10 ms·

Why we should all have a basic income

36 points by teslacar 10y ago

Kinnard 10y ago
The one thing I don't get about the Basic Income push is . . . what will be done about inflation? With more and more money chasing the same amount of resources, goods, and services, basic income would push up the overall price-level and undo itself by pricing out those who live at the basic income level . . . am I missing something?
- intopieces 10y ago
  This is my question as well. If the UBI is $1000/month, doesn't that become the new $0? But, this is what I figure, not being an economist, and just being someone who really wants UBI to be a thing: With an influx of cash, people will be able to buy more, which creates incentives for actors in the market to create more products to eat up the new cash. More products = competition, which keeps prices low. Plus, people already have in mind how much they want to spend for a certain item. Take, for example, peanut butter. Rather than raising the price, the makers do things like decrease the amount of the product in the jar through redesigned packaging. Just my pet theory. What I wonder is for things with terrible competition (rent, for example) what prevents those markets from just gobbling up the gains.
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    > doesn't that become the new $0? I don't think so... Because $10,000 will not be the same as ten times zero. (Or, will it?)
  - Kalium 10y ago
    Is it perhaps possible that your hypothesis might not account particularly well for inflation? One cannot pump cash arbitrarily into an economy with a limited amount of value. Past a certain point, the scarcity of money changes. If the UBI was $1,000,000/mo, I expect rents everywhere might soar and bread might cost $10k a loaf. There's more money, but the scarcity of goods doesn't change, so what happens is everything sprouts a couple of extra zeros. This is what runaway inflation can look like.
  - malloryerik 10y ago
    Indeed rent can gobble up the gains. Look at how it has gobbled up the gains in the SF Bay Area.
- 2noame 10y ago
  I'm the author of this piece for the WEF, and have written an entire separate piece specifically about inflation and rising cost concerns. Link: https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income-just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7 https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-... Basically, more and more money only chases the same amount of goods if the UBI does not exist as a transfer of existing money from top to bottom and middle as described in this piece, and instead exists as continual expansion of the monetary supply through newly created money. Additionally, UBI does not eliminate forces of market competition. In fact, I argue it will even increase competition through increased entrepreneurship. It would be really stupid to raise your prices in a competitive market where your competitor does not raise prices, or even lowers them. As a quick example, every year when Alaskans get their dividend checks, there are a lot of sales as businesses compete for that money. It would be a really stupid business in Alaska that increases its prices every time the dividend is distributed, in the knowledge people have more money to spend. You may also find this argument interesting as well in regards to concerns of technological deflation: https://medium.com/emergent-culture/an-exciting-new-idea-in-basic-income-b1b7bf622845 https://medium.com/emergent-culture/an-exciting-new-idea-in-...
  - _rpd 10y ago
    Your argument that rent won't rise to absorb most of any additional income relies on low-income people moving out of high demand areas to super-affordable "Google Homes" in remote ex-burbs and formerly rural towns. I think you're fighting history, culture and even human nature on this one. If the Great Basic Income Migration doesn't occur, and if basic income is indexed to inflation, or worse, to a local 'cost of living', then you are deliberately engineering a hyper-inflationary spiral that will make Venezuela's seem tame by comparison.
    - malloryerik 10y ago
      As has been said before on HN, a land value tax could solve this problem with a basic income.
      - 10y ago
- johngalt 10y ago
  It is not that simple. Often increased demand can lower prices. Economies of scale and all that. For example if you cut total airline passengers to 10% of current numbers, over time prices would stabilize at a much higher level for an individual ticket. I would imagine that the 'bottom' of the market would grow significantly. As businesses targetted UBI recipients. UBI communities established in cheaplandville, midwesternstate. Not to say that there wouldn't be unproductive market distortions. Primarily people leaving the workforce to live on basic. Who chooses to work pest control when the alternative is basic? It would also further stratify the rich/poor divide.
ominous 10y ago
Isn't the question "Why should we pay a basic income" instead of "Why should we receive"? No amount of "should receive" can balance zero amount of "should pay". The ones that pay are the ones that need convincing. Unless both amounts are zero: zero reasons to pay and zero reasons to receive is a fine solution.
- _rpd 10y ago
  The version of basic income advocated by some conservatives abolishes all other welfare programs to fund basic income, the idea being to eliminate expenditure on means testing overhead.
  - seoguru 10y ago
    yes. which is why the UBI has been called an unholy alliance or trojan horse. The Job Guarantee at a living wage is a better solution, it's also counter-cyclical and not inflationary (assuming useful work is done, and we have a lot that needs doing).
  - nonsince 10y ago
    But I'm a wooly liberal and I agree with that, if you keep the BI high enough to truly replace the need for it. I would rather everyone had a basic, flat rate that had basically 0 bureaucratic expense to dole out. Maybe you could have a pension-like program where if you are over retirement age or can't work you get extra pay, but any more complexity than that is probably not worth the wastage that comes with it. If I'm missing something here, please tell me.
    - _rpd 10y ago
      There are a couple of issues. The first is that the means testing ensures that a small minority of the population receives welfare. If you dissolve the entire apparatus, and distribute the proceeds to all working adults then, in the US, it only comes out to something like $5-6k per year per person. Certainly below the 'living wage' $15/hr = $30k/yr + 'cost of living' adjustments that some are calling for (although this would require almost triple current tax revenues). The second is that each and every welfare program is the end result of a hard fought political battle, and not a single program will go quietly into the good night. The optics of people suffering due to a particular lost welfare program will receive orders of magnitude more attention than the provision of basic income, no matter how generous. Basic income will become status quo, but sharp recriminations will go on, until at last each and every program will be reestablished. This is more likely the closer the level of basic income is to the $5k "cost saver."
gumby 10y ago
As far as inflation goes: think of money as a signalling mechanism, not as a reserve of wealth. This is true for the wealthy, and as the marginal cost of producing goods drops, it becomes true for more and more of the population. When factories can more flexibly adjust production, you'll find increased demand for, say, iPhones, and decreased demand for, say, TVs, will shift production and damp the price inflation. Secondly, consider that an economy without a UBI yet with mass unemployment will suffer a liquidity trap. This is a more efficient way to fight that than QE (which I'm not criticizing as it was the best tool available for the times)
Mz 10y ago
Basic Income is a completely broken mental model. Some reasons: 1) Inflation. The minute that $1000 hits your bank account, it will be worth less than you think. Every social services program struggles with this fact. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete-before-we-opened.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol... 2. Human Nature. Everyone who writes these articles assumes that people are inherently good and would make better decisions if freed from the evils of needing to earn a paycheck. History tells us otherwise. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-wisdom-tells-us-idle-hands-are.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-wisd... 3. History tells us this does not work. We have tried some version of this before. It works fine at the "testing" stage where some small-ish group of committed, idealistic people come together and decide to share and share alike. The minute it is opened up to the general public and ALL people, no matter how badly they behave, are ENTITLED to their share, it falls apart. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried-this-before-and-its.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried... I could go on. And I have: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-revolution-2-electronic.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-r... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html
malloryerik 10y ago
Yuval Harari makes a good point: when it's said that "we" should "all" have a "universal" basic income, aren't people actually talking about a national basic income? Is the US or Norway going to provide a basic income to people in Bangladesh? Or Iraq? Harari discusses this in his book "Homo Deus". You can also see him discuss it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E
AuthenticApe 10y ago
Anyone who defends "basic income" needs basic understanding in economics, which I think is much more valuable thing to have than basic income. You can't eat money. Money is just a facilitator for complicated bartering. If everyone in the world was given a millon dollars in cash by some aliens, since the things we actually want to barter would not change in any way, that would serve no purpose. Prices would adjust up and everything would stay the same. Noone would be able to afford more than they already did.
hl5 10y ago
UBI does not directly address drug use, mental health, indebtedness, or homelessness. The idea that you can solve poverty by giving "free" money to individuals who can not spend wisely while at the same time eliminating nutritional and mental health programs can only have bad results.
- dvtv75 10y ago
  You're focusing on just one group - those who don't have jobs. Consider that a UBI would directly address bad employers, such as mine. Let me explain the situation, a very common one where I am: My employer feels that, because he pays me minimum wage for some hours a week, I owe him my complete allegiance. I should work very hard for him during my work hours, and then we have a post-work meeting that assesses our productivity for the day, and our mistakes - which also includes hardware failures. The IT department just notes "Operator error" when a piece of equipment fails. This meeting is mandatory and unpaid, an illegal combination. If I refused to attend, even though it's illegal for the boss to do so, I would be fired. Most catch-up work (when their antique equipment fails) is unpaid, too. I'm owed several thousand dollars in back pay, including public holidays (which they are legally obligated to pay me for), which I will never see. According to my employer, the role includes training everyone who comes through the door, supervising them in every aspect of what they do, and if they screw up the finger gets pointed at me. (If you looked at my actual contract, you would see that this is not a job requirement.) If computer equipment fails, and we have a 21 year old box running some crucial software which is built by the corporation (so updating it to support a modern machine is no problem), I'm expected to diagnose it and offer solutions just because I have a CS degree. Again, this is not in my contract. I don't even have the superuser passwords, but it's still my job in their eyes. I have a raft of further responsibilities, including ensuring that some high-end equipment works correctly even though I'm not allowed to touch it. I did once ask for a pay increase, but I was told that there aren't many jobs around here so if I don't like it, I can quit and good luck getting another job with the reference they were threatening to give me. A UBI would mean I could quit ("Take this job and shovel it") and look for an actual job where the staff are valued, perhaps even save enough to leave the city and look everywhere around the country. The lack of a UBI (as well as the governmental and social requirement to accept any "reasonable" job) means that I have to suck it up and keep working. That would be the most powerful reason to implement a UBI, to my mind: the ability to tell bad employers that you don't need them to live.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andriesm 10y ago
What I really don't get is, why do everyone advocate for universal basic income, instead of a negative income tax. The negative income tax model achieves the same basic income with less negative motivation for people who want to pursue work at the low-end. It also avoids wastefully paying it to people who don't need it. This is my inspiration : https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM
heycomeoncomeon 10y ago
I really wish the notion that wealth equals income would die. I too believed that the distribution of income is what our problem is in our economy. But after learning how real economics works it doesn't matter how much money goes where. What matters is production. Remember currency has no actual value unless something is being produced. If money is redistributed in one area you are not producing anything. What you are doing is reallocating production from one business sector to another. Recall the barter system, which worked for thousands of years. You are exchanging your product/service for something else. Currency is a means to divide out production.
- dTal 10y ago
  I think you've got the premise of Basic Income back to front. No one is suggesting that handing out money creates wealth. Rather, the premise is that the system is imbalanced, that as things stand the money distribution is not an accurate representation of value provided. Take Warren Buffet. Did he really contribute 76 billion dollars worth of value to society? I don't think so, and I don't think even Buffet himself does (he has said that to spend his vast accumulated fortune on himself would divert resources from important things). But once you make beyond a certain amount it's almost hard not to make more, without doing anything at all! Here's[1] an interesting personal account of this on our very own HN. Conversely, someone at the bottom of the ladder can work 60-80 hour weeks in multiple jobs and barely make ends meet, let alone save. I would even argue that an unemployed person actively seeking work is probably contributing various forms of value merely by existing - most obviously in the form of liquidity to the employment market, but also in all the other ways a living person is valuable - they listen and talk, make friends, form opinions, vote, and otherwise reinforce the fabric of society (hence why it is still a tragedy if such a person gets hit by a train, and a crime if they are murdered). Moving further down still, when push comes to shove, most people would agree that even the most miserable, useless wretch does not deserve to die, if the resources for their survival are readily available. There is value, moral value, in compassion. A society that takes this view is spiritually wealthier. So you have a scenario where, monetarily, the people at the top are systemically overvalued, and the people at the bottom systemically undervalued. This seems to be a deep property of the system that can't be fixed by fiddling taxes within the existing framework - money trickles up, where it accumulates. Closing the loop with a basic income, even a nominal one, is a direct and practical solution that doesn't have to hurt anyone. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121

36 points by teslacar 10y ago

The one thing I don't get about the Basic Income push is . . . what will be done about inflation? With more and more money chasing the same amount of resources, goods, and services, basic income would push up the overall price-level and undo itself by pricing out those who live at the basic income level . . . am I missing something?

intopieces 10y ago
This is my question as well. If the UBI is $1000/month, doesn't that become the new $0? But, this is what I figure, not being an economist, and just being someone who really wants UBI to be a thing: With an influx of cash, people will be able to buy more, which creates incentives for actors in the market to create more products to eat up the new cash. More products = competition, which keeps prices low. Plus, people already have in mind how much they want to spend for a certain item. Take, for example, peanut butter. Rather than raising the price, the makers do things like decrease the amount of the product in the jar through redesigned packaging. Just my pet theory. What I wonder is for things with terrible competition (rent, for example) what prevents those markets from just gobbling up the gains.
- Koshkin 10y ago
  > doesn't that become the new $0? I don't think so... Because $10,000 will not be the same as ten times zero. (Or, will it?)
- Kalium 10y ago
  Is it perhaps possible that your hypothesis might not account particularly well for inflation? One cannot pump cash arbitrarily into an economy with a limited amount of value. Past a certain point, the scarcity of money changes. If the UBI was $1,000,000/mo, I expect rents everywhere might soar and bread might cost $10k a loaf. There's more money, but the scarcity of goods doesn't change, so what happens is everything sprouts a couple of extra zeros. This is what runaway inflation can look like.
- malloryerik 10y ago
  Indeed rent can gobble up the gains. Look at how it has gobbled up the gains in the SF Bay Area.
2noame 10y ago
I'm the author of this piece for the WEF, and have written an entire separate piece specifically about inflation and rising cost concerns. Link: https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income-just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7 https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-... Basically, more and more money only chases the same amount of goods if the UBI does not exist as a transfer of existing money from top to bottom and middle as described in this piece, and instead exists as continual expansion of the monetary supply through newly created money. Additionally, UBI does not eliminate forces of market competition. In fact, I argue it will even increase competition through increased entrepreneurship. It would be really stupid to raise your prices in a competitive market where your competitor does not raise prices, or even lowers them. As a quick example, every year when Alaskans get their dividend checks, there are a lot of sales as businesses compete for that money. It would be a really stupid business in Alaska that increases its prices every time the dividend is distributed, in the knowledge people have more money to spend. You may also find this argument interesting as well in regards to concerns of technological deflation: https://medium.com/emergent-culture/an-exciting-new-idea-in-basic-income-b1b7bf622845 https://medium.com/emergent-culture/an-exciting-new-idea-in-...
- _rpd 10y ago
  Your argument that rent won't rise to absorb most of any additional income relies on low-income people moving out of high demand areas to super-affordable "Google Homes" in remote ex-burbs and formerly rural towns. I think you're fighting history, culture and even human nature on this one. If the Great Basic Income Migration doesn't occur, and if basic income is indexed to inflation, or worse, to a local 'cost of living', then you are deliberately engineering a hyper-inflationary spiral that will make Venezuela's seem tame by comparison.
  - malloryerik 10y ago
    As has been said before on HN, a land value tax could solve this problem with a basic income.
    - 10y ago
johngalt 10y ago
It is not that simple. Often increased demand can lower prices. Economies of scale and all that. For example if you cut total airline passengers to 10% of current numbers, over time prices would stabilize at a much higher level for an individual ticket. I would imagine that the 'bottom' of the market would grow significantly. As businesses targetted UBI recipients. UBI communities established in cheaplandville, midwesternstate. Not to say that there wouldn't be unproductive market distortions. Primarily people leaving the workforce to live on basic. Who chooses to work pest control when the alternative is basic? It would also further stratify the rich/poor divide.

ominous 10y ago

Isn't the question "Why should we pay a basic income" instead of "Why should we receive"? No amount of "should receive" can balance zero amount of "should pay". The ones that pay are the ones that need convincing. Unless both amounts are zero: zero reasons to pay and zero reasons to receive is a fine solution.

_rpd 10y ago
The version of basic income advocated by some conservatives abolishes all other welfare programs to fund basic income, the idea being to eliminate expenditure on means testing overhead.
- seoguru 10y ago
  yes. which is why the UBI has been called an unholy alliance or trojan horse. The Job Guarantee at a living wage is a better solution, it's also counter-cyclical and not inflationary (assuming useful work is done, and we have a lot that needs doing).
- nonsince 10y ago
  But I'm a wooly liberal and I agree with that, if you keep the BI high enough to truly replace the need for it. I would rather everyone had a basic, flat rate that had basically 0 bureaucratic expense to dole out. Maybe you could have a pension-like program where if you are over retirement age or can't work you get extra pay, but any more complexity than that is probably not worth the wastage that comes with it. If I'm missing something here, please tell me.
  - _rpd 10y ago
    There are a couple of issues. The first is that the means testing ensures that a small minority of the population receives welfare. If you dissolve the entire apparatus, and distribute the proceeds to all working adults then, in the US, it only comes out to something like $5-6k per year per person. Certainly below the 'living wage' $15/hr = $30k/yr + 'cost of living' adjustments that some are calling for (although this would require almost triple current tax revenues). The second is that each and every welfare program is the end result of a hard fought political battle, and not a single program will go quietly into the good night. The optics of people suffering due to a particular lost welfare program will receive orders of magnitude more attention than the provision of basic income, no matter how generous. Basic income will become status quo, but sharp recriminations will go on, until at last each and every program will be reestablished. This is more likely the closer the level of basic income is to the $5k "cost saver."

gumby 10y ago

As far as inflation goes: think of money as a signalling mechanism, not as a reserve of wealth. This is true for the wealthy, and as the marginal cost of producing goods drops, it becomes true for more and more of the population. When factories can more flexibly adjust production, you'll find increased demand for, say, iPhones, and decreased demand for, say, TVs, will shift production and damp the price inflation. Secondly, consider that an economy without a UBI yet with mass unemployment will suffer a liquidity trap. This is a more efficient way to fight that than QE (which I'm not criticizing as it was the best tool available for the times)

Mz 10y ago

Basic Income is a completely broken mental model. Some reasons: 1) Inflation. The minute that $1000 hits your bank account, it will be worth less than you think. Every social services program struggles with this fact. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete-before-we-opened.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsol... 2. Human Nature. Everyone who writes these articles assumes that people are inherently good and would make better decisions if freed from the evils of needing to earn a paycheck. History tells us otherwise. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-wisdom-tells-us-idle-hands-are.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/10/ancient-wisd... 3. History tells us this does not work. We have tried some version of this before. It works fine at the "testing" stage where some small-ish group of committed, idealistic people come together and decide to share and share alike. The minute it is opened up to the general public and ALL people, no matter how badly they behave, are ENTITLED to their share, it falls apart. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried-this-before-and-its.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/ubi-we-tried... I could go on. And I have: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-revolution-2-electronic.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/industrial-r... http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html

malloryerik 10y ago

Yuval Harari makes a good point: when it's said that "we" should "all" have a "universal" basic income, aren't people actually talking about a national basic income? Is the US or Norway going to provide a basic income to people in Bangladesh? Or Iraq? Harari discusses this in his book "Homo Deus". You can also see him discuss it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E

AuthenticApe 10y ago

Anyone who defends "basic income" needs basic understanding in economics, which I think is much more valuable thing to have than basic income. You can't eat money. Money is just a facilitator for complicated bartering. If everyone in the world was given a millon dollars in cash by some aliens, since the things we actually want to barter would not change in any way, that would serve no purpose. Prices would adjust up and everything would stay the same. Noone would be able to afford more than they already did.

hl5 10y ago

UBI does not directly address drug use, mental health, indebtedness, or homelessness. The idea that you can solve poverty by giving "free" money to individuals who can not spend wisely while at the same time eliminating nutritional and mental health programs can only have bad results.

dvtv75 10y ago
You're focusing on just one group - those who don't have jobs. Consider that a UBI would directly address bad employers, such as mine. Let me explain the situation, a very common one where I am: My employer feels that, because he pays me minimum wage for some hours a week, I owe him my complete allegiance. I should work very hard for him during my work hours, and then we have a post-work meeting that assesses our productivity for the day, and our mistakes - which also includes hardware failures. The IT department just notes "Operator error" when a piece of equipment fails. This meeting is mandatory and unpaid, an illegal combination. If I refused to attend, even though it's illegal for the boss to do so, I would be fired. Most catch-up work (when their antique equipment fails) is unpaid, too. I'm owed several thousand dollars in back pay, including public holidays (which they are legally obligated to pay me for), which I will never see. According to my employer, the role includes training everyone who comes through the door, supervising them in every aspect of what they do, and if they screw up the finger gets pointed at me. (If you looked at my actual contract, you would see that this is not a job requirement.) If computer equipment fails, and we have a 21 year old box running some crucial software which is built by the corporation (so updating it to support a modern machine is no problem), I'm expected to diagnose it and offer solutions just because I have a CS degree. Again, this is not in my contract. I don't even have the superuser passwords, but it's still my job in their eyes. I have a raft of further responsibilities, including ensuring that some high-end equipment works correctly even though I'm not allowed to touch it. I did once ask for a pay increase, but I was told that there aren't many jobs around here so if I don't like it, I can quit and good luck getting another job with the reference they were threatening to give me. A UBI would mean I could quit ("Take this job and shovel it") and look for an actual job where the staff are valued, perhaps even save enough to leave the city and look everywhere around the country. The lack of a UBI (as well as the governmental and social requirement to accept any "reasonable" job) means that I have to suck it up and keep working. That would be the most powerful reason to implement a UBI, to my mind: the ability to tell bad employers that you don't need them to live.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

andriesm 10y ago

What I really don't get is, why do everyone advocate for universal basic income, instead of a negative income tax. The negative income tax model achieves the same basic income with less negative motivation for people who want to pursue work at the low-end. It also avoids wastefully paying it to people who don't need it. This is my inspiration : https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM

heycomeoncomeon 10y ago

I really wish the notion that wealth equals income would die. I too believed that the distribution of income is what our problem is in our economy. But after learning how real economics works it doesn't matter how much money goes where. What matters is production. Remember currency has no actual value unless something is being produced. If money is redistributed in one area you are not producing anything. What you are doing is reallocating production from one business sector to another. Recall the barter system, which worked for thousands of years. You are exchanging your product/service for something else. Currency is a means to divide out production.

dTal 10y ago
I think you've got the premise of Basic Income back to front. No one is suggesting that handing out money creates wealth. Rather, the premise is that the system is imbalanced, that as things stand the money distribution is not an accurate representation of value provided. Take Warren Buffet. Did he really contribute 76 billion dollars worth of value to society? I don't think so, and I don't think even Buffet himself does (he has said that to spend his vast accumulated fortune on himself would divert resources from important things). But once you make beyond a certain amount it's almost hard not to make more, without doing anything at all! Here's[1] an interesting personal account of this on our very own HN. Conversely, someone at the bottom of the ladder can work 60-80 hour weeks in multiple jobs and barely make ends meet, let alone save. I would even argue that an unemployed person actively seeking work is probably contributing various forms of value merely by existing - most obviously in the form of liquidity to the employment market, but also in all the other ways a living person is valuable - they listen and talk, make friends, form opinions, vote, and otherwise reinforce the fabric of society (hence why it is still a tragedy if such a person gets hit by a train, and a crime if they are murdered). Moving further down still, when push comes to shove, most people would agree that even the most miserable, useless wretch does not deserve to die, if the resources for their survival are readily available. There is value, moral value, in compassion. A society that takes this view is spiritually wealthier. So you have a scenario where, monetarily, the people at the top are systemically overvalued, and the people at the bottom systemically undervalued. This seems to be a deep property of the system that can't be fixed by fiddling taxes within the existing framework - money trickles up, where it accumulates. Closing the loop with a basic income, even a nominal one, is a direct and practical solution that doesn't have to hurt anyone. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13698121