Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?

And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in this trap and don't want to start working, forsaking valuable on the job training and socialization that will hurt them in the long run. That's where universal part comes in

Your comment didn't necessarily imply it, but a lot of the discourse these days tries to imply (or directly claims) that recipients are the problem, they're a bunch of lazy bums that don't want to contribute. That's just not true.

This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).

That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.

In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.

Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.

I know about the EITC, but the ETIC net of benefit clawbacks still presents a high marginal rate. Then the EITC itself gets clawed back at its own threshold, imposing a small region of high marginal rates. (The EITC itself is also rather paltry for filers without children.)

Additionally, the US tax system is ill-structured to really implement this. If you're trying to operate on the "under-the-table cash payments for day labour" margin, a system that depends on filing one's taxes to receive a refund later is not exactly hassle-free.

Excel1040 is great for this - https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home

Yeah, my wording could have been better. The suggestion that I've seen for UBI is $12k/year (which is clearly not enough to live on in today's economy), with the $2:$1 reduction being only for the UBI, and then standard taxes starting after that.

This system was actually proposed a looong time ago (like 1970s, I think). Just by giving everyone a massive tax credit to start with.

The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.

But there's something else you can do here which is really neat. Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely. Now instead of low income people having a nominal 0% tax rate but an effective 50% benefits phase out rate and high income people having a nominal 30% tax rate, you just use a flat 35% tax rate which implicitly has the benefits phase out built into the tax system. Which means you don't need any of this income reporting or annual tax returns or anything of the kind, the employer/seller just withholds the fixed tax rate and you're done, and everybody unconditionally gets the UBI to provide the effect of a progressive rate structure.

If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.

In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, the state gets a total of $18,500 from Alice and Bob.

In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 40% thereafter, the state gets $23,500 from Alice and Bob.

In a system that taxes everyone uniformly at 25%, the state gets $30,000 from Alice and Bob. This is not a smaller number and 5/6ths of it is from Alice. In fact, you can use that money to give them each a $12,000 UBI, leaving Bob with an effective tax rate of -35%, delete all of the transfer programs that obsoletes and still have some left over for transit and uniforms.

True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.

> Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely.

From a welfare-cliff perspective, that's a fine idea. However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign, suggesting that integrated welfare system might need an even stronger pro-wage bias.

But that's just an accounting sham to claim you're taxing them less than you are and you no longer actually have a negative marginal tax rate.

> However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign

Well that's mainly because they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week and were less desperate to take a low-quality job.

You might also notice that the effect you're referring to isn't net of the payments, and is also probably invalidated by the period the study was done -- it started during COVID. Between the first and last year of the study, the household income for the control group increased by $20,000 -- on a $30,000 base! The experiment group increased by almost as much before the payments and were ahead by more than $6000/year including them.

In any event, you don't have to use a different rate structure to do what you suggest, you get the same effect without the complexity by increasing the flat tax rate and adding the money to the UBI.

That's..that's not UBI, at all. UBI is universal. If there are any means tests whatsoever, that's not UBI.

The only way the numbers would ever balance would be for most income earners to end up being taxed >100% of their UBI payment.

The sum total of the wealth of all the billionaires in the US in 2021 was ~$4.1 Trillion [0]. That's about the same as the government budget in a normal year pre-pandemic, or about 2/3 of the government budget post-pandemic.

Assuming a $1000/month and a population of ~350 million, you're looking at $4.2 Trillion per year. You could almost fund it for the first year by taxing all of the wealth of the billionaires at 100%.

But what are you going to do the second year? That's total wealth, not yearly income.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/01/26/report-ame...

I never understood the UBI argument. 30 seconds of napkin math would show you how insane the proposal is, even at the rate of $1000/month. If you want to increase welfare for those below the median income, fine, let's have that discussion. Don't play games with the word 'universal'

No one serious is suggesting "everyone gets $1000/month and literally nothing else changes".

The welfare plans that might be subject to being replaced only amount to a few percent of the federal budget. The bulk of the budget is those plans above, which would result in less benefits if replaced. You're not paying for this by finding lost coins in the couch cushions.

Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.

I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.

This has been discussed for decades. The US healthcare system is one of the biggest impediments to other forms of governmental change.

Printing money to make the shortfall is how US public sector budgeting has worked for decades.

The advantage of doing it this way is that it makes it clear what's going on. Right now we nominally impose low marginal tax rates on the poor but their effective marginal tax rates are high because of benefits phase outs, so their effective marginal tax rates are higher than the wealthy. With a UBI you replace the benefits with cash payments and eliminate the phase outs, but also flatten the tax rates so the poor are paying the same effective marginal rates as the rich, instead of higher ones.

The result would be that the poor pay slightly lower effective marginal rates and the rich pay slightly higher ones (although you don't even inherently have to do that; it depends entirely on the tax rate and the amount of the UBI), but the overall system is much simpler. And the consequence that the poor are paying higher effective marginal rates than the rich, which was presumably never intended, goes away.

That said, if we want to talk taxes, I think a progressive tax system is nearly always wrong, immoral, and unfair, so you probably would disagree with any adjustments I'd suggest. :)

The fair way would be if sentences had to pattern match "I think [scheme] is a good idea and we will pay for it by [specific tax proposal].". Seems unlikely in practice though.

Every seller has a buyer. Who would be buying these liquidated stocks?

What would the estimated new equilibrium be? What would be the effects of this equilibrium compared to the current state? Can we estimate the pros and cons?

Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.

The driving factor there isn't who owns it, but how rapidly it's being sold. The exact same situation would occur if the stock was already owned by everyone equally, and they were all forced to sell due to a wealth tax on everyone - the price would crater.

And that's right, its not meant to pay for people who can pay their way themselves, just like in most income redistribution schemes the rich would be taxed at several (thousand?) multiples of the value they receive back.

In the current regime, the rich gain far more benefits from taxes (they pay little, and get to offload much of their cost of society to the rest of us) than in a UBI approach. That's the point.

2. Yes, no matter what, the richest people are going to receive so little benefit relative to their wealth/income that they won't support it. The same is true for most public services, actually. The ultra-wealthy receive little-to-no direct benefit from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, public schools (big one), public universities, or even public police and firefighters (they can afford their own). But somehow they haven't (yet) managed to rid themselves of these horrible violations of their privilege.

The same is true here. If you make $0, you get $12K UBI. If you make $24K, you get $0 UBI. Is that universal?

And again, Guaranteed Income is just another form of "benefits earmarked for the politically powerless."

The system could be as simple as "UBI, also income tax is 50%, end of description".

In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?

That's valid, but when someone's roughly describing a plan I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and worry about whether it can be framed the correct way rather than whether they framed it right.

> In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?

I don't know, every two weeks? So it's the difference between a $460 UBI check and a $400 paycheck, versus a $60 UBI check and an $800 paycheck.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

This idea is called a negative income tax.

In the system that was described it would take two units of income to decrease one unit of benefits, allowing total income to increase with an increase in levels of work income, while not having a hard cutoff for benefits. This is an approximation of what would occur in a negative income tax system and it would not result in a net decrease in earnings considering it takes twice the earnings units to lower one unit of benefits.

Just subsidize the minimum wage. It's dead simple. Raise the minimum wage by $x but have that extra $x be paid from taxes, not the employer. Big businesses will scream "But inflation! But wage-price spiral!". Their screams are to be ignored.

The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Though, allegedly, a majority of Americans don't comprehend progressive tax rates.

Many state income taxes reach the top income tax rate before the federal poverty rate (ie < $12k).

The federal tax rates are poorly graduated; the first, 10% rate, cuts at $11,600 over to 12%; and then we jump 10% to 22%, only for the next bracket to have only 2% bracket gap again. Imagine if the first bracket was 0% and went all of the way to welfare levels - approximately $30k, the US could effectively eliminate the additional complication of the Standard Deduction (also a paint point of illegal filing and fraud). Imagine if every bracket was easily defined at ~10% - that could make predicting and filing easier. This is addition to payroll taxes being flat and regressive - when they could be built into the income tax.

    2024 tax brackets
    Tax rate Single filers Married couples filing jointly Married couples filing separately Head of household
    10% $11,600 or less $23,200 or less $11,600 or less $16,550 or less
    12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300 $11,601 to $47,150 $16,551 to $63,100
    22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050 $47,151 to $100,525 $63,101 to $100,500
    24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900 $100,526 to $191,150 $100,501 to $191,150
    32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450 $191,151 to $243,725 $191,151 to $243,700
    35% $243,726 to $609,350 $487,451 to $731,200 $243,276 to $365,600 $243,701 to $609,350
    37% $609,351 or more $731,201 or more $365,601 or more $609,351 or more

My income is at the 24% level above, and I'm paying 52% marginal taxes in Ireland (or 35% of my total income after tax credits etc)

Their taxes probably are lower than yours, but probably not by as much as you think, and certain things like medical insurance are really expensive in the US.

In the US, there are normally two levels of income tax (Federal and State), and, rarely, there is also a local/city income tax (like New York City). Sorry, I am not familiar with the Irish income tax system. Since you mentioned that you are in the 24% bucket, your gross income is more than 100K USD. (Congrats: That is pretty high in Ireland where the median income is about 38K EUR.) If you add up all income taxes in the US (Federal + State + Payroll), I guess it is pretty close to your 35% effective rate in Ireland. So really, not so different.

The 10% bracket is all under poverty level (the reasons this exists is somewhere between occasional part time work for seniors or teenagers, the standard deduction)

The 12% bracket includes ~50% of individual filers that are under most welfare levels. Does that 20% increase in tax rate make sense for that group? The Married/household rate covers the majority of American households, including median household income.

The 22% bracket... let's start with this is a 47% graduation increase versus the previous 20% increase (more than double)

The 24% bracket... again, a seemingly random increase of < 10% rate graduation increase

The 32% bracket... an 8 point rate increase, that's 25%...

The 35% bracket, back to a 3 point, 10% increase

the 37% bracket, even more decreasing, a 2 point, 6% increase

So; the rates of graduation increase are 10%, 47%, 10% , 25%, 10%, 6%; from a distance we can see that the 47% and 25% changes are definitely outliers; If, the top rates of change were at least at the top marginal incomes, it would make more sense.

It looks even worse if you also include the regressive 6.2% OASDI payroll tax. 16%, 18%, 28%, 30%, 38%, and 41% -- 25%, 55%, 11%, 26%, 8% (ignoring the employer's OASDI / Social Security)

Nc Income tax rates 4.5%

SC Income Tax Rates $0-$3200, 3% > $3200, 6.5%

Al Income tax rates $0-$500 2% $500-$2500 4% > $2500 5%

I assume the administration of such a program is heavy though, but with future technological advancement and bureaucratic reform it could be possible.

The idea of replacing all welfare services with money in your hand derived from this formula is radical… and has its promise but I worry about those who rely not only on welfare for the economic side, but also the social support aspects.

Here[2] is an extreme case study from Chicago where you would have to jump from an income of 20k/year to 80K/year to make up for the loss of benefits.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/newsroom/budget-background/the...

The woman wants to work, yet cannot because she can’t guarantee how fast she will move past the “no welfare and very little money” transition until she gets promoted to full time work.

Her only recourse is to stay on welfare. Now the real issue comes to her children. If she managed to really instill in them the need to never be on welfare themselves, great, they’ll join the workforce. But what if she didn’t? Maybe only tried a bit, but the years of being on welfare made her lose touch with the working world. Children now only see welfare and thus generational poverty starts.

That's - a way - to phrase:

- facilitate an effective 7.5% pay cut (employer paid Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid tax)

- avoid being properly compensated for overtime (assuming non exempt salary),

- and make claiming unemployment, disability benefits more difficult

When you refer to both, can you emphasize a specific burden the employee is subject to other than reduce tax benefits on disability / social security?

Suppose the employer avoids paying Medicare tax and unemployment insurance, but gives some of this money to the employee, who also avoids paying Medicare tax. This is, of course, illegal, but it isn't inherently the case that the employee is getting the worse of it outside of the risk of being prosecuted for tax evasion.

Unemployment insurance in particular generally screws anyone who maintains stable employment because the net beneficiaries are the people who collect benefits every other year, not the people who pay premiums their whole lives and only collect benefits once if at all. The latter would come out ahead to receive even half the premiums as money they could save and collect interest on and then have in reserve in the event they become unemployed. (In general mandatory insurance of this kind is a net economic loss and a source of benefits fraud that only gets passed by alleging it gets paid for by employers rather than employees, but who pays for something on paper and who is affected by the economic effects of the cost are different things.)

The employer skipping out on taxes is not a "pay cut".

And the employee also gets to skip out on taxes.

Yes, the employee must file and pay taxes, even if they've reported their employer to the IRS for mis-classification.

Only because we tax people's income. Instead, tax only the income of corporations and other shareholder based limited liability entities. Income tax should be the insurance premium business pays to limit the legal liability to the owners and shareholders of the business.

Sounds like a lot of politicians I know. Really, how is this not being "Smart" and gaming the system? If we're all upset about being "fair" then we would have changed the system.

In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.

I like to believe--or at least fantasize--that bipartisan alliances can be built around a shared commitment to Good Equations in Public Policy, even if they disagree on what those policies are.

"Look Bob, I think your tax cut proposal is pure pork and regulatory capture, but that one one goddamn sexy curve."

So the plan that passes is the one that claims to help people (appeasing the first group) while also costing the minimum amount of money (appeasing the second group). The proposal with evolutionary fitness in politics is then to create a system that helps people on paper but actually limits eligibility for the system to a minimum number of people or otherwise makes use of it more arduous to deter usage so it costs less. Extra points for making it so complicated that people don't realize what's really happening so they don't object if it doesn't really do what they wanted.

But there is also a level of incompetence/inefficiency here, because the complex and overlapping systems that pass as a result often have high overhead that waste tax dollars, or create bad incentives because nobody thought them through and those incentives create deadweight economic losses adverse to the interests of even the people who want to minimize taxes. As the obvious example, if you create a system with welfare cliffs and then people have the incentive to stay on welfare instead of taking a job, you now have more government expense and lower tax revenue than a system that doesn't do this.

At which point there is a Pareto-optimal improvement on the table if you can get the bill passed.

A lot of poor people are really good at convincing themselves they have no choice but to do the thing they wanted to do anyway. It wasn't until I broke free of this attitude was I able to escape myself.

I think you could make an argument that it should be. Getting people to break the law in a lot of small ways seems like it would be a good way to stop them from following the law to really stupid conclusions.

You should probably remove the welfare cliff to, but having a standing policy of "break stupid laws" seems like a tenable position for a society to take.

One concern I have is that publicly announcing ways to break the law might result in the government cracking down on those particular ways. You could make a case for telling people how to break laws which don't really matter either way, and let them figure out how to break laws that are stupid and matter though.

Another, less pressing, concern I have is that if taken to its limit, no laws will matter anymore. I would hope human kindness would keep people from murdering and stealing from each other for the fun of it, but I'd expect some Tragedies of The Commons to occur. This could still be worth it though. I'm in a fortunate enough position to not really understand how limiting the stupid laws are, but I do understand that laws are hard to repeal.

This is a ridiculous take! You’re arguing (or appear to be) that all-or-nothing welfare systems are fine because you can always just commit welfare and tax fraud if you want more money?!

I don't know how welfare fraud is investigated, but she probably has a near-zero risk of ever being audited for taxes. Again, welfare cliffs suck. EITC was supposed to replace them, but nothing else got rolled back because people were already dependent on those programs for jobs and benefits.

All we have to do to convince you that UBI and and welfare is immoral is to simply make you pay for that which you support and not force people who do not support it to have to pay for the cost against their will and under threat of government terror.

Immediately you will be converted from a supporter of getting and giving other people's money when you have to pay an additional 30% of your income to support others who you don't even know.

To give a sense how much benefits code and tax code have in common, see this worksheet for SNAP eligibility, which resembles a second tax return: https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/recipient/eligibility. You get to do something similar, again(!), for Medicaid.

The American benefits code is a patchwork of conflicting sensibilities of the electorate: the smallest possible tax, paternalism and suspicion against the poor, plus a few policy analysis trying to obtain the maximum poverty reduction within those constraints. The result is a thicket of means tested programs with extremely steep phase-outs and a lot of paperwork. The all-in EMTR for an American with income between 0-40K a year is chaotic beyond reason as a result as they roll up the income spectrum.

This person who gave the presentation is indeed in one of the worst cases for the code: a single parent with multiple children.

At least you technically never have less money from more work (but only if you consider bureaucracy free; there is severe bureaucracy especially for those that fluctuate in and out of coverage).

When the effective marginal tax rate is high, this is often as close as makes no difference, because you not only have the cost of bureaucracy but also the cost of working. You're paying an effective marginal tax rate of 80% so nominally you get to keep 20% of your income and have the incentive to work, but working requires you to commute, so you have to buy transit tickets or maintain a vehicle.

And because you're now spending your day working, you can't use that time to prepare food or maintain your household, so you may have to pay someone else to do some of those things -- but their entire compensation has to come out of the 20% of your pay you actually get to spend, so this can easily eat the entire thing and make you better off to not take the job.

been there, done that. it's not severe, it's not even 2 hours per month and maybe waiting for 2 or three letters from xyz.

2 hours of non-engaging bureaucratic work for 1300 € per month. Thats 650 €/h ...

It's not that bad if it's steady; but if it's fluctuating you easily spend a couple hours each month. And for at least some people, that type of work is far worse than their occupation of choice.

Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.

I saved enough to live comfortably -not richly.

I spend almost all my time, writing code for free. My GH Activity Graph is almost solid green. I'm working on releasing my sixth or seventh free app in just a few years (almost all are open-source). Over the last dozen years, or so, I've released over 20 (most are deprecated).

I really don't look forward to having others destroy my work, anymore. After a fairly brief time, looking for work (at age 55), I quickly figured out that, even if anyone hired me, they would treat me (and, even worse, my work) like crap. They certainly did, during the hazi- er, interviewing process.

So I guess I'm one of those "disincentivized to work" folks.

They cannot fathom treating their employees with respect. Their employees are tools to be used, abused, and discarded. Human resources.

let the woman work & make sure her bank account statements aren't stressful. she'll take some learning paths to get certificates, qualifications, skills required for promotions, financials literacy and self-employment. pay for all of it in advance, set a time limit and rep limit for exams of three years and 12 exams. if she fails, don't pay for her learning paths anymore but keep her bank account statements stress free.

she'll have money to spend on the markets and sh'll pay at least some taxes ans she'll be evolving, living, and her children will, too, and her chances to meet a proper new partner will be much higher.

students in their early twenties who don't have children and are eligible for some form of federal financial support don't really need even more money and there are incentives to perform and get projects, grants, scholarships for all kinds of characters. apprentices who earn waaaaay too little should also get stress free bank account statements for obvious reasons.

always hear stories about people that spend their life on it, but it's barely a life, you're basically just stuck loitering.

This last part is just my opinion:

Most of the people i've seen/met on it long term, the kind people others see as "sponges" are usually somewhat unwell/sickly, not unwell enough to be recognized as officially "disabled" but they'd probably be in hospital a few times a year.

No. The reason you say that is because you're young and you believe what you've heard. You will soon cease to be the former and then presumably, likely, stop to do the latter. People want to work, they want to be useful. And yes, if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive. Sure, natural. There's nothing wrong with that. But if I support you no matter whether you add money to that yourself, then that is not detrimental to your willingness to work, it just gives you that much more leeway to choose a suitable occupation.

(1) look up the definition of "disincentive". The parent didn't say anything about people not wanting to work or not wanting to be useful. And even then, you actually agreed about it being the disincentive ("if I support you but threaten to stop supporting you as soon as you get to work for money—suddenly working for money looks less attractive").

(2) understand the meaning of the phrase "The problem with X today is Y". It's very clearly not saying that Y is a problem with X, in fact, it's implying that there are other approaches to X that don't have problem Y.

i don’t think that is a bad thing necessarily but i think we can be relatively confident of the empirical reality of the effect (at least in the short-term) for quantities of money like this?

Good thing they had the participants complete a time journal so we can see that it mostly went towards leisure time and socializing. Again, I'm not making a moral judgement here - for a similar amount of money relative to my salary I would also shift towards more leisure at the margin.

> I don’t think I’d draw a lot of conclusions

The point of the experiment is precisely so we can draw generalizable conclusions about how money around this quantity impacts people's behaviors/incentives. Many welfare programs offer similar quantities of saving.

I think your reasoning is a bit motivated - this is a pretty good social science experiment that was very careful to preregister their analysis.

I’ll cop to that, but there are a lot of people commenting here who seem to be latching on to the relatively small decrease in working hours as a primary takeaway, and I’ve seen enough motivated reasoning around this topic elsewhere to have a theory on why they’re doing so.

And, for what it’s worth, I’m not trying to critique the study itself or the conditions it was performed under.

If you code for 100 hours a week, and I code for 40 hours a week, who's working more? We care about the productivity, not the hours worked.

So you agree that "the problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work"?

This is YCombinator's blog after all, isn't it?

I live in the UK. Currently my marginal tax rate is something like 65% because for every £100 I earn, I pay 40% income tax, 12% national insurance, 9% student loan (which functions more like a tax here than a real loan), and I lose something called child benefit when I earn more.

So yeah, I want to earn more, but it's pretty marginal returns for the extra work, stress and responsibility until I've totally lost child benefit (lost totally at £80k) and then I start to keep more of the income again. And then at £100k you lose the government support for childcare, you start having to pay interest on all savings accounts, and so between £100k and £120k you can be worse off than before rather than better off, especially if you have multiple children.

That's not to say that the incentives are the same on the low end of the salary scale but you can see why people might think it.

No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling

As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?

Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!

And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.

The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.

> Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts?

Ultimately, the whole point of UBI is to head off political objections to automating away most jobs, so the tech barons can pursue the technology to do that unimpeded (at least until it's too late). "Minimum base level of support" is basically the Terrafoam welfare warehouses from Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna).

because that's the way things are in scifi like Star Trek. people want to make life imitate art.

The pipe dreams some people have... I mean its fine, you do you, nobody else in this world actually cares. But thats not how you actually achieve anything in life, in any system out there, rather exact opposite.

Your comment sure sounds like mind-reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income

It is complex. Although the label UBI suggests a good thing, I believe we should eliminate the term "universal," at least.

Humanity has always dealt with a shortage of resources and their allocation. What is certain is that no amount of UBI will fix this human condition. There will always be differences (not only economic but ideological), and people will try to compensate for them. Rinse and repeat.

It's more of a safety net than a comfortable sofa: maybe it's not as nice, but it keeps you from hitting the floor nevertheless.

This gave my life negative torque, the moment I got a little leverage, I stacked up roommates and basically lived like a digital ascetic for 12 years.

I ended up in the top 1% of earnings for my starting co-hort not because of my fairly average intelligent but because of my nearly 100% openness, insane resilience and way above average mental health game, and a decade of luck.

I spent all that time and energy getting out of poverty and by the time I bought a house and stabilized I was worn out.

The really shitty part is that all along the way I had chances and risks that I couldn't take, companies I couldn't start, etc. because while any one of those chances was a play money/time opportunity for others it would have been a bet the farm, burn the ships, might have to squat with a bunch of homeless dudes (again) risk for me.

Anything that gives a person the breathing room to stop the frantic hunter gatherer subsistence doom spiral and build skills is amazing.

Let's let other countries play the economically wasteful poverty game, let's let people in other countries die deaths of despair during their prime production years but if we want to be an advanced technology powerhouse we can't keep wasting the potential of all these poor but intelligent kids.

"How can I tie real solvable issues to some kind of thought stopping meme", it's a fun game politicians and and other disingenuous people play.

Every pundit buzzword you've injected is orthogonal to the point and the issue. You can personally pursue those plans if you want, they have nothing to do with what I am discussing.

Worse, everything you've raised is irrelevant to all the little american kids getting screwed right now.

But better America and Americans suffer and decline than having measurable but marginally imperfect solutions right? Perfection or nothing right? Iteration, measurement and incremental improvement isn't real so we shouldn't try? Defeatist attitudes didn't make this country.

For instance, couples where both partners need a job in a fixed location have less mobility than couples where one or both can work remotely. Therefore, they are locked into their geographic markets, unable to explore better opportunities.

There's nuance worth teasing apart here.

The only definition I've ever heard is that UBI allows you to lose your job and still be able to pay for the basic necessities (food, water, shelter, transportation, etc.). Anything less misses the whole point.

However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate. And so the idea (as I understood it) is that it's not supposed to go beyond that, so your incentive would still be to keep your job if you at all can, not quit it.

Excellent. Now open the border and hang out citizenship, or other form of voting rights. Does your definition require having a job once in a life time at least?

> However, just the basic necessities would make for a pretty dull and repetitive life, which most people hate

Oh no, many people would love it. Hundreds of millions for sure, if not billions.

I think it's called dystopia, and cannot last long.

Why?

This is one. We should go deeper into this question. I most certainly would continue doing a lot of the things I do now, but for fun and to progress the state-of-the-art in my field of work. I'd accept higher taxes in compensation for the assurance I will always be able to do what I do best, instead of what someone would pay me to do.

.. to pay taxes for social services.

> I'd accept higher taxes ...

how do you pay for these taxes if you have no job/income?

Nobody is saying that the carrot (personal financial gain) needs to be removed from the equation. Just that everyone is guaranteed some basic level of financial support.

Society already produces enough wealth to cover the expense of UBI. Remember it would replace any other welfare systems in place today.

Personally I think I might take a bit more risk, and choose to do something that I personally believe is of actual value to society rather than please some corporation or VC.

I’ve never seen this math worked out.

Also, some benefits are inherently lumpy. A special-needs or chronically-ill person needs (and receives) resources that wouldn’t be covered by a broad-spectrum UBI.

In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.

The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.

Yes, it IS a provocation. Let's go deeper into this question.

As much as people want. A subsistence lifestyle is incredibly cheap and accessible; most of us just don't want it.

More simply, value production is needed because value consumption is occurring.

How much value is needed is determined by the society through a free market.

What if they're not a veteran, but just an unfortunate soul with a disability that provides "zero" value?

If you do this you stop getting new veterans. Functionally speaking this is why every society with armies has veteran benefits.

It’s reasonable to assume that the powers that be may find themselves in situations politically precarious if veterans aren’t able to provide for themselves and those they ostensibly fought for. Veterans know where real and metaphorical bodies are buried, they also know that at a nation scale, the internal problems that face first world nations are usually not logistical, but political. If not for fear of disrupting business interests, UBI in the form of food stamps, housing, and Medicare for all is possible. The veterans know this, because they are fed and housed and medically treated at scale during and after service. However, if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited.

UBI is a thorny issue due to the complexities of implementing it piecemeal alongside the already-existing status quo. In some ways, a greenfield solution would be easier, but they call those revolutionary changes revolutions rather than evolutions for good reasons.

Some stray links for food for thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

Oh, I always thought it was a reference to the Roman practice of settling veterans on farmsteads [1].

> if everyone receives these same benefits also without service obligations, the ability to offer incentives to service is limited

I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes. (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41342861

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586918

> I'm not sure we could offer VA benefits to every adult without massively raising taxes.

If we eliminated waste and slippage/loss and gained efficiencies of scale by eliminating private health insurance obligations except for high net worth, like is done in some countries like Australia, I think we could come out ahead actually, due to reducing the cost of employment borne by businesses, while maintaining or increasing health outcomes for those on public healthcare rolls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(Australia)

> (Also, we treat our veterans quite poorly.)

To our great collective shame. That being a veteran is essentially a greater risk factor for peacetime structural violence in the form of homelessness, food insecurity, and lack of health care is a travesty only eclipsed by the how commonplace these issues are among fellow countrymen who are merely civilians.

What is this grand democratic experiment even for, if we still suffer from the same failure modes as that which we originally fought to save ourselves from?

What? We treat our veterans poorly, but that’s still far better than most countries today or in history.

I do take your point, though, and don’t protest too much. It’s less a matter of how much is enough for our veterans, but rather, how far we have left to go, one and all. In many ways, veterans simply arrived at the limits of political capital before the rest of us, and now that the problems veterans face are similarly butting up against many if not all in some form or fashion, we have economic capital concerns in the form of UBI that has become the stalking horse for larger structural issues largely left unaddressed facing us all.

Education assistance is more substantial maybe, but then again that’s something much of the civilized world enjoys without the threat of being blown up by ieds far from home in a pointless conflict.

Indeed though, let’s not lose perspective, let’s take a hard honest look at things and ask ourselves whether we’re doing better or worse.

The military is one of the best available options to lift people up out of poverty and give them a better chance at life, and it always has been. but it’s also a chance at no life at all, and so if people are forced into making this desperate bargain then it is disgraceful and reflects badly on what we’ve actually accomplished with all the time since antiquity.

The value that any person can create is principally limited by imagination, not the free market. The wonderful thing about a moderately regulated free market is that the imagination of more people can be used to engage the value creation inherent in every person.

Can we assume a fraction of people would still be doing these relevant things and that it'd be enough to maintain a functioning society? If not, wouldn't that point towards the directions we need technology to evolve? Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?

One thing I would bet on is that, in that scenario, degrading working conditions (as we frequently see in agriculture, transportation, etc) would make it harder to find people willing to subject themselves to them.

> Would paying more to the people who now don't need to work, but are willing to, suffice?

This is not possible because you cant simultaneously pay workers more (as a whole) and have them subsidize the non-working.

I admit it may be possible to reallocate compensation among the workers so that some get more, while collectively they get less.

I don't disagree, but aren't you implicitly admitting here that the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives doing work? We get a few laps around the sun, once, before we return to oblivion. It seems a tragedy to me to force almost everyone into spending that brief spark of life on the drudgery of increasing shareholder value.

If you agree, would you then also say that it would be in humanity's interest to work toward a situation where people can lead happy, fulfilling lives? I'm not saying I have any answers, but I am saying that implicit in your own assumption is a problem that needs solving.

people dont want to spend their lives doing work, but they do want to spend their lives consuming. If you eliminate the shareholders and shares, it still take the same amount of work to produce what we consume, so this wont help reduce work.

In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless.

The only offramp from work is reducing consumption or 2) freezing consumption (assuming productivity increases)

Does it? Seems like if we don't have excess value going to shareholders, less work could be done to provide the current level of value for things people are consuming.

A restaurant needs X hours of labor to make Y hamburgers. This is true if all the money goes to workers, or just a fraction of it.

You could pay a worker more, but that doesn't increase the supply of hamburgers.

Inversely, any value tied up in the share price is not being spent on hamburgers.

The best you can hope to do is shift some consumption from investors to workers, but consumption differences are as great as wealth/value differentials. e.g. Musk & Bezos might have 1 million times as much value to their name, but they don't consume 1 million times as many hamburgers. The vast majority of excess value held by investors is not directed towards consumption.

So why does it need to be created in the first place then? That takes work that apparently does not need to happen for any other reason than economic, not because it is valuable in and of itself.

Value =/= Work.

no extra work is happening at the burger shop. you still need X hours to make Y hamburgers. If anyone works less, fewer people eat.

The extra value is extracted from the buyers (many of whom are workers elsewhere).

>So why does it need to be created in the first place then?

In theory, the utility of investor profit serves as a market signal for what goods are desired, when things should be produced, and what should no longer be produced. Markets determine this through trial and error with thousands of participants simultaneously acting.

In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.

for the last 150 years, it has been understood that neither process is perfectly efficient. For most goods, it is conventionally understood that inefficiency of the profit signal is less than the inefficiency of political process.

By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear for Walmart curating the selection of goods they want in the quantities they want. In terms of efficiency, I think it is unlikely a panel of government politicians (with their own motives and biases) could run a store and decide on the types and quantity of goods that people will want in a more efficient way.

Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.

> In theory, people have proposed doing away with the profit signal, but the only alternative is trial and error from a political process.

You can always measure by actual consumption.

> By way of analogy, Walmart has a 2% profit margin which is a cost consumers bear

Note Walmart is subsidised by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.

>Who could, in turn, work less if burger prices didn't reflect the need to pay investors more than they invested.

This then invokes the problem that if everyone works less, less is produced. Even if you raise salaries, the options are the same. A) Same hours, same amount of goods to buy, or B) fewer hours, fewer goods to buy.

This is why I am saying "value" is entirely besides the point. What matters is production and consumption. you could cut salaries by 99%, and if production is the same, prices go down 99%. You can double salaries, and if production is the same, prices double.

The amount of "value" an investor has locked up doesnt change this. all that matters is the consumption of investors. If Investors are buying and eating all the hamburgers for themselves, yeah, that impacts workers. If they stick it a locked box of reinvested stocks, it has exactly zero impact.

>You can always measure by actual consumption.

Yes, this has been proposed in the last 150 years of economic literature. The challenge is who measures it, and who controls it. Remember, we already no that the market isnt perfect. The question is if it is better than a realistic alternative. Do you think a panel of elected republicans and democrats, with all their campaign promises, lobbyists, and personal product desires would do a better job of keeping the super market stocked?

>Note Walmart is subsidized by government programs that pay their employees because the wages Walmart pays are considered too low for survival.

Lets be honest about what is happening here. Voters feel bad and want people to have more money than Walmart needs to pay them to secure their work.

Calling this a subsidy is rhetoric. Walmart doesn't need the programs. Walmart will have enough workers either way, or even raise the wage to secure workers if they need to.

Because they are sure (rightfully so) the owners of said automation will not pay them enough to offset their lost jobs.

In both the US and UK over 30% of households are owned outright with no mortgage.

The economy is made up of us, it's not (predominantly) a downtrodden serving a tiny elite.

Most people work and do useful stuff for each other. Yes, there are bullshit jobs, but it's a huge exaggeration to pretend they all are.

What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.

You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.

People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).

It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.

A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.

The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.

That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?

(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)

If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.

Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.

That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.

On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.

On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.

That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.

It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.

...why?

We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?

Most people wouldn't want to because they would have to cut 40% of their spending across the board.

there are a lot of people today that can already have the option to work less for less money but dont choose to do it.

I think people would fight tooth and nail.

People like to have more stuff, bigger houses, better cars, air conditioning, whatever.

- People that plant things

- People that harvest things (may be the same people, but maybe not)

- People that a order things to be planted (seeds)

- People that order/plan short term things to facilitate planting (fertilizer)

- People that make those short term things (who other industry, lots of people)

- People that order/plan long term things to facilitate planting (tractor)

- People that maintain long term things to facilitate planting (repair men)

- People that build systems to allow ordering of short term things

- People that build systems to allow ordering/renting/use of long term things

- People that build systems to allow finding people that maintain long term things

- People that handle making sure those ^ people have the infrastrucure they need (government + industry)

- People that handle making sure those ^ people get hired and paid

We are WAY beyond "in order to get food for people, we need Doug the farmer". So yes, a LOT of the people participating in this thread are in the set of people that are responsible for making sure people, as a whole, have access to food.

And food is only _one_ of the things needed for a society to function

You know, those guys who always dodge their round at the pub, they never pay you back that fiver, they always need somewhere to crash?

Hell, have you ever dated someone like that, or known a friend that has? One person goes to work, cooks, maintains the home, the other just spends their time on highfalutin' ideas like their photography project?

UBI to me sounds like a way of hiding that behind bureaucracy. I don't want to support people who don't do anything useful and purely consume resources.

If UBI means everyone at the place you work is actually motivated, and you never have to watch your friend support a free-loader again, I think we're probably better off as a society.

They use that free money to get you to do things for them.

It's hidden behind bureaucracy but it's the same thing. Worse, even, because you don't have a choice.

It's like the nonsense solutions the left propose for tackling crime. "If we give people X, they won't have to steal X". I mean, sure, because they have already gotten it from me for free...

If you have a piece of industrial machinery, you will have down time for maintenance: you can pro-actively schedule planned maintenance when it's less disruptive, or the machine itself can schedule unplanned maintenance without regard to the disruption; "not having maintenance" isn't an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive unplanned maintenance" option.

If you're the parent of a toddler and that toddler wants your attention, they will get it one way or another: you can pro-actively make time for them, or you can re-actively make time when they act out, perhaps destroying something in the process; as frustrating as it is, "not making time" is simply not an option, and trying to take it is actually taking the "expensive re-active to acting out" option.

Here in the UK several years ago they cut back severely on social services to people with low-grade emotional problems. So instead of calling the social workers, they started calling emergency services, who are required to send someone out. The result was that much more more money was spent on emergency services. One could of course jail people who falsely call 999, but then that's pretty expensive too. For better or for worse, "not paying for people for them to talk to" isn't an option; it turns into "pay expensive EMTs to talk to them".

So, maybe there are these people who are just freeloaders; they get jobs and then do the minimal amount of work possible, they get boyfriends or girlfriends or spouses who will support their freeloading lifestyle. That cost is being paid right now, but in a damaging way: they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners. It would be nice not to pay that cost at all, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Maybe if we just explicitly paid them to freeload, then at least we'd have the benefit of not having them hurt our friends and our companies.

> they're dead weight in companies and vampires on romantic partners

This is trivially avoidable in both cases. The Offspring have a song that comes to mind.

And I hope two things are clear:

1. I don't like freeloaders either. I don't ever plan to be a freeloader, and I don't like the idea of paying taxes to enable people to choose a lifestyle of taking and not giving. (Obviously there are people who create value for society that's harder to "capture", like working on open-source software or making art; and there are people who have a harder time contributing because of other limitations, not because of choice; we're not talking about those people here.)

2. I don't claim to know that giving free money to people will help. It's possible freeloaders will take money from the government and companies / individuals; it's possible that having free money available will significantly increase the number of freeloaders. We don't know because we haven't tried it.

What I'm asking you to consider, however, is the possibility that 1) the overall benefits to society of UBI are greater than the harms caused by enabling freeloaders; and 2) there's no way to have UBI without enabling freeloaders.

If that's the case, then our options are:

1. Take UBI and its benefits, gritting our teeth at the necessity of enabling freeloaders

2. Miss the benefits of UBI on principle to avoid enabling freeloaders.

If UBI is a net benefit to society, in spite of freeloaders, I'd have to go with #1 instead of #2.

Consider that our current capitalist system enables lots of other types of freeloaders: people who have inherited enough capital that they can live off the profits without doing any work whatsoever, companies or people who have patented something simple and obvious and are then able to extract rents from the people actually making things, people who buy things and sell them milliseconds later. We put up with this kind of freeloading in capitalism because it's hard to prevent it without damaging the benefits that capitalism brings. The same might end up being true for UBI.

I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.

In society A, machines and clean energy allow the population to work an average of 20 hours a week. Some, even many people choose not to work at all, but still get access to a basic apartment and have their basic food, social and education, etc, needs met.

In society B, machines and dirty energy allow a tiny segment of the population to live on super-yachts, replete with airstrips for their private jets. They hire people who hire people to convince the majority of the population they must work at least 40 hours a week (preferably 80).

Which society would you say is "functioning" better?

Why blame the unemployed for the functioning of a society, when record inequality and the policies that allow it are so much more responsible?

Look at this graph, and explain to me how unemployment is the problem here: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23410.jpeg

Why are people in society B concerned with the majority working if they are unnecessary?

I think that's a great question to ask. Some possible answers:

A - to make money for the yacht class

B - to keep the 99% too busy/distracted to wonder why all the productivity gains of the last 50 years have gone to the yacht class (see graph above)

C - They're not even that concerned - they pay people to be concerned about that stuff on corporate media / in politics / in our Supreme Court.

The point above is that "100% employment" is absolutely not the barrier between society B and society A. There's no good reason for full employment to be "necessary" to a well functioning society.

It could even be argued that one measure of a functioning society is how many people need to work 60 hours a week just to have their basic needs met...

If you think that full employment is the barrier we're facing to society A then you're living in a logical wasteland.

It's not that utopian to want a society where people aren't made homeless if they don't work. Finland did it - it worked great. It wasn't even that hard.

Also in a society where just eight people own as much as 4 billion. Maybe making 'jokes' denying that we're in late stage capitalism is an odd choice? Like, yeah, we're headed for destruction.. It's funny the way Ralph Wiggum's "I'm in danger" line is funny.

Productivity gains since 1950 - 253% Wage growth since 1950 - 115%

We could be in society A right now if those gains weren't hoovered up by the yacht class.

The graph is true regardless.

Americans could be working 20 hours a week without society falling apart. The only thing that would change would be to the yacht class - who would still be very very wealthy.

> Houses are bigger, we buy more clothes, eat more food, have more gadgets.

How much more does housing cost? I'll save you the effort - it's fully twice as much per square foot, adjusted for inflation.

How much more temporary and flimsy are our clothes?

How much less nutritious is our food? How much more toxic is it - to ourselves, to the soil? How much fatter are we? How much more unhealthy?

We have more gadgets, sure. They're all owned by a handful of companies with damn-near monopoly powers, and none of them are changing this trend of a more and more unequal society.

So... What's your point?

If quitting your job doesn't put your life or your ability to get another job (because you're not capable of maintaining basic grooming, for example) at risk, then the "free market" model of employment can actually work, and people can opt out of jobs that treat them poorly or underpay them. At that point all the most essential/difficult/unpleasant jobs would actually have to pay the most, and cushier jobs with more reasonable hours could pay less, and people could do the amount of work it takes to get the amount of money they want. Think of how hard people work just to make a bit more money even when they're financially stable, just because they want a house or a cool car or a nice vacation. Why would that change if you didn't have to bleed yourself dry just to eat and sleep under a roof?

That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games.

I don't subscribe to that mindset: I want a nice place to live, with room for all of my hobbies and for guests to comfortably visit overnight. I want a good car and a nice place to park it and to work on it. I want to be able to afford a glorious steak dinner out or an amazing gyro without having to sacrifice. I want the best tools to create my own food in my own kitchen. I want the fastest internet and an ample homelab to do stuff with it. I want to make an annual thousand-mile pilgrimage to hang out with some friends for a week doing cool shit together (which requires real money), and I want to be able to take an actual-vacation some other time in the year where I can afford to go camping or something. I want to be able to provide thoughtful and useful gifts to my people, even if they happen to be expensive. (And if I were allowed to smoke weed [my job doesn't permit it and testing is both thorough and regular], I'd want the best weed.)

I wouldn't be able to accomplish these things with UBI, so even in a hypothetical future where UBI is a thing: I won't want to sit around and do nothing: So far in life, I want quite a lot more more than the basic essentials and I'm willing to work for those things.

(I do know some people who don't seem to be capable of more than nothing, due to mental and/or physical conditions, and it's likely that all of us know someone like this -- and these folks will have a rough time with life with or without UBI. But I firmly believe that most people would prefer staying in the rat race, because most people who are capable of work also have some fondness for whatever they consider to be *nice* things.

But I might fall down in the future; it's happened to me before for a variety of reasons. And it'd be nice to be able to afford to fall down without becoming homeless when my income drops from something useful to near-zero.)

And then, if you have proof of another habitable residence, you can get the cash value of all that instead.

The tricky part is that the austerity absolutely cannot reduce anyone below the minimum actual needs to live a full human life. You absolutely need to be giving them enough and healthy enough food, and water. The apartment can be claustrophobic, but it needs ventilation and sound insulation so people can actually sleep. The bed can be boring, but tall people can't be literally cramped when they sleep, and it needs to actually support their weight so people don't get back injuries. Health care needs to be fully adequate. Basically, minimum needs are 100% covered, so that if anyone ever wants to get working they don't have any immediate barriers. Don't take away anything that will make it harder for people to work.

(I've stayed in cheap-ish hotel rooms that are a lot larger and more flexible than that. I've also stayed in far worse.)

And that's... well, fuck: Isn't that OK? Is it not OK for some people who have (for whatever reason) failed to thrive and climb ahead at the present time to have these things?

(I think it's OK to give all people means with which to limit how far they can fall, even if that means that many quasi-successful people are essentially including this as a line-item that they pay to themselves on their own tax bill.

I also think that it is imperfect, and that we mustn't let imperfection stand in the way of general progress.

I mean: Nothing is fucking perfect. But the mere existence of ubiquitous imperfection doesn't somehow mean that positive progress cannot ever be made.)

Yes, teenagers can be lazy and get stuck in unproductive situations. Some adults even can! That doesn't mean that's what the majority of people want to do, and there are more effective ways of getting people unstuck than turning off their power and evicting them!

Feels bad, bro. Must be rough.

Anyway, I went ahead and turned off your lights at the meter and posted an eviction notice on your door.

You've still got two weeks to turn it around if you can find a way."

--life and landlords

There are a lot of people that dont engage in the rat race even when food, health, the material conditions of their children depend on. It seems like most people want a base level of UBI to be better than the conditions they have from working now. It also seems like the expectation for UBI is often even above the average US income of $37K, and that would be if there was no additional salary left to be had from working

Based on this, I empathize with anyone of median income or higher who feels like they are struggling to get what they want, and UBI would be a huge dead weight, likely preventing them from getting all of the things on their lists.

I assume my list would go down the drain to support a UBI policy.

And so what?

These people are still human beings. They still deserve life: If dogs deserve no-kill shelters[1] then humans also deserve a life. They deserve a chance to live out their days, and to tell stories to their (perhaps prolific) kids and grandkids (who also deserve a healthy life, and that includes having a healthy -- if piss-poor and inept -- family that includes their elders).

Right now, it often works like this: They live in squalor, and have broadly have nothing of merit. Their kids -- if they manage to thrive -- disown them. And the whole time this very real person is still alive (if they make it that far), their grandkids only know of them through photos.

That's no life. Not for the senior, the kid, or the grandkid.

We can do better than that. It will not be cheap, but we can afford it, and we'll have a healthier society as a result. People, and the families they create, are important to the healthy existence of everyone in a society.

[1]: We can certainly talk about assisted suicide for humans or just culling the herd as options that may be superior to leaving folks to die in the gutter, but isn't it easier to just avoid that topic and give all humans a stable and reliable chance to stay alive? How much does that cost, do you suppose?

I can afford it because a healthy society is a productive society, and this will return to me because good economies are built largely upon productive societies, and healthy societies are more productive than unhealthy societies are.

Productivity generates wealth.

Are these not things that we generally understand to be true?

(Unless... Can it instead be shown that it is economically beneficial to have a relatively unhealthy and unproductive society?)

[Shall I make popcorn?]

(edit, can't reply further because of HN thread limits:

My dudes, "free" money from UBI isn't to keep people from working who want to get ahead. Most people can work, and most people do want a lot more than a shitty apartment in their life and are willing to work for that.

Y'all certainly want more than shitty apartment in your own lives, don't you? So why in the fuck would you ever assume that "dur, I have a shitty apartment and some simple food, so I don't have to do anything ever!" is the be-all, end-all human state?

Please re-align yourselves with the people you actually-know in life: I promise you that you'll see that almost none of them will give up on the rat-race if they start getting UBI. They'll generally want to keep making steps that seek to bring them ahead of their peers, and that means that they'll continue to do productive things. A thousand dollars per month (or whatever) isn't enough motivation for them to somehow cease being productive and stop working to get ahead.

There is no proposal for UBI that means the end of the fantastic American dream. UBI doesn't even mean the end of capitalism. UBI just creates a baseline financial safety net onto which anyone may fall without necessarily facing disease and death in the gutter, and it's there for everyone without even a shred of additional paperwork because it exists like clockwork without additional action on the part of the recipient, while also providing a bit of a boost for those at the low-end who do produce something that lets them get ahead of the game a little bit easier.)

If getting your needs met was a disincentive for work then why are all the multi-millionaires still working instead of downsizing their lives and playing video games / smoking weed for 40 years?

Most people are not facing that binary.

Would you work 40 hours a week at McDonald's for an extra $20k/year if all your basic needs are met?

OR at that point, would you say screw it and spend your days hiking, reading, and laughing with friends?

If we're having to say that the only reason someone ever would work a specific job is because it's an alternative to homelessness then that's on the job at that point. These are "inferior jobs" in an economic sense and it's up to the employer to do better. Make working for you suck less. Even in customer-facing retail jobs it's more than possible.

I'm having a hard time seeing the downside. Employees can afford to take more risks because they're not betting their livelihood anymore, and it provides a natural upward pressure on wages and working conditions at the bottom on the labor market which is sorely needed. Anyone whose desired lifestyle can't be supported on the meager income, which is most people, there's no change.

I think that is a major motivation for most work and I question if it is as bad as you think it is? Is it really that unreasonable that someone do something they don't like to get shelter, food, and healthcare?

>But would I continue working my SWE job for my current salary, easily.

Would you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50% to pay other people who choose not to work?

How small would the difference between working full time and full retirement have to be before you considered it?

I don't actually think it's that bad but I was trying to steelman your argument. The hypothetical presumes a terrible job with not enough pay to make up for it. The kind of job that someone would only take if they had not better option. If the job isn't that bad, or it pays well enough I think people will take it despite not needing it to make rent.

> you do it if your take home income was reduced by 50%

I don't think that would happen because UBI is supposed to be replacement for all other forms of welfare and I would also expect some small gains in reducing the prison population, and administrative overhead. But to answer your question, yes. Government already takes >30% right now and because of the U I'm getting the benefit as well so that covers a good chunk of mandatory expenses. In a very real sense I need less money under this system.

I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.

>I'm not really sure how to answer the retirement question because under this system I can't "just retire" because my lifestyle wouldn't permit it.

another way to frame this is how much (if any) of your income would you be willing to give up if it meant 0 work hours. Would you take a 10k pay cut? 50k? or are you completely inflexible when it comes to lifestyle spending, or alternatively, do you like your job enough that you would do it for free.

I think we are discussing different magnitudes of Ubi. I would consider leaving a 200k job for 40k Ubi (which I think is a number more in line with what people describe.

First off, my 200k salary would be taxed into effectively a 100k salary.

I could live pretty well off 40k if I never had to work, so quitting my job would be a quality of life upgrade.

I think a lot of my peers would consider the same.

When I think UBI, I think paying for a shared living space and food. A minimum budget, not necessarily a comfortable budget.

That being said, I can see the argument to reduce disability in the event of UBI.

If no-kill shelters ever make sense (and some people must think they do, as these are things that do exist), then no-kill humanitarian efforts also must make sense. I find this to be self-evident because I think that humans are more important than domestic animals are.

UBI directly helps with the latter; UBI helps people avoid death.

UBI also indirectly helps with the former: By reducing the burden of taking care of pets when the bottom starts to fall out on folks' lives for whatever reason that happens, the need for dog shelters of any sort is also reduced.

But pretty soon, once the novelty wears of, it begins to pale. I mean, I have my own place, sure, but it's with three other guys; not someplace I'd want my GF to move into, and definitely not a place to raise a kid. I have my own car, but it's a piece of junk. I can't really afford to go to concerts or long trips, all I can really afford to do is sit around at home and play games on my PS/2.

So, after 2-3 years they all started do things to make themselves more valuable to society: one took classes to become an EMT. Another took classes to become a fire fighter. They landed better, more stable jobs, and could afford to move into a nicer home, get better cars, attend concerts and sporting events, go on trips, start families.

That would be my ideal for how UBI would work: make sure people never have to chose between a bad job and starving or being on the street; but also make sure they have a clear path and opportunities to improve their situation and become more valuable to society.

Are there "deadbeats" who would just play video games for life? Sure, but there already are. I'm not sure how much those kinds of people contribute to society, even if they are working a minimum wage job to support their lifestyle.

I think this discounts the formative experience of the prior years. I would expect it helped by: 1. Motivating those guys to make themselves more valuable on the job market. 2. Giving those guys baseline discipline/reliability to get them to their next work and training milestones.

The military reserves is an interesting beast, but if you were in the active component before that, you probably ran into lots of guys needing similar training in basic reliability. UBI could be a strong disincentive away from those minimum-wage jobs, and the outlay described by grandparent is superior to a minimum-wage standard of living.

I want to see you attempt to do the math to show that.

Here's my rough math: Mean income is about $60k. If we take the extra simple option, we can increase all tax brackets by 20% and give everyone a $12k credit, and it trivially balances. The median income increases, the low end of income drastically increases, and higher incomes drop.

Such an outcome is very far from total socialization. The effective tax rate of anyone below $60k income drops, and the max marginal rate is a not-crazy 57%.

But also we can make the tax increase progressive as well. And we can include capital gains as income and lower the percents. And we can cut a good chunk of existing welfare which decreases the tax burden. This isn't a suggestion for an optimal method, it's a basic sanity check.

You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing. My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.

12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California

It's close enough, that's for 240 million people. If I use Gross National Income I get a much higher number.

I'm not worried about children right this second.

> You are also casually applying a 20% hike, which for many people is their entire budget after taxes and housing.

Another 20%, minus 12 thousand dollars. That makes a big difference.

The median worker would pay significantly less than before.

And I already said progressive would be better. But a flat tax like that is very simple and would not be the end of the world.

> My effective rate is already >40%, and you are proposing another 20%. That would mean others are getting more of my salary than I am.

Are you taking the minus 12k into account? If so it sounds like you're making a lot more than the people you just described that can't find reasonable housing. You'll be fine.

> 12k seems an absurdity low number to provide universal shelter, Healthcare, food, security, and entertainment. My newspapers are full of stories on how 100k/yr isn't a living wage in California

The nice thing about having a guaranteed income is that you actually can move without massive risk.

Or you can adjust it based on location, idk, I'm going with the simple version first. If it only helps most people then that's enough to show the idea has merit. Nitpicking won't work!

If you are taking that as your baseline, you have already nationalized every industry and asset in the country.

Okay. Please stop nitpicking and either defend your claim about "100% socialization of income" or admit you were wrong.

Sorry for saying irrelevant words, I will try to minimize them.

A flat tax increase of 20% of income minus 12k would be far from ideal, but anyone making less than 60k would have less taxes, anyone making 60k-120k would have a 0-10% of income increase, and super high cost of living places could use different numbers.

The exact details don't matter because I only made that scenario to prove your claim wrong. Because it's wrong.

If we assume the average income is 60k, urinalysis is still wrong. A 20% flat tax for Ubi would then provide a 12K benefit. This would not be a net positive for incomes between 60 and 120k. The break-even point would be an income of 60k, progressing to a 10% net loss at 120k. 20% of 120 is negative 24,000, and 12 would be returned via Ubi.

> I think the desired level of Ubi is on par if not higher than the average American Income. This leads to the 100% redistribution claim. It is very simple.

You think the "desired level of UBI" is more than the median income? You're talking to caricatures and fools, not real advocates. And you should have said you were talking about far more than $1000 a month significantly earlier in the conversation.

Top post for this thread mocks 12K as a negligible handout, and claims UBI has never been tried.

Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?

What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?

These are exactly the types of things advocates claim UBI would solve (along with poverty and crime).

Top post says it's not enough to quit their jobs (and keep the same lifestyle, presumably) or to get a "nice" apartment. That doesn't make it negligible.

And the claim of never really trying is also true, these tests tend to be small and pick random people out of a big crowd.

> Let me ask you what level of UBI would support a disabled mother of two that cant work?

That depends on whether the children are getting UBI, or whether there is a separate program for poor children. But UBI for the mother alone should not be expected to pay for that situation.

> What level of UBI would allow a construction worker to quit their job and go back to engineering school?

Well we don't fix tuition prices through UBI. Or the housing crisis.

But let's see. 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation, you could easily get a dorm bed for $4000 per school year at a big school. (Yes I know that doesn't cover the entire year.) So if we can just do that again, and charge a reasonable tuition (my local college is about $2500 per year right now and that number would be fine) then $12k of UBI would let someone go to school.

There’s nothing magical about exceeding a 50% marginal tax rate. (Hitting 100%, sure, that would be bad.)

There’s definitely a psychological threshold there for most people. I ran an informal survey a few years back about what tax rates people would consider fair, and there was a very strong clustering at 50%.

I have a hard time understanding it myself. The whole point of taxation is redistribution, so why would you care whether you’re “winning” versus the marginal tax rate?

A substantial portion of the population doesnt think taxation should be used for distribution at all. They think the fundamental point of taxation is to pay for public goods that everyone uses like roads, police, and firemen.

Which, of course, is never going to happen, nor should it. The term "basic" definitely does not automatically entail quitting jobs or getting an apartment.

Yes, we'd try and reduce that income tax increase by getting money elsewhere, most significantly because UBI should allow us to decrease welfare payments significantly. But that would still contribute well under half of the $12K.

The numbers work at $1k a month, but they don't work for levels significantly higher than that.

And if UBI isn't balanced, then it will affect inflation, making it much less impactful.

I believe that $1k/month is a good figure for UBI. It's not quite enough to live on, but it can be in a shared-housing situation, and it can go a long ways to cover expenses if you have to quit your job due to an abusive boss or something.

... should it be? Or should you have to save some of your basic income for a period to go to school?

If every year you got enough to live off and to be an enrolled student, I think the temptation to just be a perpetual student might be really attractive to some individuals, and not really valuable to society. Even from the yardstick of "how much do you learn", I think it's important to follow formal education with meaningful periods of trying to usefully apply what you've learned to real needs.

Technically, yes. The only difference between money and an IOU is the formal paper trail (i.e. accounting). The paper trail tells where the money comes from. Granted, we as a society don't always follow the paper trail, which is perhaps what you are meaning?

What the parent means, though, is that money still needs a real, live person standing behind a promise to provide something in the future to whomever holds the IOU (money). Without such a promise, the IOU (money) doesn't mean anything. But who is offering to make that promise? Are you volunteering your services?

also the credits expire each month for extra fun

What kind of special infrastructure is needed? Doesn't your government already have a system in place for sending tax refunds to its people? That's ultimately all your $20/month is.

A universally guaranteed income that does not meet your basic needs is of course a thing. But it’s not a universal BASIC income. It’s a subset. The games people play on semantics is very strange

For a living situation "basic" implies a shared space (family or otherwise). For food it would imply enough food to be healthy, but nothing about the form of food.

I think $1000/month/person probably is "basic" income. You can survive on that indefinitely.

(Healthcare is the other big expense, but I don't think UBI can reasonably cover healthcare, it's to complex and variable)

I think $1k does count as sufficient for basic needs, personally.

I think part of the problem is that people are assuming that you can and should pick a number for UBI that is sufficient for basic needs everywhere.

$1k/mo is probably not enough in San Francisco. But should our UBI be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs anywhere they'd like to live, or should it be set up to allow anyone to meet their basic needs if they're willing to leave the high cost of living areas and go out into the rest of the country where rent and food and transportation is cheaper?

Also a UBI shouldn't have to facilitate living _everywhere_. Santa Monica is lovely. Should we arrange it so anyone can move to Santa Monica and be able to live there fully supported on their UBI?

I hadn't really thought about transportation costs, and am inclined to leave it out of UBI calculations as it doesn't feel like a necessity. But in a rural area transportation is necessary just to buy food, so I guess that adds some complexity.

Granted, some form of education are cheaper than other, especially those that can easily be self taught. I spent hundred of dollars on books and materials to learn electronics. Maybe I could spent less to learn the materials. Really, the hard part is actually spending the time and effort actually building circuits and experimenting.

If you're skilled and persistent enough, you could learn mathematics and other skills for very low cost. However, tutors and coaches are worth their money even though they are expensive, because they help demolish obstacles and get you unstuck faster so that you can progress faster.

A thousand dollars a month? Please, that's enough to pay for a lot of education like you wouldn't believe. It would make the money I spent on my continuous education look like a drop in the bucket. The difference is that I am not pursuing a degree from overpriced schools, but real knowledge and skills.

Alas, it would probably not be. People like to compare apples and oranges in discussions like this. UBI is such a game-changer that we probably wouldn't be able to predict how prices would react once such a thing is enacted. Look at the pandemic stimulus worldwide, and the inflation since.

If a lot of people had more money on hand, they would: 1) want to spend it; 2) prefer to work less (on average) so they have more time to enjoy spending it. Both of those lead to inflationary pressure, so it's unlikely $1000 in the new system would get you anything near what you currently get with it.

I was working as a home assistant and learning C++, took me a year before getting a programming job this way. Could have been much shorter if I had $1000.

Every single time we see results from a study on something like UBI, someone comes out with this argument—you missed the universal and the basic! Yes.

With that stipulated, how would you propose to test UBI before rolling it out on a country-wide scale? Every test I can think of that isn't just "implement UBI" will either fail the universal or the basic part, and "implement UBI" will never get the political will until it can be tested on a small scale first. Tests like this are the best way we know how to do it.

If you want UBI then you either are going to need to figure out how to work with incomplete tests or solve the problem of how to test UBI without just implementing it. We're not going to entirely restructure our economy because some folks on the internet think that UBI sounds great in theory.

We could try an approach like: People who make less than the poverty line pay no state/federal taxes. Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) to bring you up to poverty line for last month. Each month you get direct deposit (no bureaucracy) of up to $1000 or whatever would bring you to double the poverty line.

These programs would be automatic based on payroll tax filings and help the people who need UBI most. Also, we'd slowly be able to evolve these further to handle all benefit assistance programs and save a ton of money.

Another aspect that I think completely shifts the conversation and is often overlooked: duration.

If I am told I have X amount of money for Y amount of time, I'll plan accordingly. If Y tends to forever, that completely changes my plans.

With some money guaranteed, maybe now I can go to college or a trade school. Long term is a possibility. If it's only there for a small amount of time, I'll focus on much more immediate issues.

Without this aspect, which is kind of un-testable, all studies are kind of useless IMO.

It's the same as asking people what they would do with additional time off. The answers will vastly differ if we're talking about a couple of days, weeks, months, years or a lifetime.