Ask HN: Any volunteers for Guaranteed Basic Income Non-Profit?

I thought about this many years ago. It occurred to me that it could be put under the purview of the Federal Reserve Bank. Each citizen would become a stock holder of the Fed, owning one non-transferable share. Each stock would pay a monthly dividend and hence a basic income for all.

Few people know that right now there are already share holders in the Federal Reserve. They get paid 6% on their money guaranteed by law. Hence the Fed has incentive to keep inflation below this threshold. Lets use this as a template for every citizen. If a "basic income" was pegged to a 20hr part-time job at minimum wage, that would be approx $6000/yr. That amount is 6% of $100,000. So if the Government invested $100,000 per citizen in the Fed, that would cover it. With 200,000,000 million adults that comes to a total of $20 trillion. Now we can use another clever idea... the Treasury can just print two $10 trillion dollar coins, pay the Fed with it and issue each stock in the name of every citizen (based on SS). And the matter is all but done. This transaction is essentially the same as the current issuance of Federal bonds. So it is a simple precedence to follow. (Note, as the minimum wage gets raised, the Government adds additional funds, about $1 billion for every quarter raise.)

What's your goal, what do you want to achieve with this? Raise awareness? Promote the idea? Eventually apply this?

Also, you are based in the US, I understand? What's the number of bucks you'd say is the right amount for this? Do you reckon that's something easy to agree on?

Hope my questions are not mistaken for disagreement or criticism, I'd be all in for this if it was to be done thoughtfully.

"that they could spend on education, or applying for jobs, or starting new businesses."

Your difficulty would be to ensure the realisation of the benefit, and that there actually are jobs available that provide for these people.

I would prefer to approach the same issue in the reverse fashion, providing a job/ education with housing and minor allowances, requiring that the person start and complete a certain amount of work before any monetary incentive is provided. Available office space could be used, old buildings fallen into disuse can be repossessed to allow startup businesses some working space. This way you actually guarantee some economic value and proper utilisation of the funds. What you would end up with is the government incorporating businesses that mimic private enterprise, have stricter rules and hire from a different pool of people.

If I were homeless and or couldn't afford education, all I need is a warm bed, hot shower, library card, three square meals and google. (Not some arbitrary handout I would not be able to allocate properly, or in effect be compelled to spend unwisely because I know not the value of working for it.) The idea of a basic income is flawed if it allows comfortable survival without working, no different from communal distribution.

All that being said, I'm not American. What do I know.

I like the idea, but I'm not sure this can work. The first thing you should do is try to poke as many holes in this idea as possible, then close them and build the case as to why this would work. One problem I see is that it might hyperfocus demand toward a small number of base consumption items if a larger than anticipated number of recipients do decide to not work. This could inflate the price of these basic items and put the poorest in society back into the same boat of not having quite enough money to sustain themselves (having to pay the higher price for goods that they previously could afford etc). Then, we'd have to revisit raising the basic income level every 3-5 years instead of 8-12 years. Along with ridiculous debt ceiling fights, we'd also have basic income fights.

If it's set up to avoid these fights by being indexed to the rate of inflation, people will lose ground over the long haul, since wages tend to rise faster than inflation (and if we index it to wages, it creates a problem currently being discussed with respect to social security) and those pressures from wages might ultimately drive the price of goods out of reach for those who rely on their basic income.

You might also see irrational behavior on the part of some recipients, where they buy nonessential items (iphones, hdtvs, etc) and choose to go hungry or even homeless. Econ likes to assume rational behavior, but that's only so it can fit into a nice model. Fact is, plenty of people act irrationally, and while it's easy to ignore them in a model, it's hard to when they're sleeping along the street or in your stairwell.

And what would we do with them? Put them in jail? Force them to spend only on essential goods? If we force them to spend on essentials, aren't we just calling it welfare by a different name? The state can't let them just linger, because their loitering has costs of it's own, not limited to growing social unrest (this is partly why privatizing social security is such a horrible idea -- the market might fail and the state will still have to bail out people's private pensions or risk unrest, probably gaining nothing but added uncertainty in the long term).

Our system just might function optimally when its set up to let people choose to fail, as some surely will, and to make it just painful enough to encourage moving one's self out of poverty.

Playing devil's advocate here. A shift like this would seem to have very little margin for error.