6 ms·

As a Canadian entrepreneur I worry that mincome/basic income will serve to knock the wind out of the sails of many innovators and entrepreneurs who, like me, ar

by err4nt 10y ago

As a Canadian entrepreneur I worry that mincome/basic income will serve to knock the wind out of the sails of many innovators and entrepreneurs who, like me, are currently DRIVEN to work hard, research, push the industry along and crank up competition. I would much, much rather work hard, earn more money, and feed my neighbour - than have no hope of digging myself out of my situation no matter hos hard I worked, being taxed, and then myself being supported by taxes I lost after they've been spread around. Rigt now I see a need and want to help by helping to educate entrepreneurs on how to make more money, when I see somebody trying really hard to succeed that makes me WANT to invest anything I can in their success. But the moment people want to pillage my profits Im finding greener pastures. I dont think Im alone in this - if mincome is a big tent that relies on a few strong tentpoles to hold it up and cover everybody - those tentpoles are hard working entrepreneurs. If mincome ever becomes a reality those tentpoles will leave and what was a tent sheltering and protecting people will collapse and suffocate all left inside.

ck425 10y ago
What of the arguments that it would encourage entrepreneur by giving them more of a safety net to try new ventures? Additionally most studies suggest Basic Income won't be that much more expense and will save heavily on administration costs, so the tax aspect is minimal.
ep103 10y ago
Most of the reports I've seen have stated that actually, it works the other way around. That the vast majority of people who go into entrepreneurship only do so if they have money to fall back on, one way or another, should their business fail. So by that logic, basic income should actually significantly increase the likelihood of entrepreneurship, because while mincome will still be low enough that people will want to work, it will be high enough to remove the barrier to entrepreneurship of: "but if this idea doesn't work out, I won't be able to eat"
- pmalynin 10y ago
  I think there was a bit on NPR a few months ago that discussed the idea that having a fallback will make you work and try less exactly for the same reason. I think having the "cornered animal" type of drive goes a long way.
  - erpellan 10y ago
    By that logic productivity in all industries could be improved by introducing flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff. What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?
    - pmalynin 10y ago
      You are right -- that's how we built the Pyramids and America pre civil war, and look how far that got us. If you want interpret my response at the extremes I'm more that glad to dance.
      - ch4s3 10y ago
        The pyramids were built with corvee labor as a tax scheme and antebellum America relied on slavery, even the industrial free states utilized cheap raw materials like cotton produced in slave states. Are you suggesting that compelling people to work by force is an appropriate modern economic system?
        pmalynin 10y ago
        It's just as appropriate as 'flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff' Hence my point.
    - derekp7 10y ago
      Some companies do this to a lesser degree -- every year they fire the bottom 10% of performers -- also known as stacked ranking.
- randall 10y ago
  Another data point: I became an entrepreneur while my wife worked fulltime. Many don't have this option.
  - err4nt 10y ago
    Another data point: I was forced into it by economic circumstances (bills and no job). Literally EVERYBODY has this option.
  - clarry 10y ago
    I want to become an enterpreneur, but can't afford it. I'm not interested in "make money fast" schemes just for the sake of making money. I have ideas, things I want to try to build, but building my product would not happen overnight no matter how f*ing hard I work. More likely a minimum of anywhere between 6 and 12 months is required before it's feasible to start selling the product, and from there on it could take long before the income becomes a steady livelihood. I don't have the money to pay the bills for that long, I can't afford to become an enterpreneur. BI could change my life overnight.
    - randall 10y ago
      I disagree that you can't afford it. I've learned how that if you can't make a business that's generating 10k / month in 3 months it's probably the wrong market. You could keep iterating through markets until one of them sticks. That's what I'd recommend, anyway.
      - clarry 10y ago
        I'm not saying it's impossible for me to start generating money in 3 months. But merely generating money is not of interest to me. There are certain things I want to build, things I'm interested in, and these aren't things anyone's going to ship in three months starting from scratch.
    - err4nt 10y ago
      Try freelance, or contract work. You can be employed for yourself and making money right away without having to build a product or a business first. That's still running your own business and being an entrepreneur! Switching from salary to contract can be a big stepping stone for creating the career and life you want :D
- err4nt 10y ago
  Maybe on paper, or in theory. In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. That fire that got started when I had bills and no money is still burning strong today. But I worry if theres too mucb cushion perhaps I would have not hurt as bad, and ever achieved what Ive accomplished since then.
  - Applejinx 10y ago
    Then make way for someone who is otherwise motivated, by something other than fire. Your personal drive to get money and succeed has nothing to do with your capacity to provide goods and services: heck, it might be causing you to cut corners, cheat people, and otherwise push so hard that you're harming your longterm prospects. If you're some sort of titanic corporate entity, you're almost compelled to deliver constantly growing earnings for the next quarter. If you're a sole proprietorship but driven by these deeply personal motivations, you might be stuck in similarly self-defeating attitudes. Compare to Elon Musk, who barely seems to register the concept of money and is only interested in the specific things he's doing. Without the money, he'd be much the same person, I think.
  - sigmar 10y ago
    >it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today Canada has had health care provided to you since 1984. So to say you have "no safety net" is factually wrong. Did the existence of public health care make you decide to leave and build your business somewhere else? It seems it did not.
    - err4nt 10y ago
      Health care doesn't pay the electric bills. Health care doesn't buy groceries. I am glad if I went to the doctor I could have been seen without a cost to me. I didn't NEED a doctor, I needed food to eat, and money to pay bills to keep collections off my back.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. Canada is a first-world country, and like all first-world safety nets, hasn't had "no safety net" for quite a long time (even the US, which has a fairly weak safety net for a first world country, especially given its relative per capita wealth and income, has had significant social safety nets for a long time.)
wirt 10y ago
HN has finally gone full Randian.
sanxiyn 10y ago
This seems to be against redistribution, not basic income. Basic income is "how" of redistribution. "How much" part is very much orthogonal. Are you okay as long as basic income does not increase amount of redistribution, or do you have some specific objection to basic income as a method of redistribution?
- err4nt 10y ago
  Using the government to redistribute money to those in need is like giving your right arm a blood transfusion from your own left arm, but spilling 2/3 of the blood on the way over. I strongly believe in charity and social assistance, but its MY job, not the governments job to make sure my family and neighbours are fed and safe. Government needs to deal with national and international issues. What happens to my neighbour is MY responsibility and I believe citizens can organize and redistribute resources for muuuuuch cheaper than a government can.
troncheadle 10y ago
Alright John Gault. If we're talking nation level, your startup is not a 'tentpole.' How does your market cap compare to GE, Google, Amazon, Lockheed? Those are redwoods, and there are plenty of those. You're a maple sapling, there are plenty of those too. You're doing that thing where the middle class rebels against their own interests by positioning said interests as the interests of the working class, because they see themselves as soooo much more driven, and hardworking -- get real, plenty of people living in poverty with the same hustle as you, they just grew up on the other side of Toronto without access to the same resources. Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it.
- psycr 10y ago
  Opportunity is not evenly distributed, yes. But neither is skill. > Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it. What's the name of your business?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > Opportunity is not evenly distributed, yes. But neither is skill. Skill can be learned with enough drive. Opportunity is required for success, there's plenty of smart, skilled people in the world who are stuck in the workforce because of lack of it. Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers" is a good read on the effect opportunity (or the lack thereof) has on our lives. It can come off as pretty over simplified and anecdotal so don't take my praise of the book as me touting it as something it's not, but it's worth reading (and I rarely say that of required texts from courses I've taken).
  - troncheadle 10y ago
    That's just willfully ignorant. For majority of people, differences in opportunity are SO much more influential in their lives than differences in skill or intelligence. Consider three kids -- one is rich, suburban white, IQ is 170. The other is rich, suburban white, IQ is 75. The third is poor, inner city black, IQ 170. In this situation, which lives do you think look most similar to one another? If you answered 'obviously the white kids', then great! You get it. If you answered 'the two kids with an IQ of 170' then you need to spend some time in the real world. Let's add kid #4 -- poor, black, inner city, IQ 75. If we want to compare across QoL, opportunity, really almost any metric, we're going to group across socio-economic lines, not IQ. If you find yourself thinking 'Well what if that young black kid catches a lucky break and gets out of poverty' you're almost there -- the need to catch a lucky break to escape is a defining aspect of poverty and it works against even the most naturally skilled people. The amount of skill needed to overcome that lack in opportunity makes it silly to bring skill into the equation when talking about opportunity. Really, come on. That kind of 'they can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps' is ignorant enough to sound like dog whistling.
kohanz 10y ago
Sorry, but this is the same argument we see time and time again against higher taxes (not just Mincome). We saw it in 2008 with "Joe the Plumber". Some entrepreneurs are driven by maximizing profit margins and some aren't. If your opinion was widely shared, there would be almost no entrepreneurial success stories in countries with a much more socialist approach than even Canada (e.g. throughout Europe). I am a Canadian entrepreneur too, but I love this country and that has to do with a lot more than just how much tax I pay. If they were to raise taxes for good reasons, it wouldn't cause me to uproot my family and leave.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- err4nt 10y ago
  If they give taxes a bump of course, but what if they radically rearrange taxes. There are many voices i hear who believe people above certain limits should be taxed 90% or more, and some cutoff limits Ive heard have been 250k, or even 100k. If you suddenly fell into a 90% taxation bracket would you still be just as happy as today?
  - mordocai 10y ago
    You do realize that, assuming taxes work like they do today, it'd be 90% on the amount over 250k/100k not 90% over the total income? Assuming you realize it, your point must be that only having 10% effective increase in income after you reach the threshold is demotivating, and I would agree.
    - err4nt 10y ago
      So a bracket like that which stifles motivation would absolutely hurt industry, economy, and innovation. Its like youre in a race against every other business and country in the world, and you say: "hey, lets put these leg cuffs on! No everybody has a 3 foot stride wehn walking, so its no fair for you to walk fast. These shackles will only restrict your movement if you succeed too much and are able to take bigger strides. The most important thing is to reduce the gaps between winners and losers!" In that race, do you think you stand a fighting chance against unshackled competitors?
aleksei 10y ago
So what's your take on universal healthcare? Do you resent having to pay for the treatment of others? I get that increased taxes are offputting, but what's your alternative to making sure people aren't forced to live on the street, taking into account future loss of work due to automation? And what makes you believe that mincome would deter people from innovation?
- err4nt 10y ago
  Its not about an increased tax ration, its about entitlement and motivation. Would you feel better giving $1000 to charity, or having $500 stolen from you?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
huherto 10y ago
As an entrepreneur, you need consumers to succeed. If there is a healthy middle class (assuming basic income helps) your businesses has better chances.
milesvp 10y ago
I'm not sure you're worries are about the right things. As an entreprenuer I highly value safety nets. The odds of failing are so high that without things like publicly supported bankruptcy I don't think I'd ever risk going into the kind of debt necessary to succeed. So I imagine minimum income to be a huge boon entreprenuership. As an economist however, I may be in agreement. I have some concerns about the inflationary effects of a minimum income. I have a strong suspicion that goods strongly associated with low income will tend to get more expensive, negating much of the benefit of a minimum income. And I'm also concerned about the positive feedback in the political system where the majority continue to vote for increases to their stipends uncontrollably. All in all I'm not sure which is going to have the bigger effect long term on the economy.
- VLM 10y ago
  So ... one problem is a long term tanking in the velocity of money. Can't make commissions or skim off money that's not spent. No matter how fast or slow the revenue comes in, the fixed debt, is fixed. Its very hard to argue that even if every penny goes into the pocket of a couple New York Bankers, that there won't be more activity along the way than if nothing gets spent. Something interesting to consider is there are goods and economic fields where the population has been trained to say they'll pay anything for X, Y, or Z. Medical care, Education, Real Estate, whatever. Given that we have generations of explosive inflation in those fields way beyond normal inflation rate, I don't think changing the base income would change much in the long run. If health care costs always in the past and forever in the future until rapidly approaching system collapse will increase by 25% annually, then giving a poor person $10K/yr will have basically no impact in the long run. Like arguments I had with my wife about Peapod grocery delivery vs shopping myself... the difference is (was) approximately six months of food inflation price, and I don't enjoy shopping, and I intend to continue eating six months in the future, so I don't care if it costs a little more today, its not really changing anything in my life financially. Another interesting thing to think about is the old Dr Phil line about money problems being unable to be fixed with money. So giving 10K to poor people means in practice its all going to disappear with no improvement in standard of living, just like every other handout in the history of humanity. Such that there's almost no point in talking about that economic segment of the population WRT mincome. And its not much money for rich people, so ignore them too. mincome is a purely middle class play, its the only group that can experience any change.
Applejinx 10y ago
As an American entrepreneur I've run a small business for nearly ten years, over that time earning nearly a quarter of a million dollars (yeah, not quite Facebook). I've observed that my income closely tracks a Fed metric having to do with disposable income of working class citizens (almost perfectly tracks a metric of increases/decreases in that labor share) As such I'm finding your attitude impractical. Why do I, as a business owner, care whether you personally think some third person is a try-hard eager beaver? If you yourself don't want to work, you should indeed leave. I'm not at all sure you understand the math of this. Personally, I'm all for the poorer classes having spending money, because as near as I can work out, sometimes they will spend it on me. When they starve, I starve. No amount of exceptionalism will change that simple fact, and if you're honest about the math you see that the whole point is getting rid of 'a few strong tentpoles'. Those guys are distorting the system and SHOULD leave. Celebrating them is a fool's game.

by err4nt 10y ago

ck425 10y ago

What of the arguments that it would encourage entrepreneur by giving them more of a safety net to try new ventures? Additionally most studies suggest Basic Income won't be that much more expense and will save heavily on administration costs, so the tax aspect is minimal.

ep103 10y ago

Most of the reports I've seen have stated that actually, it works the other way around. That the vast majority of people who go into entrepreneurship only do so if they have money to fall back on, one way or another, should their business fail. So by that logic, basic income should actually significantly increase the likelihood of entrepreneurship, because while mincome will still be low enough that people will want to work, it will be high enough to remove the barrier to entrepreneurship of: "but if this idea doesn't work out, I won't be able to eat"

pmalynin 10y ago
I think there was a bit on NPR a few months ago that discussed the idea that having a fallback will make you work and try less exactly for the same reason. I think having the "cornered animal" type of drive goes a long way.
- erpellan 10y ago
  By that logic productivity in all industries could be improved by introducing flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff. What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?
  - pmalynin 10y ago
    You are right -- that's how we built the Pyramids and America pre civil war, and look how far that got us. If you want interpret my response at the extremes I'm more that glad to dance.
    - ch4s3 10y ago
      The pyramids were built with corvee labor as a tax scheme and antebellum America relied on slavery, even the industrial free states utilized cheap raw materials like cotton produced in slave states. Are you suggesting that compelling people to work by force is an appropriate modern economic system?
      - pmalynin 10y ago
        It's just as appropriate as 'flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff' Hence my point.
  - derekp7 10y ago
    Some companies do this to a lesser degree -- every year they fire the bottom 10% of performers -- also known as stacked ranking.
randall 10y ago
Another data point: I became an entrepreneur while my wife worked fulltime. Many don't have this option.
- err4nt 10y ago
  Another data point: I was forced into it by economic circumstances (bills and no job). Literally EVERYBODY has this option.
- clarry 10y ago
  I want to become an enterpreneur, but can't afford it. I'm not interested in "make money fast" schemes just for the sake of making money. I have ideas, things I want to try to build, but building my product would not happen overnight no matter how f*ing hard I work. More likely a minimum of anywhere between 6 and 12 months is required before it's feasible to start selling the product, and from there on it could take long before the income becomes a steady livelihood. I don't have the money to pay the bills for that long, I can't afford to become an enterpreneur. BI could change my life overnight.
  - randall 10y ago
    I disagree that you can't afford it. I've learned how that if you can't make a business that's generating 10k / month in 3 months it's probably the wrong market. You could keep iterating through markets until one of them sticks. That's what I'd recommend, anyway.
    - clarry 10y ago
      I'm not saying it's impossible for me to start generating money in 3 months. But merely generating money is not of interest to me. There are certain things I want to build, things I'm interested in, and these aren't things anyone's going to ship in three months starting from scratch.
  - err4nt 10y ago
    Try freelance, or contract work. You can be employed for yourself and making money right away without having to build a product or a business first. That's still running your own business and being an entrepreneur! Switching from salary to contract can be a big stepping stone for creating the career and life you want :D
err4nt 10y ago
Maybe on paper, or in theory. In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. That fire that got started when I had bills and no money is still burning strong today. But I worry if theres too mucb cushion perhaps I would have not hurt as bad, and ever achieved what Ive accomplished since then.
- Applejinx 10y ago
  Then make way for someone who is otherwise motivated, by something other than fire. Your personal drive to get money and succeed has nothing to do with your capacity to provide goods and services: heck, it might be causing you to cut corners, cheat people, and otherwise push so hard that you're harming your longterm prospects. If you're some sort of titanic corporate entity, you're almost compelled to deliver constantly growing earnings for the next quarter. If you're a sole proprietorship but driven by these deeply personal motivations, you might be stuck in similarly self-defeating attitudes. Compare to Elon Musk, who barely seems to register the concept of money and is only interested in the specific things he's doing. Without the money, he'd be much the same person, I think.
- sigmar 10y ago
  >it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today Canada has had health care provided to you since 1984. So to say you have "no safety net" is factually wrong. Did the existence of public health care make you decide to leave and build your business somewhere else? It seems it did not.
  - err4nt 10y ago
    Health care doesn't pay the electric bills. Health care doesn't buy groceries. I am glad if I went to the doctor I could have been seen without a cost to me. I didn't NEED a doctor, I needed food to eat, and money to pay bills to keep collections off my back.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > In my life I'm not ashamed to say it was the hunger of having nothing, no safety net, and having no job that STILL drives me today. Canada is a first-world country, and like all first-world safety nets, hasn't had "no safety net" for quite a long time (even the US, which has a fairly weak safety net for a first world country, especially given its relative per capita wealth and income, has had significant social safety nets for a long time.)

wirt 10y ago

HN has finally gone full Randian.

sanxiyn 10y ago

This seems to be against redistribution, not basic income. Basic income is "how" of redistribution. "How much" part is very much orthogonal. Are you okay as long as basic income does not increase amount of redistribution, or do you have some specific objection to basic income as a method of redistribution?

err4nt 10y ago
Using the government to redistribute money to those in need is like giving your right arm a blood transfusion from your own left arm, but spilling 2/3 of the blood on the way over. I strongly believe in charity and social assistance, but its MY job, not the governments job to make sure my family and neighbours are fed and safe. Government needs to deal with national and international issues. What happens to my neighbour is MY responsibility and I believe citizens can organize and redistribute resources for muuuuuch cheaper than a government can.

troncheadle 10y ago

Alright John Gault. If we're talking nation level, your startup is not a 'tentpole.' How does your market cap compare to GE, Google, Amazon, Lockheed? Those are redwoods, and there are plenty of those. You're a maple sapling, there are plenty of those too. You're doing that thing where the middle class rebels against their own interests by positioning said interests as the interests of the working class, because they see themselves as soooo much more driven, and hardworking -- get real, plenty of people living in poverty with the same hustle as you, they just grew up on the other side of Toronto without access to the same resources. Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it.

psycr 10y ago
Opportunity is not evenly distributed, yes. But neither is skill. > Basic income doesn't come off the backs of small business, and that is a silly reason to be so afraid of it. What's the name of your business?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > Opportunity is not evenly distributed, yes. But neither is skill. Skill can be learned with enough drive. Opportunity is required for success, there's plenty of smart, skilled people in the world who are stuck in the workforce because of lack of it. Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers" is a good read on the effect opportunity (or the lack thereof) has on our lives. It can come off as pretty over simplified and anecdotal so don't take my praise of the book as me touting it as something it's not, but it's worth reading (and I rarely say that of required texts from courses I've taken).
- troncheadle 10y ago
  That's just willfully ignorant. For majority of people, differences in opportunity are SO much more influential in their lives than differences in skill or intelligence. Consider three kids -- one is rich, suburban white, IQ is 170. The other is rich, suburban white, IQ is 75. The third is poor, inner city black, IQ 170. In this situation, which lives do you think look most similar to one another? If you answered 'obviously the white kids', then great! You get it. If you answered 'the two kids with an IQ of 170' then you need to spend some time in the real world. Let's add kid #4 -- poor, black, inner city, IQ 75. If we want to compare across QoL, opportunity, really almost any metric, we're going to group across socio-economic lines, not IQ. If you find yourself thinking 'Well what if that young black kid catches a lucky break and gets out of poverty' you're almost there -- the need to catch a lucky break to escape is a defining aspect of poverty and it works against even the most naturally skilled people. The amount of skill needed to overcome that lack in opportunity makes it silly to bring skill into the equation when talking about opportunity. Really, come on. That kind of 'they can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps' is ignorant enough to sound like dog whistling.

kohanz 10y ago

Sorry, but this is the same argument we see time and time again against higher taxes (not just Mincome). We saw it in 2008 with "Joe the Plumber". Some entrepreneurs are driven by maximizing profit margins and some aren't. If your opinion was widely shared, there would be almost no entrepreneurial success stories in countries with a much more socialist approach than even Canada (e.g. throughout Europe). I am a Canadian entrepreneur too, but I love this country and that has to do with a lot more than just how much tax I pay. If they were to raise taxes for good reasons, it wouldn't cause me to uproot my family and leave.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
err4nt 10y ago
If they give taxes a bump of course, but what if they radically rearrange taxes. There are many voices i hear who believe people above certain limits should be taxed 90% or more, and some cutoff limits Ive heard have been 250k, or even 100k. If you suddenly fell into a 90% taxation bracket would you still be just as happy as today?
- mordocai 10y ago
  You do realize that, assuming taxes work like they do today, it'd be 90% on the amount over 250k/100k not 90% over the total income? Assuming you realize it, your point must be that only having 10% effective increase in income after you reach the threshold is demotivating, and I would agree.
  - err4nt 10y ago
    So a bracket like that which stifles motivation would absolutely hurt industry, economy, and innovation. Its like youre in a race against every other business and country in the world, and you say: "hey, lets put these leg cuffs on! No everybody has a 3 foot stride wehn walking, so its no fair for you to walk fast. These shackles will only restrict your movement if you succeed too much and are able to take bigger strides. The most important thing is to reduce the gaps between winners and losers!" In that race, do you think you stand a fighting chance against unshackled competitors?

aleksei 10y ago

So what's your take on universal healthcare? Do you resent having to pay for the treatment of others? I get that increased taxes are offputting, but what's your alternative to making sure people aren't forced to live on the street, taking into account future loss of work due to automation? And what makes you believe that mincome would deter people from innovation?

err4nt 10y ago
Its not about an increased tax ration, its about entitlement and motivation. Would you feel better giving $1000 to charity, or having $500 stolen from you?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

huherto 10y ago

As an entrepreneur, you need consumers to succeed. If there is a healthy middle class (assuming basic income helps) your businesses has better chances.

milesvp 10y ago

I'm not sure you're worries are about the right things. As an entreprenuer I highly value safety nets. The odds of failing are so high that without things like publicly supported bankruptcy I don't think I'd ever risk going into the kind of debt necessary to succeed. So I imagine minimum income to be a huge boon entreprenuership. As an economist however, I may be in agreement. I have some concerns about the inflationary effects of a minimum income. I have a strong suspicion that goods strongly associated with low income will tend to get more expensive, negating much of the benefit of a minimum income. And I'm also concerned about the positive feedback in the political system where the majority continue to vote for increases to their stipends uncontrollably. All in all I'm not sure which is going to have the bigger effect long term on the economy.

VLM 10y ago
So ... one problem is a long term tanking in the velocity of money. Can't make commissions or skim off money that's not spent. No matter how fast or slow the revenue comes in, the fixed debt, is fixed. Its very hard to argue that even if every penny goes into the pocket of a couple New York Bankers, that there won't be more activity along the way than if nothing gets spent. Something interesting to consider is there are goods and economic fields where the population has been trained to say they'll pay anything for X, Y, or Z. Medical care, Education, Real Estate, whatever. Given that we have generations of explosive inflation in those fields way beyond normal inflation rate, I don't think changing the base income would change much in the long run. If health care costs always in the past and forever in the future until rapidly approaching system collapse will increase by 25% annually, then giving a poor person $10K/yr will have basically no impact in the long run. Like arguments I had with my wife about Peapod grocery delivery vs shopping myself... the difference is (was) approximately six months of food inflation price, and I don't enjoy shopping, and I intend to continue eating six months in the future, so I don't care if it costs a little more today, its not really changing anything in my life financially. Another interesting thing to think about is the old Dr Phil line about money problems being unable to be fixed with money. So giving 10K to poor people means in practice its all going to disappear with no improvement in standard of living, just like every other handout in the history of humanity. Such that there's almost no point in talking about that economic segment of the population WRT mincome. And its not much money for rich people, so ignore them too. mincome is a purely middle class play, its the only group that can experience any change.

Applejinx 10y ago

As an American entrepreneur I've run a small business for nearly ten years, over that time earning nearly a quarter of a million dollars (yeah, not quite Facebook). I've observed that my income closely tracks a Fed metric having to do with disposable income of working class citizens (almost perfectly tracks a metric of increases/decreases in that labor share) As such I'm finding your attitude impractical. Why do I, as a business owner, care whether you personally think some third person is a try-hard eager beaver? If you yourself don't want to work, you should indeed leave. I'm not at all sure you understand the math of this. Personally, I'm all for the poorer classes having spending money, because as near as I can work out, sometimes they will spend it on me. When they starve, I starve. No amount of exceptionalism will change that simple fact, and if you're honest about the math you see that the whole point is getting rid of 'a few strong tentpoles'. Those guys are distorting the system and SHOULD leave. Celebrating them is a fool's game.