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"Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty.

maxerickson 10y ago
It would replace welfare programs, not all social services. If children are not being cared for, the state will still intervene.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  I thought BI would replace all social services. That's how its cost is justified?
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    Why is it justified when it replaces all, but not when it replaces some? It only needs to replace enough, not necessarily all.
    - PKop 10y ago
      Because all is more easily defined than some. Some is always some, even as the number of programs increases after the initial purge.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > I thought BI would replace all social services. Most proponents of UBI see it as, at least eventually, replacing some range of existing government means- and/or behavior-tested benefit programs and, possibly, some age- or disability-tested ones (in the US, most advocates would probably include, at a minimum, EITC, General Assistance programs, SNAP, TANF, Section 8 housing subsidies; some would also include Child Tax Credit, Tuition and Student Loan related credits and deductions, Medicaid, Medicare, and/or Social Security.) I've never heard any advocate argue that it would replace all social services.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I think there is not any one set of concepts that can be called basic income. Anyway, if people really are proposing that the state should give money away because then there is no need to protect children from bad parents, that's pretty stupid.
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    OF course not. Money can't stop adults from abusing children, or each other. Money only fixed money problems. We don't have Child Protective Services because parents are poor; we have them because some people are assholes. Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich.
    - wang_li 10y ago
      > Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich. What welfare programs for the rich? The rich pay for everything. The bottom 60% net a negative ten thousand dollars. The next 20% break even (~$1000/year paid), and the top 20% pay out the nose. ETA: Go read the report for yourselves: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49440 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49440
      - odbol_ 10y ago
        For example, Walmart makes so much in government subsidies and tax breaks, and they pay their employees so little that their employees have to live off food stamps. The Waltons (owners of Walmart), are one of the richest families in the U.S. Pretty easy to see the connection.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    All payment social services, but not those that are doing enforcement activities. Replacing college loans, food stamps, welfare, etc. will save quite enough particularly if you pair it with actual fraud prosecution and verifying identity.
  - chongli 10y ago
    Child protective services are not social welfare, they're law enforcement. If they were merely social services you could turn them away at the door. You can't. If you try that, they come back with the police and a court order.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    I'm a foster parent. BI will most certainly NOT eliminate the need for me. It's not about being poor. It's about not taking proper care of your children.
  - jpindar 10y ago
    Financial benefits != social services
GauntletWizard 10y ago
We theoretically already have Child Protective Services to take children away in that case. Child abuse includes "[failing to] provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care or supervision." On the other hand, there's the darwinist approach...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vonmoltke 10y ago
Short of internment camps, how does any welfare/safety net program address this?
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Food stamps? After-school programs?
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    Food stamp administration has gotten better over the past 10 - 15 years, but as someone else in this discussion pointed out it is still fairly easy to turn food assistance into cash if you want to. After-school programs only work if the kid actually goes to them.
- DawkinsGawd 10y ago
  Subsidized housing, day care, etc? Food stamps aren't a great example because you can sell them. You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. You can't sell a service.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. People sublease housing units without permission (and even outright illegally, even before considering rental contract limits) all the time. This includes units that are subject to one form or another of public support, whether its rent control or section 8. So, yes, you absolutely can sell (as for Food Stamp benefits, usually at a value less than the subsidy) the benefit you receive from a housing voucher.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  For example, providing free breakfast & lunch in schools addresses malnutrition of poor children much better than providing the same resources indirectly through their families, especially in various cases of dysfunctional alcoholic parents.
jimrandomh 10y ago
The US has a separate set of social services that deals with protecting children from abuse and neglect, which handles such cases. Basic income can't fully replace that because not all of what it does is about poverty, so don't expect them to go away if basic income is adopted.
Manishearth 10y ago
This can happen when the income is earned, too. And there are independent safety nets for it.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> "Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty. Seems to me that with a universal unconditional benefit that is sufficient for adequate support of both parents and children (which, incidentally, I don't see as likely in any early-phase UBI, though over time it would hopefully grow to that level), failure to provide adequate support for children is, without exception, culpable neglect; interventions to address such neglect exist and are outside of the scope of the public benefit programs UBI would replace (though, if children are counted as beneficiaries with the benefits flowing to their legal guardian, you've dramatically simplified some aspects of the administration of those programs, as well, with a UBI.)
- blowski 10y ago
  In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'. In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need. As a result, children die in horrible circumstances. So the question is a good one, and can't be answered with 'tough shit' quite that easily.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'. With a mature UBI, there's still certainly room for cases where there is ambiguity over whether culpability of the form represented by a criminal prosecution for abuse/neglect exists, but a lot less room for ambiguity (at least, compared to now) over whether there is a sufficient failure of basic parental duty to justify intervention to ensure the material adequacy of care for children. > In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need. That's definitely true in the US as well. I don't disagree that these services need to be reformed and reprioritized, independently of the nature of the public benefit system. But the problem with beneficiaries (parents or otherwise) blowing or trading their benefits without meeting their and/or dependents material needs exists independently of the nature of the public benefit system -- its quite clearly a feature of the status quo system -- so its not really an argument for or against any particular public benefit structure.
goda90 10y ago
I've brought up this idea before. Have part of the UBI of children go into a fund that they can then access at 18 to use for schooling or whatever they please. With CPS helping with neglect cases while they are young, the child then isn't stuck in perpetual poverty, because at age 18 they will have savings and full UBI in hand to make their own life. The money not in the fund either is used responsibly for child rearing by the parents, or foster parents if it comes down to that.
- breischl 10y ago
  It's a laudable goal, but giving a bunch of (mostly) naive, uneducated kids a lump sum of cash is a recipe for disaster. There would instantly be an industry focused on parting them from that money, one that would be extremely profitable and mostly not related to education.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    We might call that industry the education industry. Giving kids lump sums and then convincing them to part ways with it for questionable ROI is already a massive problem.
    - breischl 10y ago
      Wait, we do that already? I don't recall getting any significant amounts of money when I graduated high school! I feel so cheated. Anyway, there does seem to be a problem with loaning kids lots of money and then parting them from it, but that's a different issue.
      - djrogers 10y ago
        You weren't given cash, but today kids are given an essentially unlimited amount of government backed loans to pay for school - the availability of which has caused education costs to skyrocket.
ygjb-dupe 10y ago
I think it becomes even more clear; when children living in poverty are living in a society where their basic needs are sufficiently provided for, you take away a great deal of the social stigma associated with engaging child protective services. If a parent can't function when the basics are provided, then teachers, neighbours, and family members will be less inclined to use the excuse "but times are tough, and that person is trying hard to be a good parent". IDK - I am inclined to think, having come from a broken home and having done community service for shoplifting food for me and my brother, if $parent (father in my case) can't get their shit together, the children would have been better off without them.
- knightofmars 10y ago
  Given your experience, what are your thoughts on being provided 3 full meals a day within the public school system? Context, I see arguing over the cost of various food programs that public schools provide. I come down on the side of "Yes, you should be guaranteeing kids are fed (minimally breakfast & lunch and if I had my way dinner too). Otherwise there's no way they're going to be able to focus on school." While the counter argument exists and is usually made from a financial standpoint, "Why should I have to pay taxes for other people's kids to get fed?" Which is, in my opinion, a short sighted viewpoint.
  - zanny 10y ago
    Socially, children are dependents. If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents. In the same way we find people guilty of animal cruelty all the time for the same reasons the same must be made of children. The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them, when we may or may not have macroeconomic desire to have more children at any given time (and that desire changes, at the society level, all the time). It is much more important to fix the actual problem - providing sufficient adoption and relocation systems to get kids out of dysfunctional households than to give them awful school cafeteria food and hope the problem goes away while ignoring it. Hunger is just a symptom of broader abuses that we should not just use state dollars to make go away temporarily. Having mentally and emotionally healthy fresh generations is probably the most valuable investment anyone can make.
phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
Michigander here. AFAIK, you can't just turn your Bridge card into cash. How does one purchase lottery tickets and drugs with welfare payments? The one way I can think of is hanging out with the high-school kids outside the liquor store and saying "I'll go buy you X if you go buy me lottery tickets and alcohol/go to your dealer and get me an O"
- phil21 10y ago
  The market for trading benefits for cash/services/products is quite robust in communities where it is the norm to be on them. I think you would be quite surprised - it's a very well developed shadow economy that has pretty well known "rule of thumb" exchange rates, money changers, runners, etc. This will pop up in any market that offers non-cash items of value.
  - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
    I think I would be too, which is why I asked. Do you have any concrete examples of such a market? I mean, I put one right in my comment. How else do you do this sort of thing? EDIT: I'm not trying to call you out, I just want to know how these things are done. Being on HN, I've seen stolen credit card marketplaces and things like that. Do people put their welfare payments on something like that? Do you have resources like that?
    - ufmace 10y ago
      What would a concrete example look like to you? They don't do these things on the internet or with apps, it's all face-to-face and word of mouth. I wouldn't bet on there being any academic studies of it either. Likely all we'll ever have is personal anecdotes from people who have been involved in these communities and somehow ended up spending much more time on the internet than is the norm there.
      - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
        Someone else pointed out googling "tide as currency", and that opened my eyes. It made me realize that people doing this are working with pointers, not values.
ZenoArrow 10y ago
The payments could be made weekly. That way if someone was irresponsible and blew their basic income on non-essentials they would only need to survive on whatever they had left for a week. Also, there would still be a role for social services in getting kids out of harms way if their parents couldn't look after them, but basic income would be sorted out separately, without using means-based testing.
Yhippa 10y ago
Just thinking of this on the fly but could you have certain things that you cannot spend BI dollars on like this? Or after layering all these restrictions you've essentially recreated the previous system?
morgante 10y ago
If you blow your guaranteed income on vices, you are unfit to be a parent. I see no reason such parents should keep their children.
- xchaotic 10y ago
  So you just give money to people with no strings attached, and when they spend it however they like, you take their kids away. That is pure evil mastermind, a bit like imperial British did with Aboriginals in Australia.
  - morgante 10y ago
    I don't see how you can possibly consider that evil. What's evil is taking money to gamble instead of making sure your children have food. If they have the means (thanks to basic income) to provide for their children and still choose not to, how can you possibly argue that person is a fit parent?
knodi123 10y ago
"tough shit" sucks when your parents blow all their regular income, and their foodstamps, and still leave their children in poverty. what part of the fact that money was handed out changes things?

maxerickson 10y ago

It would replace welfare programs, not all social services. If children are not being cared for, the state will still intervene.

eanzenberg 10y ago
I thought BI would replace all social services. That's how its cost is justified?
- Manishearth 10y ago
  Why is it justified when it replaces all, but not when it replaces some? It only needs to replace enough, not necessarily all.
  - PKop 10y ago
    Because all is more easily defined than some. Some is always some, even as the number of programs increases after the initial purge.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > I thought BI would replace all social services. Most proponents of UBI see it as, at least eventually, replacing some range of existing government means- and/or behavior-tested benefit programs and, possibly, some age- or disability-tested ones (in the US, most advocates would probably include, at a minimum, EITC, General Assistance programs, SNAP, TANF, Section 8 housing subsidies; some would also include Child Tax Credit, Tuition and Student Loan related credits and deductions, Medicaid, Medicare, and/or Social Security.) I've never heard any advocate argue that it would replace all social services.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I think there is not any one set of concepts that can be called basic income. Anyway, if people really are proposing that the state should give money away because then there is no need to protect children from bad parents, that's pretty stupid.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  OF course not. Money can't stop adults from abusing children, or each other. Money only fixed money problems. We don't have Child Protective Services because parents are poor; we have them because some people are assholes. Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich.
  - wang_li 10y ago
    > Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich. What welfare programs for the rich? The rich pay for everything. The bottom 60% net a negative ten thousand dollars. The next 20% break even (~$1000/year paid), and the top 20% pay out the nose. ETA: Go read the report for yourselves: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49440 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49440
    - odbol_ 10y ago
      For example, Walmart makes so much in government subsidies and tax breaks, and they pay their employees so little that their employees have to live off food stamps. The Waltons (owners of Walmart), are one of the richest families in the U.S. Pretty easy to see the connection.
- protomyth 10y ago
  All payment social services, but not those that are doing enforcement activities. Replacing college loans, food stamps, welfare, etc. will save quite enough particularly if you pair it with actual fraud prosecution and verifying identity.
- chongli 10y ago
  Child protective services are not social welfare, they're law enforcement. If they were merely social services you could turn them away at the door. You can't. If you try that, they come back with the police and a court order.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I'm a foster parent. BI will most certainly NOT eliminate the need for me. It's not about being poor. It's about not taking proper care of your children.
- jpindar 10y ago
  Financial benefits != social services

GauntletWizard 10y ago

We theoretically already have Child Protective Services to take children away in that case. Child abuse includes "[failing to] provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care or supervision." On the other hand, there's the darwinist approach...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vonmoltke 10y ago

Short of internment camps, how does any welfare/safety net program address this?

eanzenberg 10y ago
Food stamps? After-school programs?
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Food stamp administration has gotten better over the past 10 - 15 years, but as someone else in this discussion pointed out it is still fairly easy to turn food assistance into cash if you want to. After-school programs only work if the kid actually goes to them.
DawkinsGawd 10y ago
Subsidized housing, day care, etc? Food stamps aren't a great example because you can sell them. You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. You can't sell a service.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. People sublease housing units without permission (and even outright illegally, even before considering rental contract limits) all the time. This includes units that are subject to one form or another of public support, whether its rent control or section 8. So, yes, you absolutely can sell (as for Food Stamp benefits, usually at a value less than the subsidy) the benefit you receive from a housing voucher.
PeterisP 10y ago
For example, providing free breakfast & lunch in schools addresses malnutrition of poor children much better than providing the same resources indirectly through their families, especially in various cases of dysfunctional alcoholic parents.

jimrandomh 10y ago

The US has a separate set of social services that deals with protecting children from abuse and neglect, which handles such cases. Basic income can't fully replace that because not all of what it does is about poverty, so don't expect them to go away if basic income is adopted.

Manishearth 10y ago

This can happen when the income is earned, too. And there are independent safety nets for it.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> "Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty. Seems to me that with a universal unconditional benefit that is sufficient for adequate support of both parents and children (which, incidentally, I don't see as likely in any early-phase UBI, though over time it would hopefully grow to that level), failure to provide adequate support for children is, without exception, culpable neglect; interventions to address such neglect exist and are outside of the scope of the public benefit programs UBI would replace (though, if children are counted as beneficiaries with the benefits flowing to their legal guardian, you've dramatically simplified some aspects of the administration of those programs, as well, with a UBI.)

blowski 10y ago
In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'. In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need. As a result, children die in horrible circumstances. So the question is a good one, and can't be answered with 'tough shit' quite that easily.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'. With a mature UBI, there's still certainly room for cases where there is ambiguity over whether culpability of the form represented by a criminal prosecution for abuse/neglect exists, but a lot less room for ambiguity (at least, compared to now) over whether there is a sufficient failure of basic parental duty to justify intervention to ensure the material adequacy of care for children. > In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need. That's definitely true in the US as well. I don't disagree that these services need to be reformed and reprioritized, independently of the nature of the public benefit system. But the problem with beneficiaries (parents or otherwise) blowing or trading their benefits without meeting their and/or dependents material needs exists independently of the nature of the public benefit system -- its quite clearly a feature of the status quo system -- so its not really an argument for or against any particular public benefit structure.

goda90 10y ago

I've brought up this idea before. Have part of the UBI of children go into a fund that they can then access at 18 to use for schooling or whatever they please. With CPS helping with neglect cases while they are young, the child then isn't stuck in perpetual poverty, because at age 18 they will have savings and full UBI in hand to make their own life. The money not in the fund either is used responsibly for child rearing by the parents, or foster parents if it comes down to that.

breischl 10y ago
It's a laudable goal, but giving a bunch of (mostly) naive, uneducated kids a lump sum of cash is a recipe for disaster. There would instantly be an industry focused on parting them from that money, one that would be extremely profitable and mostly not related to education.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  We might call that industry the education industry. Giving kids lump sums and then convincing them to part ways with it for questionable ROI is already a massive problem.
  - breischl 10y ago
    Wait, we do that already? I don't recall getting any significant amounts of money when I graduated high school! I feel so cheated. Anyway, there does seem to be a problem with loaning kids lots of money and then parting them from it, but that's a different issue.
    - djrogers 10y ago
      You weren't given cash, but today kids are given an essentially unlimited amount of government backed loans to pay for school - the availability of which has caused education costs to skyrocket.

ygjb-dupe 10y ago

I think it becomes even more clear; when children living in poverty are living in a society where their basic needs are sufficiently provided for, you take away a great deal of the social stigma associated with engaging child protective services. If a parent can't function when the basics are provided, then teachers, neighbours, and family members will be less inclined to use the excuse "but times are tough, and that person is trying hard to be a good parent". IDK - I am inclined to think, having come from a broken home and having done community service for shoplifting food for me and my brother, if $parent (father in my case) can't get their shit together, the children would have been better off without them.

knightofmars 10y ago
Given your experience, what are your thoughts on being provided 3 full meals a day within the public school system? Context, I see arguing over the cost of various food programs that public schools provide. I come down on the side of "Yes, you should be guaranteeing kids are fed (minimally breakfast & lunch and if I had my way dinner too). Otherwise there's no way they're going to be able to focus on school." While the counter argument exists and is usually made from a financial standpoint, "Why should I have to pay taxes for other people's kids to get fed?" Which is, in my opinion, a short sighted viewpoint.
- zanny 10y ago
  Socially, children are dependents. If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents. In the same way we find people guilty of animal cruelty all the time for the same reasons the same must be made of children. The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them, when we may or may not have macroeconomic desire to have more children at any given time (and that desire changes, at the society level, all the time). It is much more important to fix the actual problem - providing sufficient adoption and relocation systems to get kids out of dysfunctional households than to give them awful school cafeteria food and hope the problem goes away while ignoring it. Hunger is just a symptom of broader abuses that we should not just use state dollars to make go away temporarily. Having mentally and emotionally healthy fresh generations is probably the most valuable investment anyone can make.

phjesusthatguy3 10y ago

Michigander here. AFAIK, you can't just turn your Bridge card into cash. How does one purchase lottery tickets and drugs with welfare payments? The one way I can think of is hanging out with the high-school kids outside the liquor store and saying "I'll go buy you X if you go buy me lottery tickets and alcohol/go to your dealer and get me an O"

phil21 10y ago
The market for trading benefits for cash/services/products is quite robust in communities where it is the norm to be on them. I think you would be quite surprised - it's a very well developed shadow economy that has pretty well known "rule of thumb" exchange rates, money changers, runners, etc. This will pop up in any market that offers non-cash items of value.
- phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
  I think I would be too, which is why I asked. Do you have any concrete examples of such a market? I mean, I put one right in my comment. How else do you do this sort of thing? EDIT: I'm not trying to call you out, I just want to know how these things are done. Being on HN, I've seen stolen credit card marketplaces and things like that. Do people put their welfare payments on something like that? Do you have resources like that?
  - ufmace 10y ago
    What would a concrete example look like to you? They don't do these things on the internet or with apps, it's all face-to-face and word of mouth. I wouldn't bet on there being any academic studies of it either. Likely all we'll ever have is personal anecdotes from people who have been involved in these communities and somehow ended up spending much more time on the internet than is the norm there.
    - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
      Someone else pointed out googling "tide as currency", and that opened my eyes. It made me realize that people doing this are working with pointers, not values.

ZenoArrow 10y ago

The payments could be made weekly. That way if someone was irresponsible and blew their basic income on non-essentials they would only need to survive on whatever they had left for a week. Also, there would still be a role for social services in getting kids out of harms way if their parents couldn't look after them, but basic income would be sorted out separately, without using means-based testing.

Yhippa 10y ago

Just thinking of this on the fly but could you have certain things that you cannot spend BI dollars on like this? Or after layering all these restrictions you've essentially recreated the previous system?

morgante 10y ago

If you blow your guaranteed income on vices, you are unfit to be a parent. I see no reason such parents should keep their children.

xchaotic 10y ago
So you just give money to people with no strings attached, and when they spend it however they like, you take their kids away. That is pure evil mastermind, a bit like imperial British did with Aboriginals in Australia.
- morgante 10y ago
  I don't see how you can possibly consider that evil. What's evil is taking money to gamble instead of making sure your children have food. If they have the means (thanks to basic income) to provide for their children and still choose not to, how can you possibly argue that person is a fit parent?

knodi123 10y ago

"tough shit" sucks when your parents blow all their regular income, and their foodstamps, and still leave their children in poverty. what part of the fact that money was handed out changes things?