I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless? Wouldn't the fixed income become the new zero income?
Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage? Do they double it? Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?
It replaces minimum wage in that McDonalds is welcome to offer a job flipping burgers for $1 an hour if they want. However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income) someone would only take that job if it was worth it/fulfilling to them.
Or alternatively, it could cause the wage to increase, as people won't be as desperate for just any job, driving down the demand for such jobs.
It would start to make financial sense for McDonalds to invest in automating several tasks which are currently cheaper for McDonalds to hire someone for. Imagine if you order and pay through a machine (I saw one of these at Jack in the Box already).
The person behind the counter could instead be working on their dreams of being a musician, artist, studying for college, etc.
And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...
> And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...
I think you missed the "worth it" part, which substitutes for the "fulfilling" part. Unattractive but low-skill jobs would see higher wages (and, thus, greater incentives to find labor-saving alternatives) until the utility people doing those jobs provided to others was reflected in the reward people doing those jobs received.
Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there. Obviously, McDonalds wants to stay in business, so it has to offer up some incentive to get people to work for them. If they offer enough money, there will certainly be people who would work to flip burgers.
The jobs' salaries match what they are actually worth, and can't be offered as minimum-wage jobs that people take because they don't have any money and can't get a job elsewhere.
not to mention mc donalds business would probably boost since now everybody can afford to have some junk food if they feel like it, paying some more wouldn't be a problem, I imagine.
> Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there.
Which means burgers will cost much more than they currently do.
The same will be true for all domestic products/services where a significant part of the work force currently has low wages.
Which means that you and I will pay more for goods/services than previously. The effect will be similar to a significant sales tax, might as well try funding BI that way (at least imported goods will carry some of the tax burden) and look at published studies on the effects of sales taxes...
On BI, it would be very difficult to afford the latest iPhone. If you have no skills but you want an iPhone you can either skip a few hundred meals or you can flip burgers and clean toilets for a few hours.
Don't worry, the hedonistic urge is stronger than laziness in most people. Especially since lazy usually implies watching TV which continuously bombards you with advertisements to buy things...
How does this all interact with debt? Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage? Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?
I doubt lump-sums-in-advance would be permitted. I'm sure that predatory payday loan places would jump at the chance to fill the gap, though. I hope that if BI is ever implemented, that kind of stuff will be regulated.
Presumably, Child Support would no longer exist for anyone.
Children are people, with no income, they would essentially get a child-version of basic income, paid to their parents, to raise them, regardless of all other circumstances.
(Similar to US taxes today, where the government effectively pays you some a small amount of money simply for having a child)
If a couple conceives a child, and one parent abandons the other, the single parent keeps the whole state-provided income for that child, and uses it to raise the child.
It eliminates the whole "penalty" system for distant parents, and if those people eventually get jobs, they pay into the basic income system just as anyone else does (so they aren't dis-incentivized to work).
Government workers in Sweden get 13 months paid maternity leave. That's a pretty good incentive. But they rank 187th in the world by birth rate, according to the CIA World Factbook.
> I can't raise the kid for 18 years on my fond memories of paternity leave.
How does that make it less of an incentive, though? It's better than no paternal leave.
In the end, though, people usually don't get children on a purely economically rational basis. Sweden also has daycare prices that scale with income, free and relatively high quality public and private schools, child benefits and free dental and healthcare for children.
Other than "you can use it to pay debt", not at all.
> Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage?
If you mean "will someone loan me money in return for me pledging an amount equal to my future basic income for some period", maybe, but it would be a really bad idea to let it be redirected.
> Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?
Probably not -- there is already, AIUI, a "first $X" (which may vary under specific local rules depending on context) of income which is protected against garnishments, etc., and BI probably ought to fall within that (at least until the economy advances enough to support a more than pedestrian lifestyle on BI alone, at which point it might only be part of the BI that is within that protection.)
> However, because no one _needs_ a job to live (because they can just live on the basic income)
Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.
I don't know that we necessarily need to have jobs.
We could fund it by taxation of revenue and wages, rather than just wages.
A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. That profit could be taxed at something like 60%.
The owner(s) of the business still see windfall from the cost savings of laying everyone off, and the basic income now rises for everyone and can now cover the lost wages of the newly unemployed, using the companies new profits as a funding source
so..redistribution of income? This isn't anything new. I find it interesting that so many people on a forum about technology and business would suggest punishing businesses for using technology to make their business so efficient.
When the music and movie industry wanted more protection for their IP, many people here made comments about the horse and buggy/automobile and they just needed to "change with the times".
Why should employment be any different? If your job is being taken by a robot..maybe you should think about learning another skill.
>so..redistribution of income? This isn't anything new. I find it interesting that so many people on a forum about technology and business would suggest punishing businesses for using technology to make their business so efficient.
You may find that this is because not all of us value technology solely for what increased productivity it can provide over our current, but that we create and use technology to work /for/ us so that we can spend more time doing what we would rather.
It could balance itself out. If not enough people work, BI will drop and some of the people on BI will decide it's worth getting a job to live more comfortably.
I the think that we should add a single requirement to the basic income. logging on into a national library 5 days a week for a minimum of 1 hour a day. do vr classes. force them to complete and pass standard mathematics and physics. it might take them 10 years to reach calc 2 but at that point we'll have someone who can contribute. you could even teach material from patent applications.
> Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation.
Someone needs income that is taxed. That doesn't require a job, though in the short term (e.g., until we've reached a very advanced level of automation where most market income goes to capitalists who own completely automated firms), yes, it relies on lots of people still working -- its a replacement for poverty support programs which removes the disincentive for work that many of those contain in the eligibility criteria, and the administrative overhead that enforcing eligibility rules creates, not a replacement for work.
Most people, even if they aren't starving in the street, are willing to work more to get more. That certainly tails off at some level of combined work and income (as work has an increasing marginal cost and income a decreasing marginal value), but for the vast majority of the population, that's far above the level BI could conceivably be set at without vast technological progress.
One reason the current welfare system is so broken relates to your point about McDonald's. Oftentimes someone on welfare can lose money by getting a job.
A car is necessary in some parts of the country. Good luck walking 10 miles to work in the subzero cold. A cell is not exactly necessary, but some form of communication is. A cell happens to be the most convenient. Cell phones and the current infrastructure can mostly eliminate the need for an internet line. Restaurants are, of course, not necessary.
To make things simple let's assume a flat tax of 20% pays a 10k per year basic income.
Someone making 0k ends up with .8 * 0k + 10k = 10k.
Someone making 10k ends up with .8 * 10k + 10k = 18k.
Someone making 50k ends up with .8 * 50k + 10k = 50k.
Someone making 100k ends up with .8 * 100k + 10k = 90k.
Someone making 200k ends up with .8 * 200k + 10k = 170k.
Thus the only people that get the full amount are those who would otherwise get zero income. It has little effect on someone making around the median income and it's paid for by the top of the scale.
Note: The government still needs to do other stuff so actual taxes would end up being higher. The assumption is because you have lower administrative costs than SS, unemployment, and other social programs the net effect is a smaller government and possibly lower taxes. (EX: Social Security is 12.4% for someone making 50k where basic income is 0 the disability and retirement payment can be much higher than 10k/year.)
US Personal income is about $13tn, so a 20% flat tax would currently provide about $8500/yr basic income. And that, of course, is on top of our current government spending.
Also I'm not sure what you'd do w/ payroll taxes.
You're just grossly understating what tax rates would have to be to accommodate this. You think there will be economies of scale that SS today doesn't already achieve that could somehow offset this in a meaningful way? I disagree.
I personally believe in "basic income" in a very elastic sense to increase demand in the economy when it's weak. It's something different than what's discussed here. And I'm not against it strongly, it's just I'm not able to see how we would accomplish that without tax rates similar to what you see in Europe and I don't relish that thought.
So then to lift everyone out of poverty, we just need a 40% flat tax on top of the current federal taxes (so that we can continue to fund everything else). Hooray, 70% tax rate!
First off children don't get the full amount only 1/2 which reduces costs by ~13%. $8500 / (1-.13) = 9770 / year which is rather close to 10k/year. A single person living on 10k after taxes is about the same as a single mother living on 15k hard but hardly impossible. If you add 10k per kid it creates a rather strong incentive to have a few kids.
Also, the assumption is you cut a lot of government spending not just social security. So unemployment insurance, HUD, food stamps, etc. While writing a SS check has vary low overhead handling disability is a huge part of the SS administration that goes away. And those programs are not all paid for by personal income so assuming all the other taxes stay the same you free up a fair amount of spending for the basic income.
Even just eliminating social security reduces taxes by 12.5%. And, presumably that $3,900 exemption for each qualifying child goes away along with the home mortgage tax deduction as do a lot of other deductions which can lower taxes for the rich who would otherwise be getting most of the additional tax burden. I would also suggest removing the deduction for charitable giving. (The only difference between deductions and spending is accounting the math is identical.)
PS: Actually finding the correct tax rate takes quite a bit of economic modeling 20% is reasonable ballpark, but you need to figure out what's cut to get a good idea of how that actually impacts people.
The government currently spends almost $10K per child on public schools, so you can also shuffle in and out of that budget to make the BI cost for children "disappear" in your models.
Spending on welfare programs is a tiny share of our budget. Add up everything -- state and federal -- and it's about 600bn from the data I've seen -- and before the recession it was half that.
Your comment about the 12.5% you save from social security should tell you what you need to know: In order to provide a "basic income" for JUST SENIORS we have to have a 12.5% tax. Now, nominally it's less, because social security taxes cap out at like $110k/yr so there are a lot of income dollars in the US above that amount that aren't paying Fica. Regardless, it's still a tax somewhere near 10% to provide about $15k/year to mostly just seniors. Disability and survivior benefits only make up 20% of social security.
I obviously looked up some facts here to test my assumptions -- everything is just on the social security website and usgovernmentspending.com
We give a lot more money than just 600bn to low income people though the tax code. (aka 10% income tax vs 39.6% income tax) Still 600bn / what amounts to ~275 million people = ~2,200$/person or 22% of a 10k basic income. Not to mention stipends for collage students etc.
~23.5% of the population under 18 get 1/2
prisoners get nothing or close to it.
Also people can get close to 40,000$ from social security not just 10k.
PS: Only 65.5% of Social security goes to retired workers. Well over 63 million people get paid from social security but less than 40 million of them get traditional retirement benefits. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/
He only means it effectively replaces minimum wage, in that we no longer have to require a minimum wage in order to ensure that people have enough money to eat (setting aside the question of whether that actually works).
McDonald's would obviously have to pay something in order to get people to work there. It could certainly get away with paying less if there were no minimum wage and people had a basic income.
All basic income does is create a floor. Depending on flavors of basic income, some have suggested lowering or entirely abolishing the minimum wage. This way, labor would be done at the true (or closer to true) market value. If you're not willing to work at Mickey D's for a dollar an hour, you would have a basic income to fall back on.
I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.
> I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.
The short term effects of redistribution downward on the income scale (and thus generally from those with a lower marginal propensity to consume to those with a higher propensity) would seem pretty clearly to be some degree of demand-pull inflation.
I was thinking about this the other day. I'm not trained in economics or anything, but since UBI is universal, and amount of money in people's checkbooks is simultaneously and predictably increased, the inflation wouldn't have any of the consequences of usual inflation (For citizens).
> I am not at all an economist, but I wonder: if everyone had the same amount of fixed income (in addition to whatever else they made from their jobs), wouldn't there would be continual inflation, rendering that money worthless?
Not necessarily. You'd expect some inflation, but if the level of basic income was set at a low enough level (what that is depends on the overall productivity of the economy) it wouldn't be "continual" (well, if you exclude all other effects on price level but the basic income and its effect on price and the effect of that price change on wages, and the effect of those wage changes on price, etc., the effect might be "continual", but it would be asymptotically approaching a finite limit, so not unbounded, which is really where there would be a problem.)
> Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage?
Yes.
> Do they double it?
They pay whatever the work is worth to them.
> Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?
I'm not an economist either, but here's how I'd like to see the McDonalds example play out :
Presumably, McD's pay folks on top of their basic income to entice people to work for them.
Eventually, these wages get high enough (and robots become cheap enough / advanced enough) that it becomes cheaper to automate away those jobs. The gained productivity allows McDonald's prices to drop, and a (properly configured) tax eats a healthy portion of McDonald's new profits. That tax goes directly into the basic income fund, lifting all citizens basic income by some amount.
People are still incentives to do icky jobs now (because they get more than basic income) and as they disappear, those efficiencies become profit, which is taxed and dumped into basic income which then goes up (so we lift everyone to higher standards of living as we destroy jobs people no longer need to do)
Eventually, that process repeats in every business and every industry, until we live in a Star Trek style post-currency economy, where people only work for exercise / interest / fun, and all necessities are covered by machines for some amount near free.
It's not an overnight thing, it's a "spread out over the next century" type change, where basic income started at the US minimum wage, but (over 100 years) eventually gives folks the 100-year-from-now equivalent of 100k/year salary as basic income.
To your first point: not necessarily. Most serious suggestions of a basic income don't involve just printing a huge amount of cash and mailing it out. They're about taxing high earners more, saving a bunch of money on other social programs (and probably police and stuff as well), and then distributing that money to everyone. If you balance that out instead of just increasing the money supply, it might not cause crazy inflation.
To the second - they pay whatever they need to pay to get the workers they need. Everyone is already getting $X a week from the basic income. Fast food workers will make a total of $X+Y a week, and doctors will earn $X+Z, where Z is probably a lot more than Y.
Also, remember basic incomes are typically suggested to be enough to live on and no more - so if you want some luxury items (whatever we decide those are) you'll probably need to get a job somewhere. So there's still incentive to get a job.
The inflation theory assumes that everyone will go out and spend exactly as much more as they are now getting in fixed income. Obviously, that is not the case. Some people will save more. Others, above a certain threshold, will have marginally less money, because we would need to pay for a fixed income with taxes. I did the math a while ago, but can't find it now. My recollection was that at about $70,000 of income per year, an individual would break even between the extra income and extra taxes. People making over $70,000 would actually pay more in taxes than they receive.
Also, just because it replaces minimum wages doesn't mean McDonald's doesn't pay its employees. It means that both sides, employees and employers are working in an elastic, free market, so the wages will be set depending on labor supply and demand.
I'm also not an economist. I think, though, that basic income breaks a lot of assumptions that hold for economics today, but wouldn't hold in such a scenario.
Basic income might lead to inflation. It's impossible for the basic income to become worthless, though, unless all money becomes worthless. Even if everyone gets $X a month, any other amount of money can be expressed as a multiple of X.
McDonalds in this situation could pay zero wage, if anyone wanted to work at this price. I doubt many would, though. Instead, they would pay $Y in addition to the $X that everyone already gets.
Ideally, no one works at McDonalds, because it's automated. If it can't be automated, then McDonalds has to pay people enough to make it worth working at McDonalds, not just enough to survive. This increases the price of things that aren't automated, which increases the reward for those who can figure out how to automate it.
(Objecting to this automation by pointing out how far away we are from AI / useful robots is like objecting to flight by pointing out how many joints are in a bird's wing. An automated McDonalds will look different than what we have today. Perhaps insisting on human hands preparing and serving their food will become an affection of the wealthy.)
If the fixed income came from newly-printed money then yes, it would cause inflation. If it came from taxes then no, it would not cause inflation in and of itself.
In both cases, it would increase the purchasing power of the poor and reduce the purchasing power of the rich, because $5000 means more to somebody making $10000 than it does to somebody making $1000000.
There are many huge cultural and socioeconomic implication of Basic Income.
Inflation is dependent on money supply, you don't need to print new money to apply basic income. You would worry as much of its inflation impact as you would for bailing out banks, if its the same printing. Its not a BI specific concern.
Pricing, on the other hand, would probably change drastically, as there would probably be a solid market of goods for people that want to get by with BI alone, so essentials will probably be priced to fit perfectly with BI.
On the second point: Basic Income is guaranteed, regardless of other jobs. So you would work at McDonalds if you wanted more money. Otherwise it creates the perverse incentive not to work which you described.
BI could be nefarious or the savior socioeconomic rule, and it deserves experimentation.
Personally, I find its socio-economic impacts the most interesting and important in shaping a society. With BI, the jobs nobody wants to do will experience a reverse Supply/Demand.
Cleaning toilets today is cheap because you have enough people that need it to survive: when they dont need it anymore, the supply for those jobs will plummet, and suddenly they will start earning way more money. I find this to be such a strong positive force that this alone justifies doing BI to me.
Also, it will very quickly destroy crime. Petty theft and small crimes have no reason to exist anymore, since you dont need to steal to eat or to try to get out of a desperate situation. Specially if being in Jail means you dont get your BI (because its used for prison budgets) it creates a magnificent economical incentive not to do crime and to get out of jail as fast as you can. Organized crime like drug dealers would likely plummet as well: as most organizations they are heavily pyramidal and require a vast number of poor people to work for peanuts and take all the risk. Take them away, and they have no supply chain, so even large organizations will get wrecked quickly. Suddenly, White-collar crime goes way higher in the scale of important.
In terms of society education, you will prevent and help millions of people to be able to pursue education without having to sacrifice it to make ends meet.
Another strongly positive force is to eliminate government "fat". Firing government employees that are useless or provide little value is a very politically expensive move no-one makes, because nobody wants to throw people on the street. Now, this is not the street anymore, they have a strong safety net so we can stop worrying about politics and focus on making things productive.
I clearly see a lot of potential on BI, and I also appreciate it could have devastating downsides. But thats what experimentation is all about finding out.
Do you assume people would be spending their BI rationally? Spending everything on gambling and drugs would still be possible, having more than the least possible income by shady means would still appeal to some. It seems to me reasons for crime wouldn't be exactly destroyed.
If BI was disbursed bi-weekly, then "Spending everything" wouldn't be a catastrophic failure. It's not like you'd be sitting on a pot of gold. What if BI was disbursed daily, even? You would never amass enough money to "spend everything" on gambling on drugs...
Irrational spending of BI is not relevant. One could have irrational spending of your own salary as well. Thats not the problem BI tries to solve.
Theres always going to be money crimes as long as there is money, but its very different to take a risk on your monthly stipend to get 200 bucks. Its just a huge economical incentive not to do it, particularly in the lowest class, where violent crime is concentrated.
Gangs, Mafia's and drug organizations are based on a worker class that is super cheap to them, those out of poverty and desperation. It would deal a major blow to everyday regular crime.
The desired end-game here is that no one needs to work at McDonalds at all. Basic income goes hand in hand with the massive productivity gains that technology has and will bring. We somehow have to match up nobody needing to work anymore (to produce) with nobody having to (to live).
Money is a sign of poverty so I wouldn't expect basic income to really fix the welfare problem either. It would alleviate some issues for some people but I agree inflation would just eat any benefit the income offered. The same way inflation ate any benefit minimum wage offered.
I don't think anything other than an economic and social Ragnarök is going to fix the poverty problem. Both capitalism and socialism don't seem to have the answers.
During boom times, yes. During those times I think we would reduce it -- but not eliminate it -- or severely means-test it. But when the economy is not performing efficiently -- the way things are now for example -- this will do nothing but increase aggregate demand.
Think about inflation like this: More bidders for the same goods and services. Well, right now there are goods and services on the sidelines.
Means-testing is where a lot of the cost of social welfare systems comes into play, and where nearly all of the moral hazard starts (making it more expensive to work than to not work). It's best to keep means-testing out of it altogether.
I am always wary of supporting a basic income guarantee. Although it sounds much better than the current welfare mess we have, the actual implementation will probably be an addition rather than a replacement.
Yeah, somehow I don't see the IRS and the various other federal institutions than have grown up around revenue collection closing their doors any time soon.
The good thing about guaranteed basic income is that it has the positives of welfare without the negative incentives (i.e. if I make over X amount, my check stops coming). If you implement minimum income without replacing the current provisioning system, then you haven't really solved any problems.
It was successful when trialed in Canada so I'd say its viable. But ya, I don't trust our politicians to be sensible and cut spending to pay for a new program. [e.g. Use this to remove the most inefficient $ for $ welfare related programs so more of it ends up in the hands of the people that need it]
It's important to note that the "Mincome" experiment provided a Guaranteed Minimum income, not a Basic Income. The distinction being that the former started to drop off if the recipients earned more than some threshold (at a rate of $0.50 less per $1 earned, so as not to serve as a disincentive).
This is similar to most basic income or negative income tax proposals. Most finance themselves through progressive income taxes, generally scaled so that those of average income see their taxes increase the same amount as what they receive from BI.
The current mess is not only poorly implemented, it's based on false assumptions. We just need to stop pretending there's something wrong with people not being able to find a decent job, and stop punishing them.
You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return?
EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% of my income to government, to give it to others. If I were unemployed, I'd be "punished" by receiving welfare, food stamps and a bunch of other stuff, without having to contribute in any way to society.
Because you don't live in a vacuum. Our society makes it possible so that you can earn a living. You're just paying back for having that opportunity to those that are less fortunate.
Those that are less fortunate aren't also the ones that make it possible for me to earn a living. Police, teachers, firemen, road workers and some others do all that, work hard at it, and I appreciate their contribution. They're not the ones we're talking about here.
That's an excessive over-simplification of my point. And to answer you: no, he doesn't become "worthless" to me (whatever that may mean), but I will stop paying him for his services.
The fact is that the healthiest situation for any society is for every member to be able to afford to meet their basic needs with a little extra income. This is clearly not possible through a purely free job market. 'Sacrificing' some of your income to maintain this society and permit mobility is in your best interests. Who's to say you won't be the next one fired, or your child?
But they won't. It's safe to say that lazy people are good at being lazy and will find a way to be lazy no matter what system they're in.
Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. It's better to accept the fact that a fixed percentage of people are only going to take while most others give (and take), and stop wasting the enormous overhead trying to figure out which is which.
Without a society there'd be no education system, no legal tender, no laws protecting employees, no laws protecting companies, no infrastructure supporting it - and so on. So society makes it possible for people to have jobs. There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, which tends to indicate that the group has had a lot of input to the success of the individual for a long time.
I can't even imagine how something as complex as the prerequisites for programming would work without a society. State of nature economies. I suppose you could have small family groups at some point on the hunter-gatherer to farming spectrum, but the minute those families come together into groups and start to develop more complex interactions... that looks mightily like a society to me.
But it doesn't follow from that that society makes it possible for everyone to have a job. Just that those who do could not without one.
It's very close to being the same underlying logical form that goes:
'All cats are four-legged mammals. Buts not all four-legged animals are cats.'
All employees are enabled by a society. But not all people in a society are so enabled.
you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you...
in the same vein, your job only exist because there's people with enough buying power to keep the business you're at existing, so again you depend on people, and you could be punished or rewarded depending on how society as a entire organism does...
> you are not, but society is an organism with more than you in it, and if he's thrown into the bin because he's can't make it in it the guy may think it's fair to take it from you...
I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.
EDIT: Paying people so they don't steal from me is called a protection racket. If that's what you're arguing for, let's call it what it is.
People like you scare me. I can't even understand that point of view, and I don't think we can have a productive argument if we don't share a basic understanding of what a society is. Saying that taxes are theft is as absurd to me as saying that private property is imoral.
It's easier to understand people like this if you study how religious fundamentalism works. The key is in understanding that everything in the world, in their point of view, boils down to a basic set of axioms. This simplified reality allows them to extrapolate claims outwards that are otherwise absurd if approached from another direction, because contrary facts have already been discarded as irrelevant; it gives them the comfort of feeling that their beliefs are "holy" or "logical", which reinforces it in an infinite loop.
> Saying that taxes are theft is as absurd to me as saying that private property is imoral.
I'm not arguing that "taxes are theft". I'm arguing that giving money to poor people so they don't attack me is theft. buzaga was saying that if I/we don't "take care of the unfortunate", they'll decide to take our money/stuff by force. Sounds like a veiled threat to "give them money, or else..." That is theft, in my opinion.
I'm perfectly fine with taxes as long as they go to things that benefit everyone equally, including me (like roads, schools, police and courthouses).
EDIT: Also, please point out where I said (or implied) that "taxes are theft". You completely misread what I wrote, therefore I have to agree that we can't have a productive argument.
By that logic (extending it a bit), we could fire all the cops, and just give our money over to criminals who ask for it. There's a point at which I draw the line, and prefer to fight instead.
The discussion, and the topic, talks about a change that isn't so radical but that could improve things in society as a whole. But you're still talking in 'me' vs 'they' terms, and 'the criminals' and 'threats', mocking 'the unfortunate'...
This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it
Society is made of many individuals, you can't disconnect a discussion about society from one about individuals, including "me". If you make high-level society-wide decisions that trample on individuals' rights, that also has society-wide implications (even if it's just a minority of individuals). What you're proposing is a tyranny of the majority, where the opinion of a single individual is discounted "for the greater good".
On the other hand, I believe society is just a big group of individuals, so "what about me?" does matter (in fact, it's maybe the most important question in all of society).
We are proposing a public funded program. That program is funded by taxes. This is what you said:
> why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.
The implications are obvious. Taxes don't have different natures depending on the use we as society give to the money we collect. In fact, the very economic definition of taxes is that you aren't promised anything specific in return[1].
Regarding the tyranny of the majority argument, that would only apply if we were proposing a ridulous amount of taxation. We are not. It's been pointed out that this program could be funded by replacing it with current expenses, and by a minimal raise in taxes. That's not oppression, that'a a choice that we as society are well within our rights to make.
In short: spending taxpayers money can't be theft, and taxes aren't a service you pay if you like how the money is spent.
[1] > From the view of economists, a tax is a non-penal, yet compulsory transfer of resources from the private to the public sector levied on a basis of predetermined criteria and without reference to specific benefit received (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax)
> Depending on the circumstances, killing can be acceptable, eating human flesh can be acceptable, why wouldn't stealing be?
Maybe you find those acceptable, but I find all of them horrible. Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense (in which case someone else is trying to kill you first), while cannibalism is just sick.
"Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense"
How is that not "depending on the circumstances"? Is not "killing is needed to defend myself" a circumstance?
"while cannibalism is just sick."
So, if someone is genuinely in a situation where their options are 1) starve to death, or 2) eat the other guy who just starved to death, you think it's clear that they should choose 1?
The only reason that you can make the money you do is because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. Aristotle, Newton, Watt, Tesla, Von Nuemann, et cetera. Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day. If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society. Your income taxes are only about a third of that. Who's the thief now?
> Left to your own devices (and assuming that the other 7 billion people are in the same boat) you'd be starving as a subsistence farmer making the equivalent of about $1 a day.
That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.
> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.
So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?
Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.
"There are differences in productivity even among farmers."
Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.
"So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%"
Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work. Not to mention that society provides the source of your inspiration, provided your education, an outlet for your talents, et cetera.
Obviously my argument is a little bit of reductio ad absurdum. But much less so than "taxation is theft".
> Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.
I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.
> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.
Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.
> But much less so than "taxation is theft".
Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).
Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.
The correct answer here is that you are not valuing your opportunity costs highly enough. If you are working 8-10 hours a day, you should be making an incredible surplus. People in ancient societies worked less, and managed to survive just fine. With the technology available today, you could be making millions of dollars of surplus value, if given the opportunity. All you would need is the time to experiment with your skill set, until you found a niche where your work generates a very large surplus.
Paradoxically, you would gain much more from a BI than someone who is currently living in poverty, because you would be free to extract the maximum potential from your hard work and talent.
But what's stopping you from just working hard, saving your money, and then taking extended time off of work to do what you want to? Why does that money need to come from other people? Maybe if the government just let you keep the majority of your earnings you could use that money to "work on what (you) like or not work at all when (you) don't want to".
Actually, nothing's stopping me from doing all of that. I'm also not asking for BI (it sounds like a bad idea long term), I'd take it if it was offered though.
If people can improve their economic performance so much with just a small cash grant then, why haven't businesses jumped in on this apparently incredible opportunity? Seems like a great chance for businesses to make some money in tandem with people reaching their potential.
Naturally it would be much better for businesses to do this than the government. Businesses have much higher motivations to use their money wisely (i.e. give the right amount to the right people and create the right incentives to ensure people are motivated to use the funds wisely, go bankrupt or get sued by investors if they spend poorly) than a government (which just gets to shrug or inflate the currency or embark on a fresh round of vilifying productive citizens).
Oh wait, don't we already have that? Bank loans or something, I don't know, lol.
> You should also look at it from the other side: if I have a job that I work at 8-10 hours a day (and might not do if I didn't need the money), how am I "punishing" the other guy by not sharing the fruits of my labor with him for nothing in return?
The question itself is incorrect. Low-paid workers or the unemployed are not parasites on highly-paid workers; the capitalist class is a parasite on all workers, no matter the salary, and through their control over government they continually engineer a level of unemployment that can suppress wages.
(If you don't believe me about the government, look up how inflation targeting works. Central banks are supposed to target both low unemployment and low inflation, but for the past several decades, the deliberate policy choice has been to consistently sacrifice wage growth (ie: exploit workers harder) in order to maintain both low inflation and economic growth at the same time.)
Another missed advantage:
it moves the job market from demand/supply type of market to easy/difficult type of market: the highest paid jobs will be the ones nobody wants to do.
I'm not sure if this is intended as snark at CEOs, criticism of the notion that a shift would occur, criticism of the notion that a shift should occur, or just general extrapolation.
Personally, I expect we would see unpleasant jobs become more expensive than they currently are, and pleasant jobs become less expensive than they currently are. I think it's tremendously unlikely that this effect would be so dramatic that "the CEO would be the lowest paid employee at every company", even accepting the implicit assumption that CEO is the least unpleasant job (which seems false).
bureaucratic overhead with proper tech is close to zero. Basic Icome is too a big leap in social and political context. I am very much in favour of Minimal Activity proposition. It's way more easier to implement.
The idea that you absolutely must work hard in exchange for the necessities of your life, is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness, like a fundamental law of conservation, that it seems a lot of people cannot conceive otherwise.
Cellphones and the Internet were adopted on a person by person basis. It became easy to imagine yourself with them once the neighbour got it.
Basic Income takes much more buy in from more people to get off the ground.
I like the idea of it being attempted on the city level though, I'd never thought of that. It's likely the smallest scale that would work with the least amount of individual buy in required.
I seem to remember that in 1994 most people understood the usefulness of both technologies, especially cell phones. Cost was the real hinderance. Though if we go one more year, by 1995, internet access was starting to become common in the home.
I think the real fallacy beneath the surface is that if we do something like this people will just totally stop working.
A few will, but most will use their newfound flexibility to shift what they work on: explore other career options, create art and culture, etc. Overall there will likely be a lot more entrepreneurship, invention, science, art, literature, and music.
It's tied into the far right's religious-based doctrine of original sin view of humanity: we are miserable evil disgusting monsters who must be beaten and cudgeled into exhibiting any form of virtue. If it weren't for life-or-death struggle we would all sit around, drink beer, play video games, and probably screw goats. It's the same mentality behind strict physical discipline of children... if you spare the rod, the kid will grow up to be lazy or a monster.
Besides, the people who would completely stop working are the lazy people nobody would want to hire in the first place. You're not losing much by taking those folks out of the work force.
That's not why communism didn't work. Communism didn't work because they tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy. It was central planning that failed, not guaranteed minimums.
A guaranteed minimum income without economic micromanagement or other central planning is what I'd like to see tried.
>Communism didn't work because they tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy.
No, sorry, you're completely wrong. Communism didn't work because it destroyed every incentive for industrious, honest labour, supplanting healthy competitive free-market economics with a landscape of scheming and parasitism as people scrambled to exploit one another.
Communism failed (and will fail every single time another stupid generation which hasn't even bothered to pay attention to the past implements its ideas again) because, under Communism, there is no economy.
Communism is a terrible, terrible idea. Just like all coercive redistribution, which, proportional to the degree of redistribution, destroys economic growth. It's no accident that, other than a handful of tight-knit low-population nation cum communities with large oil stakes, the number of socialist policies enacted by a legislature correlates directly with poor economic performance.
The tragedy is that populations suffering from the negative effects of these policies delude themselves into thinking that an expansion of the policies will fix their woes, rather than hard work and smart investment. It's a vicious circle.
Great, I look forward to the day when you read The Gulag Archipelago and a first-year economics textbook and realise that you're talking out your ass. Maybe throw in some Hayek while you're at it. Good luck!
I lived in Russia for several years. Communism didn't work because people didn't have a strong incentive to work. They also lost sight of how to efficiently organize resources.
I can't tell you how many times I walked into a store and the clerk was reading a book and when I tried to ask a question they just ignored me or shrugged me off without bothering to even try to help. Sometimes they will flat out lie about whether they have something in stock to get you out of the store.
Another example, I can go to a market and there are 5 old ladies in a row all selling potatoes. I can't find any carrots or onions and so I have to walk another mile to a different market to get them. Instead, one of them could sell carrots at a premium so I don't have to walk so far, and another onions.
>I can't tell you how many times I walked into a store and the clerk was reading a book and when I tried to ask a question they just ignored me or shrugged me off without bothering to even try to help.
This might be true in the US, where both political parties are right-wing and flaunt "socialist" as a curse-word every day.
I think BI is something that cant and shouldnt happen country-wide one day to the other. Cities should start doing it first. Cities like.. SF? which have a ridicolous surplus of money the city squanders, while still having a lower class without medical care.
So you view a program that gives away money to some people and a program that gives away money to all people, as so completely unrelated as to be utterly incomparable?
Not utterly incomparable, but you seemed dismissive of implementing a BI program in SF on the basis of another social program, seemingly without regard to what is different about it.
If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended. The value and meaning of citizenship will rapidly change and tolerance for outsiders taking a slice of the pie will rapidly plunge. I think there will be a lot of ramifications like this that most people probably aren't considering.
Every attempt at analyzing this for the US economy I have seen concludes that immigration is at best a wash for the people who were already US citizens. It does, however, have the effect of worsening income disparity. Capital benefits while low income wages are driven down. Of course one also has to consider environmental costs.
Really?.. I think BI per se might change the landscape somewhat - and that depends on its scale - but "rapidly change" - no, you don't principally differentiate strangers with passports from strangers without.
You have to live here for a full calendar year before you can apply for the dividend. Even then, the dividend is only $800-$1200 per year, hardly enough to offset the higher cost of living in AK.
Um, one small difference, you have to be a resident of Alaska for at least a year, intend to remain a permanent resident and not be absent more than 180 days without a valid reason. [1]
As a US state, Alaska can't halt immigration to the state (at least not from US citizens.) If Alaska was it's own country, I would bet they would have pretty severe restrictions on immigration.
> If anything like basic income happens expect immigration to be halted and birthright citizenship grants to be ended.
Why? Doesn't make a lot of sense. To the extent that immigration might strain a BI system, there are much smaller changes that would allow managing the impacts, while still maintaining the basic high-level structure of the existing citizen and immigration system.
There is an underlying premise that only the US will have a basic income. If robots/AI do most of the labor there is no (long term) reason why all countries can't offer basic income to their citizens.
The swiss referendum for basic income also referred to "citizen" income as well, knowing full well that 20% of their population has immigrant status. Steal from the poor to feed the middle.
May be not, other countries may move in that direction. Furthermore, they may even move faster. For example, Mexico already passed a universal income law for people over 65.
You could argue the system in the UK provides similar payments and could be called a basic income system if you rebrand it. Basically the system comes out roughly as:
Zero earned income. You get about £60-200 from the state per week so lets call this a £60 basic income. Typical unemployed.
Annual income £12K. No tax and no subsidies. We could rebrand as £60/wk basic income = 3K/yr and and 25% tax on the 12K.
Typical minimum wage earner.
Income £50k. Roughly £35K in your pocket, £15K tax. Rebrand as 18K tax less 3K minimum income.
The system kind of works. One of the main problems is that there is a very steep effective marginal between zero income and minimum wage - a lot of people end up about equally well off in the short term whether they do nothing or flip burgers. This would be better under a straight basic income system.
I think you could improve the basic income set up by something like karma points where you get a bit more money if you are productive even if it's doing something unpaid like charity work or writing poems and less if you are criminal etc.
Isn't it actually radically different in that you are not allowed to choose to stay unemployed, i.e. you have to be at least trying to look for work in order to be eligible for such benefits?
In other countries there are similar systems but before you get "basic income" like benefits, your property will have to be used up / sold.
No. Simply having money means nothing. This is true for all economies. It's entirely up to society accepting the currency you have to produce the goods you desire.
In a basic income society, the amount received should be based off of indexes for items/services deemed necessary to meet some basic quality-of-life thresholds. If the private sector cannot provide items/services to meet those thresholds, then the government should step in to provide them, until the private sector can provide it more efficiently(if possible).
Unemployment runs no lower that 70% among disabled people in the best of times.
Anyone that is not literally perfect (beautiful, slim, brilliant, healthy, emotionally well centered) faces huge obstacles from the powers that be in our society.
It should be tied to some indexes that reflect the cost of living. If it's impossible to actually live a very minimal life on the basic income, there's not much point, as you'll still have to work and be under stress about making ends meet.
So basic income is the minimum living cost? What if minimum cost of living increase every year as it does? What if you live in San Francisco where the standard of living is crazy high? Do the citizens of S.F get a higher basic income than say Milwaukee?
This is an issue with the concept of basic income. Likely the most equitable solution would be for government to step in and provide housing directly or limit rents in some areas.
The federal basic income level would likely be based off of a national averages for cost of living, with state/city governments stepping in to provide greater subsidies if they feel it's needed. People may still need to pay more for convenience, but should have other options available, even if it means moving an hour or two away from the trendy metro areas.
The point of a universal/general basic income is that it's the same for everyone. SF's cost of living is significantly higher, but nobody's stopping you from getting a job there still on top of your GBI.
If on top of having a job and getting GBI you still can't live in San Francisco, then you'd move to a cheaper area of the state/country.
What's interesting is that a lot of people flock to urban areas for the increased opportunity, but with a GBI, this may not be the case as much because there's less of a strain to make ends meet. This could reduce the cost of living in urban areas.
I once stumbled upon a YouTube video consisting of a woman who received ~$1,400/mo entirely supplied by Government Assistance Programs.
I once saw a job posting for a Web Developer/Python position where the client stated: "$1,000/mo is enough in Belarus."
I stopped to think for a bit: "I hardly made $800/mo when I was freelancing, and I was happiest when I was not working."
I think the biggest argument for Basic Income is to normalize what is already an existing systemic exploitation of a broken system. Professional exploiters and accidental/system-justifier exploiters need to be cut off, which might motivate professionals and invalids to assess our system as more just. I'm sure a positive network effect will follow.
Why not just try it? Why not stop arguing these speculative points and just try it?
You actually raise a good point about testing it. If you have heard of the Sea Steading Institute they are proposing that we establish a bunch of "startup" style countries to examine which policies and solutions will work and which won't. The problem with basic income though is that it relies on captive individuals (value producers who pay tax) and given the choice they are most likely going to move to somewhere that doesn't force them to pay as much tax. I can't see how socialism can survive without forcing people against their will.
This assumes that a basic income is funded through income taxation. Instead, fund it through a land value tax (a rent on land ownership paid to society). The LVT is just the cost of investment, like any business owner renting space to run their business on.
Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today.
If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).
I could list out the many benefits and the nay-sayer objections with counter arguments, but after twenty years I've come to realize money distribution is not the problem. The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.
The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together. But quite frankly we as a society are not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime.
> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together
So, rationing? I wonder if that's been tried before.
Money is a repesentation of resources. And resources cannot be allocated efficiently by central authority, because of the calculation problem[1]. But maybe some college dorm discussions will bear some other solution.
How the hell do you allocate resources with maximal efficiency, without either a central authority or trade?
Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but those two are "I tell you what you want" and "You tell me what you want", and I don't see the third option.
I don't think it matters which. We are potentially going to go from 7 billion people to 9 billion people. At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do, so where does that leave us is a few decades while the poorer nations are evolving at such a rapid pace? Ideally we get engineers and scientists to start with x amount of resources and x number of people then learn along the way.
At the 7 billion mark we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone were to consume at the level Americans do
You're assuming that we are already making maximal use of all available resources. We aren't; we're not even close. The reason the "poorer nations" are poor is politics, not lack of resources.
What indication did I give you that leads you to believe I'm making that assumption?
You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a lot of what we do produce gets wasted for political reasons. If we got rid of that waste, we might well be able to support everyone at an American standard of living with just one planet's worth of resources, not 5.
I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more
That's part of what you suggested, but it isn't all of it. See above.
The American standard of living is inherently based in part on the standard of wastefulness. Our attitude towards wastefulness in general is a prerequisite for many of our liberties worldwide. If you remove these properties from the equation you don't really have the American standard of living anymore.
What's your definition of "wastefulness"? For example, am I being "wasteful" by using a computer connected to the Internet to make this post?
If your answer to that question is yes (I don't actually think it is, but bear with me), then you are right that the only way to have an American standard of living is to be "wasteful" in this sense; but that would be true of any standard of living beyond bare subsistence. Good luck convincing people to buy into that.
If your answer to that question is no, then you're wrong that we need to be "wasteful" to have an American standard of living. The computer I'm using to make this post is considerably more efficient than the computer I would have used to do so when I first joined HN a few years ago, let alone the one I was using to make posts on CompuServe discussion groups a couple of decades ago. The new car my wife and I bought recently is considerably more efficient than the 12-year-old car I have (which we are going to replace soon for that very reason). We have a lot of room to make things more efficient without sacrificing any functionality at all--indeed, while continuing to add functionality. The computer I'm using now is not only more efficient (less power consumption, longer battery life, etc.) than older ones, it's more functional as well (faster CPU, more RAM, more hard drive).
Being wasteful, in my mind, is wasting resources, energy, effort etc. for slight conveniences and superficial benefits. Most of the things people do are wasteful, but I think what's important is a matter of degree. And no, not being able to convince people to buy into that is completely irrelevant to the argument.
Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it, which more than cancels out any perceived efficiency gain. Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use. Maybe it's just collecting dust in your attic, where it will stay useless until any of the above two scenarios happen.
More importantly, I'd like to propose that what drives innovation in computer hardware is largely our attitude towards wastefulness. You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced. I'm arguing that the whole process is wasteful, never mind that your machine performs better per Watt. Your old laptop probably had a greater cost to the environment in its manufacturing process and after you got rid of it than whatever energy you spent using it during its lifetime, and even more definitely the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.
Let's get into farming, food production and food packaging if you still aren't convinced.
Being wasteful, in my mind, is wasting resources, energy, effort etc. for slight conveniences and superficial benefits.
And who gets to decide which conveniences are "slight" and which benefits are "superficial"? Sounds like nice work if you can get it.
Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it
Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.
Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use.
If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.
You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced.
This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?
For example, when you say:
the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.
You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.
> And who gets to decide which conveniences are "slight" and which benefits are "superficial"? Sounds like nice work if you can get it.
By that I did not mean to suggest that there's is or should be a universally enforced definition of what is "slight" or "superficial". I meant to point out that no matter how you define those words the definition of wastefulness depends on it. How you choose to implement it is a matter of values.
> Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.
There are various ways to go about recycling computers. Even if your computer was sent straight to a manufacturer to have its raw materials extracted, it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.
> If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.
"Throwing away" was admittedly not very carefully worded, try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use". Never mind that millions of tons of electronics go into landfills every year.
> This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?
Why anyone is throwing their stuff away in favor of new stuff is besides my point. Perhaps they don't realize the consequences, or they ignore them on the basis that they won't personally have to face them.
> You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.
I am not ignoring that there is a benefit to you having a new laptop, and I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do. All I am saying is that the shape of our society largely depends on our general lack of interest in the consequences of what we do with discarded products.
I did not mean to suggest that there's is or should be a universally enforced definition of what is "slight" or "superficial".
Perhaps not, but you did appear to be suggesting that some people should be able to tell other people what is "slight" or "superficial", instead of everyone getting to decide that for themselves. If everyone gets to decide for themselves what is "slight" or "superficial", then we basically have the situation we have now; but you don't seem satisfied with the situation we have now.
it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.
Not necessarily; there would have to be sufficient benefit to the person re-using it. You keep on ignoring that part of the equation.
try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use"
Same comment here: you're assuming that continued use is actually a benefit for whoever is using the item. What if it isn't?
I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do.
Huh? Saying that people are not taking proper account of the consequences of their actions is telling people what they should do--it's saying they should take proper account of the consequences. If you're not willing to own that statement, then you should stop harping about the consequences.
I think I'll skip the debate over "the size of things" and just suggest there's a significant problem with our current rate of utilization and fair distribution. If your argument is simply that we have room for optimizing the worlds resources, then sure I can agree with that, but frankly I doubt that's going to work very well under a model that's really dog eat dog and has a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things.
a hoarding, power hungry society that uses money as the means to manage the distribution and ownership of things.
Actually, I think the problem is that we don't use money enough to manage distribution and ownership; too much distribution and ownership is controlled by factors other than money. But it's true that there is a problem with money as a control mechanism, though it isn't what you appear to think it is: the problem with money as a control mechanism is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons.
"...is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons."
That's the power hungry part I'm talking about. The government is not some machine that is broken, it's a select group of people within our society running around trying to balance appeasing the public horde while trying to amass as much power as possible. The behaviour of the people within government is a reflection of the state and quality of our society as a whole.
How is not relevant. What's relevant is that society has to change to the point where it becomes possible and also a priority. I do believe, unfortunately[1], that the money system has to collapse first.
1. unfortunately in the sense that some hardship will follow suit.
In other words, you're punting. You say "society has to change" but you refuse to give any information about how it has to change. Other than saying you think the money system has to collapse first, which doesn't inspire confidence; to say that "some hardship will follow suit" is a massive understatement.
I don't see the how part as something worth getting into. It's also dependant on the technological advancements and makeup of society at the time change starts to happen.
It took centuries for the monetary systems to develop with many bumps a long the way. That will also need to happen in a resource managed economy.
I don't see the how part as something worth getting into.
In other words, you advocate a "resource managed economy" but you conveniently exempt yourself from having to explain how you are going to avoid having it suck the way the Soviet Union sucked. Pardon me for not getting all excited about society spending centuries in that quagmire. For all the problems our current money economies have, they are still way better than the Soviet Union.
And if that trend continues, at some point in the not too distant future, it will become profitable to mine metals from, say, automobile junkyards, instead of from the ground. Or we'll find substitutes, as we already have for many metals (an automobile junkyard a decade from now, containing mostly cars built around this time, won't have nearly as much metal in it because the car bodies will be mostly composite).
No, but if the price goes up enough, you can mine it, as I said, from places like auto junkyards where people have thrown it away.
If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.
No, if our usage of aluminum increases, assuming the supply is constant, its price will go up, so people will have incentives to find substitutes. (I already gave one example: using composites instead of metal for car bodies; that mostly substitutes for steel, not aluminum, but it does substitute for some aluminum usage, and the general point is the same.) So the increasing price of aluminum will regulate its usage so that we never run out; we just keep shifting certain uses to substitutes so that aluminum is only needed for uses that are valuable enough to make it worth paying the market price.
This is not just theoretical, by the way; it has happened many, many times. Aluminum itself is an example: most of its uses are uses in which it displaced other metals, like iron and steel (a good example is car engines: most of them are made of aluminum now because it's cheaper than cast iron).
I agree with this sentiment, and money is without a doubt a huge obstacle in properly reassigning and redistributing resources. It allows hoarding more than any other asset, being so abstract and thats a fundamental flaw in its mechanics.
> The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.
A major source of trouble now is that money is tightly coupled with politics. It boggles the mind how it's not universally understood that politics should be entirely de-coupled from private money. All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.
Unless this is done, very few things of true substance will be fixed.
> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together.
I don't think that's doable unless we've made work entirely optional. When AI and robots could do any job we don't want to do, then you could instate some form of basic income, or even your more radical idea.
But until then, it's going to be very, very hard to change things in a fundamental way.
100% on a public fund? So I should be paying for the elections of Republicans and Democrats even though they are private parties that may for no reason exclude me?
It's done this way in many other countries. For example, in Canada, each party receives $2 per vote received in the last election to campaign in the next election. Corporate donations are banned, although small donations by individuals are still allowed.
You're paying now through the distortion of the electoral process and the indirect increase in your cost of goods and services (the hundreds of billions spent on elections comes from somewhere). Don't you think it's worth it for your taxes to go up $2 to eliminate those costs?
>All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.
That's a horrible idea. The dominate parties would become even more dominate with the backing of the government. I do not approve of my tax money being spent on ridiculous political commercials either.
It's not enough to 'destroy' money, you'd have to prevent it from reappearing. Since it's easy for communities to create 'money', destroying it won't bring any freedom or radical change; just disruption.
It's just as with anarchy - you can destroy government, but you can't prevent "government"(s) from springing up to replace them, and usually worse than the ones before.
This "natural instinct to truck and barter" only showed up about 200 to 300 years ago. Before then there was feudalism, chieftains, etc. Humans have had other technologies for distributing social assets.
I think I'm missing what you're saying, can you expound on this? There are records of mercantile law going back to Hammurabi; there's been paper fiat currency in China since the 7th century or so. Coinage and trade has plenty of historical record in Phoenician and Roman era.
It is a powerful assertion to say you cant do something ever. There are many "natural creations of human interaction" to be discovered, and many that died or we definitely wish they died with a really strong consensus.
And prisons having currency could be a model example of how money is an arbitrary and unfair element of trade and distribution.
>> If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).
Not even close. Do the math and also keep in mind that just recently our government was operating at a trillion dollar deficit (almost 30% of their entire budget) and even if you could operate at extreme deficits forever, that still wouldn't be enough.
I support the basic income, but I have also thought about alternatives that do not require government support. Consider e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee plays the same role as a job in the current economy by circulating currency from producers to consumers. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments. The good news is that if in the future wealth inequality causes economic output to shrink, businesses might be forced to accept these types of currencies in order to grow.
And where will the source for the Guaranteed Income come from? It will surely be taxes - income, sales, other. All taxes in some way or the other depend on the state of the economy. What if the economy goes into a recession or has severe fluctuations from year to year? Will "Guaranteed Income" be continued if there isn't sufficient wealth and production to pay for it?
Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.
Any guaranteed entitlement scheme that does not account for the source of the funding will run into the same problems, sooner or later. (Just see the fate of a number of guaranteed pension funds in some parts of the country).
Yet, somehow, welfare, food stamps, medicaid, social security, etc etc etc still keep writing checks when the economy is down. Ok, so wipe all those out (including the significant overhead of running each one by its own, separate organization), and send the checks to everyone who's a citizen.
> Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.
This is already happening. See above. It doesn't run out if you have a functioning economy. I'd also argue that GBI would make the economy function a lot better by opening up business opportunities to those who don't have access currently.
Most could come from the money diverted from existing anti-poverty programs. The rest could be made up by the increased taxes collected on the jump in spending by those receiving the BI. (Those at or below the poverty line spend more then 100% of every dollar they receive.)
I've read this thread; and I think my biggest hope here is the realization in the bureaucrats that are afraid of losing their job ... that they'll be getting money anyway because the basic income will provide their money now.
I am glad that someone is speaking up on their behalf, but I don't get your point. Have you spoken to each of these 47 million individuals? Are you one of them? Are you just letting your butt do the talking? We'll never know.
Aside from the fact that the Daily Mail is a tabloid which makes its money primarily from inflaming right-wing sensibilities while misreporting or fabricating stories, this seems like a particularly ludicrous assertion considering that it would imply a far higher rate of welfare fraud than actually happens.
Could you tell us how much money it's possible to claim from the system, and how much a realistic minimal standard of living might actually be? If you do your research honestly, you might find it illuminating.
I don't consider myself very liberal but basic income makes sense to me just from a simplicity perspective. The amount of complexity right now in the welfare state almost certainly introduces all kinds of bizarre unintended effects. With basic income, you push all that onto the (hopefully fairly efficient) market. It would also let me sleep well at night knowing that nobody could game the system, since everyone, from the rich down to the poor, get their basic income.
I guess the biggest question with it is what is the differential in outcomes for people. What % of people who work now out of fear of living on the street would stop working if they could be sure they would have the bare minimum to survive. I can't imagine many. Everyone always wants more for themselves and their children. If people choose to not work, basic income puts a cap on how much of a "drain" they are on society.
There are a lot of nice properties to this concept and it would be interesting to hear well-founded opposition arguments. Unfortunately I have to assume that almost all of the arguments are going to be along the lines of "doing this will encourage people to be lazy" without any real evidence that this is the case.
Providing a basic income for all people, regardless of their merit to the society as a whole, is problematic. It's not enough to just hand over a couple hundred dollars to someone and say "have fun". We need to ensure everyone is getting the proper basic services, first.
I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribution infrastructure. Money should be something you spend purely on things you want, not things you need.
Given that we built a distribution infrastructure of some kind to automatically and evenly distribute the total food resources of the country, we would see a dramatic change in how money is looked upon and how we use it. No longer will we require money, instead, money is something you earn and use for things you wish to do. We can focus all of our time and energy on furthering our technology, our minds, and the human race in general.
I kindly disagree. I would prefer a system where a basic income is distributed (simply for the efficiency) and those that receive it are educated on how to spend it to meet their basic needs. This could be integrated into school curriculum, online courses, etc.
That makes sense, though I keep thinking about people who are (for various reasons) fundamentally non-rational actors. Those with mental illnesses or drug abuse issues, etc.
I think you'd find that drug abusers are much less likely to commit crimes once they have a steady flow of money. "Well now we're paying people to do drugs!" But we're doing that in the first place, through welfare and food stamps, etc. And if we don't pay enough, they steal. So in one instance we ignore the problem and it ends up costing us, in another instance we accept that there are people who are going to withhold contributing to society and we give them their check anyway because they'd just end up taking it.
As far as mental illness goes, that is an interesting problem I don't think GBI would solve. Sure you can give a schizophrenic person a check, but are they going to cash it? Or would you still have some sort of public facility for mentally disabled people? I would hope so.
Those are fair concerns. Mental illness is a serious problem as an estimated 1 in 4 adults suffers from some form of mental illness in a given year. Perhaps, those problems could be solved with conservatorships, better healthcare, and private services built around providing basic needs. The latter is done for free by volunteers in many cities already; Meals on Wheels, for example.
It is absolutely reasonable, but its way easier to provide BI than to provide that infrastructure. Its cheaper, and allows people to have more freedom to pick between options.
What you describe seems like the status quo system: the state distributes food and shelter to people directly (through food stamps and council housing). The idea of basic income is that it is much more efficient if the state redistributes _money_, and then everyone can buy food and shelter using money.
Given that we have no distribution system in place, it is true that if the state redistributes money, that is a more efficient way to go. However, you slightly missed my point. I'm not talking about a system that gives you vouchers. I'm talking about a system that gives you FOOD. This isn't food stamps, this is a system that lives outside of the economy. You don't pay for food, you don't have a "quota". Everything is centralized. Basically, this removes the need for brick and mortar grocery stores, and ends our dependence on large companies like Wal-Mart, et. al., to sell us our food.
There's some cases where basic services provided centrally at no cost make sense (though in many cases there is room for fairly endless debate over whether a basic services model or a basic income model where the services are purchased makes more sense.)
I think that you overstate the scope of things for which a basic services model is better; really, I think all of the things on your list are things where BI works better than basic services.
I agree there are immense benefits but it fails to recognize that markets rule the world. Once there would be a Basic Income, that is when market prices would go up to cancel out the benefit. You underestimate the rulers of the world (wealthy) to hold onto their advantage.
I see it as many times better than welfare or unemployment since it is distributed equally to everyone. If there is a limit it will eventually be too low, so even rich people would get it, they would have to or it would be destroyed.
Social security is an insurance policy really that doesn't hit wealthy wallets much beyond what everyone pays, but people still want to destroy it and this is against workers directly paying in their whole lives for a subpar investment, yes small businesses pay the full 15%ish and social security returns 2% annually and also props up our dollar big time with investment in t-bills. So even benefits like that are too social for many.
But a Basic Income distributed to everyone would lose the current perception of welfare/unemployment being bad when really these are helpful to keep the low end propped up and in the end I believe it saves money. You'd have to keep moving it up like minimum wage as the effects are normalized, it really is a travesty that minimum wage hasn't gone up as well.
People in America really don't like helping one another so this and other programs with even a hint of social aspects will not catch on. But if someone gets a benefit that the complainer also gets, they would probably be ok with it. However this does not redistribute and would eventually be cancelled out in pricing.
Why would prices go up? It's a money redistribution scheme, not a money creation scheme. The poor have more money, the rich have slightly less, the middle class have about the same, and the bureaucrats and parasitical corporations that live off administering the welfare system have a lot less.
Goods generally purchased by the poor might go up slightly, but BI should shift the poor into the low end of lower middle class. In other words, putting them in a situation comparable to that of the majority of the American population, so the effect on the demand curve should not be large.
Because the propensity to consume is not equal across the economic spectrum; downward redistribution increases expected consumption and, therefore, overall price levels.
The idea that this would eat up the beneficial effects of BI is hard to justify, but the idea that some increase in overall price level is likely is pretty easy to justify.
Because the value of a dollar will shrink for one with more money in the system, unless it is a direct take from wealthy which just won't happen since they are closer to legislation. It would have to be equal to work and that would only last for a while, hence my comment that it would have to re-adjust frequently.
Just like salaries have gone up over time yet the value of a dollar has shrunk, there would only be a momentary boom from the extra money and then the market, as markets purpose is, will find the value and adjust. It would keep things in more of a wave though like when minimum wage goes up, there is a temporary boom to low end markets but it always makes it back to the current distribution (I think minimum wage is a good thing). The money given would always find the way back up through pricing with a basic income though. Apartments suddenly would be x% higher and price increases because there is more money out there and if more actual printed then pricing has to come up. It is a forever balance and the only way to break it I can see is to ramp up the ladder individually.
Markets run everything and they are good, we would still all be farming and dumb if there weren't markets to trade goods for services. Markets and exchanges created conditions for the need for mathematics and allowed people have more free time as they could make products and sell them. This led to more time to think and create/innovate and the reason we have mathematics and technology today. But markets do find fair product to market/user value. Markets are as key to innovation and the evolution of human intelligence as anything. But they will always normalize after infusion, just recently we infused it from the top to banks, which may have kept us from the brink of destruction but only to get it back to 'balanced'. Why didn't they instead just give everyone 6k? Monetary distribution, unless we go away from markets/currency as value, will be pretty close to what we have now always (doesn't mean individuals can't climb it).
It could be proven that we all think like the wealthy on this, once a human gets ahead, they don't want to lose that ground or progress. Case in point the US, if you live in the US like I do, we might have a higher quality of life and currency status than many parts of the world. Would you give that up to allow all countries in the world to be equal in monetary value? If you aren't in the US how about where you live? The people above the fold want to keep it that way, the people below will want it another way, the people above the fold create the game rules, repeat until entropy.
I support the idea, but there are other things that have to go with it in order to really work and not end up like the broken economy that Argentina had to put up with when doing something similar.
It would need serious tax reform, changes to how business are treated locally and internationally.
One suggestion for tax reform is to apply taxes strictly on only sales tax, not income tax. Certain property taxes may still be effectful, but it's really a huge mess that will really function if not taken all together.
I suppose an analogy is when it comes to extreme programming, you can't just take what you like and get all the benefits--not that basic income specifies these other things, but I believe there is a bigger package that has to be considered.
I am not stating that it is _the_ solution, but here are some thoughts as to why it would help.
We spend billions just paying accountants to fool around wit millions of rules that most people do not understand. Sales tax is very simple. Rich people get out of paying taxes by doing inefficient things like tax shelters.
Now, the sales tax would need to be refunded for those in the basic income bracket, especially on food, housing, etc..
Remember that HN article about "We'll not incorporate in the US" by some Danish group? What needs to happen is to encourage businesses to run locally, and part of that is simplifying the entire structure to represent what the economy is closest to--consumption.
Here's the thing: I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.
Further, I think we need to bad times to help us recognize the good times and a basic income would do much to soften those bad times...
I worry that Basic Income is in the long term practically unavoidable, but at the same time will create new levels of depravity in mankind.
> I believe that millions of years of evolution have baked into every living thing a deep need to work, and we'll feel bad if we don't (because for millions of years lazyness meant death). We need to struggle.
I think there is a difference between "work" that fulfills our desire to dedicate time and effort toward challenging endeavors and "work" that creates sufficient net value to keep oneself alive (or in the case of a redistributive society, to keep society as a whole alive).
And yes, I think this even applies to people who do jobs that align very closely with their passions, like many computer programmers. My argument isn't that passionate programmers wouldn't continue programming if they had no need for a wage, but rather that they would do precisely the parts of programming they enjoy.
It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.
Also, given hedonic adaptation, humans are rarely content with any given level of luxury. While there are certainly negatives to that, it does mean that most (or at least many) people would continue to attempt to earn as much as possible even with a basic income.
Finally, the money does have to come from somewhere. I expect that the system would be designed so that it begins net neutral for the middle class. And I can't see most middle class people suddenly deciding to give up half their income just because there's suddenly a softer landing. For the rich, the effect would obviously be even less pronounced.
>It's not like the economic incentive to work will be completely gone though. Presumably BI would be, at least to start, roughly the bare minimum required to survive. Any luxuries would still require earned income.
Curiously, I think Basic Income would drive creativity in some people to acquire luxuries without working for someone else (building their own stuff, or unfortunately, stealing). I think many would wear that as a badge of pride. We already worship business leaders and entrepreneurs. Imagine the praise of successful entrepreneurship of one's life and possessions and not just his business.
1. I think you underestimate the daily hell of the lives of workers who hate their jobs. There are millions of people out there who are homeless because they'd rather sleep outside than perform the jobs available to them.
2. People who are forced to work two (or more) jobs to stay afloat are struggling way more than could conceivably be incentivized by evolution. I can't imagine how miserable and downtrodden people must be who have no weekend to look forward to in which to pursue their interests.
3. I don't believe that doing something meaningless like sweeping floors or checking groceries fills any kind of psychological need. I've personally gone a few months before without doing any kind of work, and it was glorious.
4. What about all of those psychological needs (family, relationships, hobbies) which people compromise for the sake of work?
Yeah, and early vertebrate species in the Cambrian just swam around singing happy songs and smooching anemones all day while they enjoyed a universe free of those horrible constraints of energy and matter that nasty humans invented to oppress each other.
Get a fucking grip. Hunter gatherers lived in shitty conditions with unbelievably poor material wealth, and had no protections against disease, injury, starvation, attack by animals, attack by other humans, old age, death in childbirth, etc etc. Average lifespan was 20.
Oh, and you're also wrong about much of the rest of it as well. There is a reason that anthropologists consider farming "the worst mistake in human history":
From an evolutionary standpoint, I disagree with your first statement. Work involves using energy. When an animal does not need food, it is often better served by not working so as to conserve its energy.
Some citizens, with their guaranteed basic income, will spend it wisely to cover their needs...as envisioned by proponents of this approach.
Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.
What then? Simply increase the amount of basic income awarded, and hope that by throwing more money at the symptoms of poverty, the cause will be addressed?
And where does this money come from? Not immediately, of course, but 5-10 years down the road once society has been changed by this policy's implementation? Why would the financial engines of today, which could theoretically fund such an endeavor, continue to run as efficiently in the future?
They will get jobs to supplement their income, if they living expenses are higher than the BI. And if they always spend more, they definitely have the same problem today.
When talking about public policy, it's important to get away from words like "some" and talk about actual statistics, because this will impact real people, not just a philosophical position.
If some is 10% of the population, and poverty is resolved for 90% of the population, the system would be much much better than the current system for eliminating poverty.
In Canada, we have actual statistics for both Old Age Security and the Mincome experiment.
"Dr. Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals."
I think in that case you would be justified in telling the irresponsible person tough luck and maybe they would spend it more wisely the next time around. If they die of starvation that's their problem. I have a hard time believing that would be a wide spread problem though.
Exactly, and it isn't like this is the ONLY form of income. This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line. If you are living below the poverty line and go out and buy yourself a car you can't afford, guess what, you'll have to sell the car, and you'll have learned your lesson that next year, you can't go waste your BI.
> This is meant to subsidize those who are living below the poverty line
Now that's just silly. If it were meant to subsidize people living below the poverty line it would target people living below the poverty line, not households making over 50k a year who would likely sock away the money or spend it on a bathroom renovation.
Actually the basic income creates new business models. If you can't take care of yourself you can sign up with a company that takes your basic income and provides 3 hots, a cot and an allowance. Can't image it will be the nicest accomidations but it will be there if you need it...
This might not work out the way you think. With more money in everyone's pocket, for example, people in subsistence circumstances working minimum-wage second jobs while their children sit alone at home would no longer be compelled as strongly to take or keep such jobs. Some would stick with them, but surely there would be a cohort for whom it's no longer necessary, or who could now afford to be pickier about the nature of that second job. And the movement of this margin, however slightly, in favor of the employee, would place upward pressure on the wages at those types of jobs.
There are businesses whose profitability and business model assume a steady supply of takers of these sorts of jobs at the lowest possible wage. How would basic income affect that supply?
We would then have come full circle. Robots/AI remove jobs, which causes basic income legislation to take root, which cause people to stop working the jobs the Robots/AI took away in the first place!
You could limit the damage a person could do to themselves by paying more frequently. In my experience, even very irresponsible people are able to manage weekly paychecks so that they don't starve before the next check arrives.
It would be very tough to prevent people from borrowing against their future BI money, though. An irresponsible person could dig themselves quite a hole that way, and lenders would be eager to make that loan.
If someone is unable to meet their needs when provided with the resources to do so, they probably have bigger problems (mental illness, substance abuse) that should be themselves addressed. Making sure everyone has access to some resources they can build upon, and making sure everyone is sufficiently well off, are not the same problem. Throwing money at people substantially addresses the former. Some of the latter is likely to remain, and that portion is not likely to be addressed by throwing more money.
I want to live in a society of people who are working together to make human existence meaningful. What I don't want is the pseudo-free market designed to further despotism and self-interested behavior which we have today.
That said, I'm not for giving someone food, shelter, water, and health care for falling out of a uterus. You have to contribute in some measurable way. Also I believe that we should provide, specifically these things...NOT currency/income.
I've seen too many examples of people having children for well-fare checks.
Make economic inheritance tax 100% with allowances for personal, sentimental items etc. Distribute the resources amongst public works projects and personal resource funds for each citizen.
760 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 453 ms ] threadAlso: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage? Do they double it? Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?
It would start to make financial sense for McDonalds to invest in automating several tasks which are currently cheaper for McDonalds to hire someone for. Imagine if you order and pay through a machine (I saw one of these at Jack in the Box already).
The person behind the counter could instead be working on their dreams of being a musician, artist, studying for college, etc.
I think you missed the "worth it" part, which substitutes for the "fulfilling" part. Unattractive but low-skill jobs would see higher wages (and, thus, greater incentives to find labor-saving alternatives) until the utility people doing those jobs provided to others was reflected in the reward people doing those jobs received.
The jobs' salaries match what they are actually worth, and can't be offered as minimum-wage jobs that people take because they don't have any money and can't get a job elsewhere.
Which means burgers will cost much more than they currently do.
The same will be true for all domestic products/services where a significant part of the work force currently has low wages.
Which means that you and I will pay more for goods/services than previously. The effect will be similar to a significant sales tax, might as well try funding BI that way (at least imported goods will carry some of the tax burden) and look at published studies on the effects of sales taxes...
Don't worry, the hedonistic urge is stronger than laziness in most people. Especially since lazy usually implies watching TV which continuously bombards you with advertisements to buy things...
Presumably, Child Support would no longer exist for anyone.
Children are people, with no income, they would essentially get a child-version of basic income, paid to their parents, to raise them, regardless of all other circumstances.
(Similar to US taxes today, where the government effectively pays you some a small amount of money simply for having a child)
If a couple conceives a child, and one parent abandons the other, the single parent keeps the whole state-provided income for that child, and uses it to raise the child.
It eliminates the whole "penalty" system for distant parents, and if those people eventually get jobs, they pay into the basic income system just as anyone else does (so they aren't dis-incentivized to work).
A recurring cash payment meeting or exceeding the costs of raising the kid on the other hand...
How does that make it less of an incentive, though? It's better than no paternal leave.
In the end, though, people usually don't get children on a purely economically rational basis. Sweden also has daycare prices that scale with income, free and relatively high quality public and private schools, child benefits and free dental and healthcare for children.
Other than "you can use it to pay debt", not at all.
> Can I get a lump sum payment in return for my future wage?
If you mean "will someone loan me money in return for me pledging an amount equal to my future basic income for some period", maybe, but it would be a really bad idea to let it be redirected.
> Can it be taken away to pay creditors, child support, back taxes, etc. ?
Probably not -- there is already, AIUI, a "first $X" (which may vary under specific local rules depending on context) of income which is protected against garnishments, etc., and BI probably ought to fall within that (at least until the economy advances enough to support a more than pedestrian lifestyle on BI alone, at which point it might only be part of the BI that is within that protection.)
Well, someone needs a job for the system to work, since it's presumably funded by taxation. At least one person (more realistically, a large portion of the population) still needs to be creating wealth.
I don't know that we necessarily need to have jobs.
We could fund it by taxation of revenue and wages, rather than just wages.
A company who fires all it's employees, and uses only robots, would see a huge surge in profit from reduced overhead. That profit could be taxed at something like 60%.
The owner(s) of the business still see windfall from the cost savings of laying everyone off, and the basic income now rises for everyone and can now cover the lost wages of the newly unemployed, using the companies new profits as a funding source
Where is their revenue coming from?
When the music and movie industry wanted more protection for their IP, many people here made comments about the horse and buggy/automobile and they just needed to "change with the times".
Why should employment be any different? If your job is being taken by a robot..maybe you should think about learning another skill.
You may find that this is because not all of us value technology solely for what increased productivity it can provide over our current, but that we create and use technology to work /for/ us so that we can spend more time doing what we would rather.
Everybody can contribute or not, in their terms, I guess that's the magic.
Someone needs income that is taxed. That doesn't require a job, though in the short term (e.g., until we've reached a very advanced level of automation where most market income goes to capitalists who own completely automated firms), yes, it relies on lots of people still working -- its a replacement for poverty support programs which removes the disincentive for work that many of those contain in the eligibility criteria, and the administrative overhead that enforcing eligibility rules creates, not a replacement for work.
Most people, even if they aren't starving in the street, are willing to work more to get more. That certainly tails off at some level of combined work and income (as work has an increasing marginal cost and income a decreasing marginal value), but for the vast majority of the population, that's far above the level BI could conceivably be set at without vast technological progress.
e.g. Immigrants. I'm not sure if we should start calling them deltas or epsilons...
There are a lot of things people could do without: car, cell phone, internet, restaurants...
Note: The government still needs to do other stuff so actual taxes would end up being higher. The assumption is because you have lower administrative costs than SS, unemployment, and other social programs the net effect is a smaller government and possibly lower taxes. (EX: Social Security is 12.4% for someone making 50k where basic income is 0 the disability and retirement payment can be much higher than 10k/year.)
Also I'm not sure what you'd do w/ payroll taxes.
You're just grossly understating what tax rates would have to be to accommodate this. You think there will be economies of scale that SS today doesn't already achieve that could somehow offset this in a meaningful way? I disagree.
I personally believe in "basic income" in a very elastic sense to increase demand in the economy when it's weak. It's something different than what's discussed here. And I'm not against it strongly, it's just I'm not able to see how we would accomplish that without tax rates similar to what you see in Europe and I don't relish that thought.
Also, the assumption is you cut a lot of government spending not just social security. So unemployment insurance, HUD, food stamps, etc. While writing a SS check has vary low overhead handling disability is a huge part of the SS administration that goes away. And those programs are not all paid for by personal income so assuming all the other taxes stay the same you free up a fair amount of spending for the basic income.
Even just eliminating social security reduces taxes by 12.5%. And, presumably that $3,900 exemption for each qualifying child goes away along with the home mortgage tax deduction as do a lot of other deductions which can lower taxes for the rich who would otherwise be getting most of the additional tax burden. I would also suggest removing the deduction for charitable giving. (The only difference between deductions and spending is accounting the math is identical.)
PS: Actually finding the correct tax rate takes quite a bit of economic modeling 20% is reasonable ballpark, but you need to figure out what's cut to get a good idea of how that actually impacts people.
Your comment about the 12.5% you save from social security should tell you what you need to know: In order to provide a "basic income" for JUST SENIORS we have to have a 12.5% tax. Now, nominally it's less, because social security taxes cap out at like $110k/yr so there are a lot of income dollars in the US above that amount that aren't paying Fica. Regardless, it's still a tax somewhere near 10% to provide about $15k/year to mostly just seniors. Disability and survivior benefits only make up 20% of social security.
I obviously looked up some facts here to test my assumptions -- everything is just on the social security website and usgovernmentspending.com
PS: Only 65.5% of Social security goes to retired workers. Well over 63 million people get paid from social security but less than 40 million of them get traditional retirement benefits. http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/
McDonald's would obviously have to pay something in order to get people to work there. It could certainly get away with paying less if there were no minimum wage and people had a basic income.
I don't think that inflation would be a huge problem, since this is wealth redistribution, likely through taxes, rather than printing money and giving it to people. However, I'm no economist either, so I may be far off base in regards to inflation.
The short term effects of redistribution downward on the income scale (and thus generally from those with a lower marginal propensity to consume to those with a higher propensity) would seem pretty clearly to be some degree of demand-pull inflation.
Not necessarily. You'd expect some inflation, but if the level of basic income was set at a low enough level (what that is depends on the overall productivity of the economy) it wouldn't be "continual" (well, if you exclude all other effects on price level but the basic income and its effect on price and the effect of that price change on wages, and the effect of those wage changes on price, etc., the effect might be "continual", but it would be asymptotically approaching a finite limit, so not unbounded, which is really where there would be a problem.)
> Also: How does Macdonalds work in this situation, if the fixed income "replaces" minimum wage. Does Macdonalds pay on top of this wage?
Yes.
> Do they double it?
They pay whatever the work is worth to them.
> Do they pay zero? If they pay zero, what incentives workers to work at Macdonalds?
Nothing, so they don't pay zero.
I'm not an economist either, but here's how I'd like to see the McDonalds example play out :
Presumably, McD's pay folks on top of their basic income to entice people to work for them.
Eventually, these wages get high enough (and robots become cheap enough / advanced enough) that it becomes cheaper to automate away those jobs. The gained productivity allows McDonald's prices to drop, and a (properly configured) tax eats a healthy portion of McDonald's new profits. That tax goes directly into the basic income fund, lifting all citizens basic income by some amount.
People are still incentives to do icky jobs now (because they get more than basic income) and as they disappear, those efficiencies become profit, which is taxed and dumped into basic income which then goes up (so we lift everyone to higher standards of living as we destroy jobs people no longer need to do)
Eventually, that process repeats in every business and every industry, until we live in a Star Trek style post-currency economy, where people only work for exercise / interest / fun, and all necessities are covered by machines for some amount near free.
It's not an overnight thing, it's a "spread out over the next century" type change, where basic income started at the US minimum wage, but (over 100 years) eventually gives folks the 100-year-from-now equivalent of 100k/year salary as basic income.
Time will only tell.
To the second - they pay whatever they need to pay to get the workers they need. Everyone is already getting $X a week from the basic income. Fast food workers will make a total of $X+Y a week, and doctors will earn $X+Z, where Z is probably a lot more than Y.
Also, remember basic incomes are typically suggested to be enough to live on and no more - so if you want some luxury items (whatever we decide those are) you'll probably need to get a job somewhere. So there's still incentive to get a job.
Also, just because it replaces minimum wages doesn't mean McDonald's doesn't pay its employees. It means that both sides, employees and employers are working in an elastic, free market, so the wages will be set depending on labor supply and demand.
Basic income might lead to inflation. It's impossible for the basic income to become worthless, though, unless all money becomes worthless. Even if everyone gets $X a month, any other amount of money can be expressed as a multiple of X.
McDonalds in this situation could pay zero wage, if anyone wanted to work at this price. I doubt many would, though. Instead, they would pay $Y in addition to the $X that everyone already gets.
Ideally, no one works at McDonalds, because it's automated. If it can't be automated, then McDonalds has to pay people enough to make it worth working at McDonalds, not just enough to survive. This increases the price of things that aren't automated, which increases the reward for those who can figure out how to automate it.
(Objecting to this automation by pointing out how far away we are from AI / useful robots is like objecting to flight by pointing out how many joints are in a bird's wing. An automated McDonalds will look different than what we have today. Perhaps insisting on human hands preparing and serving their food will become an affection of the wealthy.)
In both cases, it would increase the purchasing power of the poor and reduce the purchasing power of the rich, because $5000 means more to somebody making $10000 than it does to somebody making $1000000.
Inflation is dependent on money supply, you don't need to print new money to apply basic income. You would worry as much of its inflation impact as you would for bailing out banks, if its the same printing. Its not a BI specific concern. Pricing, on the other hand, would probably change drastically, as there would probably be a solid market of goods for people that want to get by with BI alone, so essentials will probably be priced to fit perfectly with BI.
On the second point: Basic Income is guaranteed, regardless of other jobs. So you would work at McDonalds if you wanted more money. Otherwise it creates the perverse incentive not to work which you described.
BI could be nefarious or the savior socioeconomic rule, and it deserves experimentation.
Personally, I find its socio-economic impacts the most interesting and important in shaping a society. With BI, the jobs nobody wants to do will experience a reverse Supply/Demand.
Cleaning toilets today is cheap because you have enough people that need it to survive: when they dont need it anymore, the supply for those jobs will plummet, and suddenly they will start earning way more money. I find this to be such a strong positive force that this alone justifies doing BI to me.
Also, it will very quickly destroy crime. Petty theft and small crimes have no reason to exist anymore, since you dont need to steal to eat or to try to get out of a desperate situation. Specially if being in Jail means you dont get your BI (because its used for prison budgets) it creates a magnificent economical incentive not to do crime and to get out of jail as fast as you can. Organized crime like drug dealers would likely plummet as well: as most organizations they are heavily pyramidal and require a vast number of poor people to work for peanuts and take all the risk. Take them away, and they have no supply chain, so even large organizations will get wrecked quickly. Suddenly, White-collar crime goes way higher in the scale of important.
In terms of society education, you will prevent and help millions of people to be able to pursue education without having to sacrifice it to make ends meet.
Another strongly positive force is to eliminate government "fat". Firing government employees that are useless or provide little value is a very politically expensive move no-one makes, because nobody wants to throw people on the street. Now, this is not the street anymore, they have a strong safety net so we can stop worrying about politics and focus on making things productive.
I clearly see a lot of potential on BI, and I also appreciate it could have devastating downsides. But thats what experimentation is all about finding out.
Theres always going to be money crimes as long as there is money, but its very different to take a risk on your monthly stipend to get 200 bucks. Its just a huge economical incentive not to do it, particularly in the lowest class, where violent crime is concentrated.
Gangs, Mafia's and drug organizations are based on a worker class that is super cheap to them, those out of poverty and desperation. It would deal a major blow to everyday regular crime.
I don't think anything other than an economic and social Ragnarök is going to fix the poverty problem. Both capitalism and socialism don't seem to have the answers.
Think about inflation like this: More bidders for the same goods and services. Well, right now there are goods and services on the sidelines.
Means-testing is where a lot of the cost of social welfare systems comes into play, and where nearly all of the moral hazard starts (making it more expensive to work than to not work). It's best to keep means-testing out of it altogether.
The good thing about guaranteed basic income is that it has the positives of welfare without the negative incentives (i.e. if I make over X amount, my check stops coming). If you implement minimum income without replacing the current provisioning system, then you haven't really solved any problems.
EDIT: To put it another way: if I'm a productive worker and have a job, I am "rewarded" by working for a boss (taking orders from him/her), and having to turn over 35-50% of my income to government, to give it to others. If I were unemployed, I'd be "punished" by receiving welfare, food stamps and a bunch of other stuff, without having to contribute in any way to society.
This argument doesn't hold water for me. Society makes it possible for everyone to earn a living, so people who aren't doing it should start.
But they won't. It's safe to say that lazy people are good at being lazy and will find a way to be lazy no matter what system they're in.
Pretending we can build a system that eradicates laziness in an exercise in futility. It's better to accept the fact that a fixed percentage of people are only going to take while most others give (and take), and stop wasting the enormous overhead trying to figure out which is which.
Not at all. You know what eradicates laziness? Hunger.
Do you have evidence of the size and nature of job vacancies compared to the skills and number of the unemployed?
While I can't speak for OP:
Without a society there'd be no education system, no legal tender, no laws protecting employees, no laws protecting companies, no infrastructure supporting it - and so on. So society makes it possible for people to have jobs. There's an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, which tends to indicate that the group has had a lot of input to the success of the individual for a long time.
I can't even imagine how something as complex as the prerequisites for programming would work without a society. State of nature economies. I suppose you could have small family groups at some point on the hunter-gatherer to farming spectrum, but the minute those families come together into groups and start to develop more complex interactions... that looks mightily like a society to me.
But it doesn't follow from that that society makes it possible for everyone to have a job. Just that those who do could not without one.
It's very close to being the same underlying logical form that goes:
'All cats are four-legged mammals. Buts not all four-legged animals are cats.'
All employees are enabled by a society. But not all people in a society are so enabled.
in the same vein, your job only exist because there's people with enough buying power to keep the business you're at existing, so again you depend on people, and you could be punished or rewarded depending on how society as a entire organism does...
I already had a similar discussion on Slashdot recently. Taking other people's money by force is, IMHO, theft. My question then isn't why it would be OK for the guy, but why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.
EDIT: Paying people so they don't steal from me is called a protection racket. If that's what you're arguing for, let's call it what it is.
I'm not arguing that "taxes are theft". I'm arguing that giving money to poor people so they don't attack me is theft. buzaga was saying that if I/we don't "take care of the unfortunate", they'll decide to take our money/stuff by force. Sounds like a veiled threat to "give them money, or else..." That is theft, in my opinion.
I'm perfectly fine with taxes as long as they go to things that benefit everyone equally, including me (like roads, schools, police and courthouses).
EDIT: Also, please point out where I said (or implied) that "taxes are theft". You completely misread what I wrote, therefore I have to agree that we can't have a productive argument.
You still can't seem to think outside your box it seems.
Misery breeds violence, there's no "or else", there's no "they", it's reality, I could resort to violence to survive and so could you.
This is not a conversation for the 'what about me?' mindset. The whole of this discussion(also to the other replies) you're only talking about yourself, I don't want to talk baseless opinions, the stuff I'm talking about is conceptual so you need to understand the concepts that precede the topic and don't seem to be there yet. I've made my argument at the first reply then tried expanding on it but you missed it
On the other hand, I believe society is just a big group of individuals, so "what about me?" does matter (in fact, it's maybe the most important question in all of society).
> why does theft become OK for society? Why are you arguing that stealing is acceptable if you're desperate enough? I say it's never acceptable.
The implications are obvious. Taxes don't have different natures depending on the use we as society give to the money we collect. In fact, the very economic definition of taxes is that you aren't promised anything specific in return[1].
Regarding the tyranny of the majority argument, that would only apply if we were proposing a ridulous amount of taxation. We are not. It's been pointed out that this program could be funded by replacing it with current expenses, and by a minimal raise in taxes. That's not oppression, that'a a choice that we as society are well within our rights to make.
In short: spending taxpayers money can't be theft, and taxes aren't a service you pay if you like how the money is spent.
[1] > From the view of economists, a tax is a non-penal, yet compulsory transfer of resources from the private to the public sector levied on a basis of predetermined criteria and without reference to specific benefit received (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax)
It's not taken from you, if everybody receives basic income, how can it be taking from you? You're missing the point.
Maybe you find those acceptable, but I find all of them horrible. Killing someone is only acceptable in self defense (in which case someone else is trying to kill you first), while cannibalism is just sick.
How is that not "depending on the circumstances"? Is not "killing is needed to defend myself" a circumstance?
"while cannibalism is just sick."
So, if someone is genuinely in a situation where their options are 1) starve to death, or 2) eat the other guy who just starved to death, you think it's clear that they should choose 1?
That's an unreasonable assumption. There are differences in productivity even among farmers. Some people are much better at farming than others.
> If you currently make $35K a year, that means that you owe 99.9% of your income to society.
So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%, nothing more? Also, you're arguing that I owe part of my success to the drug addict who gets high all the time, and to the drunk who starts drinking early in the morning, and to the mugger who robs people at gunpoint? Even to people who play World of Warcraft all day?
Society is a mix of people that make wildly different contributions, and in some cases hugely negative impacts. I am immensely grateful to people like Leibniz, Newton, Shakespeare and others, but not so much to people who just coast through life. I also wish Stalin, Hitler and many others would have never existed.
Not if you don't have access to machinery, modern seeds, chemicals, weather forecasting, tens of thousands of years worth of agricultural research and oral history, et cetera.
"So my own creativity, labor, skills, talents and education only matter for 0.1%"
Pretty much useless to the subsistence farmer. Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work. Not to mention that society provides the source of your inspiration, provided your education, an outlet for your talents, et cetera.
Obviously my argument is a little bit of reductio ad absurdum. But much less so than "taxation is theft".
I disagree with that. Half my native country is rural, with a really long history of agriculture, and it's far from homogenous. Work ethic and intelligence really matter, even for farmers (especially work ethic; some people just work harder than others). There's always that one farmer who has more cattle or pigs than the others (or takes better care of their crops), and a few who can barely feed themselves. This was true even centuries before modern equipment, like tractors and chemicals.
> Basically the only thing that matters is luck and hard work.
Not everyone is equally hard working; in fact, I'd say the differences among individuals are quite significant. Also, you're ignoring intelligence/creativity.
> But much less so than "taxation is theft".
Also, as I already said in another comment, I'm not arguing that "taxation is theft" (as I already asked another commenter, please point out where I explicitly claimed that). I'm only arguing that paying people so they don't hurt me is theft (or extortion or a protection racket).
Two ideas seem insane to me in this whole thread: 1) that "we should pay poor people to stop them from killing us" and 2) that "we as a society are punishing people who can't find a job", with the corollary of "we're rewarding people who do have jobs". So far, I've only been arguing against these.
Paradoxically, you would gain much more from a BI than someone who is currently living in poverty, because you would be free to extract the maximum potential from your hard work and talent.
Personally, I'd love to get BI. That would free me to work only on what I like, or not work at all when I don't want to.
Naturally it would be much better for businesses to do this than the government. Businesses have much higher motivations to use their money wisely (i.e. give the right amount to the right people and create the right incentives to ensure people are motivated to use the funds wisely, go bankrupt or get sued by investors if they spend poorly) than a government (which just gets to shrug or inflate the currency or embark on a fresh round of vilifying productive citizens).
Oh wait, don't we already have that? Bank loans or something, I don't know, lol.
The question itself is incorrect. Low-paid workers or the unemployed are not parasites on highly-paid workers; the capitalist class is a parasite on all workers, no matter the salary, and through their control over government they continually engineer a level of unemployment that can suppress wages.
(If you don't believe me about the government, look up how inflation targeting works. Central banks are supposed to target both low unemployment and low inflation, but for the past several decades, the deliberate policy choice has been to consistently sacrifice wage growth (ie: exploit workers harder) in order to maintain both low inflation and economic growth at the same time.)
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/road-to-recovery
Personally, I expect we would see unpleasant jobs become more expensive than they currently are, and pleasant jobs become less expensive than they currently are. I think it's tremendously unlikely that this effect would be so dramatic that "the CEO would be the lowest paid employee at every company", even accepting the implicit assumption that CEO is the least unpleasant job (which seems false).
Could you define this?
interesting.
Basic Income takes much more buy in from more people to get off the ground.
I like the idea of it being attempted on the city level though, I'd never thought of that. It's likely the smallest scale that would work with the least amount of individual buy in required.
A few will, but most will use their newfound flexibility to shift what they work on: explore other career options, create art and culture, etc. Overall there will likely be a lot more entrepreneurship, invention, science, art, literature, and music.
It's tied into the far right's religious-based doctrine of original sin view of humanity: we are miserable evil disgusting monsters who must be beaten and cudgeled into exhibiting any form of virtue. If it weren't for life-or-death struggle we would all sit around, drink beer, play video games, and probably screw goats. It's the same mentality behind strict physical discipline of children... if you spare the rod, the kid will grow up to be lazy or a monster.
Besides, the people who would completely stop working are the lazy people nobody would want to hire in the first place. You're not losing much by taking those folks out of the work force.
A guaranteed minimum income without economic micromanagement or other central planning is what I'd like to see tried.
No, sorry, you're completely wrong. Communism didn't work because it destroyed every incentive for industrious, honest labour, supplanting healthy competitive free-market economics with a landscape of scheming and parasitism as people scrambled to exploit one another.
Communism failed (and will fail every single time another stupid generation which hasn't even bothered to pay attention to the past implements its ideas again) because, under Communism, there is no economy.
Communism is a terrible, terrible idea. Just like all coercive redistribution, which, proportional to the degree of redistribution, destroys economic growth. It's no accident that, other than a handful of tight-knit low-population nation cum communities with large oil stakes, the number of socialist policies enacted by a legislature correlates directly with poor economic performance.
The tragedy is that populations suffering from the negative effects of these policies delude themselves into thinking that an expansion of the policies will fix their woes, rather than hard work and smart investment. It's a vicious circle.
I can't tell you how many times I walked into a store and the clerk was reading a book and when I tried to ask a question they just ignored me or shrugged me off without bothering to even try to help. Sometimes they will flat out lie about whether they have something in stock to get you out of the store.
Another example, I can go to a market and there are 5 old ladies in a row all selling potatoes. I can't find any carrots or onions and so I have to walk another mile to a different market to get them. Instead, one of them could sell carrots at a premium so I don't have to walk so far, and another onions.
That's communism.
They do that plenty in capitalist Israel.
I think BI is something that cant and shouldnt happen country-wide one day to the other. Cities should start doing it first. Cities like.. SF? which have a ridicolous surplus of money the city squanders, while still having a lower class without medical care.
[1]: http://pfd.alaska.gov/Eligibility/EligibilityRequirements
Why? Doesn't make a lot of sense. To the extent that immigration might strain a BI system, there are much smaller changes that would allow managing the impacts, while still maintaining the basic high-level structure of the existing citizen and immigration system.
Exactly. But we're not there yet, and possibly not very close.
Has served Europe well for the past fifty years or so.
Do we have any examples where this has worked before?
Zero earned income. You get about £60-200 from the state per week so lets call this a £60 basic income. Typical unemployed.
Annual income £12K. No tax and no subsidies. We could rebrand as £60/wk basic income = 3K/yr and and 25% tax on the 12K. Typical minimum wage earner.
Income £50k. Roughly £35K in your pocket, £15K tax. Rebrand as 18K tax less 3K minimum income.
The system kind of works. One of the main problems is that there is a very steep effective marginal between zero income and minimum wage - a lot of people end up about equally well off in the short term whether they do nothing or flip burgers. This would be better under a straight basic income system.
I think you could improve the basic income set up by something like karma points where you get a bit more money if you are productive even if it's doing something unpaid like charity work or writing poems and less if you are criminal etc.
Last I heard the UK was a depressed shithole with a stagnant economy. Hardly a glorious example of the success of such policies.
Isn't it actually radically different in that you are not allowed to choose to stay unemployed, i.e. you have to be at least trying to look for work in order to be eligible for such benefits?
In other countries there are similar systems but before you get "basic income" like benefits, your property will have to be used up / sold.
If I have money does that mean I am assured that the goods required to fulfill my basic needs exist and can be purchased by that money?
In a basic income society, the amount received should be based off of indexes for items/services deemed necessary to meet some basic quality-of-life thresholds. If the private sector cannot provide items/services to meet those thresholds, then the government should step in to provide them, until the private sector can provide it more efficiently(if possible).
Unemployment runs no lower that 70% among disabled people in the best of times.
Anyone that is not literally perfect (beautiful, slim, brilliant, healthy, emotionally well centered) faces huge obstacles from the powers that be in our society.
The federal basic income level would likely be based off of a national averages for cost of living, with state/city governments stepping in to provide greater subsidies if they feel it's needed. People may still need to pay more for convenience, but should have other options available, even if it means moving an hour or two away from the trendy metro areas.
If on top of having a job and getting GBI you still can't live in San Francisco, then you'd move to a cheaper area of the state/country.
What's interesting is that a lot of people flock to urban areas for the increased opportunity, but with a GBI, this may not be the case as much because there's less of a strain to make ends meet. This could reduce the cost of living in urban areas.
I once saw a job posting for a Web Developer/Python position where the client stated: "$1,000/mo is enough in Belarus."
I stopped to think for a bit: "I hardly made $800/mo when I was freelancing, and I was happiest when I was not working."
I think the biggest argument for Basic Income is to normalize what is already an existing systemic exploitation of a broken system. Professional exploiters and accidental/system-justifier exploiters need to be cut off, which might motivate professionals and invalids to assess our system as more just. I'm sure a positive network effect will follow.
Why not just try it? Why not stop arguing these speculative points and just try it?
It only works if you test.
If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).
I could list out the many benefits and the nay-sayer objections with counter arguments, but after twenty years I've come to realize money distribution is not the problem. The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.
The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together. But quite frankly we as a society are not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime.
So, rationing? I wonder if that's been tried before.
Money is a repesentation of resources. And resources cannot be allocated efficiently by central authority, because of the calculation problem[1]. But maybe some college dorm discussions will bear some other solution.
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Maybe I'm just an old stick in the mud, but those two are "I tell you what you want" and "You tell me what you want", and I don't see the third option.
Of course, I'm aware that whyme said "eliminates money all together" so this might not be what he meant.
You're assuming that we are already making maximal use of all available resources. We aren't; we're not even close. The reason the "poorer nations" are poor is politics, not lack of resources.
I didn't make any claim to suggest why poor nations are poor, did I? I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more.
You said we would need 5 planets worth of resources if everyone lived at an American standard of living. That would only be true if it took a full one planet's worth of resources for everyone at the standard they are living at now. But it doesn't; we aren't using the full productive capacity of planet Earth now, not even close, and a lot of what we do produce gets wasted for political reasons. If we got rid of that waste, we might well be able to support everyone at an American standard of living with just one planet's worth of resources, not 5.
I simply suggested that as poor nations evolve, their people will consume more
That's part of what you suggested, but it isn't all of it. See above.
If your answer to that question is yes (I don't actually think it is, but bear with me), then you are right that the only way to have an American standard of living is to be "wasteful" in this sense; but that would be true of any standard of living beyond bare subsistence. Good luck convincing people to buy into that.
If your answer to that question is no, then you're wrong that we need to be "wasteful" to have an American standard of living. The computer I'm using to make this post is considerably more efficient than the computer I would have used to do so when I first joined HN a few years ago, let alone the one I was using to make posts on CompuServe discussion groups a couple of decades ago. The new car my wife and I bought recently is considerably more efficient than the 12-year-old car I have (which we are going to replace soon for that very reason). We have a lot of room to make things more efficient without sacrificing any functionality at all--indeed, while continuing to add functionality. The computer I'm using now is not only more efficient (less power consumption, longer battery life, etc.) than older ones, it's more functional as well (faster CPU, more RAM, more hard drive).
Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it, which more than cancels out any perceived efficiency gain. Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use. Maybe it's just collecting dust in your attic, where it will stay useless until any of the above two scenarios happen.
More importantly, I'd like to propose that what drives innovation in computer hardware is largely our attitude towards wastefulness. You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced. I'm arguing that the whole process is wasteful, never mind that your machine performs better per Watt. Your old laptop probably had a greater cost to the environment in its manufacturing process and after you got rid of it than whatever energy you spent using it during its lifetime, and even more definitely the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.
Let's get into farming, food production and food packaging if you still aren't convinced.
And who gets to decide which conveniences are "slight" and which benefits are "superficial"? Sounds like nice work if you can get it.
Where is the computer you were using before now? Chances are that someone else is using it
Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.
Chances are that you just threw it away, which is more detrimental to the environment than continued use.
If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.
You couldn't sell and develop new hardware at such a rapid pace if people weren't readily throwing their old stuff away to have it replaced.
This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?
For example, when you say:
the cost of manufacturing your current laptop was more than what you save by using it instead of the old one.
You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.
By that I did not mean to suggest that there's is or should be a universally enforced definition of what is "slight" or "superficial". I meant to point out that no matter how you define those words the definition of wastefulness depends on it. How you choose to implement it is a matter of values.
> Not likely. Computer recycling centers return the materials to manufacturers so they can be used as raw materials for new production. They don't resell the systems as-is.
There are various ways to go about recycling computers. Even if your computer was sent straight to a manufacturer to have its raw materials extracted, it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.
> If your definition of "wasteful" is "putting things in landfills instead of recycling them", you could have just said so.
"Throwing away" was admittedly not very carefully worded, try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use". Never mind that millions of tons of electronics go into landfills every year.
> This is quite true. But you're failing to ask the next question: why are people readily throwing their old stuff away? Because the new stuff is perceived by them to have better functionality. (This is not just true for computers; it's true for pretty much everything, cars, houses, clothes, etc.) They may be wrong, but who made you the judge of that?
Why anyone is throwing their stuff away in favor of new stuff is besides my point. Perhaps they don't realize the consequences, or they ignore them on the basis that they won't personally have to face them.
> You are completely ignoring the benefit to me of having my current laptop instead of my previous one. You're basically saying that people should be satisfied with old, outdated products that don't work very well compared to new ones, just so that we can avoid manufacturing new ones. If you want to make that tradeoff for yourself, fine, go for it. But if you expect other people to accept your definition of what are "slight conveniences and superficial benefits" that don't justify buying new stuff, you're going to need to do a lot better than just pointing out that people buy a lot of new stuff.
I am not ignoring that there is a benefit to you having a new laptop, and I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do. All I am saying is that the shape of our society largely depends on our general lack of interest in the consequences of what we do with discarded products.
Perhaps not, but you did appear to be suggesting that some people should be able to tell other people what is "slight" or "superficial", instead of everyone getting to decide that for themselves. If everyone gets to decide for themselves what is "slight" or "superficial", then we basically have the situation we have now; but you don't seem satisfied with the situation we have now.
it would be better if it was given to someone in need of a computer for immediate reuse.
Not necessarily; there would have to be sufficient benefit to the person re-using it. You keep on ignoring that part of the equation.
try "getting rid of it in a way that does not guarantee continued use"
Same comment here: you're assuming that continued use is actually a benefit for whoever is using the item. What if it isn't?
I'm not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do.
Huh? Saying that people are not taking proper account of the consequences of their actions is telling people what they should do--it's saying they should take proper account of the consequences. If you're not willing to own that statement, then you should stop harping about the consequences.
Actually, I think the problem is that we don't use money enough to manage distribution and ownership; too much distribution and ownership is controlled by factors other than money. But it's true that there is a problem with money as a control mechanism, though it isn't what you appear to think it is: the problem with money as a control mechanism is that governments manipulate the money supply for political reasons.
That's the power hungry part I'm talking about. The government is not some machine that is broken, it's a select group of people within our society running around trying to balance appeasing the public horde while trying to amass as much power as possible. The behaviour of the people within government is a reflection of the state and quality of our society as a whole.
1. unfortunately in the sense that some hardship will follow suit.
In other words, you're punting. You say "society has to change" but you refuse to give any information about how it has to change. Other than saying you think the money system has to collapse first, which doesn't inspire confidence; to say that "some hardship will follow suit" is a massive understatement.
It took centuries for the monetary systems to develop with many bumps a long the way. That will also need to happen in a resource managed economy.
In other words, you advocate a "resource managed economy" but you conveniently exempt yourself from having to explain how you are going to avoid having it suck the way the Soviet Union sucked. Pardon me for not getting all excited about society spending centuries in that quagmire. For all the problems our current money economies have, they are still way better than the Soviet Union.
No, but if the price goes up enough, you can mine it, as I said, from places like auto junkyards where people have thrown it away.
If our usage of aluminum increases, eventually there will not be enough aluminum.
No, if our usage of aluminum increases, assuming the supply is constant, its price will go up, so people will have incentives to find substitutes. (I already gave one example: using composites instead of metal for car bodies; that mostly substitutes for steel, not aluminum, but it does substitute for some aluminum usage, and the general point is the same.) So the increasing price of aluminum will regulate its usage so that we never run out; we just keep shifting certain uses to substitutes so that aluminum is only needed for uses that are valuable enough to make it worth paying the market price.
This is not just theoretical, by the way; it has happened many, many times. Aluminum itself is an example: most of its uses are uses in which it displaced other metals, like iron and steel (a good example is car engines: most of them are made of aluminum now because it's cheaper than cast iron).
A major source of trouble now is that money is tightly coupled with politics. It boggles the mind how it's not universally understood that politics should be entirely de-coupled from private money. All of politics should run 100% (including elections) on a public fund.
Unless this is done, very few things of true substance will be fixed.
> The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together.
I don't think that's doable unless we've made work entirely optional. When AI and robots could do any job we don't want to do, then you could instate some form of basic income, or even your more radical idea.
But until then, it's going to be very, very hard to change things in a fundamental way.
You mean like everyone else who's tried before moving to public funded elections, with restrictions on campaign donations?
Of course I can't guarantee that one change will result in a third-party getting meaningful representation, but it's at least a start.
You're paying now through the distortion of the electoral process and the indirect increase in your cost of goods and services (the hundreds of billions spent on elections comes from somewhere). Don't you think it's worth it for your taxes to go up $2 to eliminate those costs?
That's a horrible idea. The dominate parties would become even more dominate with the backing of the government. I do not approve of my tax money being spent on ridiculous political commercials either.
You can't eliminate money. It's a natural creation of human interaction. Even prisoners have money.
Radiation, waste heat, carbon dioxide - the list goes on and on.
It's just as with anarchy - you can destroy government, but you can't prevent "government"(s) from springing up to replace them, and usually worse than the ones before.
If you can't get rid of drugs and prostitution, you won't be able to get rid of money.
And prisons having currency could be a model example of how money is an arbitrary and unfair element of trade and distribution.
Not even close. Do the math and also keep in mind that just recently our government was operating at a trillion dollar deficit (almost 30% of their entire budget) and even if you could operate at extreme deficits forever, that still wouldn't be enough.
Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.
Any guaranteed entitlement scheme that does not account for the source of the funding will run into the same problems, sooner or later. (Just see the fate of a number of guaranteed pension funds in some parts of the country).
> Ultimately, it is another form of "spending other people's money" which runs out at some point or the other.
This is already happening. See above. It doesn't run out if you have a functioning economy. I'd also argue that GBI would make the economy function a lot better by opening up business opportunities to those who don't have access currently.
Please show us all how a person living in a US city could survive on food stamps, ethana.
Could you tell us how much money it's possible to claim from the system, and how much a realistic minimal standard of living might actually be? If you do your research honestly, you might find it illuminating.
I guess the biggest question with it is what is the differential in outcomes for people. What % of people who work now out of fear of living on the street would stop working if they could be sure they would have the bare minimum to survive. I can't imagine many. Everyone always wants more for themselves and their children. If people choose to not work, basic income puts a cap on how much of a "drain" they are on society.
There are a lot of nice properties to this concept and it would be interesting to hear well-founded opposition arguments. Unfortunately I have to assume that almost all of the arguments are going to be along the lines of "doing this will encourage people to be lazy" without any real evidence that this is the case.
I'm talking about shelter, food, water, and a basis for living comfortably. We have the resources to do this, today. We just don't have the distribution infrastructure. Money should be something you spend purely on things you want, not things you need.
Given that we built a distribution infrastructure of some kind to automatically and evenly distribute the total food resources of the country, we would see a dramatic change in how money is looked upon and how we use it. No longer will we require money, instead, money is something you earn and use for things you wish to do. We can focus all of our time and energy on furthering our technology, our minds, and the human race in general.
As far as mental illness goes, that is an interesting problem I don't think GBI would solve. Sure you can give a schizophrenic person a check, but are they going to cash it? Or would you still have some sort of public facility for mentally disabled people? I would hope so.
We shouldn't need to buy food. That's the point.
I think that you overstate the scope of things for which a basic services model is better; really, I think all of the things on your list are things where BI works better than basic services.
I see it as many times better than welfare or unemployment since it is distributed equally to everyone. If there is a limit it will eventually be too low, so even rich people would get it, they would have to or it would be destroyed.
Social security is an insurance policy really that doesn't hit wealthy wallets much beyond what everyone pays, but people still want to destroy it and this is against workers directly paying in their whole lives for a subpar investment, yes small businesses pay the full 15%ish and social security returns 2% annually and also props up our dollar big time with investment in t-bills. So even benefits like that are too social for many.
But a Basic Income distributed to everyone would lose the current perception of welfare/unemployment being bad when really these are helpful to keep the low end propped up and in the end I believe it saves money. You'd have to keep moving it up like minimum wage as the effects are normalized, it really is a travesty that minimum wage hasn't gone up as well.
People in America really don't like helping one another so this and other programs with even a hint of social aspects will not catch on. But if someone gets a benefit that the complainer also gets, they would probably be ok with it. However this does not redistribute and would eventually be cancelled out in pricing.
Goods generally purchased by the poor might go up slightly, but BI should shift the poor into the low end of lower middle class. In other words, putting them in a situation comparable to that of the majority of the American population, so the effect on the demand curve should not be large.
Because the propensity to consume is not equal across the economic spectrum; downward redistribution increases expected consumption and, therefore, overall price levels.
The idea that this would eat up the beneficial effects of BI is hard to justify, but the idea that some increase in overall price level is likely is pretty easy to justify.
Just like salaries have gone up over time yet the value of a dollar has shrunk, there would only be a momentary boom from the extra money and then the market, as markets purpose is, will find the value and adjust. It would keep things in more of a wave though like when minimum wage goes up, there is a temporary boom to low end markets but it always makes it back to the current distribution (I think minimum wage is a good thing). The money given would always find the way back up through pricing with a basic income though. Apartments suddenly would be x% higher and price increases because there is more money out there and if more actual printed then pricing has to come up. It is a forever balance and the only way to break it I can see is to ramp up the ladder individually.
Markets run everything and they are good, we would still all be farming and dumb if there weren't markets to trade goods for services. Markets and exchanges created conditions for the need for mathematics and allowed people have more free time as they could make products and sell them. This led to more time to think and create/innovate and the reason we have mathematics and technology today. But markets do find fair product to market/user value. Markets are as key to innovation and the evolution of human intelligence as anything. But they will always normalize after infusion, just recently we infused it from the top to banks, which may have kept us from the brink of destruction but only to get it back to 'balanced'. Why didn't they instead just give everyone 6k? Monetary distribution, unless we go away from markets/currency as value, will be pretty close to what we have now always (doesn't mean individuals can't climb it).
It could be proven that we all think like the wealthy on this, once a human gets ahead, they don't want to lose that ground or progress. Case in point the US, if you live in the US like I do, we might have a higher quality of life and currency status than many parts of the world. Would you give that up to allow all countries in the world to be equal in monetary value? If you aren't in the US how about where you live? The people above the fold want to keep it that way, the people below will want it another way, the people above the fold create the game rules, repeat until entropy.
It would need serious tax reform, changes to how business are treated locally and internationally.
One suggestion for tax reform is to apply taxes strictly on only sales tax, not income tax. Certain property taxes may still be effectful, but it's really a huge mess that will really function if not taken all together.
I suppose an analogy is when it comes to extreme programming, you can't just take what you like and get all the benefits--not that basic income specifies these other things, but I believe there is a bigger package that has to be considered.
We spend billions just paying accountants to fool around wit millions of rules that most people do not understand. Sales tax is very simple. Rich people get out of paying taxes by doing inefficient things like tax shelters.
Now, the sales tax would need to be refunded for those in the basic income bracket, especially on food, housing, etc..
Remember that HN article about "We'll not incorporate in the US" by some Danish group? What needs to happen is to encourage businesses to run locally, and part of that is simplifying the entire structure to represent what the economy is closest to--consumption.
Further, I think we need to bad times to help us recognize the good times and a basic income would do much to soften those bad times...
I worry that Basic Income is in the long term practically unavoidable, but at the same time will create new levels of depravity in mankind.
I think there is a difference between "work" that fulfills our desire to dedicate time and effort toward challenging endeavors and "work" that creates sufficient net value to keep oneself alive (or in the case of a redistributive society, to keep society as a whole alive).
And yes, I think this even applies to people who do jobs that align very closely with their passions, like many computer programmers. My argument isn't that passionate programmers wouldn't continue programming if they had no need for a wage, but rather that they would do precisely the parts of programming they enjoy.
Also, given hedonic adaptation, humans are rarely content with any given level of luxury. While there are certainly negatives to that, it does mean that most (or at least many) people would continue to attempt to earn as much as possible even with a basic income.
Finally, the money does have to come from somewhere. I expect that the system would be designed so that it begins net neutral for the middle class. And I can't see most middle class people suddenly deciding to give up half their income just because there's suddenly a softer landing. For the rich, the effect would obviously be even less pronounced.
Curiously, I think Basic Income would drive creativity in some people to acquire luxuries without working for someone else (building their own stuff, or unfortunately, stealing). I think many would wear that as a badge of pride. We already worship business leaders and entrepreneurs. Imagine the praise of successful entrepreneurship of one's life and possessions and not just his business.
2. People who are forced to work two (or more) jobs to stay afloat are struggling way more than could conceivably be incentivized by evolution. I can't imagine how miserable and downtrodden people must be who have no weekend to look forward to in which to pursue their interests.
3. I don't believe that doing something meaningless like sweeping floors or checking groceries fills any kind of psychological need. I've personally gone a few months before without doing any kind of work, and it was glorious.
4. What about all of those psychological needs (family, relationships, hobbies) which people compromise for the sake of work?
I believe that a basic income may make life easier, but it will make it all that much harder to reach equality of respect, equality of dignity.
Before that, humans as foragers are believed to have worked about 20hrs per week, if they so chose.
Get a fucking grip. Hunter gatherers lived in shitty conditions with unbelievably poor material wealth, and had no protections against disease, injury, starvation, attack by animals, attack by other humans, old age, death in childbirth, etc etc. Average lifespan was 20.
Hard work came with farming. Before farming people worked very few hours.
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...
Some citizens, with their guaranteed basic income, will spend it wisely to cover their needs...as envisioned by proponents of this approach.
Others, however, will waste their income and again find themselves short of what is necessary to cover their needs.
What then? Simply increase the amount of basic income awarded, and hope that by throwing more money at the symptoms of poverty, the cause will be addressed?
And where does this money come from? Not immediately, of course, but 5-10 years down the road once society has been changed by this policy's implementation? Why would the financial engines of today, which could theoretically fund such an endeavor, continue to run as efficiently in the future?
If some is 10% of the population, and poverty is resolved for 90% of the population, the system would be much much better than the current system for eliminating poverty.
In Canada, we have actual statistics for both Old Age Security and the Mincome experiment.
Statistics on OAS (includes stats on the US). http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/elderly-po...
And quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
"Dr. Evelyn Forget conducted an analysis of the program in 2009 which was published in 2011. She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families, which resulted in more teenagers graduating. In addition, those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidences of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. Additionally, the period saw a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals."
Now that's just silly. If it were meant to subsidize people living below the poverty line it would target people living below the poverty line, not households making over 50k a year who would likely sock away the money or spend it on a bathroom renovation.
You can do this now at least under the UK system.
There are businesses whose profitability and business model assume a steady supply of takers of these sorts of jobs at the lowest possible wage. How would basic income affect that supply?
It would be very tough to prevent people from borrowing against their future BI money, though. An irresponsible person could dig themselves quite a hole that way, and lenders would be eager to make that loan.
That said, I'm not for giving someone food, shelter, water, and health care for falling out of a uterus. You have to contribute in some measurable way. Also I believe that we should provide, specifically these things...NOT currency/income.
I've seen too many examples of people having children for well-fare checks.