6 ms·

Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc.

• dllthomas 13y ago
  That'd be a whole lot more expensive, not meet people's individual needs as well, and have more opportunity for corruption and abuse.
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Maybe instead of giving everyone cash, the government could provide people with a default shelter, food plan, etc. The problem that BI advocates see with that is that there is much greater overhead in managing a default shelter program, food plan, non-food-non-shelter-necessities-of-life-plan, etc., than just establishing and managing a single universal cash allowance plan.
  • tomjen3 13y ago
    It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI? Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food.
    • dragonwriter 13y ago
      > It has a higher overhead now, but how many people would actually use it, versus BI? It has a higher overhead even with a much smaller number of people using it, because the overhead is involved in enforcing the conditions which don't exist for unconditional basic income. (That is, the overhead in existing social welfare programs is largely costs expended to prevent people from using them, either at all or in the incorrect amounts for their particular qualifications. A fixed universal unconditional entitlement doesn't have that overhead because it doesn't have that function.) > Also you can always increase BI (and if everybody gets it, that is going to be a fairly popular campaing promise), but people can only eat so much food. People can recieve and derive utility from virtually unlimited amounts of food (just like money), even if they can only eat a limited amount, as food is a commodity. And as much as the point you make about the politics of raising BI is frequently made about any social benefit, I don't think there's much reason to believe its true of BI. There are quite a lot of people who are already aware that benefits have costs (both personal and social), and the people who have the most interest in focussing on the personal cost also have the most resources to bring the social costs to the public eye. That being said, there's no reason BI levels couldn't be managed by a politically insulated group (something like the Federal Reserve), and plenty of reasons why a legislature might prefer to leave those kinds of decisions to such a body.
• JonFish85 13y ago
  How's the government going to decide where to put people? The poor people get to live in the richest neighborhoods in NYC? Or do they get pushed out to the cheaper areas of Harlem? In the first scenario, the costs are insanely high. In the second, you're forcing the poor into a bad neighborhood. Food: who decides who gets what? Vegan options OK? Food allergies? Only organic? Whenever personal decisions are left to the government, things get bad.
  • alexvr 13y ago
    No, I'm suggesting that the government should offer only the bare minimum with very little freedom of choice if anything at all.
    • jlgreco 13y ago
      Why is that better? That sounds much worse in just about every way that I can conceive.
      • ihateloggingin 13y ago
        The point is to punish the undeserving poor.
• danielweber 13y ago
  Yes, public housing projects worked so well. You can go look up economics papers on Google Scholar or SSRN about the benefits of direct payments versus in-kind payments. You might worry that someone will use their direct payment and spend it on hooch, but you can't stop that: if you give them food stamps they will trade that for money and then spend it on hooch.
  • tomjen3 13y ago
    Actually you can stop it, by doing exactly what he says - you can eat free food at this particular place, but so can everybody else. It stops hunger, but it has a resale value of 0.