7 ms·

This basic income idea has been popping up a lot lately. And there's some merit to it, but there's some major problems too. The biggest problem I see is givin

This basic income idea has been popping up a lot lately. And there's some merit to it, but there's some major problems too. The biggest problem I see is giving people cash. Why not instead give each adult a voucher for housing (just barely adequate for cheap housing) and each person $5/day food stamps (or something similar), regardless of income. Everyone gets a lower stress level this way. The risk of being homeless or hungry go to near zero. It doesn't matter if you're unemployable, or starting a business, or between jobs. You know you're going to be okay. While giving people cash seems to have the same effect, it doesn't. At least here in the US, money problems are (mostly) a money-management problem. Many people use any cash they get to pay for whatever seems the most pressing at the moment - whether it's rent or a big screen TV. People buy the TV when they have money and rent isn't due yet, then have a little unexpected expense and can't pay rent. The stress level hurts them, hurts their families, causes increased expenses (e.g. payday loan). My parents were like this, in six-figure-income years and in dead-broke years. It hurt us quite a bit. And "loaning" them money NEVER helped - they'd pay the mortgage today and then buy the TV when the next payday came in. And there's LOTS of people like this, which is why there's a payday loan on every corner. Now, we've taken care of my mom by covering her housing and utilities directly. And her stress level is down a lot. It works great. This would have also helped me a lot when I was a student. And it means more startups - since all startups would be "ramen profitable" by default. And in the US, we could fund this with about a 10% tax (probably less if we took some funds out of SS, disability, section 8, etc.).

nostromo 11y ago
> Why not instead give each adult a voucher for housing (just barely adequate for cheap housing) and each person $5/day food stamps (or something similar), regardless of income. Because individuals are better at determining their priorities than are central planners. It sounds like your parents were bad with money -- but it also sounds like your assistance with budgeting has been more valuable than the government could ever hope to be.
- ddorian43 11y ago
  Individuals in that situation usually are not.
  - nostromo 11y ago
    While some poor people are bad with money, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of them are capable of deciding between paying rent and buying a new TV.
    - over 11y ago
      Speaking from personal experience with a bunch of people that live way too close to zero or negative net worth, it's not buy a new TV or pay rent, it's buy a new TV or maintain a 6-12 month safety net in case everything goes to hell (which you might need, one day, to pay rent). But hey, that's what loans and credit cards are for, right?
      - thedevil 11y ago
        This exactly. It's not like they buy TVs instead of paying rent. Of course very few are that stupid. The problem is that they charge up their cards and blow their safety buffer on the TV/car/etc.
- thedevil 11y ago
  I'm not promoting any central planning. That certainly would be a disaster. The reason I suggest a voucher and food stamps is because they give the individuals the flexibility to apply them to their situation. Edit: Also, it's definitely not just my parents. Look around you, there's payday loans on every corner. My parents only took a couple payday loans that I knew about. Their money-management issues are a drop in the ocean of similar problems.
  - _ak 11y ago
    With vouchers and food stamps, you're effectively prescribing how the basic income is supposed to be spent. But that totally misses the point of a basic income. You get money, you spend it as you see fit. Where some people will pay their rent and buy food, others may want to spend it on booze and gambling. They'd still have free reign over the money just like people with an income have nowadays. Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle.
sdenton4 11y ago
Take a look at GiveDirectly, which focuses on direct cash payments to the poor instead of traditional centrally planned aid actions. https://www.givedirectly.org/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ One of their early findings was that people in Kenya in thatched roof homes used their money to get tin roofs, an intervention that was on nobody's radar, and greatly improved quality of life. People are in poverty /by definition/ because they don't have money, and are generally painfully aware of what their biggest challenges are.
- thedevil 11y ago
  1) A housing voucher would cover analogous issues in the US. 2) Being poor in a poor country is very different from being poor in a rich country. 3) I don't know the details of the program, but it likely involved different amounts of accountability and social influences than a basic income.
  - DougWebb 11y ago
    "I don't know anything about what you're talking about, but I'm going to assume it supports my point of view."
    - thedevil 11y ago
      "One of your concerns isn't backed up so I'm going to ignore your other points and troll"
  - Chathamization 11y ago
    > A housing voucher would cover analogous issues in the US. Or it wouldn't. I don't really want someone to suffer just because a bureaucrat forgot to put an item on a list of approved purchases. Or someone suffers because they have a particular edge case that wasn't considered.
  - sdenton4 11y ago
    The housing voucher wouldn't cover school books, electricity bills, gas to get to work, or materials to keep a small business going. All of which also come up in the GiveDirectly outcomes. On point 3, the initial Givedirectly interventions gave cash to the poorest members of a village, which created resentment and social problems; going forward, they just give money to everyone in a village. If anything, they've learned to use /fewer/ evaluations on giving money out, and explicitly avoid getting involved in accountability beyond exit surveys. The point is to reduce overhead and increase impact, exactly what we hope to have from a basic income scheme. I'm definitely in the camp that believes that basic income doesn't take the place of things like alcohol rehab programs or mental health facilities. But it will be a huge boon to people who are poor because they don't have money, people living paycheck to paycheck in bullshit jobs (if they can manage to find jobs at all), which is an increasingly large slice of the US population.
patcon 11y ago
Or just give them no-strings-attached digital cash (ie some sort of credit card) and track it to learn about what people do when unsupervised. I will admit to being an optimist, but my understanding is that there's a history of paternal policy being oversimplistic, and of people solving their own problems in clever and unexpected ways when given the latitude to do so :)
- thedevil 11y ago
  While I can appreciate the optimism, I think it's important that we get this right (which might or might not be my idea). Think about all the payday loan places. They're everywhere. Think about all the credit card debt (among other excess debts). Note that a lot of people with credit card debt make much more than any basic income would be. Think about how much the poor (who do not have luxury of wasting money) spend on cars, cigarettes, and TVs. With all these things in your head, do you still think that people will manage the money well if you just hand them money? Will they handle money that they didn't work for better than they handle the money they did work for? Sure, some of it will go to good purposes. Why not make most of it go towards good purposes? And to be clear, I'm not just trying to blame the poor - good money management is psychologically hard.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    > Why not make most of it go towards good purposes? Because doing so costs more than the amount of cash wasted in the first place.
  - DKnoll 11y ago
    It's much more important that we get this right (as Ontarians). Sweeping generalisations like yours about 'the poor' are largely unwelcome here, and also a driving force for the incredible level of inequality in your country. There are government systems in place to provide housing, food, and more already. The idea is to replace these many systems with one, which would reduce the occurrence of people who need benefits being denied, and also dramatically reduce administrative overhead. The overall goal is not just to raise people from poverty, it's also to allow people a break from working to survive so they can take time to focus on personal development, family and mental health.
sowbug 11y ago
Your proposal is something other than universal basic income. You want to solve the problem of some people making bad choices with money. That's a different problem, and as you show in the case of your parents, it has little to do with how much money someone has. Most people are rational and will act rationally if given the option. UBI wants to give everyone the option.
- zanny 11y ago
  Money management education, of course, remains a gigantic problem in the way of adopting UBI schemes. Any country considering trying them needs to accept that they need to also give these people pervasive access to education on how to manage money. One interesting sociological change I imagine would happen if you had a UBI is a shift in cultural treatment of destitution. Today, being homeless is often being down on your luck - bad circumstances beyond your control can leave you on the streets, and you get sympathy for that. That sympathy can, and often does, reduce due blame for poor money management that got someone into that situation. Under a UBI you have no excuse anymore, assuming the allocated funds are proper to afford cheap poverty-level housing and food, if you are not able to live sustainably on that income that is entirely your fault, and you would correspondingly get much less sympathy. People macroscopically usually act in self interest. If you are poor, it is often rationalized as being a net positive to blow what you have and appeal to others for handouts using a mask of bad luck. Systemically, it can promote cultural absolution of responsibility for money management, which combined with the current welfare system (and its well documented extraordinary flaws) promote poor money management. We would have to see how a society adapted to basic income performs, but I imagine the incidence of poor money management would dramatically decline when social acceptance of it evaporates.
  - vehementi 11y ago
    It's not in the way of UBI schemes any more than it is in the way of people earning employment income.
    - zanny 11y ago
Riseed 11y ago
> At least here in the US, money problems are (mostly) a money-management problem. There is a money-management problem in the US, but it crosses class lines and is a different problem than addressing/ameliorating poverty. Financial literacy would do a lot of good for a lot of people, but money management advice/lessons don't address the needs of those without money, regardless of whether they grok the message. My experience with poverty in the US, both first- and second-hand, is that the money problems are mostly a money-deficit problem. Being poor is expensive in many ways: financially[0], emotionally[1], intellectually[2]... and poverty closes doors in ways many don't realize[3]. [0] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low-income-americans-often-have-pay-more-its-expensive-be-poor http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low... [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/122887/poor-people-dont-have-less-self-control https://newrepublic.com/article/122887/poor-people-dont-have... [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 [3] http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-peo...
eru 11y ago
Why give people vouchers? Vouchers are like restricted money. As an example, a part of welfare poor people get in the UK can only be spent on rent. Thus subsidizing landlords.
rando289 11y ago
> The biggest problem I see is giving people cash. Why not instead give each adult a voucher for housing (just barely adequate for cheap housing) and each person $5/day food stamps (or something similar), regardless of income. You haven't explained whatsoever what the "problem" is. Like saying "there is a big problem with nuclear energy. Why aren't we just using windmills." So... whats the problem?
- aptwebapps 11y ago
  I thought GP's point was laid out well enough in the rest of the comment.
  - rando289 11y ago
    It was, just formatted poorly into paragraphs. A paragraph is supposed to have some feet to stand on it's own.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Food stamps have a funny way of skewing the prices of the things you can use them for. What's wrong with cash? Why do we need to everybody like irresponsible children? (Giving new meaning to the word nanny state, eh)
rando289 11y ago
> At least here in the US, money problems are (mostly) a money-management problem. I don't think so.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jacalata 11y ago
Do food stamps cover tampons? Sanitary pads? Painkillers? Which type, aspirin or ibuprofen? Are landlords required to accept housing vouchers? Are they required to not ask for more rent than a housing voucher provides? Will the housing vouchers also help me pay my mortgage? What about hotels, if I suddenly lost my house? Why don't you want me to save money by moving in with my partner? Which other scenarios have you not considered? How much money do you want to spend on micromanaging everybody's lives?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

nostromo 11y ago

> Why not instead give each adult a voucher for housing (just barely adequate for cheap housing) and each person $5/day food stamps (or something similar), regardless of income. Because individuals are better at determining their priorities than are central planners. It sounds like your parents were bad with money -- but it also sounds like your assistance with budgeting has been more valuable than the government could ever hope to be.

ddorian43 11y ago
Individuals in that situation usually are not.
- nostromo 11y ago
  While some poor people are bad with money, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of them are capable of deciding between paying rent and buying a new TV.
  - over 11y ago
    Speaking from personal experience with a bunch of people that live way too close to zero or negative net worth, it's not buy a new TV or pay rent, it's buy a new TV or maintain a 6-12 month safety net in case everything goes to hell (which you might need, one day, to pay rent). But hey, that's what loans and credit cards are for, right?
    - thedevil 11y ago
      This exactly. It's not like they buy TVs instead of paying rent. Of course very few are that stupid. The problem is that they charge up their cards and blow their safety buffer on the TV/car/etc.
thedevil 11y ago
I'm not promoting any central planning. That certainly would be a disaster. The reason I suggest a voucher and food stamps is because they give the individuals the flexibility to apply them to their situation. Edit: Also, it's definitely not just my parents. Look around you, there's payday loans on every corner. My parents only took a couple payday loans that I knew about. Their money-management issues are a drop in the ocean of similar problems.
- _ak 11y ago
  With vouchers and food stamps, you're effectively prescribing how the basic income is supposed to be spent. But that totally misses the point of a basic income. You get money, you spend it as you see fit. Where some people will pay their rent and buy food, others may want to spend it on booze and gambling. They'd still have free reign over the money just like people with an income have nowadays. Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle.

sdenton4 11y ago

Take a look at GiveDirectly, which focuses on direct cash payments to the poor instead of traditional centrally planned aid actions. https://www.givedirectly.org/ https://www.givedirectly.org/ One of their early findings was that people in Kenya in thatched roof homes used their money to get tin roofs, an intervention that was on nobody's radar, and greatly improved quality of life. People are in poverty /by definition/ because they don't have money, and are generally painfully aware of what their biggest challenges are.

thedevil 11y ago
1) A housing voucher would cover analogous issues in the US. 2) Being poor in a poor country is very different from being poor in a rich country. 3) I don't know the details of the program, but it likely involved different amounts of accountability and social influences than a basic income.
- DougWebb 11y ago
  "I don't know anything about what you're talking about, but I'm going to assume it supports my point of view."
  - thedevil 11y ago
    "One of your concerns isn't backed up so I'm going to ignore your other points and troll"
- Chathamization 11y ago
  > A housing voucher would cover analogous issues in the US. Or it wouldn't. I don't really want someone to suffer just because a bureaucrat forgot to put an item on a list of approved purchases. Or someone suffers because they have a particular edge case that wasn't considered.
- sdenton4 11y ago
  The housing voucher wouldn't cover school books, electricity bills, gas to get to work, or materials to keep a small business going. All of which also come up in the GiveDirectly outcomes. On point 3, the initial Givedirectly interventions gave cash to the poorest members of a village, which created resentment and social problems; going forward, they just give money to everyone in a village. If anything, they've learned to use /fewer/ evaluations on giving money out, and explicitly avoid getting involved in accountability beyond exit surveys. The point is to reduce overhead and increase impact, exactly what we hope to have from a basic income scheme. I'm definitely in the camp that believes that basic income doesn't take the place of things like alcohol rehab programs or mental health facilities. But it will be a huge boon to people who are poor because they don't have money, people living paycheck to paycheck in bullshit jobs (if they can manage to find jobs at all), which is an increasingly large slice of the US population.

patcon 11y ago

Or just give them no-strings-attached digital cash (ie some sort of credit card) and track it to learn about what people do when unsupervised. I will admit to being an optimist, but my understanding is that there's a history of paternal policy being oversimplistic, and of people solving their own problems in clever and unexpected ways when given the latitude to do so :)

thedevil 11y ago
While I can appreciate the optimism, I think it's important that we get this right (which might or might not be my idea). Think about all the payday loan places. They're everywhere. Think about all the credit card debt (among other excess debts). Note that a lot of people with credit card debt make much more than any basic income would be. Think about how much the poor (who do not have luxury of wasting money) spend on cars, cigarettes, and TVs. With all these things in your head, do you still think that people will manage the money well if you just hand them money? Will they handle money that they didn't work for better than they handle the money they did work for? Sure, some of it will go to good purposes. Why not make most of it go towards good purposes? And to be clear, I'm not just trying to blame the poor - good money management is psychologically hard.
- zyxley 11y ago
  > Why not make most of it go towards good purposes? Because doing so costs more than the amount of cash wasted in the first place.
- DKnoll 11y ago
  It's much more important that we get this right (as Ontarians). Sweeping generalisations like yours about 'the poor' are largely unwelcome here, and also a driving force for the incredible level of inequality in your country. There are government systems in place to provide housing, food, and more already. The idea is to replace these many systems with one, which would reduce the occurrence of people who need benefits being denied, and also dramatically reduce administrative overhead. The overall goal is not just to raise people from poverty, it's also to allow people a break from working to survive so they can take time to focus on personal development, family and mental health.

sowbug 11y ago

Your proposal is something other than universal basic income. You want to solve the problem of some people making bad choices with money. That's a different problem, and as you show in the case of your parents, it has little to do with how much money someone has. Most people are rational and will act rationally if given the option. UBI wants to give everyone the option.

zanny 11y ago
Money management education, of course, remains a gigantic problem in the way of adopting UBI schemes. Any country considering trying them needs to accept that they need to also give these people pervasive access to education on how to manage money. One interesting sociological change I imagine would happen if you had a UBI is a shift in cultural treatment of destitution. Today, being homeless is often being down on your luck - bad circumstances beyond your control can leave you on the streets, and you get sympathy for that. That sympathy can, and often does, reduce due blame for poor money management that got someone into that situation. Under a UBI you have no excuse anymore, assuming the allocated funds are proper to afford cheap poverty-level housing and food, if you are not able to live sustainably on that income that is entirely your fault, and you would correspondingly get much less sympathy. People macroscopically usually act in self interest. If you are poor, it is often rationalized as being a net positive to blow what you have and appeal to others for handouts using a mask of bad luck. Systemically, it can promote cultural absolution of responsibility for money management, which combined with the current welfare system (and its well documented extraordinary flaws) promote poor money management. We would have to see how a society adapted to basic income performs, but I imagine the incidence of poor money management would dramatically decline when social acceptance of it evaporates.
- vehementi 11y ago
  It's not in the way of UBI schemes any more than it is in the way of people earning employment income.
  - zanny 11y ago

Riseed 11y ago

> At least here in the US, money problems are (mostly) a money-management problem. There is a money-management problem in the US, but it crosses class lines and is a different problem than addressing/ameliorating poverty. Financial literacy would do a lot of good for a lot of people, but money management advice/lessons don't address the needs of those without money, regardless of whether they grok the message. My experience with poverty in the US, both first- and second-hand, is that the money problems are mostly a money-deficit problem. Being poor is expensive in many ways: financially[0], emotionally[1], intellectually[2]... and poverty closes doors in ways many don't realize[3]. [0] http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low-income-americans-often-have-pay-more-its-expensive-be-poor http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21663262-why-low... [1] https://newrepublic.com/article/122887/poor-people-dont-have-less-self-control https://newrepublic.com/article/122887/poor-people-dont-have... [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976 [3] http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-people/ http://tressiemc.com/2013/10/29/the-logic-of-stupid-poor-peo...

eru 11y ago

Why give people vouchers? Vouchers are like restricted money. As an example, a part of welfare poor people get in the UK can only be spent on rent. Thus subsidizing landlords.

rando289 11y ago

> The biggest problem I see is giving people cash. Why not instead give each adult a voucher for housing (just barely adequate for cheap housing) and each person $5/day food stamps (or something similar), regardless of income. You haven't explained whatsoever what the "problem" is. Like saying "there is a big problem with nuclear energy. Why aren't we just using windmills." So... whats the problem?

aptwebapps 11y ago
I thought GP's point was laid out well enough in the rest of the comment.
- rando289 11y ago
  It was, just formatted poorly into paragraphs. A paragraph is supposed to have some feet to stand on it's own.
ant6n 11y ago
Food stamps have a funny way of skewing the prices of the things you can use them for. What's wrong with cash? Why do we need to everybody like irresponsible children? (Giving new meaning to the word nanny state, eh)

rando289 11y ago

> At least here in the US, money problems are (mostly) a money-management problem. I don't think so.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jacalata 11y ago

Do food stamps cover tampons? Sanitary pads? Painkillers? Which type, aspirin or ibuprofen? Are landlords required to accept housing vouchers? Are they required to not ask for more rent than a housing voucher provides? Will the housing vouchers also help me pay my mortgage? What about hotels, if I suddenly lost my house? Why don't you want me to save money by moving in with my partner? Which other scenarios have you not considered? How much money do you want to spend on micromanaging everybody's lives?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]