'd have an additional program office with only caseload related reductions in the administration of other programs, until the UBI reached a level that entire programs could be eliminated because it became impossible to qualify for them.

> BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population.

No, the whole point of BI is that its just money. "fungible daily ration packs" are not being built and trucked, monthly fixed-amount benefit checks are delivered (or electronically deposited.) [0]

People use the money to buy services in the market.

> Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever.

If you use a ramp-up UBI and phase-out of other programs (which is the only way you get the short-term surge of government workers you talk about), the supply chain can adapt slowly, and its not a program.

> Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods.

Arguably, the restrictions around food stamps and the administrative cost of dealing with them contributes to that problem.

> Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.

Food deserts typically do not have no food stores, or even no food stores that sell some things that qualify for government food benefits. There are lots of specific concrete definitions used to identify food deserts, and they tend to focus on local availability of particular variety of selections or prices of particular options.

Most food deserts have some (often small) food-selling stores, including ones that accept government food benefits.

[0] Incidentally, a universal basic banking service would be a useful side-program along with UBI, reducing the problem of the unbanked.

My personal opinion is, like the ancestor post, that BI is unworkable as a cash-only benefit. People forget that money is an economic lubricant. It does not make the gears turn. Possession of cash is economic shorthand for being able to command the disposition of real goods and services.

Having cash is a symptom of providing value to the economy, not the cause of it.

If you take a big chunk of cash from rich folks, and dump it on poor folks, that does not alter the underlying structure of the economy. The real-world supply pipeline for bringing popcorn from a field in Indiana to a bodega in East L.A. remains the same size. You have to divert a lot of cash for a long time before anyone will even consider upping the bandwidth of that specific food channel. Until then, popcorn is just $N more expensive at the bodega.

You're not providing anyone with anything more than a temporary illusory benefit if you don't build some actual infrastructure. Giving cash for rent does little good, unless someone actually builds more houses and apartments as a means to getting some of that cash, or to more of it than their existing landlord competitors.

The same amount of cash, spent on eminent domain compensation and general building contractors, can directly generate a permanent reduction in the local monthly cost of housing, rather than as a potential incentive for someone out there to maybe try to get at it.

If you do not build the economic infrastructure required for the benefit to exist, the amount of cash you have to throw at the free market to provide it can increase without bound. The economy is currently structured to funnel property and luxuries towards the rich. Screwing on a bypass pipe from a rich person's consumption endpoint to somewhere further back in their existing cash flow structure does not accomplish much.

Personally, I'd be fine with overlooking what I would assume to be the small number of people who would shamelessly exploit it, because I'd like to think that basic dignity and self-respect would prevent that number from ever being very large. In other words, the system would need some functional slack and it should be funded adequately so that it's not considered a "scarce resource" and the slack can be generous.

Myself, I'm ok if a system like this existed so that if I did have a problem family member, it wouldn't be assumed to be my responsibility to take care of them, and further, I don't like the idea of charities because it presumes benign wealthy people are available to fund them. It seems better, with social programs, to socialize the cost so that I can pay into a general fund so that it can be another-person (aka a professional)'s problem.

"Someone being too expensive to help" ... that makes no real sense today given how much money is swirling around. It's just a matter of what you prioritize.

Financial literacy is nothing more than reading comprehension and some grade 8 arithmetic.

Maybe an efficiency apartment with groceries delivered for 80%. Maybe a bunk in a dorm and a meal ticket for 50%.

Even an individual who can't manage their own money can still chose a service based on their needs.

How about if they get a grave disease and need urgent treatments and related resources for that? Is medical treatment supposed to be free in the scenario of BI as well ? Because, THAT, we know how well it works (free medical coverage) in several countries where it's already applied.

But see, that's why his is a trick question ...

If the answer is "tough shit" then it's a concession that implementing BI (or anything like it) is simply adjusting the "tough shit dial" to a relatively different value. There's still a benefits ceiling, beyond which it's "tough shit".

At that point it becomes difficult to justify any particular point on the tough shit dial - especially when todays tough shit was, four generations ago, essentially heaven on earth.

No benefits at all is a rational position. Endless benefits, cradle to grave is also a rational position. Neither of them are self-contradictory or loony. You may disagree with either of them but neither of them are crazy.

It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically. His question - and your answer - illustrate that very well.

No. In most countries of the world, including the United states, limited social benefits exist. It is sometimes messy, it is sometimes unfair. But they are reality.

Yes, that is exactly my point and it is from knowledge of the US systems especially that that point is informed.

It is my contention that they don't work - not just practically, on the ground, but even theoretically.

But it doesn't mean that they don't work at all. You are dismissing them because they aren't working perfectly. And I am saying that it is wrong to dismiss something just because it isn't perfect, especially if there is no better alternative.

I don't see how this follows. You are arguing that perfect is the enemy of good? This tough shit dial be as low as is acceptable fiscally and to the contemporary standards of society.

> It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically. His question - and your answer - illustrate that very well.

By this logic do current US welfare programs count as the "bullshit in-between?" Those are very much workable practically in the sense that they are currently in effect and are not planned to be dismantled. For that matter doesn't any level of government support for disadvantaged citizens count as the "bullshit in-between?"

For example, give everyone a housing voucher. They can only spend it on housing, with the assumption they will need to top up from other funds

It would still be "universal" because everyone has it and you don't suffer clawbacks.

If you stipulate that every family can spend an extra $1000 on housing, rent will go up by $1000 pretty quickly, and housing prices will go up by whatever $1000/mo in mortgage payments will allow.

But in normal markets, people will still try to supply the good at the lowest cost and consumers will still try to gain it at the lowest price, and the market will find some midpoint.

Moreover, if you can't make "universal housing vouchers" work, how are you going to make "universal basic income" work? The former is a much simpler problem.

The key questions in my mind are:

(a) how do we prevent people borrowing against it?

(b) what to do about kids of people who squander their basic entitlements, but it's not like the current system handles this issue well.

Single payer healthcare + UBI and the rest is up to you.