11 ms·

European Citizen's Initiative for UBI

68 points by nemexis 5y ago

yeslibertarian 5y ago
UBI, just another socialist way to subjugate people. When a right requires an obligation to do something by a third party through the use of force by the state, then it is not a right, it's a priviledge. How are you going to pay for the UBI? through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  Wow. Isn't that a bit extreme? I don't think you fully appreciate how "normal life" depends on having a third party being obliged to do something for you. Your libertarian success is predicated on a functioning society, with a certain level of peace and mutual trust etc. History of civilization shows various ways to achieving various degrees of internal peace and mutual trust required for free enterprise to flourish, and all had some form of "obligation" baked in (religious or secular rule)
- na85 5y ago
  >UBI, just another socialist way to subjugate people. Seems preferable to endless wage slavery at the behest of unaccountable corporations run by billionaire oligarchs. If the choice is between driving a delivery truck and having to piss in a bottle versus a UBI and upsetting libertarians, I know which one I'd choose. >When a right requires an obligation to do something by a third party through the use of force by the state, then it is not a right, it's a priviledge. What "privilege" are you referring to here? >How are you going to pay for the UBI? through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax. Part of the allure of a UBI is that society could do away with separate welfare programs and such, which is probably more efficient from a reduction of bureaucracy standpoint, since you no longer have to have that silo in your government.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    If the choice is between driving a truck (even with the bottle) and the "Maduro diet" in Venezuela, a lot of us would probably pick the truck and the bottle. The failure mode of socialism is really unpleasant. "Wage slavery" doesn't come close. The argument you should be making is why Europe's UBI proposal won't wind up at Venezuela. Calling capitalism "wage slavery" isn't how you do that.
    - na85 5y ago
      >If the choice is between driving a truck (even with the bottle) and the "Maduro diet" in Venezuela That's a false dichotomy
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Using Venezuela as an example for socialism is already the first mistake. As is confounding socialism with a strong social state.
- j-pb 5y ago
  If you don't like the inflation of the governments currency, just build your own. (Thats the libertarian argument when it comes to everything else privatized, e.g. roads, no?)
  - gruez 5y ago
    >If you don't like the inflation of the governments currency, just build your own So crypto? Besides, it's not really an opt-out because you're still obligated to pay taxes, and network effects make it very hard for you to actually opt out.
    - j-pb 5y ago
      It's almost as if cetain endeavours make more sense when they're done collectively, and socially. If only there was some form of common institution where everybody would chime in with their labour, money, and votes to ensure the benefit, wellbeing and freedom of everybody.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - yeslibertarian 5y ago
    The libertarian argument is that government should not force the usage of inflated currencies as the legal tender.
- twen_ty 5y ago
  So what's your solution? I'm not holding my breath...
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Given the username, I'm guessing their solution is "Don't do UBI".
- nr2x 5y ago
  Well, in the U.S. we're practically out of capitalist ways to subjugate people to the point that we have people being paid pennies an hour to work in overcrowded, for-profit, prisons. Likewise, one of the biggest, and most brutal, prison systems in the world, which just so happens to be disproportionally full of people who's ancestors were slaves. So, let's try some new forms of subjugation at least as you'd have to be incredibly creative to find new ways of capitalist oppression.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    The US prison system isn't just one of the biggest, it is the biggest.
- Proven 5y ago
  That's exactly what it is. Privileges and handouts in exchange for obedience and votes (at least nationally - the EU has gone full CCP with their irreplaceable bureaucrats). > through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax. 100% correct. Most EU members have official debt that equals GDP (some are worse) and they probably figure they have another 50% of GDP to borrow. Now is also a great opportunity to transition from Covid 19 handouts to UBI (first experimentally and then - after EU-funded scientists discover it works really well - on an ever growing scale). If they spend 5% of GDP per year on UBI, that can go on for a decade or longer before everything collapses.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  In the 20th century UBI was mostly supported by libertarians, for example Charles Murray and Milton Friedman. They called in Negative Income Tax, but mathematically it's the same thing. It's smarter and more efficient than the system we have now, especially if it's funded by land value taxes.
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  money will just disappear at some point, it already lost all of its meaning, it is not used to share services anymore money is used to empower the wrong people, take a look at our society, people who invest live a better life than people who take care of our elderly people, worse they live a better life than the people who are cleaning our cities worse, they live a better life than researchers, and scientists money is a dumb thing, nowadays
u678u 5y ago
How does that work across the EU though? Eastern Europe has minimum wages of just a few EUR/hr.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  The answer is it doesn't :-)
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    A lazy answer if so, and a disappointing take on organizing society if that’s considered acceptable.
    - wyager 5y ago
      Maybe because "organizing society" according to some grand central plan isn't actually a very effective strategy.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Labor laws, entitlements, taxes, and other public policy are “organizing society”, and based on quality of life metrics most of Europe is crushing it. Sounds effective to me. I am an American living in a third world country in a first world suit, so I am admittedly biased.
        wyager 5y ago
        Taxes are less destructive than radically restructuring the entire economy, which most UBI advocates seem to want to do. Median household income in the US is significantly higher than any EU country except Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I think most Americans who complain incessantly about how "third world" America is view Europe through rose-colored glasses. Any third-world aspects of the US (which do exist) are not caused by our economic policies.
wyager 5y ago
Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win for a sufficiently narrow group of people. You're basically taking wealth from the top X of society and transferring it to the bottom 1-X, where X is probably somewhere in the range of 30-70%. This is too wide for the strategy to work effectively. Either no one really feels like they're winning that much, or the cost to the losers is so high that they're going to fight tooth and nail to stop it. That's just the implementation challenge I see from the political angle. I also think there are a ton of problems with UBI and it would probably be very economically and socially destructive, but that's a separate argument from the fact that it's going to be very difficult to implement in a democracy.
- slg 5y ago
  I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.
  - PKop 5y ago
    In a democracy, where votes are there to be bought, but perhaps not other regimes have this specific flaw.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    I assume the hypothesis is that the potential benefits would be spread too thin across the population to be considered particularly valuable.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    I listened to a Tulsi Gabbard interview, and she said that was one of the reasons Obamacare seems half-assed. She said that the Democrats and Republicans both had opportunities to make compromises that would have benefited everyone, but they decided not to work together because it gives both parties something simple to argue about during election season. Democrats get to say "Obamacare sucks because Republicans are holding it back", and Republicans get to say "Obamacare is another big government program that doesn't even do what they said it would". Both parties are right, and both parties have no desire to fix it.
spurgu 5y ago
Something I've been thinking about is how are addicts and mentally ill detected/addressed in a UBI society? Today it becomes apparent because when you have issues you tend to lose your job and have to join job seeking programs and/or contact social services. With UBI you could just fall through the cracks undetected. Has this been addressed by someone?
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I haven't heard of any programs anywhere where people who suffer from addiction or mental health issues and subsequently lose their job are somehow taken care of. People fall through the cracks all the time, every day. Here in BC, 851 people died of toxic drugs so far in 2021[1]. This is a huge issue and one that UBI might make easier to address. The person suffering from addiction or mental health issues would not be dependent on the job which could help prevent homelessness and further degradation of their state. Friends and family being able to temporarily leave the workforce to care for each other could help get that person the help they need. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-drug-deaths-may-2021-1.6084469 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-dru...
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Many issues of mental illness and drug abuse come from a lack of stability and ability to reliably meet basic needs. Some people… have a best possible outcome of at best not contributing anything to society for big chunks of their lives. This is just a feature of humanity. You get the most people out of this situation by taking away the fear of not having enough to exist. A big chunk of people don’t need to be in prison or institutionalized or in elaborate programs to “help”, they just need time and shelter and good food, with enough freedom to pursue happiness in their own way. Drugs, crime, and mental breakdowns always have a component of desperation as cause. You can take that away and help all of those problems without needing to do anything else. I have known people in social programs to “help” and my god were they terrible under constant threat of losing support and filled with perverse incentives to not try to be better.
- samatman 5y ago
  Right now (speaking from a US perspective, since that's what I know), a best case scenario for someone with mental health issues like you're describing is SSI. It's around $700 a month. To qualify, they must establish that they're unable to do any job which could earn them about $1200 a month, they can never have more than $2000 in assets, and they basically can't work. With UBI, they just... get the $700 a month (for the sake of argument). If they can work a little, well, then they do. If they get a gift, inheritance, any sort of windfall, good for them. There isn't ever a choice between continuing to get the lifeline check or trying to reenter the workforce, also known as the poverty trap. This is one of the basic arguments for UBI over means-tested benefits, in fact.
eplanit 5y ago
That logo of money changing hands makes a bad impression IMHO. It made me laugh, but I doubt that's their goal. It seems like self-parody, though I'm sure it's not.
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  your interpretation of the logo is wrong, you need to get new pair of glasses, and maybe some brain cells, lack of proper education maybe?
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  instantly flagged, i guess i hit a nerve :) and i can properly map the elusive people on there, nice ;)
  - dang 5y ago
    Can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a different sort of internet here, to the extent possible. Also, we've had to ask you this more than once before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - Shadonototro 5y ago
      i would believe you if the the parent comment were flagged too, but it's not but yes you are right, i should avoid it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740269
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  poles are shifting, quick, take your personal belongings and hide!
enaaem 5y ago
I’m sceptical about UBI, but I am willing to change my mind if it works (on a large scale) in practice. The only thing is that I do not want to be part of the experiment. Since I am from the EU this initiative concerns me, but I would fully support an US or Chinese experiment.
bassman9000 5y ago
Reading the main site, or the Spanish one: https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/ https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/ Can't find a decent, detailed description of the proposal. They have an intro video, a translation of the same one in the main page: https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Video-promocion-ICE-castellano.mp4 https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/... which is mostly gross oversimplifications, I suspect, to trigger emotional responses. Around 2:00 they mention funding. Basically, more and higher taxes, and the critical point, IMHO: replacing current subsidies and other public services with UBI. The devil is in the details, though, and wording is critical: they seem to say, but don't clearly state, that they're getting rid of everything else, and thus saving all that money to spend on UBI. E.g. for countries with a public healthcare system: does UBI mean all public healthcare becomes private, and you spend UBI on your provider of choice? Does this mean people/enterprises no longer need to pay healthcare taxes? E.g. for countries with unemployment insurance: does this mean it fully goes away, so people/enterprises no longer need to pay the unemployment tax? E.g. what about pensions? Does UBI become your pension, thus no more taxes paid for your retirement? We all know what you need to live when you're 20 is a fraction of what you need at 70. I'm extremely skeptical of any of these initiatives because they tend to be scarce in basic details. Which is likely done on purpose.
- xondono 5y ago
  Agreed that it’s too scarce on details. The obvious problem here is that UBI only makes sense if you take those other programs out (no public healthcare, no public pensions), but it will be unthinkable for most europeans to loose those. There’s no way to sell a change that requires people to take that amount of personal responsibility, especially when they’ve enjoyed life without them. I also hate that what was a good economics idea has become into a meme, and has been modified in a way that defeats the purpose. All the current talk about UBI started with people discussing back the concept of NIT (negative income tax), and the on-paper benefits of removing poverty traps from the system.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    UBI would replace a lot of existing social security programs, pensions and health care are jone of those candidates.
knorker 5y ago
Where do I sign against this? This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual. This is complete insanity. Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a very significant proportion would do: nothing. So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free. You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There's no downside. Or if you're one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever? Do you know how many people would be "artists" or "authors" if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it's all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted. I'm for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance. UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else. Neil Breen is funny because there's only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny. And NONE of them would be forced to "get their life together". Their life IS together, they're "film makers". So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing. And we can't keep the world running on the backs of the 25%. Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects. UBI is absolutely bananas.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > This is just FIRE without the money. I love how you framed this as a bad thing. As if FIRE was something one has to earn after years and years of wage slavery. > Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. > So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free. That assumption has been disproved time and again.
austincheney 5y ago
I would really like to see a real world UBI experiment. For example, implement UBI on two small communities. To counter act the impacts of potential inflation the experiment would need to occur for about 5 years because inflation follows changes to cash flow with a tail of about 9 to 12 months. You would need two communities to test whether isolation has an effect such that one community is geographically isolated from other population centers and the other is a suburb of a major metropolitan area. I suspect there are all kinds of interesting pros and cons worth study, but without trials everything is just a wild guess.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  A lot of small rural towns around the country already virtually are with very significant portions of the population receiving direct welfare and disability payments. The study to do is why existing programs don’t work better.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Unless you can isolate all supply chains, small experiments like this would be misleading.
- nemexis 5y ago
  it is happening in Spain right now for 850.000 households
nemexis 5y ago
world economic forum debate on the subject https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU

68 points by nemexis 5y ago

UBI, just another socialist way to subjugate people. When a right requires an obligation to do something by a third party through the use of force by the state, then it is not a right, it's a priviledge. How are you going to pay for the UBI? through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax.

ithkuil 5y ago
Wow. Isn't that a bit extreme? I don't think you fully appreciate how "normal life" depends on having a third party being obliged to do something for you. Your libertarian success is predicated on a functioning society, with a certain level of peace and mutual trust etc. History of civilization shows various ways to achieving various degrees of internal peace and mutual trust required for free enterprise to flourish, and all had some form of "obligation" baked in (religious or secular rule)
na85 5y ago
>UBI, just another socialist way to subjugate people. Seems preferable to endless wage slavery at the behest of unaccountable corporations run by billionaire oligarchs. If the choice is between driving a delivery truck and having to piss in a bottle versus a UBI and upsetting libertarians, I know which one I'd choose. >When a right requires an obligation to do something by a third party through the use of force by the state, then it is not a right, it's a priviledge. What "privilege" are you referring to here? >How are you going to pay for the UBI? through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax. Part of the allure of a UBI is that society could do away with separate welfare programs and such, which is probably more efficient from a reduction of bureaucracy standpoint, since you no longer have to have that silo in your government.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  If the choice is between driving a truck (even with the bottle) and the "Maduro diet" in Venezuela, a lot of us would probably pick the truck and the bottle. The failure mode of socialism is really unpleasant. "Wage slavery" doesn't come close. The argument you should be making is why Europe's UBI proposal won't wind up at Venezuela. Calling capitalism "wage slavery" isn't how you do that.
  - na85 5y ago
    >If the choice is between driving a truck (even with the bottle) and the "Maduro diet" in Venezuela That's a false dichotomy
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Using Venezuela as an example for socialism is already the first mistake. As is confounding socialism with a strong social state.
j-pb 5y ago
If you don't like the inflation of the governments currency, just build your own. (Thats the libertarian argument when it comes to everything else privatized, e.g. roads, no?)
- gruez 5y ago
  >If you don't like the inflation of the governments currency, just build your own So crypto? Besides, it's not really an opt-out because you're still obligated to pay taxes, and network effects make it very hard for you to actually opt out.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    It's almost as if cetain endeavours make more sense when they're done collectively, and socially. If only there was some form of common institution where everybody would chime in with their labour, money, and votes to ensure the benefit, wellbeing and freedom of everybody.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- yeslibertarian 5y ago
  The libertarian argument is that government should not force the usage of inflated currencies as the legal tender.
twen_ty 5y ago
So what's your solution? I'm not holding my breath...
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Given the username, I'm guessing their solution is "Don't do UBI".
nr2x 5y ago
Well, in the U.S. we're practically out of capitalist ways to subjugate people to the point that we have people being paid pennies an hour to work in overcrowded, for-profit, prisons. Likewise, one of the biggest, and most brutal, prison systems in the world, which just so happens to be disproportionally full of people who's ancestors were slaves. So, let's try some new forms of subjugation at least as you'd have to be incredibly creative to find new ways of capitalist oppression.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  The US prison system isn't just one of the biggest, it is the biggest.
Proven 5y ago
That's exactly what it is. Privileges and handouts in exchange for obedience and votes (at least nationally - the EU has gone full CCP with their irreplaceable bureaucrats). > through taxes and inflation, which is the worst kind of tax. 100% correct. Most EU members have official debt that equals GDP (some are worse) and they probably figure they have another 50% of GDP to borrow. Now is also a great opportunity to transition from Covid 19 handouts to UBI (first experimentally and then - after EU-funded scientists discover it works really well - on an ever growing scale). If they spend 5% of GDP per year on UBI, that can go on for a decade or longer before everything collapses.
akvadrako 5y ago
In the 20th century UBI was mostly supported by libertarians, for example Charles Murray and Milton Friedman. They called in Negative Income Tax, but mathematically it's the same thing. It's smarter and more efficient than the system we have now, especially if it's funded by land value taxes.
Shadonototro 5y ago
money will just disappear at some point, it already lost all of its meaning, it is not used to share services anymore money is used to empower the wrong people, take a look at our society, people who invest live a better life than people who take care of our elderly people, worse they live a better life than the people who are cleaning our cities worse, they live a better life than researchers, and scientists money is a dumb thing, nowadays

u678u 5y ago

How does that work across the EU though? Eastern Europe has minimum wages of just a few EUR/hr.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
axiosgunnar 5y ago
The answer is it doesn't :-)
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  A lazy answer if so, and a disappointing take on organizing society if that’s considered acceptable.
  - wyager 5y ago
    Maybe because "organizing society" according to some grand central plan isn't actually a very effective strategy.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Labor laws, entitlements, taxes, and other public policy are “organizing society”, and based on quality of life metrics most of Europe is crushing it. Sounds effective to me. I am an American living in a third world country in a first world suit, so I am admittedly biased.
      - wyager 5y ago
        Taxes are less destructive than radically restructuring the entire economy, which most UBI advocates seem to want to do. Median household income in the US is significantly higher than any EU country except Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark. I think most Americans who complain incessantly about how "third world" America is view Europe through rose-colored glasses. Any third-world aspects of the US (which do exist) are not caused by our economic policies.

wyager 5y ago

Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. From this angle, the problem with UBI is it doesn't really represent a clear win for a sufficiently narrow group of people. You're basically taking wealth from the top X of society and transferring it to the bottom 1-X, where X is probably somewhere in the range of 30-70%. This is too wide for the strategy to work effectively. Either no one really feels like they're winning that much, or the cost to the losers is so high that they're going to fight tooth and nail to stop it. That's just the implementation challenge I see from the political angle. I also think there are a ton of problems with UBI and it would probably be very economically and socially destructive, but that's a separate argument from the fact that it's going to be very difficult to implement in a democracy.

slg 5y ago
I have no idea if you are right or not, but it is a pretty wild political science theory that a policy can benefit too large of a majority of the population and therefore would be unpopular.
- PKop 5y ago
  In a democracy, where votes are there to be bought, but perhaps not other regimes have this specific flaw.
- mypastself 5y ago
  I assume the hypothesis is that the potential benefits would be spread too thin across the population to be considered particularly valuable.
- hn8788 5y ago
  I listened to a Tulsi Gabbard interview, and she said that was one of the reasons Obamacare seems half-assed. She said that the Democrats and Republicans both had opportunities to make compromises that would have benefited everyone, but they decided not to work together because it gives both parties something simple to argue about during election season. Democrats get to say "Obamacare sucks because Republicans are holding it back", and Republicans get to say "Obamacare is another big government program that doesn't even do what they said it would". Both parties are right, and both parties have no desire to fix it.

spurgu 5y ago

Something I've been thinking about is how are addicts and mentally ill detected/addressed in a UBI society? Today it becomes apparent because when you have issues you tend to lose your job and have to join job seeking programs and/or contact social services. With UBI you could just fall through the cracks undetected. Has this been addressed by someone?

barbazoo 5y ago
I haven't heard of any programs anywhere where people who suffer from addiction or mental health issues and subsequently lose their job are somehow taken care of. People fall through the cracks all the time, every day. Here in BC, 851 people died of toxic drugs so far in 2021[1]. This is a huge issue and one that UBI might make easier to address. The person suffering from addiction or mental health issues would not be dependent on the job which could help prevent homelessness and further degradation of their state. Friends and family being able to temporarily leave the workforce to care for each other could help get that person the help they need. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-drug-deaths-may-2021-1.6084469 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-toxic-dru...
colechristensen 5y ago
Many issues of mental illness and drug abuse come from a lack of stability and ability to reliably meet basic needs. Some people… have a best possible outcome of at best not contributing anything to society for big chunks of their lives. This is just a feature of humanity. You get the most people out of this situation by taking away the fear of not having enough to exist. A big chunk of people don’t need to be in prison or institutionalized or in elaborate programs to “help”, they just need time and shelter and good food, with enough freedom to pursue happiness in their own way. Drugs, crime, and mental breakdowns always have a component of desperation as cause. You can take that away and help all of those problems without needing to do anything else. I have known people in social programs to “help” and my god were they terrible under constant threat of losing support and filled with perverse incentives to not try to be better.
samatman 5y ago
Right now (speaking from a US perspective, since that's what I know), a best case scenario for someone with mental health issues like you're describing is SSI. It's around $700 a month. To qualify, they must establish that they're unable to do any job which could earn them about $1200 a month, they can never have more than $2000 in assets, and they basically can't work. With UBI, they just... get the $700 a month (for the sake of argument). If they can work a little, well, then they do. If they get a gift, inheritance, any sort of windfall, good for them. There isn't ever a choice between continuing to get the lifeline check or trying to reenter the workforce, also known as the poverty trap. This is one of the basic arguments for UBI over means-tested benefits, in fact.

eplanit 5y ago

That logo of money changing hands makes a bad impression IMHO. It made me laugh, but I doubt that's their goal. It seems like self-parody, though I'm sure it's not.

Shadonototro 5y ago
your interpretation of the logo is wrong, you need to get new pair of glasses, and maybe some brain cells, lack of proper education maybe?
Shadonototro 5y ago
instantly flagged, i guess i hit a nerve :) and i can properly map the elusive people on there, nice ;)
- dang 5y ago
  Can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a different sort of internet here, to the extent possible. Also, we've had to ask you this more than once before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Shadonototro 5y ago
    i would believe you if the the parent comment were flagged too, but it's not but yes you are right, i should avoid it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740269
Shadonototro 5y ago
poles are shifting, quick, take your personal belongings and hide!

enaaem 5y ago

I’m sceptical about UBI, but I am willing to change my mind if it works (on a large scale) in practice. The only thing is that I do not want to be part of the experiment. Since I am from the EU this initiative concerns me, but I would fully support an US or Chinese experiment.

bassman9000 5y ago

Reading the main site, or the Spanish one: https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/ https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/ Can't find a decent, detailed description of the proposal. They have an intro video, a translation of the same one in the main page: https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Video-promocion-ICE-castellano.mp4 https://rentabasicaincondicional.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/... which is mostly gross oversimplifications, I suspect, to trigger emotional responses. Around 2:00 they mention funding. Basically, more and higher taxes, and the critical point, IMHO: replacing current subsidies and other public services with UBI. The devil is in the details, though, and wording is critical: they seem to say, but don't clearly state, that they're getting rid of everything else, and thus saving all that money to spend on UBI. E.g. for countries with a public healthcare system: does UBI mean all public healthcare becomes private, and you spend UBI on your provider of choice? Does this mean people/enterprises no longer need to pay healthcare taxes? E.g. for countries with unemployment insurance: does this mean it fully goes away, so people/enterprises no longer need to pay the unemployment tax? E.g. what about pensions? Does UBI become your pension, thus no more taxes paid for your retirement? We all know what you need to live when you're 20 is a fraction of what you need at 70. I'm extremely skeptical of any of these initiatives because they tend to be scarce in basic details. Which is likely done on purpose.

xondono 5y ago
Agreed that it’s too scarce on details. The obvious problem here is that UBI only makes sense if you take those other programs out (no public healthcare, no public pensions), but it will be unthinkable for most europeans to loose those. There’s no way to sell a change that requires people to take that amount of personal responsibility, especially when they’ve enjoyed life without them. I also hate that what was a good economics idea has become into a meme, and has been modified in a way that defeats the purpose. All the current talk about UBI started with people discussing back the concept of NIT (negative income tax), and the on-paper benefits of removing poverty traps from the system.
- hef19898 5y ago
  UBI would replace a lot of existing social security programs, pensions and health care are jone of those candidates.

knorker 5y ago

Where do I sign against this? This is just FIRE without the money. Did you read the actual proposal? They explicitly want to give a middle class life to everyone, with zero obligation from the individual. This is complete insanity. Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. Kids are idiots (past me included), and if they knew they had the option to do nothing productive, then that's what a very significant proportion would do: nothing. So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free. You know what, why NOT be a teenage parent and never do anything productive? There's no downside. Or if you're one of the ones being productive, when you hit 30 and get a child, suddenly why bother going back to work ever? Do you know how many people would be "artists" or "authors" if they could? They really believe in themselves, and write poems their whole life, publish books, paint stuff. But it's all shit. Literally nobody wanted what 99% of them did. But they had no obligation to produce anything anybody else wanted. I'm for a strong social safety net and reducing inequality, but UBI is insanity until we actually have achieved Star Trek level of abundance. UBI assumes that everything that people want that gives them fulfilment is actually useful to anybody else. Neil Breen is funny because there's only one of him. Europe has what, 800M people? There would easily be 5M Neil Breens, but even missing the mark on unintentionally funny. And NONE of them would be forced to "get their life together". Their life IS together, they're "film makers". So we would have like 25% otherwise productive people dropping out completely, and another 50% switching to something that makes them fulfilled, but contributes nothing. And we can't keep the world running on the backs of the 25%. Another problem is that UBI becomes a level of power. People start planning their life after not needing it, and then politicians decide to not make it grow by inflation. Or they bump it up and make future generations pay for it. C.f. pension systems, medicare, and BBC funding for some unintended political side effects. UBI is absolutely bananas.

barbazoo 5y ago
> This is just FIRE without the money. I love how you framed this as a bad thing. As if FIRE was something one has to earn after years and years of wage slavery. > Kids will make zero plans to use school to make themselves useful. > So you'll have a population that is incapable of doing anything useful, demanding a middle class lifestyle, for free. That assumption has been disproved time and again.

austincheney 5y ago

I would really like to see a real world UBI experiment. For example, implement UBI on two small communities. To counter act the impacts of potential inflation the experiment would need to occur for about 5 years because inflation follows changes to cash flow with a tail of about 9 to 12 months. You would need two communities to test whether isolation has an effect such that one community is geographically isolated from other population centers and the other is a suburb of a major metropolitan area. I suspect there are all kinds of interesting pros and cons worth study, but without trials everything is just a wild guess.

colechristensen 5y ago
A lot of small rural towns around the country already virtually are with very significant portions of the population receiving direct welfare and disability payments. The study to do is why existing programs don’t work better.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Unless you can isolate all supply chains, small experiments like this would be misleading.
nemexis 5y ago
it is happening in Spain right now for 850.000 households

nemexis 5y ago

world economic forum debate on the subject https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU https://youtu.be/7rL6gJkdlNU