8 ms·

I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bur

• verisimi 1y ago
  There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
  • tokai 1y ago
    Then its just welfare not UBI.
    • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      Who says UBI won't be welfare (as defined by you) in the end?
      • treyd 1y ago
        Because the U in UBI means "universal". Saying this as someone that isn't strongly in favor of UBI.
      • tokai 1y ago
        Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this. edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
        • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
          We can redefine the "universal" part to mean "universal to those who need it ('need' by some arbitrary regularly changing criterion)". :-)
          • Yokolos 1y ago
            Then by definition it's not universal and it's not UBI anymore ...
            • aleph_minus_one 1y ago
              Politicians only care about definitions if they serve their agenda.
              • Yokolos 1y ago
                ... people care about definitions. We all care about definitions. What are you even talking about? We're not politicians and we're arguing definitions. Dude, go out and touch grass.
    • mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Yes, because UBI as in "giving an amount of money sufficient to live to everyone" is impossible.
      • nebulous1 1y ago
        How come?
        • mytailorisrich 1y ago
          Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
          • toomuchtodo 1y ago
            Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
          • mothballed 1y ago
            It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
  • paganel 1y ago
    Don’t forget about giving the government almost all of your bio data, such as your fingerprints and eye-scans. All in the name of “keeping the system fair / keeping the s scammers away” or some other similar bs.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    Nice conflation of a bunch of unrelated things. The only one of those that's justifiable for UBI is some sort of ID requirement to prevent double-claiming.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      Nobody ever envisioned federal transit funds being used to coerce states into adopting particular social policies yet here we are.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        The national drinking age? Really that's just an outgrowth of how dysfunctional the US is, especially along the Federal split. Not really an issue in Ireland or the UK, neither of which is federated.
        • rayiner 1y ago
          The point is that money will always be used as a hook for coercion.
  • andy99 1y ago
    I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions. It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle. There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
    • schwartzworld 1y ago
      > It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle. Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
      • mothballed 1y ago
        If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
        • Retric 1y ago
          Schools aren’t going to accept lunches from some random person for hopefully obvious reasons. That said, the random person buying grocery is paying a corp here.
          • mothballed 1y ago
            My kid's school will let kids bring their own lunch, if you hand it to the parent they can accept it.
            • Retric 1y ago
• DanielHB 1y ago
  In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
  • bombcar 1y ago
    Everyone gets it or everyone with a childs?
    • 1313ed01 1y ago
      Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together). It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
      • bombcar 1y ago
        The US has something similar, but of course badly done and confusing, with the "child tax credit" https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/child-tax... against your income tax later, instead of a monthly check.
        • andruby 1y ago
          Does that mean that people who don't pay tax, don't get it? (unemployed/retired/...)
          • votepaunchy 1y ago
            The Child Tax Credit is mostly refundable. https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/refundable-tax-credits https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/refundabl...
      • 1y ago
• schwartzworld 1y ago
  It saves a lot of work and therefore money. But there’s another layer to consider for many people. Someone getting benefits who doesn’t deserve it is less important than someone who needs help not getting it. You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
  • andy99 1y ago
    Yes I agree and right now the system seems like the opposite: better ten deserving people go without than one undeserving person gets an extra penny, even if we have to pay way more in bureaucracy costs adjudicate everything.
  • bell-cot 1y ago
    > You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to. Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the scam of collecting benefits via fake or stolen identities?
    • schwartzworld 1y ago
      A big part of why UBI isn't really viewed as a great option by actual socialists. I'd rather see us literally just give people food, housing and medicine without money being involved, but for some reason that's a tough sell to most people.
      • bell-cot 1y ago
        > I'd rather see us literally just give... Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent. In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
        • cindyllm 1y ago
• glitchc 1y ago
  It requires an application. How is that not eligibility testing? Did you read the article?
  • CalRobert 1y ago
    The article is not describing a universal basic income.
  • hrimfaxi 1y ago
    > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
    • glitchc 1y ago
      My apologies.
• Aunche 1y ago
  There is no such thing as "the absence of eligibility testing." Otherwise, I'd be signing up for UBI for my 100 imaginary friends. Too much administrative overhead has always been a concern troll argument against welfare anyways. Even the most bureaucratic welfare programs have a administrative burden of less than 10%. With a fraction of that, you could easily screen out the top 10% of income earners from basic income.
• palmotea 1y ago
  > I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program. I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment. Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.
  • parpfish 1y ago
    isn't "spreading the profits around equally" just universal income that's indexed to some sort of return?
    • palmotea 1y ago
      It's a universal income, but not a universal basic income.
    • ajmurmann 1y ago
      It also would have taxing 100% of profits as a step 0. That's so fraud with issues that should be obvious
    • chii 1y ago
      No, because it involves forcefully taking what would've been owned by somebody.
• TimPC 1y ago
  This program is an insignificant spec of spending compared to UBI though. UBI in most countries would be 50% of all government spending and welfare related spend is just nowhere close to that.
• ajmurmann 1y ago
  Another benefit over most welfare programs is that there is no welfare cliff. You'll never have less incentive (or negative in some programs) to start a job because you'd lose the benefit (other than relative marginal value of the next marginal dollar being inherently lower).
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  I firmly believe that removing the administrative spend to run the current bureaucratic nightmare that is welfare would free up enough money to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
  • euleriancon 1y ago
    Well, the US publishes numbers for a lot of its programs so we can see exactly how much is spent on the bureaucratic nightmare. Medicaid FY 2023 Budget: $900.3b ($620b federal, $280b state) [1] FY 2023 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): 5% ($45b) [2] SNAP FY 2024 Budget: $100.3b [3] FY 2024 Budget not spent on benefits (admin overhead): $6.5b [3] TANF FY2024 Budget: $31.5b ($16.5b federal, $15b state) [4] FY2023 Budget spent on program overhead: %10.1 ($3.2b) [5] Total Admin Spending $54.7b -> $169 per person in the US So not totally negligible but also not exactly a basic income [1] (https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending https://www.macpac.gov/topic/spending) [2] (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R42640) See figure 4 [3] (https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-government-spend-on-snap-every-year/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...) [4] (https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/880/872093.pdf) [5] (https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tanf_and_moe_financial_pie_charts_final.pdf https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ofa/fy2023_tan...)
    • steveBK123 1y ago
      Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud. In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio. That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
      • roboror 1y ago
        >Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead Public or private? I've never seen "the left" criticize admin overhead in public services. McKinsey estimates healthcare profit pools will reach $819 billion in 2027.
• chermi 1y ago
  Which is precisely while UBI will never happen - it takes power away from the government. Replacing the vast majority of welfare with NIT/UBI just makes too much sense. It's too efficient. Less government jobs, less government power. So it will never happen.
  • jandrese 1y ago
    The fundamental problem with UBI is that if it is enough to live on (even if it's a crummy life), then who is going to pick the strawberries? The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay. If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
    • yoyohello13 1y ago
      I'll bet with a UBI we will learn real quick which jobs are actually essential to society functioning and which are busy work.
    • EarlKing 1y ago
      > The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay. Perhaps you could try paying them more?
      • jandrese 1y ago
        Don't forget your competition is people in third world countries who have access to effectively slave labor, but do have higher shipping costs.
        • EarlKing 1y ago
          Is there some reason that you are bound to do business with literal slavemasters? Are you incapable of resisting doing business with the lowest bidder?
• tracker1 1y ago
  That's about the only thing I like about it as well... that said, I'd only support it for natural/born citizens.
  • snakeboy 1y ago
    I assume this is a joke?
    • tracker1 1y ago
      Why would you think it is a joke?
      • snakeboy 1y ago
        Isn't your final clause > that said, I'd only support it for natural/born citizens. directly in contradiction to the spirit of UBI that you endorsed immediately preceding it?
        • tracker1 1y ago
          The spirit of UBI isn't to bring in everyone around the world and try to pay for it. No nation can pay for the entire world, no matter what anyone thinks. The US may be effectively more wealthy than most of the world, but there are a lot of people in the world. If you increase the effective population without increasing the tax paying workforce, it simply doesn't math anymore.
• dizzant 1y ago
  An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate. My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately. Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
  • danudey 1y ago
    This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs. It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live? Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent. A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.