5 ms·

Part of the idea is that with a basic income, there's no longer a need for many "social safety net" programs: disability, social security, food stamps, medicaid

Part of the idea is that with a basic income, there's no longer a need for many "social safety net" programs: disability, social security, food stamps, medicaid, etc. The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income. I'm not sure if this is true or not. You can find serious people with reasonable seeming numbers on both sides of that argument.

eanzenberg 10y ago
Right.. Basic income essentially wants to take mone out of the pot currently reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people who choose not to enter the work force.
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  I believe the basic idea is to use that able-bodied distribution as an excuse to heavily raise taxes, with the goal being that the needy and disabled would not receive less. The logic being that if everyone has a safety net, we don't need to reward people as much since they now have lower risk. Personally I don't believe that would actually happen, but the idea does account for that angle.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  There's nothing inherently wrong with not entering the workforce in the post-scarcity society we are rapidly approaching. People can instead choose to spend time raising their children, practicing a hobby, or trying to start their own business without fear of not being able to support themselves. Most humans naturally don't want to sidle idle all their lives, some will, but the vast majority will find some productive use of their time - a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours.
  - sfeng 10y ago
    The conflict here is that humans are animals, and animals evolved to use the minimum amount of energy possible to satisfy their needs. Yes you can learn the reward of willfully working hard, but I'm not sure whether everyone, or even most people, will make that transition.
    - noonespecial 10y ago
      In a post scarcity world why would most people need to? The whole point is that technology is about to make it possible to satisfy everyone's needs with minimum human energy and instead of reveling in it, we seem to be planning to de facto kill all the extra people we used to need with poverty. If 3/4 of everyone wants to watch TV and take fun drugs and our society has the wealth to allow that to happen, hooray!
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      Human beings also waste energy on frivolous things, recreation is not generally a trait shared by most animals - yet humans spend a fair amount of time just doing nothing productive or required for our survival. The same is true for work, while many people are forced to take whatever job they can to survive - there's no reason they wouldn't choose to punch a clock because they enjoy it. I wouldn't mind working less, but I love what I do, I get a sense of pride and accomplishment out of it - if it weren't required for my survival I wouldn't suddenly stop.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    ...a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours. The data suggests that men, at least, really want to watch TV and take drugs. They don't spend much time raising children or on civic engagement. Here is a good survey article: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21... If you want to say "that isn't a true Scotsman/basic income", please explain how writing "basic income" at the top of the check would change things.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      I'm assuming you intend to reference the discussion of disability benefits late in that article; the key difference between that and basic income is that disability benefits are received by people who are judged to be occupationally disabled, which fall into two groups: (1) People who have worked and are actually physically unable to do so any longer (and, generally, for the same reason, inhibited in other important life functions), and (2) People who wish not to work so much that they have engaged in elaborate frauds to be adjudicated unable to work. And, in both cases, actually receiving money from work reduces their eligibility for payments and may jeopardize their eligibility to receive benefits at all. I think its quite reasonable to believe that neither of those (nor the two combined) would be representative in their use of money and their actions when receiving a certain amount of money, on top of the fact that receiving money which is partially conditioned on non-work induces different behaviors (even in the same set of people) than receiving unconditional funds.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        The article discuss the fact that most of those who are consuming disability benefits are not, in fact, physically unable to work. This is readily apparent from the fact that disability claims are strongly correlated with the economy; recessions do not cause people to become paraplegics. And this rise is in spite of workplaces and daily life becoming safer. NPR also has an expose on rampant disability fraud, although they of course use more polite language: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
  - DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
    Apologies if I'm coming from too far behind in the conversation, but I have a question about your post-scarcity assumption. It seems to me that in most societies, human populations continue to grow until they hit some hard resource barrier. And it's not a simple, gentle equilibrium that's reached: we usually end up with poverty and/or war as a result. How would you reconcile my take on human nature with your expectation of post-scarcity?
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      The human population seems to be stabilizing actually, with dramatically decreased infant mortality most parents these days focus on one or two kids instead of three or more - this is even more prevalent in more educated populations. Finland, for example had more deaths than births last year. I wouldn't be surprised if the population of the human race shrinks over the next century.
  - gremlinsinc 10y ago
    As a note to the post-scarcity society looming, the 'humans must work 40 hours or they're not worth anything' is a recent development... Working times in middle ages was much more leisurely: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... -- Including average working days to be 150-175 depending on the century.. W/ robotics, etc...why can't we move back to that.. I think a parent should always be home with child, whether mom or dad. -- I see a rise in home schooling and learning through other ways than schools. A marriage of pre-industrialism and post-scarcity w/ the ability to spend free time coding and working on entrepreneurism, or scientific discovery sounds a lot better than working 9-6 5 days a week to make the next Bill Gates or Mark Z. rich.
  - massysett 10y ago
    So the people who get out and work every day are supposed to support the people who want to "practice a hobby." People who get out and work find this repugnant and that's why UBI is a non-starter.
    - billmalarky 10y ago
      >So the people who get out and work every day are supposed to support the people who want to "practice a hobby." Only if they choose to. Everyone will receive the basic income, those who wish (and are able to) to supplement this income by working will be free to do so. >People who get out and work find this repugnant Working people will cease to exist as the majority in the not-so-distant future. There needs to be a solution for humans no longer being able to add value in the workplace.
      - snuxoll 10y ago
        One should also add that a hobby can be productive. A UBI could result in a revival of the arts and crafts: painters, sculptors, woodworkers, etc - all of which could be economically and culturally productive. I wouldn't choose to stop coding, personally - it is one of my passions, but in a society with a UBI I could see cutting hours and spending more time with my daughter, fishing, etc.
        massysett 10y ago
        Awesome. Nice of other people to get out and work so that you can go fishing.
        snuxoll 10y ago
        No need for the hostile tone. The push for a UBI is directly tied with increasing automation in virtually all sectors, there's going to be less work to go around as we go forward - is it really fair to judge someone for being okay with taking more time for themselves when there's less for them to do? I would go crazy if I didn't have code to write, it's not like I'll ever stop working if I wasn't forced to - but I wouldn't mind to cut back my week and spend time on my own endeavors if it wouldn't be a crushing blow financially.
- mrec 10y ago
  It would arguably also encourage people to enter the work force, by removing the welfare traps that can, all too often, make people who switch from benefits to paid work worse off. There's also a distinction to be made between "not working" and "not in paid employment". Carers, OSS devs etc can add value to society without ever showing up in employment stats.
  - petra 10y ago
    You could just take that money and give it to a million other causes more socially valuable than distributing BI to everyone. Heck just think what some of this could do to research.
    - mrec 10y ago
      > You could just take that money and give it to a million other causes more socially valuable than distributing BI to everyone. You're thinking of it as extra money. Try thinking of it instead as money that's already being paid to everyone, just made unconditional. People are not (generally) starving in the streets, so the money is clearly being spent to keep them alive. Some of that is via benefits, which BI would replace. Some of it is via pay-for-work, and given a BI employers could pay less with the BI making up the difference. You can make a separate argument about whether a BI removes incentives to work, but AIUI evidence from pilot programs so far suggests that it doesn't. > Heck just think what some of this could do to research. How many of the famous names in science were able to make their discoveries because they belonged to a gentry class who didn't have to work for a living? How many people have to leave academic research because they can't get funding any more? What tends to happen to OSS contribution rates once people move from study to full-time work?
- ploxiln 10y ago
  Or, alternatively, it wants to take money out of the pot currently reserved for people best able to game the existing complex and flawed systems, and distribute it everyone fairly, including those who need it (some small number of whom currently "fall through the cracks").
wmf 10y ago
Obviously if the same money is spread among more people, some people will receive less than they used to. If social security isn't enough to live on, replacing it with basic income could be worse. Eliminating bureaucratic overhead helps but it's not clear how much.
marcell 10y ago
> The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income. This isn't really the case. Basic income is not about cost savings. The programs you mention are wealth transfers, so the overhead is in fact trivial. They take money from person A, and give it to person B. There are checks in place to make sure person B qualifies, which accounts for the overhead. For retirement transfer (social security), you check each persons age--not too hard in America. All those programs would have to be colossally, amazingly inefficient for basic income to be more efficient at redistributing wealth. Out of it's over $1 trillion budget, estimates of administrative overhead are around 1%. Even for more complex programs like foodstamps, overhead is likely low and under 10% [1]. Basic income is about wealth re-distribution, not efficiency. It applies a huge tax increase to the top 10-20% of society, and gives that money to the bottom 80-90%. It's that simple. So the question everyone should ask is: should we have a policy of taking money from the top 10%, and giving it to the bottom 90%? [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-blumenthal/food-stamp-myths_b_1334924.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-blumenthal/food-stamp-my... (not the most reliable source, but best I could find quickly)
- massysett 10y ago
  Even for Social Security old age benefits, the overhead is a lot more than just checking someone's age. Benefits depend upon how much income someone had during his working years. So those records have to be checked. You also have to make sure people don't get fraudulent benefits. And that's just for old age benefits. For Social Security disability, you have to make sure someone is disabled. For unemployment, you have to make sure they worked in the first place, that they lost their job in a manner that garners them benefits, and their benefit size depends on what their pay was. Making all this work takes bureaucrats, judges to adjudicate claims, and people to investigate fraud. I have no idea whether UBI would be dramatically more efficient but even something like Social Security is far more complex than just checking someone's age.
- snarf21 10y ago
  I agree with you, taxes on the top are required no matter what. BI has other problems but I thought one of the other benefits of it was that it reduces fraud. You can't game the system as much. Needs based systems are easily defeated and then some of give you money based on your "need". This means you get more than you should (and presumably more than BI would provide). I actually think the best BI approach is like an EITC on steroids. You get all your money back if you are at the super low end and you can also make that a multiplier to encourage filling of lower wage jobs. What I mean by that is that if someone makes $15K a year, they may get 20K + $10K (2/3 earnings) back as a refund (could be quarterly, etc.) Someone who makes $0K a year would just get the $10K. Not well thought out yet but illustrating approach.
lewisl9029 10y ago
I'm a huge fan of the concept of a universal basic income, but I don't see how it can be a replacement for social programs for basic necessities like food stamps. There will always be people out there who will choose to blow their entire paycheck on frivolous purchases outside of their means and not have any money left over at the end of the month for food. As stupid and irresponsible they are for making that choice, a humane, post-scarcity society shouldn't just let those people just starve to death on the streets as a consequence. As a much more charitable example, consider the case of someone getting into an accident and ending up having to spend all or most of their basic income on medical expenses. How could someone like this survive if the basic income were to completely replace all existing social programs? So basic income will have to coexist with these existing programs. Perhaps the existing programs can be reduced in scale due to less people needing to rely on them thanks to the introduction of a basic income, but probably not nearly enough to completely offset the immense costs of the basic income program itself. This means the overall expenditure for social programs will likely have to increase due to the introduction of a universal basic income, and I personally am perfectly fine with increasing tax rates on the rich to make that happen, but it's not going to be easy.

eanzenberg 10y ago

Right.. Basic income essentially wants to take mone out of the pot currently reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people who choose not to enter the work force.

RyanZAG 10y ago
I believe the basic idea is to use that able-bodied distribution as an excuse to heavily raise taxes, with the goal being that the needy and disabled would not receive less. The logic being that if everyone has a safety net, we don't need to reward people as much since they now have lower risk. Personally I don't believe that would actually happen, but the idea does account for that angle.
snuxoll 10y ago
There's nothing inherently wrong with not entering the workforce in the post-scarcity society we are rapidly approaching. People can instead choose to spend time raising their children, practicing a hobby, or trying to start their own business without fear of not being able to support themselves. Most humans naturally don't want to sidle idle all their lives, some will, but the vast majority will find some productive use of their time - a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours.
- sfeng 10y ago
  The conflict here is that humans are animals, and animals evolved to use the minimum amount of energy possible to satisfy their needs. Yes you can learn the reward of willfully working hard, but I'm not sure whether everyone, or even most people, will make that transition.
  - noonespecial 10y ago
    In a post scarcity world why would most people need to? The whole point is that technology is about to make it possible to satisfy everyone's needs with minimum human energy and instead of reveling in it, we seem to be planning to de facto kill all the extra people we used to need with poverty. If 3/4 of everyone wants to watch TV and take fun drugs and our society has the wealth to allow that to happen, hooray!
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    Human beings also waste energy on frivolous things, recreation is not generally a trait shared by most animals - yet humans spend a fair amount of time just doing nothing productive or required for our survival. The same is true for work, while many people are forced to take whatever job they can to survive - there's no reason they wouldn't choose to punch a clock because they enjoy it. I wouldn't mind working less, but I love what I do, I get a sense of pride and accomplishment out of it - if it weren't required for my survival I wouldn't suddenly stop.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  ...a basic income means they don't have to work 40 hours a week just to survive so they can do what they really want to do in their spare hours. The data suggests that men, at least, really want to watch TV and take drugs. They don't spend much time raising children or on civic engagement. Here is a good survey article: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21... If you want to say "that isn't a true Scotsman/basic income", please explain how writing "basic income" at the top of the check would change things.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    I'm assuming you intend to reference the discussion of disability benefits late in that article; the key difference between that and basic income is that disability benefits are received by people who are judged to be occupationally disabled, which fall into two groups: (1) People who have worked and are actually physically unable to do so any longer (and, generally, for the same reason, inhibited in other important life functions), and (2) People who wish not to work so much that they have engaged in elaborate frauds to be adjudicated unable to work. And, in both cases, actually receiving money from work reduces their eligibility for payments and may jeopardize their eligibility to receive benefits at all. I think its quite reasonable to believe that neither of those (nor the two combined) would be representative in their use of money and their actions when receiving a certain amount of money, on top of the fact that receiving money which is partially conditioned on non-work induces different behaviors (even in the same set of people) than receiving unconditional funds.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      The article discuss the fact that most of those who are consuming disability benefits are not, in fact, physically unable to work. This is readily apparent from the fact that disability claims are strongly correlated with the economy; recessions do not cause people to become paraplegics. And this rise is in spite of workplaces and daily life becoming safer. NPR also has an expose on rampant disability fraud, although they of course use more polite language: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  Apologies if I'm coming from too far behind in the conversation, but I have a question about your post-scarcity assumption. It seems to me that in most societies, human populations continue to grow until they hit some hard resource barrier. And it's not a simple, gentle equilibrium that's reached: we usually end up with poverty and/or war as a result. How would you reconcile my take on human nature with your expectation of post-scarcity?
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    The human population seems to be stabilizing actually, with dramatically decreased infant mortality most parents these days focus on one or two kids instead of three or more - this is even more prevalent in more educated populations. Finland, for example had more deaths than births last year. I wouldn't be surprised if the population of the human race shrinks over the next century.
- gremlinsinc 10y ago
  As a note to the post-scarcity society looming, the 'humans must work 40 hours or they're not worth anything' is a recent development... Working times in middle ages was much more leisurely: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... -- Including average working days to be 150-175 depending on the century.. W/ robotics, etc...why can't we move back to that.. I think a parent should always be home with child, whether mom or dad. -- I see a rise in home schooling and learning through other ways than schools. A marriage of pre-industrialism and post-scarcity w/ the ability to spend free time coding and working on entrepreneurism, or scientific discovery sounds a lot better than working 9-6 5 days a week to make the next Bill Gates or Mark Z. rich.
- massysett 10y ago
  So the people who get out and work every day are supposed to support the people who want to "practice a hobby." People who get out and work find this repugnant and that's why UBI is a non-starter.
  - billmalarky 10y ago
    >So the people who get out and work every day are supposed to support the people who want to "practice a hobby." Only if they choose to. Everyone will receive the basic income, those who wish (and are able to) to supplement this income by working will be free to do so. >People who get out and work find this repugnant Working people will cease to exist as the majority in the not-so-distant future. There needs to be a solution for humans no longer being able to add value in the workplace.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      One should also add that a hobby can be productive. A UBI could result in a revival of the arts and crafts: painters, sculptors, woodworkers, etc - all of which could be economically and culturally productive. I wouldn't choose to stop coding, personally - it is one of my passions, but in a society with a UBI I could see cutting hours and spending more time with my daughter, fishing, etc.
      - massysett 10y ago
        Awesome. Nice of other people to get out and work so that you can go fishing.
        snuxoll 10y ago
        No need for the hostile tone. The push for a UBI is directly tied with increasing automation in virtually all sectors, there's going to be less work to go around as we go forward - is it really fair to judge someone for being okay with taking more time for themselves when there's less for them to do? I would go crazy if I didn't have code to write, it's not like I'll ever stop working if I wasn't forced to - but I wouldn't mind to cut back my week and spend time on my own endeavors if it wouldn't be a crushing blow financially.
mrec 10y ago
It would arguably also encourage people to enter the work force, by removing the welfare traps that can, all too often, make people who switch from benefits to paid work worse off. There's also a distinction to be made between "not working" and "not in paid employment". Carers, OSS devs etc can add value to society without ever showing up in employment stats.
- petra 10y ago
  You could just take that money and give it to a million other causes more socially valuable than distributing BI to everyone. Heck just think what some of this could do to research.
  - mrec 10y ago
    > You could just take that money and give it to a million other causes more socially valuable than distributing BI to everyone. You're thinking of it as extra money. Try thinking of it instead as money that's already being paid to everyone, just made unconditional. People are not (generally) starving in the streets, so the money is clearly being spent to keep them alive. Some of that is via benefits, which BI would replace. Some of it is via pay-for-work, and given a BI employers could pay less with the BI making up the difference. You can make a separate argument about whether a BI removes incentives to work, but AIUI evidence from pilot programs so far suggests that it doesn't. > Heck just think what some of this could do to research. How many of the famous names in science were able to make their discoveries because they belonged to a gentry class who didn't have to work for a living? How many people have to leave academic research because they can't get funding any more? What tends to happen to OSS contribution rates once people move from study to full-time work?
ploxiln 10y ago
Or, alternatively, it wants to take money out of the pot currently reserved for people best able to game the existing complex and flawed systems, and distribute it everyone fairly, including those who need it (some small number of whom currently "fall through the cracks").

wmf 10y ago

Obviously if the same money is spread among more people, some people will receive less than they used to. If social security isn't enough to live on, replacing it with basic income could be worse. Eliminating bureaucratic overhead helps but it's not clear how much.

marcell 10y ago

> The money saved eliminating all these programs (and their nontrivial overhead) can be used to give everyone a modest basic income. This isn't really the case. Basic income is not about cost savings. The programs you mention are wealth transfers, so the overhead is in fact trivial. They take money from person A, and give it to person B. There are checks in place to make sure person B qualifies, which accounts for the overhead. For retirement transfer (social security), you check each persons age--not too hard in America. All those programs would have to be colossally, amazingly inefficient for basic income to be more efficient at redistributing wealth. Out of it's over $1 trillion budget, estimates of administrative overhead are around 1%. Even for more complex programs like foodstamps, overhead is likely low and under 10% [1]. Basic income is about wealth re-distribution, not efficiency. It applies a huge tax increase to the top 10-20% of society, and gives that money to the bottom 80-90%. It's that simple. So the question everyone should ask is: should we have a policy of taking money from the top 10%, and giving it to the bottom 90%? [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-blumenthal/food-stamp-myths_b_1334924.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-blumenthal/food-stamp-my... (not the most reliable source, but best I could find quickly)

massysett 10y ago
Even for Social Security old age benefits, the overhead is a lot more than just checking someone's age. Benefits depend upon how much income someone had during his working years. So those records have to be checked. You also have to make sure people don't get fraudulent benefits. And that's just for old age benefits. For Social Security disability, you have to make sure someone is disabled. For unemployment, you have to make sure they worked in the first place, that they lost their job in a manner that garners them benefits, and their benefit size depends on what their pay was. Making all this work takes bureaucrats, judges to adjudicate claims, and people to investigate fraud. I have no idea whether UBI would be dramatically more efficient but even something like Social Security is far more complex than just checking someone's age.
snarf21 10y ago
I agree with you, taxes on the top are required no matter what. BI has other problems but I thought one of the other benefits of it was that it reduces fraud. You can't game the system as much. Needs based systems are easily defeated and then some of give you money based on your "need". This means you get more than you should (and presumably more than BI would provide). I actually think the best BI approach is like an EITC on steroids. You get all your money back if you are at the super low end and you can also make that a multiplier to encourage filling of lower wage jobs. What I mean by that is that if someone makes $15K a year, they may get 20K + $10K (2/3 earnings) back as a refund (could be quarterly, etc.) Someone who makes $0K a year would just get the $10K. Not well thought out yet but illustrating approach.

lewisl9029 10y ago

I'm a huge fan of the concept of a universal basic income, but I don't see how it can be a replacement for social programs for basic necessities like food stamps. There will always be people out there who will choose to blow their entire paycheck on frivolous purchases outside of their means and not have any money left over at the end of the month for food. As stupid and irresponsible they are for making that choice, a humane, post-scarcity society shouldn't just let those people just starve to death on the streets as a consequence. As a much more charitable example, consider the case of someone getting into an accident and ending up having to spend all or most of their basic income on medical expenses. How could someone like this survive if the basic income were to completely replace all existing social programs? So basic income will have to coexist with these existing programs. Perhaps the existing programs can be reduced in scale due to less people needing to rely on them thanks to the introduction of a basic income, but probably not nearly enough to completely offset the immense costs of the basic income program itself. This means the overall expenditure for social programs will likely have to increase due to the introduction of a universal basic income, and I personally am perfectly fine with increasing tax rates on the rich to make that happen, but it's not going to be easy.