11 ms·

"If we’re interested in social policies that are resilient I think the dignity problem, or the moral aspects of these policies are worth considering more closel

by IsaacL 10y ago

"If we’re interested in social policies that are resilient I think the dignity problem, or the moral aspects of these policies are worth considering more closely." I certainly agree the moral aspects are worth considering. No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. The current welfare systems are a messy parcel of compromises, but they at least acknowledge that people have to demonstrate need to be the recipients of government handouts. Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income.

duaneb 10y ago
> Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. Have you witnessed this?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 1123581321 10y ago
  I have seen it in every discussion. Some of the forms of evasion include: * focusing on the wealth/profit generated by a surge in entrepreneurship from the millions suddenly motivated to start successful businesses * focusing on the unlimited wealth created by robots/asteroids/solar in space which will fund any program we wish * focusing on how we can't afford not to try BI, i.e., the default system is a financial failure anyway so comparison is pointless * taking the position that BI is only replacing current welfare programs (until it's pointed out that current programs would not support anyone if spread around) Occasionally, someone will admit that they are proposing a 100% tax rate, which is about what such a system requires. Even more occasionally, it's admitted that every country must implement a 100% tax rate at once to avoid mass emigration of anyone earning more than ~$20k/year.
  - xienze 10y ago
    Don't forget lots of incorrect assumptions about human nature, namely that there won't be a large, permanent underclass created by BI and that the people actually paying for BI will be more than happy to do so.
    - fweespeech 10y ago
      > Don't forget lots of incorrect assumptions about human nature, namely that there won't be a large, permanent underclass created by BI and that the people actually paying for BI will be more than happy to do so. I think almost everyone would want to work on $13-$15k a year. However, they'd work part time. And tbh, for our current welfare system, that is essentially what happens already. They work minimum wage jobs, part time, on call.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    The most common evasion is in the handwaving around the size of the proposed UBI check. Total US tax revenue per person comes out to just over $20000/year, that's $1666/month (in comparison, a 40 hour workweek at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, no holidays, comes out at $15080/year or $1256/month). If you abolished every single government program and fire every single government employee, right from the DoD down to your local playground, from congress to the schools, never mind every single existing welfare program, assuming that tax revenue somehow managed to stay at the same level, what with no IRS to collect it and 22 million newly unemployed public sector workers, you could barely afford to pay a UBI at the minimum wage, never mind attending to the people who might legitimately need more help (also, no roads or schools). UBI is either going to require cuts of a depth never proposed, much less enacted, in any western country, ever -- or be too small (perhaps a hundred dollars a month) to live up to its promises.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      Or you raise taxes for the rich 1%.
      - 10y ago
- IsaacL 10y ago
  Yes. The huge majority of pro-UBI writings I see talk up the benefits in great detail but either ignore, or misrepresent, the costs. Lots of naive idealists support UBI - but I also frequently see UBI advocates who purport to be "evidence-based" and "rational", and yet who fail to provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how they propose to fund their scheme. Instead they do 1 of 3 things: 1. Provide evidence countering non-essential arguments, e.g., will basic income recipients be motivated to work? This implies they've addressed the opposing side, while simultaneously ignoring the essential counter-argument, i.e., where the money comes from. 2. Hand-wave about reduced administration costs. (This is nowhere near sufficient to cover the huge increase in spending). Or automation (yeah, we have better deep learning algorithms, but machine vision, robotics and natural language processing are advancing glacially slowly, so most jobs will require a human in the loop for the foreseeable future). 3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible. With a small amount of research I found numerous counter-arguments to UBI, including a paper by the New Zealand government finding what I stated in point 3, i.e., UBI would imply benefit reductions to pensioners and the disabled and still require major tax hikes. I see many people becoming full-time advocates and researchers into UBI, claiming it to be a rational, scientific, evidence-based policy. And yet they miss these basic issues. (It's no mystery why. After realising that current welfare systems don't work, and that a UBI can't work, the logical next step is to question wealth redistribution itself, but that's too far for most). The 20th century saw many intellectuals proposing "scientific" utopian schemes while blatantly ignoring reality, with well-known results. http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Working%20papers/Treasury-A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor... http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-of-a-universal-basic-income-but-heres-the-problem/ http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal-basic-income-is-ahead-of-its-time-to-say-the-least https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal...
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    OTOH, back of the envelope calculations by detractors are usually misleading by an order of magnitude. For example 320 million Americans * 15K/year in basic income = 4.8 trillion dollars that has to come from new taxes and spending cuts. But if it all comes from tax increases than somebody currently making the average income will see their taxes go up by exactly amount as their BI payment. Is that actually a tax increase? And if we can get cost savings from simplifying welfare, then their BI payment is more than their tax increase. 4.8 Trillion is completely unfeasible, but the real cost is in the order of hundreds of billions. A heck of lot, but it is feasible.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  Yeah. Many people who are into BI are unwilling to admit its a very expensive proposition that they insist will be fixed with "economic growth". Its the same handwaving the GOP does. Perfect example: There are 242,470,820 adults in the US. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586 http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am... > In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... ~55% of people make $30k or less and would get the full grant. He proposes b/t 30k and 60k it drops to 50%. So lets just drop it for the other 45% to 7k (instead of $6500) to keep the numbers simple. ($13,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($7,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $2.5 trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:U.S._Federal_Spending.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... The current budget is $3.7 trillion. Healthcare + Social Security + Nondiscretionary Defense = 937+882+585 (billions) = $2.4 trillion. So you are already roughly at the same budget (despite his argument that isn't the case). Yes, he wants people 18-21 not to have access but that won't work in practice realistically some people get kicked out in this country at age 18 and have access to welfare. The argument he makes is: > The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper. Despite his age assumption & numbers being borderline unrealistic... https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet.html https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta... NHE per capita is ~$9,523. He wants insurance to cost $3,000, even if we magically assume 100% of that goes straight to payments. That extra $6,523 has to come from somewhere for people on Medicaid. If you get a $13,000 grant, you basically lose (realistically) access to medical care with basic income beyond very basic care. (i.e. If you get cancer, no one will cover it so you die. If you get a possibly deadly chronic disease, you can't afford it, you die.) http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spending-by-residence/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spendin... That is worse for Medicare enrollees which is ~$10.3k So they lose ~$7.3k worth of care. Yes it is cheaper (using his math) but he doesn't explicitly explain the impact. It pays for itself by: 1) Cutting income for those on social security to ~$1000. ( Realistically, for the elderly, with overhead for private insurance you are spending probably ~$12 for equivalent care) 2) Cutting medical care for those on welfare currently to $0. ( Realistically, you can't pay for the current level of medical care for the average person on this BI. ) 3) Food costs will go up without subsidies, which will likely add $240 in annual costs (conservatively). So its basically cutting Social Security to ~$750/year for the elderly and cutting medical care for those in poverty to the bare essentials. Similarly, at the rate of medical inflation, the "cheaper" is almost entirely sourced from killing Social Security or Medical Care (depending on how you look at it) but it'll get worse (assuming you are adjusting BI on the CPI). And this is the most concrete article with numbers I could find in like 5 minutes of Googling it. The rest were all hand wavy. If you don't kill Medicaid/Medicare on that same proposal, and just reduce the subsidy by $3k: ($10,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($5,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $1.88 trillion If you drop Medicare/Medicaid the budget they can take the money from is only $1.467 trillion. So now its obvious where the money came from to save those billions.
exabrial 10y ago
Your last two sentences couldn't be any more eloquent. When reasoning on these issues, one should always carefully examine the phrase: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Every single word is chosen very carefully.
- bsbechtel 10y ago
  A basic right is something you inherently have, and cannot be taken away. It's not something to be provided by the government. I wish more people had a better understanding of this.
  - clavalle 10y ago
    A reasonable expectation is something that should be provided by others in a society to those that need them and is the glue that holds that society together. I wish more people had a better understanding of this. Edit: for example, if someone is in a severe accident and unable to help themselves, it is a reasonable expectation in a functioning society that a passerby might call for help or help directly.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    This treats rights (legal) as though they were laws of nature. I have yet to see convincing data or argument supporting this notion. There is ample evidence from history that the legal construct called "rights" is in fact not absolute at all. In fact, all the data we have suggest that "rights" are in fact provided by the government. The mechanisms differ (e.g. the US's constitutional republic encodes government-defined rights in the Constitution and laws derived from it), but ultimately "rights" are something that people, in the forming of the government they live under, agree should exist.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      The US constitution recognizes rights that are inherent to people and enumerates them in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant the rights within it, it merely recognizes them. Theoretically, the government has no authority to infringe on these rights. Obviously, in practice this is different.
krupan 10y ago
I think the philosophy of a basic income scheme is to acknowledge that we all have need of support from the government (which ultimately means, from each other) to some degree or another. No demonstration necessary.
sanxiyn 10y ago
What this seems to say is that people shouldn't starve, but to get food people should demonstrate that they are starving. I am unsure why demonstration is essential, because either way others are still obligated to provide food so that people aren't starving.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  If my brother tells me he's hungry and broke I might make him dinner and let him crash on my couch. If I just saw him spend $500 on weed I'll probably tell him he's on his own. The demonstration is essential because if we don't require it, some people will exploit our kind nature to rob us. This is already a massive problem in programs where we do require demonstrations of need. See NPR's expose on rampant disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ It's hard to see how eliminating safeguards will improve things.
  - heartsucker 10y ago
    But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us? If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      We stop when the marginal cost of additional oversight exceeds the marginal benefit of additional fraud prevented. I.e., we keep increasing oversight until diminishing returns causes $1 of additional fraud prevention spending to reduce fraud by $0.99. I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.
      - heartsucker 10y ago
        I was taking the most simplistic approach. Your point is better than mine, but usually the argument I see is that "there are welfare queens, and that's not fair, therefore there shouldn't be welfare at all." I was more arguing against that.
thescriptkiddie 10y ago
>at least acknowledge that people have to demonstrate need to be the recipients of government handouts The entire point of universal basic income is that no such need exists, and pretending that it does is the reason that our current system is failing.
moron4hire 10y ago
At least some of the budget would come from realizing reductions in bureaucratic overhead from eliminating the welfare apparatus and costs associated with crime (which poverty is the biggest predictor of). We also always seem to have enough money to bomb the ever living shit out of brown people in all the far flung regions of the universe, so I don't understand why cost should ever be an issue. I don't think need is either an important issue. The problem with your last sentence is that it "no right to income" implies "no right to feed one's self", i.e. "no right to live." Do people deserve to starve to death just because they are lazy?
- brixon 10y ago
  US uses a lot of debt for those bombs.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    When you have bombs, debt doesn't mean much.
- IsaacL 10y ago
  The right to life implies you have the right to earn an income. This also implies property rights on your earned income. (The original formulation was "life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness").
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Your property is not more sacred than another person's life.
jedbrown 10y ago
Are states divided into two groups -- the givers and the takers? http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-st... The sign on your tax return seems much less of a class divide than whether you spend every waking moment trying to afford food and shelter.
pmontra 10y ago
> those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors Don't we already have this? Example: people working for the state vs people working in private companies. > you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income I'm not sure that this is a consequence but let's suppose it is. It's already happened in that context for millenia, peacefully at least until everybody agreed that it was a good deal for both parties. Is basic income a good deal for all parties? There are some experiments running or about to start. We'll see.
kasbah 10y ago
You can't put a dollar value on a lot of contributions towards society. For instance artists, for now, need to try and sell their work but a lot of cultural works are not necessarily sell-able. It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here?
- icebraining 10y ago
  Playing Devil's advocate, > You can't put a dollar value on a lot of contributions towards society You could still measure whether any contribution is being made at all and only give BI to those who are contributing. Which is essentially what existing subsidies for art & etc are for. > It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here? Under BI, members of minorities who overcame those handicaps will be paying more in taxes to support a whole bunch of white males, though.
  - kasbah 10y ago
    Very good points, I think my comments weren't very focused on the argument at hand but more some thoughts that had been kicking around in my brain that go against the general sentiment of the parent comment. I do think the poor and those with skills in areas that are beneficial to society but not necessarily commercial suffer under our current systems but maybe BI isn't the solution either. I think the appeal of BI is more one for simplifying the bureaucracies around benefits but we would still need some bureaucracy for those that need additional income to support themselves (say people with severe disabilites that can not work). Thanks for the thought out response, the downvotes were getting me down.
k__ 10y ago
> it's going to split the population into two groups Isn't the point of UBI, that everyone gets the money? Not only those who don't work.
- icebraining 10y ago
  True, but if you pay more in taxes than you get from UBI, it's essentially an accounting operation; you're still a net payer in practice.
emodendroket 10y ago
Consider the resilience of a system like Social Security, where everyone both pays in and gets benefits, compared to means-tested programs.
dsr_ 10y ago
"those who are net recipients... and those who are net contributors" We already have that in the US. For example, on a state-by-state basis: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the... Every serious basic income article I've read addresses the question of who pays for it. The answer is, unsurprisingly, everyone who pays taxes.
- jackcosgrove 10y ago
  Why break it down by state except to make a politically charged generalization? The modern economy is dependent on cities and states are a mostly arbitrary political division inherited from a time when cultivated land area determined economic value.
  - jonwachob91 10y ago
    Because most welfare is paid for by the states...
    - jackcosgrove 10y ago
      The link is about state economic dependence on the federal government, not which layer of government distributes welfare benefits. It's just a rehashing of the red state-blue state federal dependence argument, which is really the rural-urban dependence argument. If you want to knock rural areas as being net welfare recipients, just call them rural areas rather than red states. But even that's still an unhelpful generalization. If you really want to be granular, you would single out the urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and yes rural areas (such as oil patches) that are net contributors.
      - logiczero 10y ago
        And as one of the comments pointed out, many of the rural states are completely at the mercy of the Federal government. When the Federal government controls 48% of a state's land (Wyoming), yet doesn't allow logging, mining or agricultural activities on most of it, what exactly is the local population supposed to generate revenue from?
rco8786 10y ago
> those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. Isn't that already the case?
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
People often miss the fourth dimension when talking about welfare and social security, even though it's a fairly direct element of most of it e.g. "you pay when you're healthy, you get healthcare when you're sick", "you pay when you're young, you get money when you're old". So there wouldn't be a bright line division, as some people would be receiving one week/month/year/decade and paying the next.
VLM 10y ago
An interesting hack on that outlook is my home state spends a lot of money on bureaucracy and paperwork to "stealth up" what we do with a fraction of gasoline taxes which offset the general fund (aka lower our state income tax) and we obfuscate the heck out of state lotto income by embedding it in prop tax relief. It would be possible to hack the system by getting rid of all the stealth and corruption and just issuing each of us a check for the gas tax and lotto tax. Then just issue simple, cheap, straightforward normal un-obfuscated prop tax bills and un-obfuscated state income tax forms. As a side dish WRT "The government's money" all of this money came from voluntary participation in various tax schemed monopolies and centrally controlled economic planning. A state level "mincome" funded entirely by lotto players and gas tax and so forth is interesting. It should be sustainable and cheaper overall than the current system of byzantine complexity. Frankly we have a large number of "bribes" paid to the government by non-humans. It would be interesting rather than slush funding them and obfuscating them to mincome all incoming bribe money. All state corporate income tax, all our weird little excises and fees and utility cable tv franchise fees, all of it goes to mincome and the government itself can only accept personal human being state income tax for general revenue. Its an interesting mental model and if implemented would likely save a lot of money... obfuscation is expensive after all. I'm pretty well paid and spend pretty freely, I'd likely remain a net tax payer, but I could imagine many poor people continuing to pay very little tax and getting the same state mincome check.
mc32 10y ago
As pointed out by someone in another thread, some countries is the ME approach a basic income concept. It'd be interesting to read about the results found in the ME where a near UBI has been implemented and whether that has had net benefits or mixed results. I think some kind of UBI could be of benefit, but there could be some undesired effects that need to be understood before we can consider it a better replacement for the current system.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism >Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income. No, you don't. Wealth is created in one of two ways - by nature or by people. The fairest and most equitable way to distribute wealth is to share the natural wealth equally as possible and try and make sure that people are compensated as closely as possible for the wealth which they create (e.g. Walmart billionaires). Our economic set up ensures that natural wealth is kept among the ultra wealthy (e.g. oil barons) and the ultra wealthy can parasitically extract wealth created by others.
CPLX 10y ago
> it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is an attribute of all conceivable systems of government, and as such the comment contains no insight.
chongli 10y ago
those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is only one way to split the pie. Another way to look at it is the division between people who earn their lot in life by working and people who collect economic rents from the commons. It seems only fair to me that those who collect rents should contribute more. This is the principle underlying the concept of the social dividend [0]. Take a factory owner, for example. They are net recipients of many societal benefits, including: roads, electricity, water, sewage removal, education and health care for their employees, favourable tax rates for their property, etc. For that factory owner to then turn around and cry foul at being called upon to be a net contributor to basic income is hypocritical bordering on antisocial. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dividend
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  The factory owner already us a net contributor to the taxation that paid for that infrastructure and those services. His or her issue isn't with taxation specifically, his or problem is with more taxation in general. My issues with Basic Income are similar to those raised by PJ O'Rourke about government in general. Government is incompetent, and BI is a recipe for handing even more power to politicians. I'm not convinced that is a good idea.
intopieces 10y ago
>No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. When the idea of basic income is boiled down entirely to dollars and cents, sure. But, because of the volatility in the labor market, there isn't a way for an individual to know or predict whether they or someone else will be a net giver or a net-taker, as these things must be measured across a person's lifetime. J.K. Rowling was a taker for years, now she's wholeheartedly a giver. These status are primarily self-assigned and perceived based on.... well, I'm not sure what they're based on. See the author's 'popularity' argument, see the interviews with people who are anti-welfare but pro-mincome for themselves. It's also worth considering -- as every discussion of UBI brings up -- the incalculable, invaluable net effects of such a scheme (and indeed of welfare itself). There are intangible benefits that are unnoticed even to the 'net contributors' -- that is, people who are housed and fed are less likely to stab you in the street for your iPhone. >Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. If a particular advocate of UBI doesn't include the tax increase in every point she makes about the system, it's only because that's a given, and has always been mentioned in some other comment. If you believe a particular funding scheme is flawed, have at it. >you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income. UBI doesn't imply that others are obligated to provide them with income. It's explicit in the system. Unless you believe all taxation is theft (in which case: Game over, you'll never come around to UBI), it's safe to say that you believe 'society' has some obligation to the health and safety of its members. UBI is just the free-market expression of that: Rather than have the government try to create a massive, bloated system that tries to predict what people need, give them the tools they need to get it themselves. That tool is money.
legulere 10y ago
Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants and has everything they are to owe to the society that formed them. What a single human can achieve compared to that is extremely small. The reality is that the greatest amount of wealth is not attained by work but inherited. This stands in total opposition to the idea that our society is a meritocracy.
Suncho 10y ago
Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. We absolutely shouldn't let them evade that question. So I'll go ahead and not evade it for you. No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is incorrect. Other commenters rightly point out that the benefits of basic income extend far beyond what can be measured in terms of money. But even if we only take into account the money, your assumption that you need taxes to support basic income is wrong. Money is not zero-sum. The money supply (including deposits, credit, etc.) expands and contracts depending on the needs of the economy. Without making a rigorous argument, I will boldly assert that we can pay for a basic income without taxing anyone. We can pay for it through deficit spending or helicopter money (money-financed fiscal policy), which are both essentially the equivalent of printing money. You might worry that such a practice would cause inflation or devaluation of the dollar thereby resulting an implicit tax on those who have a lot of money. Here's two reasons why basic income through printing money wouldn't cause inflation: 1. Prices are determined by the amount of spending in the economy relative to the amount of real wealth* being traded. For some (inelastic) spending, people will spend whether they have the money or not. They'll borrow in order to spend. If you give them free money, they'll borrow less. The Fed can raise interest rates to make sure this happens. You're just swapping an unstable form of credit money for stable base money that never has to be paid back. 2. More spending isn't necessarily inflationary either. Most of what we produce is subject to an economy of scale. That means that the more of it we make, the cheaper it gets to make each individual unit. If you give poor people money to buy things they otherwise would not have bought, we make more of that stuff to meet the new demand, and prices can remain stable or even come down. Rich people benefit too because they have more customers to sell to. The money we hand to the poor doesn't just stay with the poor. It ends up in the hands of the rich as usual. EDIT: 3. Money gradually leaves circulation over time. People hoard it and save it. If we're not continually injecting new money into the economy, we run into trouble. A basic income is as good of a way to do this as any. It's certainly better than incentivizing a bubble in private credit. EDIT: 4. As technology advances, we produce more and more real wealth. If we want prices to remain stable, we need more and more money circulating. So we need to inject more new money than just what's necessary to replace the money that we lose through saving/hoarding. A fun thought experiment is to ask yourself what would happen if the taxing arm of the treasury had no direct access to information about how much spending the government was doing and vice versa. Instead, they had to make decisions about how much to tax (and spend) based on macroeconomic indicators such as inflation. Would the budget naturally balance itself? Unlikely. We would run a deficit because that's what's most stable. We just wouldn't know we were running a deficit. I would argue that for a government that can issue its own currency, we shouldn't think of taxation as a way to fund government spending. Instead we can think of it as an economic policy tool to remove excess money from the economy. But we have other tools to do that too (e.g. raising interest rates or fractional reserve requirements). Paying for a basic income is cheaper than withholding a basic income. Instead of asking how we pay for a basic income, we should be asking how we expect to be able to pay for all the job creation/job protection we seem to think we need. I know you probably disagree, but that's okay. I'm happy to discuss all of this further if you'd like to know more. * - I'm defining the real wealth of a product or service to be the mean marginal utility across all people. For example, the real wealth of a luxury car isn't much higher than the real wealth of a normal car. This is because most people in the world would get a similar boost in marginal utility out of owning either one. A rich person will spend their money on less real wealth compared to a poor person because, for example, they'd get more personal utility from buying a luxury car than they would would by spending the same amount of money on two normal cars, even though the two normal cars represent nearly twice as much real wealth.

by IsaacL 10y ago

duaneb 10y ago

> Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. Have you witnessed this?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
1123581321 10y ago
I have seen it in every discussion. Some of the forms of evasion include: * focusing on the wealth/profit generated by a surge in entrepreneurship from the millions suddenly motivated to start successful businesses * focusing on the unlimited wealth created by robots/asteroids/solar in space which will fund any program we wish * focusing on how we can't afford not to try BI, i.e., the default system is a financial failure anyway so comparison is pointless * taking the position that BI is only replacing current welfare programs (until it's pointed out that current programs would not support anyone if spread around) Occasionally, someone will admit that they are proposing a 100% tax rate, which is about what such a system requires. Even more occasionally, it's admitted that every country must implement a 100% tax rate at once to avoid mass emigration of anyone earning more than ~$20k/year.
- xienze 10y ago
  Don't forget lots of incorrect assumptions about human nature, namely that there won't be a large, permanent underclass created by BI and that the people actually paying for BI will be more than happy to do so.
  - fweespeech 10y ago
    > Don't forget lots of incorrect assumptions about human nature, namely that there won't be a large, permanent underclass created by BI and that the people actually paying for BI will be more than happy to do so. I think almost everyone would want to work on $13-$15k a year. However, they'd work part time. And tbh, for our current welfare system, that is essentially what happens already. They work minimum wage jobs, part time, on call.
- mseebach 10y ago
  The most common evasion is in the handwaving around the size of the proposed UBI check. Total US tax revenue per person comes out to just over $20000/year, that's $1666/month (in comparison, a 40 hour workweek at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, no holidays, comes out at $15080/year or $1256/month). If you abolished every single government program and fire every single government employee, right from the DoD down to your local playground, from congress to the schools, never mind every single existing welfare program, assuming that tax revenue somehow managed to stay at the same level, what with no IRS to collect it and 22 million newly unemployed public sector workers, you could barely afford to pay a UBI at the minimum wage, never mind attending to the people who might legitimately need more help (also, no roads or schools). UBI is either going to require cuts of a depth never proposed, much less enacted, in any western country, ever -- or be too small (perhaps a hundred dollars a month) to live up to its promises.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Or you raise taxes for the rich 1%.
    - 10y ago
IsaacL 10y ago
Yes. The huge majority of pro-UBI writings I see talk up the benefits in great detail but either ignore, or misrepresent, the costs. Lots of naive idealists support UBI - but I also frequently see UBI advocates who purport to be "evidence-based" and "rational", and yet who fail to provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how they propose to fund their scheme. Instead they do 1 of 3 things: 1. Provide evidence countering non-essential arguments, e.g., will basic income recipients be motivated to work? This implies they've addressed the opposing side, while simultaneously ignoring the essential counter-argument, i.e., where the money comes from. 2. Hand-wave about reduced administration costs. (This is nowhere near sufficient to cover the huge increase in spending). Or automation (yeah, we have better deep learning algorithms, but machine vision, robotics and natural language processing are advancing glacially slowly, so most jobs will require a human in the loop for the foreseeable future). 3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible. With a small amount of research I found numerous counter-arguments to UBI, including a paper by the New Zealand government finding what I stated in point 3, i.e., UBI would imply benefit reductions to pensioners and the disabled and still require major tax hikes. I see many people becoming full-time advocates and researchers into UBI, claiming it to be a rational, scientific, evidence-based policy. And yet they miss these basic issues. (It's no mystery why. After realising that current welfare systems don't work, and that a UBI can't work, the logical next step is to question wealth redistribution itself, but that's too far for most). The 20th century saw many intellectuals proposing "scientific" utopian schemes while blatantly ignoring reality, with well-known results. http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Working%20papers/Treasury-A-Guaranteed-Minimum-Income-for-New-Zealand%20.PDF http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor... http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-of-a-universal-basic-income-but-heres-the-problem/ http://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/31-03-2016/i-love-the-idea-... https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal-basic-income-is-ahead-of-its-time-to-say-the-least https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-06/universal...
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  OTOH, back of the envelope calculations by detractors are usually misleading by an order of magnitude. For example 320 million Americans * 15K/year in basic income = 4.8 trillion dollars that has to come from new taxes and spending cuts. But if it all comes from tax increases than somebody currently making the average income will see their taxes go up by exactly amount as their BI payment. Is that actually a tax increase? And if we can get cost savings from simplifying welfare, then their BI payment is more than their tax increase. 4.8 Trillion is completely unfeasible, but the real cost is in the order of hundreds of billions. A heck of lot, but it is feasible.
fweespeech 10y ago
Yeah. Many people who are into BI are unwilling to admit its a very expensive proposition that they insist will be fixed with "economic growth". Its the same handwaving the GOP does. Perfect example: There are 242,470,820 adults in the US. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586 http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am... > In my version, every American citizen age 21 and older would get a $13,000 annual grant deposited electronically into a bank account in monthly installments. Three thousand dollars must be used for health insurance (a complicated provision I won’t try to explain here), leaving every adult with $10,000 in disposable annual income for the rest of their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... ~55% of people make $30k or less and would get the full grant. He proposes b/t 30k and 60k it drops to 50%. So lets just drop it for the other 45% to 7k (instead of $6500) to keep the numbers simple. ($13,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($7,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $2.5 trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:U.S._Federal_Spending.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... The current budget is $3.7 trillion. Healthcare + Social Security + Nondiscretionary Defense = 937+882+585 (billions) = $2.4 trillion. So you are already roughly at the same budget (despite his argument that isn't the case). Yes, he wants people 18-21 not to have access but that won't work in practice realistically some people get kicked out in this country at age 18 and have access to welfare. The argument he makes is: > The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare. As of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current system. By 2020, it would be nearly a trillion dollars cheaper. Despite his age assumption & numbers being borderline unrealistic... https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nhe-fact-sheet.html https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta... NHE per capita is ~$9,523. He wants insurance to cost $3,000, even if we magically assume 100% of that goes straight to payments. That extra $6,523 has to come from somewhere for people on Medicaid. If you get a $13,000 grant, you basically lose (realistically) access to medical care with basic income beyond very basic care. (i.e. If you get cancer, no one will cover it so you die. If you get a possibly deadly chronic disease, you can't afford it, you die.) http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spending-by-residence/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D http://kff.org/medicare/state-indicator/per-enrollee-spendin... That is worse for Medicare enrollees which is ~$10.3k So they lose ~$7.3k worth of care. Yes it is cheaper (using his math) but he doesn't explicitly explain the impact. It pays for itself by: 1) Cutting income for those on social security to ~$1000. ( Realistically, for the elderly, with overhead for private insurance you are spending probably ~$12 for equivalent care) 2) Cutting medical care for those on welfare currently to $0. ( Realistically, you can't pay for the current level of medical care for the average person on this BI. ) 3) Food costs will go up without subsidies, which will likely add $240 in annual costs (conservatively). So its basically cutting Social Security to ~$750/year for the elderly and cutting medical care for those in poverty to the bare essentials. Similarly, at the rate of medical inflation, the "cheaper" is almost entirely sourced from killing Social Security or Medical Care (depending on how you look at it) but it'll get worse (assuming you are adjusting BI on the CPI). And this is the most concrete article with numbers I could find in like 5 minutes of Googling it. The rest were all hand wavy. If you don't kill Medicaid/Medicare on that same proposal, and just reduce the subsidy by $3k: ($10,000 * 242,470,820 * .55) + ($5,000 * 242,470,820 * .45) = $1.88 trillion If you drop Medicare/Medicaid the budget they can take the money from is only $1.467 trillion. So now its obvious where the money came from to save those billions.

exabrial 10y ago

Your last two sentences couldn't be any more eloquent. When reasoning on these issues, one should always carefully examine the phrase: "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Every single word is chosen very carefully.

bsbechtel 10y ago
A basic right is something you inherently have, and cannot be taken away. It's not something to be provided by the government. I wish more people had a better understanding of this.
- clavalle 10y ago
  A reasonable expectation is something that should be provided by others in a society to those that need them and is the glue that holds that society together. I wish more people had a better understanding of this. Edit: for example, if someone is in a severe accident and unable to help themselves, it is a reasonable expectation in a functioning society that a passerby might call for help or help directly.
- sidlls 10y ago
  This treats rights (legal) as though they were laws of nature. I have yet to see convincing data or argument supporting this notion. There is ample evidence from history that the legal construct called "rights" is in fact not absolute at all. In fact, all the data we have suggest that "rights" are in fact provided by the government. The mechanisms differ (e.g. the US's constitutional republic encodes government-defined rights in the Constitution and laws derived from it), but ultimately "rights" are something that people, in the forming of the government they live under, agree should exist.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    The US constitution recognizes rights that are inherent to people and enumerates them in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant the rights within it, it merely recognizes them. Theoretically, the government has no authority to infringe on these rights. Obviously, in practice this is different.

krupan 10y ago

I think the philosophy of a basic income scheme is to acknowledge that we all have need of support from the government (which ultimately means, from each other) to some degree or another. No demonstration necessary.

sanxiyn 10y ago

What this seems to say is that people shouldn't starve, but to get food people should demonstrate that they are starving. I am unsure why demonstration is essential, because either way others are still obligated to provide food so that people aren't starving.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
If my brother tells me he's hungry and broke I might make him dinner and let him crash on my couch. If I just saw him spend $500 on weed I'll probably tell him he's on his own. The demonstration is essential because if we don't require it, some people will exploit our kind nature to rob us. This is already a massive problem in programs where we do require demonstrations of need. See NPR's expose on rampant disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ It's hard to see how eliminating safeguards will improve things.
- heartsucker 10y ago
  But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us? If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    We stop when the marginal cost of additional oversight exceeds the marginal benefit of additional fraud prevented. I.e., we keep increasing oversight until diminishing returns causes $1 of additional fraud prevention spending to reduce fraud by $0.99. I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.
    - heartsucker 10y ago
      I was taking the most simplistic approach. Your point is better than mine, but usually the argument I see is that "there are welfare queens, and that's not fair, therefore there shouldn't be welfare at all." I was more arguing against that.

thescriptkiddie 10y ago

>at least acknowledge that people have to demonstrate need to be the recipients of government handouts The entire point of universal basic income is that no such need exists, and pretending that it does is the reason that our current system is failing.

moron4hire 10y ago

At least some of the budget would come from realizing reductions in bureaucratic overhead from eliminating the welfare apparatus and costs associated with crime (which poverty is the biggest predictor of). We also always seem to have enough money to bomb the ever living shit out of brown people in all the far flung regions of the universe, so I don't understand why cost should ever be an issue. I don't think need is either an important issue. The problem with your last sentence is that it "no right to income" implies "no right to feed one's self", i.e. "no right to live." Do people deserve to starve to death just because they are lazy?

brixon 10y ago
US uses a lot of debt for those bombs.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  When you have bombs, debt doesn't mean much.
IsaacL 10y ago
The right to life implies you have the right to earn an income. This also implies property rights on your earned income. (The original formulation was "life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness").
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Your property is not more sacred than another person's life.

jedbrown 10y ago

Are states divided into two groups -- the givers and the takers? http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-st... The sign on your tax return seems much less of a class divide than whether you spend every waking moment trying to afford food and shelter.

pmontra 10y ago

> those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors Don't we already have this? Example: people working for the state vs people working in private companies. > you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income I'm not sure that this is a consequence but let's suppose it is. It's already happened in that context for millenia, peacefully at least until everybody agreed that it was a good deal for both parties. Is basic income a good deal for all parties? There are some experiments running or about to start. We'll see.

kasbah 10y ago

You can't put a dollar value on a lot of contributions towards society. For instance artists, for now, need to try and sell their work but a lot of cultural works are not necessarily sell-able. It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here?

icebraining 10y ago
Playing Devil's advocate, > You can't put a dollar value on a lot of contributions towards society You could still measure whether any contribution is being made at all and only give BI to those who are contributing. Which is essentially what existing subsidies for art & etc are for. > It also seems to me that, due to our racist and sexist history, there is a massive wage inequality geared towards industries that are dominated by white males. Who is paying for whom here? Under BI, members of minorities who overcame those handicaps will be paying more in taxes to support a whole bunch of white males, though.
- kasbah 10y ago
  Very good points, I think my comments weren't very focused on the argument at hand but more some thoughts that had been kicking around in my brain that go against the general sentiment of the parent comment. I do think the poor and those with skills in areas that are beneficial to society but not necessarily commercial suffer under our current systems but maybe BI isn't the solution either. I think the appeal of BI is more one for simplifying the bureaucracies around benefits but we would still need some bureaucracy for those that need additional income to support themselves (say people with severe disabilites that can not work). Thanks for the thought out response, the downvotes were getting me down.

k__ 10y ago

> it's going to split the population into two groups Isn't the point of UBI, that everyone gets the money? Not only those who don't work.

icebraining 10y ago
True, but if you pay more in taxes than you get from UBI, it's essentially an accounting operation; you're still a net payer in practice.

emodendroket 10y ago

Consider the resilience of a system like Social Security, where everyone both pays in and gets benefits, compared to means-tested programs.

dsr_ 10y ago

"those who are net recipients... and those who are net contributors" We already have that in the US. For example, on a state-by-state basis: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the... Every serious basic income article I've read addresses the question of who pays for it. The answer is, unsurprisingly, everyone who pays taxes.

jackcosgrove 10y ago
Why break it down by state except to make a politically charged generalization? The modern economy is dependent on cities and states are a mostly arbitrary political division inherited from a time when cultivated land area determined economic value.
- jonwachob91 10y ago
  Because most welfare is paid for by the states...
  - jackcosgrove 10y ago
    The link is about state economic dependence on the federal government, not which layer of government distributes welfare benefits. It's just a rehashing of the red state-blue state federal dependence argument, which is really the rural-urban dependence argument. If you want to knock rural areas as being net welfare recipients, just call them rural areas rather than red states. But even that's still an unhelpful generalization. If you really want to be granular, you would single out the urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and yes rural areas (such as oil patches) that are net contributors.
    - logiczero 10y ago
      And as one of the comments pointed out, many of the rural states are completely at the mercy of the Federal government. When the Federal government controls 48% of a state's land (Wyoming), yet doesn't allow logging, mining or agricultural activities on most of it, what exactly is the local population supposed to generate revenue from?

rco8786 10y ago

> those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. Isn't that already the case?

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

People often miss the fourth dimension when talking about welfare and social security, even though it's a fairly direct element of most of it e.g. "you pay when you're healthy, you get healthcare when you're sick", "you pay when you're young, you get money when you're old". So there wouldn't be a bright line division, as some people would be receiving one week/month/year/decade and paying the next.

VLM 10y ago

An interesting hack on that outlook is my home state spends a lot of money on bureaucracy and paperwork to "stealth up" what we do with a fraction of gasoline taxes which offset the general fund (aka lower our state income tax) and we obfuscate the heck out of state lotto income by embedding it in prop tax relief. It would be possible to hack the system by getting rid of all the stealth and corruption and just issuing each of us a check for the gas tax and lotto tax. Then just issue simple, cheap, straightforward normal un-obfuscated prop tax bills and un-obfuscated state income tax forms. As a side dish WRT "The government's money" all of this money came from voluntary participation in various tax schemed monopolies and centrally controlled economic planning. A state level "mincome" funded entirely by lotto players and gas tax and so forth is interesting. It should be sustainable and cheaper overall than the current system of byzantine complexity. Frankly we have a large number of "bribes" paid to the government by non-humans. It would be interesting rather than slush funding them and obfuscating them to mincome all incoming bribe money. All state corporate income tax, all our weird little excises and fees and utility cable tv franchise fees, all of it goes to mincome and the government itself can only accept personal human being state income tax for general revenue. Its an interesting mental model and if implemented would likely save a lot of money... obfuscation is expensive after all. I'm pretty well paid and spend pretty freely, I'd likely remain a net tax payer, but I could imagine many poor people continuing to pay very little tax and getting the same state mincome check.

mc32 10y ago

As pointed out by someone in another thread, some countries is the ME approach a basic income concept. It'd be interesting to read about the results found in the ME where a near UBI has been implemented and whether that has had net benefits or mixed results. I think some kind of UBI could be of benefit, but there could be some undesired effects that need to be understood before we can consider it a better replacement for the current system.

crdoconnor 10y ago

>Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism >Once you establish that people have a permanent, inalienable right to an income, you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income. No, you don't. Wealth is created in one of two ways - by nature or by people. The fairest and most equitable way to distribute wealth is to share the natural wealth equally as possible and try and make sure that people are compensated as closely as possible for the wealth which they create (e.g. Walmart billionaires). Our economic set up ensures that natural wealth is kept among the ultra wealthy (e.g. oil barons) and the ultra wealthy can parasitically extract wealth created by others.

CPLX 10y ago

> it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is an attribute of all conceivable systems of government, and as such the comment contains no insight.

chongli 10y ago

those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is only one way to split the pie. Another way to look at it is the division between people who earn their lot in life by working and people who collect economic rents from the commons. It seems only fair to me that those who collect rents should contribute more. This is the principle underlying the concept of the social dividend [0]. Take a factory owner, for example. They are net recipients of many societal benefits, including: roads, electricity, water, sewage removal, education and health care for their employees, favourable tax rates for their property, etc. For that factory owner to then turn around and cry foul at being called upon to be a net contributor to basic income is hypocritical bordering on antisocial. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dividend

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
The factory owner already us a net contributor to the taxation that paid for that infrastructure and those services. His or her issue isn't with taxation specifically, his or problem is with more taxation in general. My issues with Basic Income are similar to those raised by PJ O'Rourke about government in general. Government is incompetent, and BI is a recipe for handing even more power to politicians. I'm not convinced that is a good idea.

intopieces 10y ago

>No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. When the idea of basic income is boiled down entirely to dollars and cents, sure. But, because of the volatility in the labor market, there isn't a way for an individual to know or predict whether they or someone else will be a net giver or a net-taker, as these things must be measured across a person's lifetime. J.K. Rowling was a taker for years, now she's wholeheartedly a giver. These status are primarily self-assigned and perceived based on.... well, I'm not sure what they're based on. See the author's 'popularity' argument, see the interviews with people who are anti-welfare but pro-mincome for themselves. It's also worth considering -- as every discussion of UBI brings up -- the incalculable, invaluable net effects of such a scheme (and indeed of welfare itself). There are intangible benefits that are unnoticed even to the 'net contributors' -- that is, people who are housed and fed are less likely to stab you in the street for your iPhone. >Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. If a particular advocate of UBI doesn't include the tax increase in every point she makes about the system, it's only because that's a given, and has always been mentioned in some other comment. If you believe a particular funding scheme is flawed, have at it. >you imply that others are obligated to provide them with that income. UBI doesn't imply that others are obligated to provide them with income. It's explicit in the system. Unless you believe all taxation is theft (in which case: Game over, you'll never come around to UBI), it's safe to say that you believe 'society' has some obligation to the health and safety of its members. UBI is just the free-market expression of that: Rather than have the government try to create a massive, bloated system that tries to predict what people need, give them the tools they need to get it themselves. That tool is money.

legulere 10y ago

Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants and has everything they are to owe to the society that formed them. What a single human can achieve compared to that is extremely small. The reality is that the greatest amount of wealth is not attained by work but inherited. This stands in total opposition to the idea that our society is a meritocracy.

Suncho 10y ago

Don't let basic income advocates evade the question of who pays for their utopian scheme. We absolutely shouldn't let them evade that question. So I'll go ahead and not evade it for you. No matter how you arrange your basic income scheme (and the tax system to support it), it's going to split the population into two groups: those who are net recipients of government money, and those who are net contributors. This is incorrect. Other commenters rightly point out that the benefits of basic income extend far beyond what can be measured in terms of money. But even if we only take into account the money, your assumption that you need taxes to support basic income is wrong. Money is not zero-sum. The money supply (including deposits, credit, etc.) expands and contracts depending on the needs of the economy. Without making a rigorous argument, I will boldly assert that we can pay for a basic income without taxing anyone. We can pay for it through deficit spending or helicopter money (money-financed fiscal policy), which are both essentially the equivalent of printing money. You might worry that such a practice would cause inflation or devaluation of the dollar thereby resulting an implicit tax on those who have a lot of money. Here's two reasons why basic income through printing money wouldn't cause inflation: 1. Prices are determined by the amount of spending in the economy relative to the amount of real wealth* being traded. For some (inelastic) spending, people will spend whether they have the money or not. They'll borrow in order to spend. If you give them free money, they'll borrow less. The Fed can raise interest rates to make sure this happens. You're just swapping an unstable form of credit money for stable base money that never has to be paid back. 2. More spending isn't necessarily inflationary either. Most of what we produce is subject to an economy of scale. That means that the more of it we make, the cheaper it gets to make each individual unit. If you give poor people money to buy things they otherwise would not have bought, we make more of that stuff to meet the new demand, and prices can remain stable or even come down. Rich people benefit too because they have more customers to sell to. The money we hand to the poor doesn't just stay with the poor. It ends up in the hands of the rich as usual. EDIT: 3. Money gradually leaves circulation over time. People hoard it and save it. If we're not continually injecting new money into the economy, we run into trouble. A basic income is as good of a way to do this as any. It's certainly better than incentivizing a bubble in private credit. EDIT: 4. As technology advances, we produce more and more real wealth. If we want prices to remain stable, we need more and more money circulating. So we need to inject more new money than just what's necessary to replace the money that we lose through saving/hoarding. A fun thought experiment is to ask yourself what would happen if the taxing arm of the treasury had no direct access to information about how much spending the government was doing and vice versa. Instead, they had to make decisions about how much to tax (and spend) based on macroeconomic indicators such as inflation. Would the budget naturally balance itself? Unlikely. We would run a deficit because that's what's most stable. We just wouldn't know we were running a deficit. I would argue that for a government that can issue its own currency, we shouldn't think of taxation as a way to fund government spending. Instead we can think of it as an economic policy tool to remove excess money from the economy. But we have other tools to do that too (e.g. raising interest rates or fractional reserve requirements). Paying for a basic income is cheaper than withholding a basic income. Instead of asking how we pay for a basic income, we should be asking how we expect to be able to pay for all the job creation/job protection we seem to think we need. I know you probably disagree, but that's okay. I'm happy to discuss all of this further if you'd like to know more. * - I'm defining the real wealth of a product or service to be the mean marginal utility across all people. For example, the real wealth of a luxury car isn't much higher than the real wealth of a normal car. This is because most people in the world would get a similar boost in marginal utility out of owning either one. A rich person will spend their money on less real wealth compared to a poor person because, for example, they'd get more personal utility from buying a luxury car than they would would by spending the same amount of money on two normal cars, even though the two normal cars represent nearly twice as much real wealth.