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I've never understood why this is not a more popular idea. I'm a Bernie-supporting lefty liberal weenie and yet all my hardcore small government libertarian fri

I've never understood why this is not a more popular idea. I'm a Bernie-supporting lefty liberal weenie and yet all my hardcore small government libertarian friends agree with me on this one. They tend to characterize basic income as, "I oppose wealth redistribution on principle, but since it's never going away, we might as well have the least shitty version possible." How has this not gotten done?

jokoon 11y ago
If welfare is having a bad time in term of public opinion, how do you want basic income to have a better public perception?
- acdha 11y ago
  Basic income is very cheap to administer — removing huge staffs and lengthy, error-prone processes disliked by libertarians and liberals alike – and it avoids the perverse incentives which do things like punish parents for getting a job which pays enough that they lose childcare support but not enough to come out ahead after replacing it. The other big win is that if it doesn't require a visible symbol, you avoid the cognitive trap where someone sees someone using food stamps to buy a steak and spends the next 20 years yelling about how wasteful welfare is (and, of course, never once asking how much it cost per calorie).
- avn2109 11y ago
  Because we are not going to call a universal basic income "welfare." Rather, we are going to call it "The America Permanent Fund" and loudly brag about how it's just a copy of the wildly-popular Alaska Permanent fund, that literally nobody has opposed ever.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and say that has less to do with nomenclature and more to do with oil, rather than working Alaskans, paying for the Permanent Fund. Plus there can't be too many people aiming to go through life living solely off the Permanent Fund.
evanpw 11y ago
Well, the libertarians wouldn't support it as an addition to the current welfare state, and the liberals wouldn't support it if it was conditional on dismantling Social Security, Medicare, etc. If we were building something from scratch, we might be able to get to a basic income, but right now, there's too much disagreement about the proper size of the welfare state to make any sweeping changes to its structure.
- Ankaios 11y ago
  A workable implementation will probably end up somewhere in between—many programs might continue to exist, but the number of people they support would decrease, as would the level of support. If the basic income was set somewhere near the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for an individual, it would be ~ $1000 / month [1]. (This is just for a rough sense of scale. I don't actually think it's a good idea to specifically aim to match that number, but I suspect we shouldn't go much above it. That's a longer discussion, though.) That wouldn't completely cover Social Security for everyone—the average monthly retirement benefit is ~ $1300 [2]—but it would cover a large chunk. Further, the minimum eligibility level for Medicaid is 133 % of the FPL [3], so if we'd like to maintain our current standards, provision of a roughly FPL basic income won't obviate Medicaid for everyone. (Medicare's qualification criteria are primarily age based, so the number of eligible beneficiaries would be unchanged by the existence of the basic income.) [1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines [2] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/ https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/ [3] http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by-topics/eligibility/eligibility.html http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by...
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    So give people a one-time option when the program is introduced to choose either social security or the basic income. And of course for anyone more than a few years from retirement age, the basic income will be the obvious choice because it begins paying immediately, so social security will de facto phase itself out over time. But then you can trivially sell it as "no changes to social security."
dennisgorelik 11y ago
If basic income was implemented, then it would have to be much smaller, than current welfare payouts (because there would be 15 times more people who collect it). Lefty liberals would not agree with the decrease of the payout for such transition, so there is no transition.

jokoon 11y ago

If welfare is having a bad time in term of public opinion, how do you want basic income to have a better public perception?

acdha 11y ago
Basic income is very cheap to administer — removing huge staffs and lengthy, error-prone processes disliked by libertarians and liberals alike – and it avoids the perverse incentives which do things like punish parents for getting a job which pays enough that they lose childcare support but not enough to come out ahead after replacing it. The other big win is that if it doesn't require a visible symbol, you avoid the cognitive trap where someone sees someone using food stamps to buy a steak and spends the next 20 years yelling about how wasteful welfare is (and, of course, never once asking how much it cost per calorie).
avn2109 11y ago
Because we are not going to call a universal basic income "welfare." Rather, we are going to call it "The America Permanent Fund" and loudly brag about how it's just a copy of the wildly-popular Alaska Permanent fund, that literally nobody has opposed ever.
- notahacker 11y ago
  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that has less to do with nomenclature and more to do with oil, rather than working Alaskans, paying for the Permanent Fund. Plus there can't be too many people aiming to go through life living solely off the Permanent Fund.

evanpw 11y ago

Well, the libertarians wouldn't support it as an addition to the current welfare state, and the liberals wouldn't support it if it was conditional on dismantling Social Security, Medicare, etc. If we were building something from scratch, we might be able to get to a basic income, but right now, there's too much disagreement about the proper size of the welfare state to make any sweeping changes to its structure.

Ankaios 11y ago
A workable implementation will probably end up somewhere in between—many programs might continue to exist, but the number of people they support would decrease, as would the level of support. If the basic income was set somewhere near the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) for an individual, it would be ~ $1000 / month [1]. (This is just for a rough sense of scale. I don't actually think it's a good idea to specifically aim to match that number, but I suspect we shouldn't go much above it. That's a longer discussion, though.) That wouldn't completely cover Social Security for everyone—the average monthly retirement benefit is ~ $1300 [2]—but it would cover a large chunk. Further, the minimum eligibility level for Medicaid is 133 % of the FPL [3], so if we'd like to maintain our current standards, provision of a roughly FPL basic income won't obviate Medicaid for everyone. (Medicare's qualification criteria are primarily age based, so the number of eligible beneficiaries would be unchanged by the existence of the basic income.) [1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines http://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines [2] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/ https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfact/stat_snapshot/ [3] http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by-topics/eligibility/eligibility.html http://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid-chip-program-information/by...
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  So give people a one-time option when the program is introduced to choose either social security or the basic income. And of course for anyone more than a few years from retirement age, the basic income will be the obvious choice because it begins paying immediately, so social security will de facto phase itself out over time. But then you can trivially sell it as "no changes to social security."

dennisgorelik 11y ago

If basic income was implemented, then it would have to be much smaller, than current welfare payouts (because there would be 15 times more people who collect it). Lefty liberals would not agree with the decrease of the payout for such transition, so there is no transition.