We already have that in the US. For example, on a state-by-state basis: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
Every serious basic income article I've read addresses the question of who pays for it. The answer is, unsurprisingly, everyone who pays taxes.
1. Not every one would work to pay taxes, when there is a way to not work and still get paid.
2. Lesser the number of people who work lesser the pool of money to share among the remaining.
3. Those who still continue to work feel cheated all the time to be working and making up for everyone. While they push insane hours to make a living, punished all the time for earning, endlessly being asked to pay for others, or be called greedy and evil otherwise.
4. Mass exodus of people follows to places where there is a decent rewards in return for work.
5. Ecosystem as a whole has endless iteration of fewer and fewer contributors, and more and more people who think are entitled to free cash. At some point it all collapses in its own weight.
1 - 5 is basically the story of every single socialist economy in the past 150 years.
Not that it necessarily matters, since most "socialist" economies didn't really have anything like a basic income. The closest was probably the USSR, where everyone was notionally guaranteed an income, but only because everyone was guaranteed a job, and voluntary long-term joblessness was illegal.
The fact of the matter is that there has never been a country-scale attempt at implementing a basic income. Nothing even resembling a basic income has been employed in a country that didn't also have its economy devastated by war - whether civil, cold, or world. The small-scale trials of basic income have had either neutral or positive outcomes.
The problem here is not underemployment. Underemployment is a situation where people want to work, but don't have jobs. The situation I mentioned systematically disincentivizes working making it very easy to get by life without work. The net situation is people feel they are entitled to free stuff without doing any work for it. And its always somebody else responsibility to provide for them, while they do nothing at all to contribute anything back.
>>Most socialist ex-economies collapsed primarily due to the effects of the end of the cold war.
Cold war was the perfect test of which country could retain their best. There were barely any incentives to stay in socialist countries. At any given point of time a minority was slogging till death to feed the remaining mouths in their countries. Why do think you so many people from countries like India(Largely still socialistic society) want to move to US?
Robbing Peter to feed Paul only works that long.
>>They were generally already devastated by WW2. It is by no means certain that a capitalist economy would have fared any better.
That's strange since none of the socialist economies did better even those which didn't participate in the world wars.
>>The fact of the matter is that there has never been a country-scale attempt at implementing a basic income.
Sorry, you say- since nothing like it with 100% match existed before we should discard cases with 99.99999% match.
0% working for some definitions of work. People want to be and do all sorts of things and will continue to, automation should help us live more comfortably and more gently on the earth, not make us redundant.
34 million Americans resort to minimum-wage jobs because there's nothing else. This is not a fad or a downturn; its the new normal.
Citation: this article calls manufacturing automation "an explosion" in the last decade. http://www.automationworld.com/manufacturing-trends-2015
It's just a rehashing of the red state-blue state federal dependence argument, which is really the rural-urban dependence argument.
If you want to knock rural areas as being net welfare recipients, just call them rural areas rather than red states. But even that's still an unhelpful generalization.
If you really want to be granular, you would single out the urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and yes rural areas (such as oil patches) that are net contributors.
Connecticut has 3.6 million people, Wyoming has roughly 0.6 million people. 6.2% of Connecticut's 5543^2 miles of land is public 56% of Wyoming's 97818^2 miles of land is public.
So Wyoming has about 8 times as much private land as Connecticut and about 1/6th the number of people.
I realize that there is a lot more involved than just land, but it looks like in the aggregate, there is about 50 times as much private land in Wyoming per person than in Connecticut.
It is easy to poke holes in my analysis, but I'd be surprised if scarcity of land is the roadblock to a healthy economy in Wyoming.
I'm also not trying to take an opinion on whether the federal government should hold all that land, just pointing out that there is a lot of land in Wyoming on a per-capita basis.
This is only one way to split the pie. Another way to look at it is the division between people who earn their lot in life by working and people who collect economic rents from the commons. It seems only fair to me that those who collect rents should contribute more. This is the principle underlying the concept of the social dividend [0].
Take a factory owner, for example. They are net recipients of many societal benefits, including: roads, electricity, water, sewage removal, education and health care for their employees, favourable tax rates for their property, etc. For that factory owner to then turn around and cry foul at being called upon to be a net contributor to basic income is hypocritical bordering on antisocial.
His or her issue isn't with taxation specifically, his or problem is with more taxation in general.
My issues with Basic Income are similar to those raised by PJ O'Rourke about government in general. Government is incompetent, and BI is a recipe for handing even more power to politicians. I'm not convinced that is a good idea.
This is already a massive problem in programs where we do require demonstrations of need. See NPR's expose on rampant disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
It's hard to see how eliminating safeguards will improve things.
If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.
I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.
Also, since the purpose of the program is to reduce poverty, not to detect fraud, another effect is that the additional oversight will keep people away from the program, either by (as above) their inability to navigate the efforts to protect the program from fraud, but also by the effect of intrusive (and possibly personal and demeaning) questions and inspections has on people's self-image who choose to accept the aid (as per TFA), causing them to avoid taking it to avoid social stigma.
I know these are the types of points that laissez-faire libertarians laugh at i.e. "imagine someone who is taking my money refuse any indignity; they can always choose to starve," but those sorts of libertarians don't think that poverty is a concern anyway. When those types get to design programs like this, they end up largely populated by people who are willing to navigate them as a job, hence largely fraudulent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The vast bulk of overhead is ultimately fraud control in some form, and as that expands, so the program expands, while the number of people being helped stays steady or even shrinks. This massive administration is farmed out to contractors to reduce ballooning costs (cronies, friends of friends and/or benefactors - an externality that affects us all as a rise in corruption) who are rewarded for finding more fraud with a higher proportion of the budget of the program. Their primary motivation then becomes to find excuses to exclude people from the program.
This is depressing to even type. The reason one would have basic income is to eliminate this. I believe that every millionaire should receive a check. Means-testing is a scam.
Unfortunately good government requires carefully understanding and administering a bureaucracy, taking into account individual incentives, and building something non-simple.
Basic income is just a cheap mental hack used to seduce the lazy. It's like looking at a webapp, realizing that 75% of your compute cycles are doing error handling and then saying "aha, the solution is to ignore all errors!" It's seductive, brilliant in it's simplicity, and complete idiocy.
Among other things, this is why essentially no basic income proponents are willing to even do a back of the envelope calculation to show how it would work. (Similarly, "eliminate all error handling" guy will refuse to write a proof of concept.)
[edit: I altered this comment to explain in better detail what I think is wrong with BI, but eliminated a sentence that SandBOx replied to. I believe the real goal of most BI proponents is to create a vote bank of government dependents.]
It's a reform of the French tax system based around a basic income and flat taxes on income and wealth. The resulting redistribution is similar to the current system without the nasty border effects and bureaucracy.
1) Trust your brother, feed him and let him crash. Costs you $50.
2) Don't trust your brother. Hire an investigator to determine if he bought weed. Most of the time nothing is found so you wind up helping him, which now cost $70. Occaaionally you discover something and choose not to help. Still costs you $20.
Is #2 worth it? That depends on how often the investigator finds a reason not to help.
You actually have 4 options: do nothing and then put people in jail. Which will cost you WAYYYYYY more per person, per year, than just giving them money directly to "freeload".
Do nothing and wait for the mass revolt when half the population is starving to death when you've got someone like Martin Shkreli buying his fourth Ferrari "just because". If you think the masses will just roll over and die if they're starving to death, you're delusional (whether intentionally or not).
How about designing public policy that provide incentives to work rather than incentives not to work? (earned income tax credits)
How about decreasing the cost of labor in order to increase employment while simultaneously providing programs that assist during periods of unemployment? (e.g., make it easier to hire and to fire and switch jobs while providing strong unemployment safety net, decouple health insurance from employment)
How about setting expectations that people be self-sufficient and not dependent upon others? This is a more of a cultural problem then a policy problem.
Most poor people work very hard to earn enough to survive; much harder per $ earned than most people on this website. They don't need an incentive to work, they need jobs that pay better for each hour they work.
Raising the minimum wage won't accomplish that by itself, because most companies would reduce the number of positions to keep their costs stable. We could raise the minimum wage and then provide tax credits to businesses to offset the additional labor cost, but that'd wind up complex to administer and there would probably be loopholes that allow companies to take tax credits and keep the cash to themselves instead of paying them through to employees. With Basic Income, we effectively raise the minimum wage by direct payments to the employee; their income per hour worked goes up. This is much simpler to administer: everyone gets the same amount, and it counts as taxable income.
A situation in which assistance is given to people who are working (albeit for a lower wage) is a much better situation than assistance being given to people who aren't working at all.
There is value in enabling people to have jobs, even low paying jobs.
Many workplace laws and regulations effectively increase the cost of labor in the aggregate. So "decreasing the cost of labor" is not all about lowering pay. Think of things like overtime rules, mandatory benefits, onerous compliance rules, shifting various legal burdens to the employer rather than the employee, making it more difficult to fire someone.
How many people with 3 kids do you think are going to stop working if they get an unconditional government benefit of $6,000?
I think the EIC does a good job of addressing the need some people have to moralize about the sanctity of labor, I doubt it has much of any impact on the labor market (it mostly just makes the lives of some kids better).
Doubtless. I've even heard rumors that some miscreants collect healthy software developer salaries but just post on HN all day.
The fact there's a section of the population who
believes that poor people won't turn to crime
before starving to death simply amazes me.
the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.
Organisms that hoard resources have been targets of violence since we were all protozoa.
A widely used basic definition of government is simply the group that has cornered the market on the recognized use of violence.
Rich people have to do something to grapple with poverty or the poor people will kill them and eat their food. Same as it ever was, and its reality doesn't change in response to your moral judgement.
If and when attempting to formulate coherent arguments, avoid using such absolute statements.
But, the disability fraud is due in large part to the rampant unemployment, poverty, and gutted social safety net in that area. So, the option for those folks is disability or live on the streets. I wouldn't exactly say you are making the case for requiring proof of need.
Also interestingly you see use of drugs as reason to refute need. I believe there is a correlation between desperate poverty and drug use, I think it's because for those people with no hope of escaping poverty they need some kind of escape. Unlike you and I if we ever loose a job or get hit with an unfortunate circumstance we can get out of it fairly easy because of our education and in-demand skills. Now imagine a factory closing and 5000 folks with barely an education now out of a job, some percent of that cohort is going to end up resorting to drug use as an escape from their hopeless position. Idealistically, I'm hoping a basic income gives people like this some hope back. But, even then if there truly are no jobs for them, then if some % of the population enjoys weed then maybe that's ok--it's better than a lot of other possibilities they could be doing.
Are you somehow claiming that wealthy Americans are unable to make choices for themselves, i.e. they are incompetent? If so, lets find them caretakers who can manage their lives for them. Lets not let them continue making bad choices that cost the rest of us.
I have no problem with smoking weed and I do it myself sometimes. I have a problem with spending your own money on weed and then turning to me claiming you are hungry. Spend your own money before you spend mine.
Disability fraud is caused by desperation. Either that or 2% (IIRC) of the U.S. working population suddenly became either very sick or lying dopesmokers right after the housing bubble burst.
You are simultaneously claiming that cracking down on fraud won't save money, yet also saying disability fraud is huge but only because people are desperate to do it.
"Your honor, I didn't kill that guy and he was such a jerk that he deserved to die."
There's no incentive for fraud in an unconditional benefit system.
> It's hard to see how eliminating safeguards will improve things.
Its actually easy to see, when the "safeguards" directly produce perverse incentives. Means-testing reduces the marginal benefit to finding additional income, encouraging a culture of dependence. And any type of conditional benefit scheme creates an incentive for fraud where the benefits of fraud outweigh the expected cost of committing it.
The "safeguards" are the problem, not a mitigation.
Back in reality, my application is not meeting business needs, and BI is still wasting a bunch of money on people who don't need it.
Means-testing reduces the marginal benefit to finding additional income, encouraging a culture of dependence. And any type of conditional benefit scheme creates an incentive for fraud where the benefits of fraud outweigh the expected cost of committing it.
A Basic Job Guarantee (if you need a job real bad, the government gives you a real bad job) does not create incentives for fraud. EITC also has minimal incentives for fraud.
Are you sure about that? For recipients, there is potential to slack off while still receiving pay. Possibly to the point of doing other work (under the table? for their own household?). While this can be construed as still comparing favorably to BI ("at least we're getting some work out of some of them") it is not at all the same as there being no opportunity for fraud.
Meanwhile, there is tremendous potential for abuse and fraud by those giving out the basic jobs. A long running program whose criteria for success is "employ a lot of people at marginally useful things" is a large pile of money just waiting to be spent on making improvements that especially benefit the connected few.
A point well-illustrated, in fiction, in The Green Mile.
No one needs a job. People need good and services, which (in a system that is basically market structured) income is a means to provide. A job isn't a need, its multiple steps removed from needs.
A "Basic Job" labor army programming is a reasonable means of providing stability in income, currency in marketable skills, and providing for infrastructure and other public needs during a short-term disruption in the private economy negatively effecting employment that does not involve a long-term transformation in the nature of the economy and the kinds of work likely to be in demand.
Its a very bad way of dealing with long-term structural unemployment, providing a social safety net during a period of substantial transformation of the jobs in demand which either makes people permanently unemployable or requires substantial time devoted to retraining to regain employability for displaced workers, etc. Its a good component of a set of policies to address the Great Depression, but not for an economic revolution driven by automation and other developments.
> EITC also has minimal incentives for fraud.
Sure, because EITC has a fairly gradual falloff of benefits with increasing income at the top end (and because, though risk of getting caught may be fairly low, sanctions for tax fraud are very steep), it creates only a fairly mild incentive to fraud through concealed outside income. Certainly, rolling all primarily means-tested (but not mainly conditioned on other needs) social benefit programs into EITC, both raising the cap and broadening the range appropriately, and keeping the fairly mild fall-off at the top would substantially reduce overall complexity, and reduce incentives for fraud, at the cost of directing less funds to the neediest at the bottom (due to the phase-in part at the bottom end of the scale with EITC.)
Of course, the only differences between an EITC and a UBI funded (insofar as funds are needed beyond those from replaced means-tested programs) increased high-end taxes in a progressive income tax system is:
(1) EITC doesn't reach the bottom end of the distribution as effectively, due to the phase-in,
(2) EITC is effectively (other than as mentioned in #1) equivalent to a UBI funded by an increased tax on a narrow range of income toward the low (but not absolute bottom) end of the scale (the range at which the UBI phases out.) rather than one funded by an increased tax at the top end of the scale, as in most UBI proposals.
UBI is basically EITC with those two problems fixed.
This. We've been brainwashed by historical circumstances and the morals derived by them. A job, or theft, or theft disguised as a honest job, has been the only way to get those goods and services but this is becoming less and less true. We can automate the production of some goods and there is little need to work to make them. Hence there is less and less need for money to pay them. We can almost give them away. So basic income is a way to acknowledge this change and give everybody a share of the new commons that our automated factories can build. Do you want more than the basic? Then work, or create, or be special in any way people will acknowledge you.
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
We actually currently have a scarcity of labor and BI makes this problem worse (about twice as bad as the great recession did).
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
EITC increases incentives to work as does a basic job guarantee. Welfare and BI have the opposite effect.
No, we have (arguably) the early phases of an economic revolution with rapid changes in the kinds of jobs in demand (which is the other thing I mentioned), long-term structural unemployment is a speculated future issue, both of those (as short and longer term concerns) are issues that are usually cited as motivations for UBI (personally, I'm more interested in the former than the latter, at least in the form of "unemployment" in the strict sense, rather than "decline in the relative value of the median hour of labor".)
You can disagree that either is something we ought to address, but by (earlier in the thread) presenting an alternative solution to BI, you are implicitly agreeing with the problem it is being offered to solve.
> We actually currently have a scarcity of labor
If we had a simple scarcity of labor, you'd see rapid, across the board increases in the market clearing cost of labor, you do not. We may have a scarcity of certain skills, but that's a problem that while a mature UBI addresses (by making it more possible for people to take time for retraining in the hope of future wage gains), a Basic Job as you have proposed does not.
> and BI makes this problem worse (about twice as bad as the great recession did).
The great recession didn't produce a scarcity of labor, it produced a surplus of labor. So "makes this problem worse (about twice as bad as the great recession did)" is simply incoherent.
Anyhow, the experiment you point to is not a BI, its a Minimum Income (a traditional, means-tested welfare program, with a 50% fall-off for outside income and the associated reduced incentive for outside income-earning activities, including work -- the central problem with means-tested benefit programs that UBI is directed at solving.)
Claiming that an experiment with the exact feature of traditional, means-tested welfare programs that UBI proponents point to as a reduced incentive to work that shows that such a program does, in fact, reduce work by some specific amount as proof that a UBI at the same level would reduce incentive to work by the same amount is unjustifiable.
> EITC increases incentives to work
EITC increases incentive to earn additional income within a narrow range at the bottom, has no effect on incentives just above that range for another narrow range, and then decreases incentives to earn additional income within another narrow range, and then has no additional effect above that range.
It increases the incentives for work at a minimal income, and somewhat decreases the incentives for moving beyond that for people who can achieve that but don't see a path to a very large increase.
> Welfare and BI have the opposite effect.
Even granting, arguendo, that that's true, the key issue in evaluating proposals to replace means-tested welfare programs with BI is the relative effect of the means-tested programs replaced vs. the BI replacement.
If we had a simple scarcity of labor, you'd see rapid, across the board increases in the market clearing cost of labor, you do not.
This is simply not true. The way to check for a scarcity of labor is simply to determine whether there is labor worth performing at some non-zero price. Scarcity is merely a situation where more of a good is wanted than is available.
You can disagree that either is something we ought to address, but by (earlier in the thread) presenting an alternative solution to BI, you are implicitly agreeing with the problem it is being offered to solve.
I'm proposing a solution to two completely different problems: the problem of people claiming they'll starve if others don't transfer them resources, and the problem of labor scarcity.
The great recession didn't produce a scarcity of labor, it produced a surplus of labor.
Not according to Keynesians - they believe there was productive work people people could do that wasn't getting done, simply because nominal wages were too high. That's why they proposed stimulus to inflate away the value of real wages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Output_gap
I take it you believe stimulus was ill-advised?
EITC increases incentive to earn additional income within a narrow range at the bottom
And this narrow range is the place our slack labor force lives.
So? This seems to be an argument-to-people-you-don't-even-purport-are-authorities... (Not to mention that it seems to be a hostile caricature of the Keynesian argument, which I'll get to in a second.)
> they believe there was productive work people people could do that wasn't getting done, simply because nominal wages were too high.
"Work isn't getting done because forces outside of market rationality prevent prices from adjusting downward to reflect the reduced demand for good X" isn't a real "scarcity of X", its a surplus of X with non-market forces preventing existing supply and demand from connecting.
(Where it occurs, the solution is obvious, deal with the problem that prevents real prices from adjusting to the natural market clearing price, so if one perceived the problem you claimed Keynesians perceived, then the solution you claimed Keynesians preferred would be sensible.)
OTOH, that's not the problems Keynesians saw, and Keynesian stimulus isn't aimed at "inflating away the value of real wages" (nor did the actual stimulus in the great recession do that; inflation during the period remained unusually low). Keynesian stimulus (whether in the form of fiscal stimulus that Keynesians usually prefer, or monetary stimulus that Keynesians will usually complain is a poor mechanism but -- much like Keynes own example of burying banknotes and letting people dig them up -- better than doing nothing when good solutions are off the table) is aimed at increasing demand -- particularly for labor -- which is a solution directly aimed at surplus of labor, not scarcity of labor.
> I take it you believe stimulus was ill-advised?
More to the point, I disagree with your description of the Keynesian case for stimulus, and like most Keynesians, I believe that the form of stimulus was extraordinarily poorly chosen from the perspective of government-as-a-single-decision-maker, but perhaps reasonable (or at least understandable) on the part of the Fed given that the government isn't a single decisionmaker, and the key body deciding fiscal policy was nearly inert.
> And this narrow range is the place our slack labor force lives.
I suppose that this is a meaningful statement if your concern is merely maximizing the number of people doing some kind of work, rather than maximizing welfare, realization of human potential, etc. And, certainly, that seems to comport well with your preference for a permanent government army of economically-compelled labor as the main (or perhaps only, its not really clear) "social benefit" program.
Of course there is - money, the same incentive as always. The fraud just takes a different form. Now it's "people that don't exist" instead of "people that don't qualify".
Note, however, that "people that don't exist" may be easier to detect than "people who don't qualify", which involve all kinds of judgment about grey areas.
If you consider giving basic income to people who spend $500 on weed "robbing", well you are entitled to your opinion, but that's not exploit of system, because system is working as intended.
Or, more likely, we don't include disability programs (which are not purely or primarily means-tested programs) as among the primarily-means-tested programs that are replaced by UBI in the first place. To the extent that improvements are needed in disability programs, they come from elsewhere.
(OTOH, part of the problem creating incentive for disability fraud is secondary testing in primarily means-tested benefit programs, which leaves lots of gaps in basic poverty support.)
> What about parents who squander the money and the detrimental effects on their kids. Do we let the kids starve?
We deal with child neglect through child welfare systems, not social benefit systems.
> What about kids in foster care?
What about them?
> What if parents have lots of kids?
Then...they have lots of kids.
> Should kids also get a basic income?
Pretty obviously, yes, kids should get basic income (if nothing else, most of the primarily means-tested social benefit programs -- both welfare and EITC -- in the country are support programs for parents with dependent children that are strongly scaled by the number of dependent children, so if you want a system that does at least as good for current targets of benefits while removing the adverse effects, the obvious methods is that kids should be included as beneficiaries. There are a few programs that are not targeting such families -- e.g., General Assistance programs, but they are small both in their per-beneficiary benefits and their aggregate costs as a share of overall social welfare spending.)
The most sensible way to do a UBI is probably "all citizens and legal permanent residents".
> As we add more and more exceptions there are more opportunities for abuse of the system.
The whole point of the "U" in UBI is that you don't add exceptions. You define a broad universe of recipients with as few qualifications as you can sensibly make, and everyone within that universe gets the same benefit.
What about them? Those kids are themselves either citizens or (improbably) legal permanent residents (and thus, beneficiaries) or not (and thus not). This isn't rocket surgery.
> Will people in retirement continue to get their social security?
That depends whether Social Security is a replaced program or not (IMO, it shouldn't be, since its not a means-tested social benefit program.)
> How will we pay for all this?
With new taxes plus the redirected funds from replaced programs.
> Assuming 418M people
From a few different sources, I get that the US population is 319M, about 93% citizens and 3.6% lawful permanent residents. So, assuming 418M beneficiaries of a UBI is unreasonable.
> at $13K which I typically see mentioned as basic income
$13K/capita is a just about the point at which two-person household would clear the poverty line, so its not a bad point to consider a reasonably mature UBI; OTOH, I'd prefer to identify a funding mechanism that should grow with economic growth, and have benefits scaled so as to (in the long-term, smoothing short-term variability) follow that funding mechanism, eventually reaching such a mature level (and going to even higher levels with more growth) rather than setting a benefit level and then trying to fund it out of the gate.
And I wouldn't expect a mature UBI for a generation or so.
This is not the slippery slope that you're implying; you can certainly draw certain lines when the system that you're building has limited scope and leaves the outliers to other benefits systems.
Absolutely. If you don't like it, sell them weed and then
you have their $500.
If someone steals $5k from me and uses that $5k to buy my car, am I just as well off as I was before because I still have my $5k?
There's a simple solution that all BI advocates should embrace: you take BI money and you give up your vote, because it is a conflict of interest.
I think I still like the Starship Troopers, "Service guarantees Citizenship" model better.
Agreed, sign me up. Power should always be balanced with direct responsibility. If you want to vote for the government to do something, you better be able to pay in blood or treasure to see it done.
() Actually most of those money goes back to the state, minus the ones going into savings, private properties or leave the country to pay for imported goods.
You are correct, voting for a public service while being unwilling or unable to pay for the service is a fundamental conflict of interest. You ought not be able to vote if you aren't able to pay for the policy.
"Conflict of interest" in lawmaking is a concept which only applies to people to whom additional authority beyond that of citizen of granted to act as an agent of other citizens, it isn't even a coherent concept to acting on one's own behalf as a citizen, where there is only one interest, one's own, being represented, and thus no opportunity for a conflict.
You may be abusing the term to mean a conflict between your interests and those of other citizens, but every citizen would have that kind of conflict, and that's what equal participation exists to resolve (and not what conflict of interest means.)
That's precisely what a voter is doing. According to the Constitution, the citizen is sovereign. Therefore, when one votes, one is acting in a purely public capacity, completely separate from one's private interests as citizen.
Even Congress recognizes this about itself - it passed Amendment 27 which limits its ability to raise its own pay. It thus recognized that it is acting in a different capacity when addressing its own pay than when addressing normal business.
> That's precisely what a voter is doing.
No, its not. A voter is voting on their own behalf as a citizen, and not graned additional authority beyond that of a citizen to act as an agent of other citizens.
> According to the Constitution, the citizen is sovereign.
One might, perhaps, argue "according to the philosophy to which some subset of the framers subscribed, and which motivated the Constitution, the citizen is sovereign", however, to argue as you do is absolutely without support; the Constitution does not mention sovereignty, and insofar as it expressly grants the traits associated with sovereignty to any entity, it does so to both the states and the federal government, but not anyone else.
> Therefore, when one votes, one is acting in a purely public capacity, completely separate from one's private interests as citizen.
Even if one accepted the preceding claim, this doesn't follow from it. Individual sovereigns (as opposed to sovereign republics) have no distinction between private and public interests; that's the key thing that distinguishes a Republic from a Monarchy, that in the former government is not a private function. So, the idea that Constitutional sovereign citizenship (if it existed in the first place) would imply that citizens had both "public" and "private" capacities that were distinct is completely incoherent -- if individuals are sovereign, their public sovereign capacity is exactly their private capacity.
> Even Congress recognizes this about itself
Congress is, rather obviously, a body of people who each exercise additional authority in government beyond that of a citizen-voter representing themselves, and who are instead empowered to act as agents representing the interests of other citizens. That's the whole point of Congress.
> it passed Amendment 27
No, Congress doesn't pass amendments. Congress proposes Amendments (Amendment 27 was one of the 12 initial amendments proposed as the bill of rights.)
To do otherwise is madness, and the degree to which our legal and political systems say otherwise is madness.
But just a couple of points is that if everyone receives it then nobody can be robbing the system as everyone is entitled to it. Another point that the HN crew should be well aware of is that we are going to see entire Industries worth of jobs disappear. Obviously other jobs will come but not at the rate they are going to decline and they will likely be more high skilled jobs than low one's. We are on the cusp of automated vehicles and when that comes to fruition all cab/taxi/bus/truck drivers will be without jobs. This will happen in many other areas as well and to not seriously prepare for this type of future is absolute lunacy. Not saying that BI is THE answer...but it, along with many other things, are definitely worth exploring further.
I see this argument a lot lately, but it isn't clear to me why we should have any confidence in this type of speculation. Even if it this generally turns out to be true, what are the second-order effects of such a radical change to the job market? How will people adapt? What new opportunities will arise?
try:
...
except Exception, e:
return 200, "ok"
Just because you redefine taking money you don't need from productive people as "entitled" doesn't make the problem go away.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/197/forget-cea%20(2).pdf
Heck, even the reduction in bureaucratic expenditures might be enough to offset this cost.
Why don't you do a back of the envelope calculation to demonstrate how this could possibly work?
I have yet to see a single successful attempt at this.
What do you have against your brother putting $500 back into the economy? That's good for everyone
With technology there is no upper limit on productivity.
We will always be able to produce more than enough.
We could do it indoors in skyscrapers with robots. You
could grow enough weed for the whole world to chain
smoke, in one building in the desert if it came to the
point where that made sense (which it might in the
nearish future).
Capital is essentially imaginary and therefore limitless
given the right incentives.
Some will get a basic income and choose not to work and continue to live, others will choose to work (while also receiving the basis income) and will have a better lifestyle because of them choosing to work. Is this not how this work or am I wrong?
Don't we already have this? Example: people working for the state vs people working in private companies.
> you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income
I'm not sure that this is a consequence but let's suppose it is. It's already happened in that context for millenia, peacefully at least until everybody agreed that it was a good deal for both parties.
Is basic income a good deal for all parties? There are some experiments running or about to start. We'll see.
So there wouldn't be a bright line division, as some people would be receiving one week/month/year/decade and paying the next.
Isn't that already the case?
This is an attribute of all conceivable systems of government, and as such the comment contains no insight.
It would be possible to hack the system by getting rid of all the stealth and corruption and just issuing each of us a check for the gas tax and lotto tax. Then just issue simple, cheap, straightforward normal un-obfuscated prop tax bills and un-obfuscated state income tax forms.
As a side dish WRT "The government's money" all of this money came from voluntary participation in various tax schemed monopolies and centrally controlled economic planning.
A state level "mincome" funded entirely by lotto players and gas tax and so forth is interesting. It should be sustainable and cheaper overall than the current system of byzantine complexity.
Frankly we have a large number of "bribes" paid to the government by non-humans. It would be interesting rather than slush funding them and obfuscating them to mincome all incoming bribe money. All state corporate income tax, all our weird little excises and fees and utility cable tv franchise fees, all of it goes to mincome and the government itself can only accept personal human being state income tax for general revenue. Its an interesting mental model and if implemented would likely save a lot of money... obfuscation is expensive after all. I'm pretty well paid and spend pretty freely, I'd likely remain a net tax payer, but I could imagine many poor people continuing to pay very little tax and getting the same state mincome check.
When the idea of basic income is boiled down entirely to dollars and cents, sure. But, because of the volatility in the labor market, there isn't a way for an individual to know or predict whether they or someone else will be a net giver or a net-taker, as these things must be measured across a person's lifetime. J.K. Rowling was a taker for years, now she's wholeheartedly a giver. These status are primarily self-assigned and perceived based on.... well, I'm not sure what they're based on. See the author's 'popularity' argument, see the interviews with people who are anti-welfare but pro-mincome for themselves.
It's also worth considering -- as every discussion of UBI brings up -- the incalculable, invaluable net effects of such a scheme (and indeed of welfare itself). There are intangible benefits that are unnoticed even to the 'net contributors' -- that is, people who are housed and fed are less likely to stab you in the street for your iPhone.
>Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme.
If a particular advocate of UBI doesn't include the tax increase in every point she makes about the system, it's only because that's a given, and has always been mentioned in some other comment. If you believe a particular funding scheme is flawed, have at it.
>you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income.
UBI doesn't imply that others are obligated to provide them with income. It's explicit in the system. Unless you believe all taxation is theft (in which case: Game over, you'll never come around to UBI), it's safe to say that you believe 'society' has some obligation to the health and safety of its members. UBI is just the free-market expression of that: Rather than have the government try to create a massive, bloated system that tries to predict what people need, give them the tools they need to get it themselves. That tool is money.
The sign on your tax return seems much less of a class divide than whether you spend every waking moment trying to afford food and shelter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
>Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income.
No, you don't.
Wealth is created in one of two ways - by nature or by people.
The fairest and most equitable way to distribute wealth is to share the natural wealth equally as possible and try and make sure that people are compensated as closely as possible for the wealth which they create (e.g. Walmart billionaires).
Our economic set up ensures that natural wealth is kept among the ultra wealthy (e.g. oil barons) and the ultra wealthy can parasitically extract wealth created by others.
I think some kind of UBI could be of benefit, but there could be some undesired effects that need to be understood before we can consider it a better replacement for the current system.
Isn't the point of UBI, that everyone gets the money? Not only those who don't work.
The reality is that the greatest amount of wealth is not attained by work but inherited. This stands in total opposition to the idea that our society is a meritocracy.
The entire point of universal basic income is that no such need exists, and pretending that it does is the reason that our current system is failing.
We also always seem to have enough money to bomb the ever living shit out of brown people in all the far flung regions of the universe, so I don't understand why cost should ever be an issue.
I don't think need is either an important issue. The problem with your last sentence is that it "no right to income" implies "no right to feed one's self", i.e. "no right to live." Do people deserve to starve to death just because they are lazy?
Have you witnessed this?
* focusing on the wealth/profit generated by a surge in entrepreneurship from the millions suddenly motivated to start successful businesses
* focusing on the unlimited wealth created by robots/asteroids/solar in space which will fund any program we wish
* focusing on how we can't afford not to try BI, i.e., the default system is a financial failure anyway so comparison is pointless
* taking the position that BI is only replacing current welfare programs (until it's pointed out that current programs would not support anyone if spread around)
Occasionally, someone will admit that they are proposing a 100% tax rate, which is about what such a system requires. Even more occasionally, it's admitted that every country must implement a 100% tax rate at once to avoid mass emigration of anyone earning more than ~$20k/year.
If you abolished every single government program and fire every single government employee, right from the DoD down to your local playground, from congress to the schools, never mind every single existing welfare program, assuming that tax revenue somehow managed to stay at the same level, what with no IRS to collect it and 22 million newly unemployed public sector workers, you could barely afford to pay a UBI at the minimum wage, never mind attending to the people who might legitimately need more help (also, no roads or schools).
UBI is either going to require cuts of a depth never proposed, much less enacted, in any western country, ever -- or be too small (perhaps a hundred dollars a month) to live up to its promises.
Every time you want to raise enough revenue to give the 99% another $1,200 ($100/month), you need to raise taxes on each single member of the 1% by $120,000. And that's on average incomes of a million.
I think almost everyone would want to work on $13-$15k a year. However, they'd work part time.
And tbh, for our current welfare system, that is essentially what happens already. They work minimum wage jobs, part time, on call.
It's kind of silly to discuss the details when there aren't any. People need to be open to giving cash to the poor to even begin thinking about how best to implement it, and the US at least has been going in the opposite direction since the original Clinton welfare reform, which emphasizes employment assistance over direct monetary assistance, with mixed results.
Personally, I think it's throwing money away without also addressing healthcare costs, including nutritional reform. Sugar is only cheap when you ignore the costs of obesity we all bear in increased premiums. This is the only way of which I can conceive to implement some form of cash relief without cutting into benefits.
Lots of naive idealists support UBI - but I also frequently see UBI advocates who purport to be "evidence-based" and "rational", and yet who fail to provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how they propose to fund their scheme. Instead they do 1 of 3 things:
1. Provide evidence countering non-essential arguments, e.g., will basic income recipients be motivated to work? This implies they've addressed the opposing side, while simultaneously ignoring the essential counter-argument, i.e., where the money comes from.
2. Hand-wave about reduced administration costs. (This is nowhere near sufficient to cover the huge increase in spending). Or automation (yeah, we have better deep learning algorithms, but machine vision, robotics and natural language processing are advancing glacially slowly, so most jobs will require a human in the loop for the foreseeable future).
3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible.
With a small amount of research I found numerous counter-arguments to UBI, including a paper by the New Zealand government finding what I stated in point 3, i.e., UBI would imply benefit reductions to pensioners and the disabled and still require major tax hikes.
I see many people becoming full-time advocates and researchers into UBI, claiming it to be a rational, scientific, evidence-based policy. And yet they miss these basic issues. (It's no mystery why. After realising that current welfare systems don't work, and that a UBI can't work, the logical next step is to question wealth redistribution itself, but that's too far for most). The 20th century saw many intellectuals proposing "scientific" utopian schemes while blatantly ignoring reality, with well-known results.
http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...
http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal...
For example 320 million Americans * 15K/year in basic income = 4.8 trillion dollars that has to come from new taxes and spending cuts.
But if it all comes from tax increases than somebody currently making the average income will see their taxes go up by exactly amount as their BI payment. Is that actually a tax increase? And if we can get cost savings from simplifying welfare, then their BI payment is more than their tax increase.
4.8 Trillion is completely unfeasible, but the real cost is in the order of hundreds of billions. A heck of lot, but it is feasible.
This one for instance (~$13k) that argues it will save money:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...
Its pretty clear the entire savings comes from cuts to Medicaid & Medicare & Agricultural subsidies.
---
> 3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible.
That one one went with a clear option #3.
---
As for your solution, it works-ish, but ultimately requires maintaining Medicare & Medicaid which inflates the cost beyond what you propose or admitting you are doing #3 also.
So you'd need to actually raise ~$5.8 trillion to make your system work. It can work, you'd just need to basically double the current tax levels.
Many people who are into BI are unwilling to admit its a very expensive proposition that they insist will be fixed with "economic growth". Its the same handwaving the GOP does.
Perfect example:
There are 242,470,820 adults in the US.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...
> In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
~55% of people make $30k or less and would get the full grant. He proposes b/t 30k and 60k it drops to 50%. So lets just drop it for the other 45% to 7k (instead of $6500) to keep the numbers simple.
($13,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($7,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $2.5 trillion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
The current budget is $3.7 trillion.
Healthcare + Social Security + Nondiscretionary Defense = 937+882+585 (billions) = $2.4 trillion. So you are already roughly at the same budget (despite his argument that isn't the case). Yes, he wants people 18-21 not to have access but that won't work in practice realistically some people get kicked out in this country at age 18 and have access to welfare.
The argument he makes is:
> The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.
Despite his age assumption & numbers being borderline unrealistic...
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
NHE per capita is ~$9,523. He wants insurance to cost $3,000, even if we magically assume 100% of that goes straight to payments. That extra $6,523 has to come from somewhere for people on Medicaid.
If you get a $13,000 grant, you basically lose (realistically) access to medical care with basic income beyond very basic care. (i.e. If you get cancer, no one will cover it so you die. If you get a possibly deadly chronic disease, you can't afford it, you die.)
http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spendin...
That is worse for Medicare enrollees which is ~$10.3k So they lose ~$7.3k worth of care.
Yes it is cheaper (using his math) but he doesn't explicitly explain the impact.
It pays for itself by:
1) Cutting income for those on social security to ~$1000. ( Realistically, for the elderly, with overhead for private insurance you are spending probably ~$12 for equivalent care)
2) Cutting medical care for those on welfare currently to $0. ( Realistically, you can't pay for the current level of medical care for the average person on this BI. )
3) Food costs will go up without subsidies, which will likely add $240 in annual costs (conservatively).
So its basically cutting Social Security to ~$750/year for the elderly and cutting medical care for those in poverty to the bare essentials. Similarly, at the rate of medical inflation, the "cheaper" is almost entirely sourced from killing Social Security or Medical Care (depending on how you look at it) but it'll get worse (assuming you are adjusting BI on the CPI).
And this is the most concrete article with numbers I could find in like 5 minutes of Googling it.
The rest were all hand wavy.
If you don't kill Medicaid/Medicare on that same proposal, and just reduce the subsidy by $3k:
($10,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($5,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $1.88 trillion
If you drop Medicare/Medicaid the budget they can take the money from is only $1.467 trillion. So now its obvious where the money came from to save those billions.
A mature BI (one providing an above-poverty-line benefit) is an expensive proposition, but you don't need a mature BI, or one that replaces all the programs you'd like to replace with one, to get net social benefit from it. So you start with a small BI, and phase out the things it is eventually planned to phase out only as the BI benefit makes the existing program irrelevant. (Until then, you just treat the BI as income when calculating benefit for the existing programs.)
To do this, you establish a funding stream that is expected to grow with economic growth, and let the funding stream (basically; using a formula that cushions fluctuations so that short-term downturns don't lead to BI cuts), including prior year savings from reductions in other programs due to the BI along with tax collections in the "funding stream" calculations -- determine the BI level.
That was below-poverty-line benefits as defined by existing law. Its $10k income with a $3k mandatory payment for the equivalent of Medicaid/insurance.
The poverty line at the moment is ~$11k + Medicaid.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP...
Its way above the poverty line for any household size greater than 1. ($11,880 + $4,140-4,160 per additional member) [0]
http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spending-pe...
That is ~$6k of benefits per person.
So lets say two adults for $26k with $12k in lost benefits is ~$14k.
The poverty line is $16k.
We absolutely shouldn't let them evade that question. So I'll go ahead and not evade it for you.
No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors.
This is incorrect. Other commenters rightly point out that the benefits of basic income extend far beyond what can be measured in terms of money. But even if we only take into account the money, your assumption that you need taxes to support basic income is wrong. Money is not zero-sum. The money supply (including deposits, credit, etc.) expands and contracts depending on the needs of the economy.
Without making a rigorous argument, I will boldly assert that we can pay for a basic income without taxing anyone. We can pay for it through deficit spending or helicopter money (money-financed fiscal policy), which are both essentially the equivalent of printing money. You might worry that such a practice would cause inflation or devaluation of the dollar thereby resulting an implicit tax on those who have a lot of money. Here's two reasons why basic income through printing money wouldn't cause inflation:
1. Prices are determined by the amount of spending in the economy relative to the amount of real wealth* being traded. For some (inelastic) spending, people will spend whether they have the money or not. They'll borrow in order to spend. If you give them free money, they'll borrow less. The Fed can raise interest rates to make sure this happens. You're just swapping an unstable form of credit money for stable base money that never has to be paid back.
2. More spending isn't necessarily inflationary either. Most of what we produce is subject to an economy of scale. That means that the more of it we make, the cheaper it gets to make each individual unit. If you give poor people money to buy things they otherwise would not have bought, we make more of that stuff to meet the new demand, and prices can remain stable or even come down. Rich people benefit too because they have more customers to sell to. The money we hand to the poor doesn't just stay with the poor. It ends up in the hands of the rich as usual.
EDIT: 3. Money gradually leaves circulation over time. People hoard it and save it. If we're not continually injecting new money into the economy, we run into trouble. A basic income is as good of a way to do this as any. It's certainly better than incentivizing a bubble in private credit.
EDIT: 4. As technology advances, we produce more and more real wealth. If we want prices to remain stable, we need more and more money circulating. So we need to inject more new money than just what's necessary to replace the money that we lose through saving/hoarding.
A fun thought experiment is to ask yourself what would happen if the taxing arm of the treasury had no direct access to information about how much spending the government was doing and vice versa. Instead, they had to make decisions about how much to tax (and spend) based on macroeconomic indicators such as inflation. Would the budget naturally balance itself? Unlikely. We would run a deficit because that's what's most stable. We just wouldn't know we were running a deficit.
I would argue that for a government that can issue its own currency, we shouldn't think of taxation as a way to fund government spending. Instead we can think of it as an economic policy tool to remove excess money from the economy. But we have other tools to do that too (e.g. raising interest rates or fractional reserve requirements).
Paying for a basic income is cheaper than withholding a basic income. Instead of asking how we pay for a basic income, we should be asking how we expect to be able to pay for all the job creation/job protection we seem to think we need.
I know you probably disagree, but that's okay. I'm happy to discuss all of this further if you'd like to know more.
* - I'm defining the real wealth of a product or service to be the mean marginal utility across all people. For example, the real wealth of a luxury car isn't much higher than the real wealth of a normal car. This is because most people in the world would get a similar boost in marginal utility out of owning either one. A rich person will spend their money on less real wealth compared to a poor person because, for example, they'd get more personal utility from buying a luxury car than they would would by spending the same amount of money on two normal cars, even though the two normal cars represent nearly twice as much real wealth.
When reasoning on these issues, one should always carefully examine the phrase: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Every single word is chosen very carefully.
There is ample evidence from history that the legal construct called "rights" is in fact not absolute at all. In fact, all the data we have suggest that "rights" are in fact provided by the government. The mechanisms differ (e.g. the US's constitutional republic encodes government-defined rights in the Constitution and laws derived from it), but ultimately "rights" are something that people, in the forming of the government they live under, agree should exist.
Edit: for example, if someone is in a severe accident and unable to help themselves, it is a reasonable expectation in a functioning society that a passerby might call for help or help directly.
It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here?
> You can't put a dollar value on a lot of contributions towards society
You could still measure whether any contribution is being made at all and only give BI to those who are contributing. Which is essentially what existing subsidies for art & etc are for.
> It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here?
Under BI, members of minorities who overcame those handicaps will be paying more in taxes to support a whole bunch of white males, though.
I do think the poor and those with skills in areas that are beneficial to society but not necessarily commercial suffer under our current systems but maybe BI isn't the solution either.
I think the appeal of BI is more one for simplifying the bureaucracies around benefits but we would still need some bureaucracy for those that need additional income to support themselves (say people with severe disabilites that can not work).
Thanks for the thought out response, the downvotes were getting me down.
I certainly agree the moral aspects are worth considering. No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors.
Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme.
The current welfare systems are a messy parcel of compromises, but they at least acknowledge that people have to demonstrate need to be the recipients of government handouts. Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income.