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>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start w

by nawitus 13y ago

>With a basic guarantee many people who are marginally employed would stop working. I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work. >You'd have two classes of citizens: the workers and those who are effectively parasites off of the workers. I don't like people being poor but society is just not wealthy for poverty to disappear. There are countries like Finland with a social security guarantee. You can pretty much refuse to work and get $1000/month as a social security (though there are details and sanctions which make this more complex in reality). Anyway, the point is this: in Finland you can already be a "parasite" and some people do that. Finland doesn't have a basic income guarantee. We also have a system where living on basic social security (toimeentulotuki) working 5 hours per week doesn't really make sense. The effective tax rate for working only a little is 90-100%. If you make 100 euros per week, the social security is decreased by 100 euros. With basic income the effective tax rate would be 20-30%, so working would make sense. In Finland you pretty much have either full-time/part-time workers (20+ hours) or people who are completely unemployed. Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more. An unemployed person living on $1000/month basic income can increase his or her standard of living substantially by getting paid $200/month more. If someone is working full time and getting paid $3000/month, a $200 increase per month has a lesser increase in standard of living. The current social security system has an incentive to be completely unemployed. Basic income means that it makes sense to work 1 hours, 2 hours, 5 hours, 10hours, 20 hours or 40 hours per week. All different kinds of working situations are naturally covered under basic income guarantee.

rdl 13y ago
In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections. You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.
dnautics 13y ago
>I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work. I am what in the US you would consider a "strong libertarian" - and I would say, I would be in favor of instituting a basic income if we got rid of the minimum wage.
- innguest 13y ago
  Seconded. I'm also a believer in basic income as an otherwise staunch libertarian, purely based on how much sense it makes.
- ballard 13y ago
  Under-the-table arrangements are like the majority of BitTorrent traffic, economies that occur despite rules because there is net utility. People still pay taxes and still license (not own) retail movies.
- incompatible 13y ago
  A basic income would hardly be libertarian. Although I also tend to libertarian, I do see a role for government in addressing cases of market failure, or where the market fails to meet certain moral standards. An example would be if somebody working in the best job they can find doesn't earn enough to pay for basic accommodation and food. The government would provide the safety net in this case. However there must still be some incentive for people in this situation to try and find better work (or perhaps move to a better location). Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled(paying slightly better, so according to the market more important, but leaving the employee no better off due to the government subsidy.) It's particularly silly with the current system that you can legally work for nothing, be a volunteer or an unpaid intern, but you can't work for $1 per hour. If you make low paid work illegal, you make the low paid unemployed. Perhaps some day all of this "scarcity economics" will be moot, if we could invent the star-trek style replicator, I suspect "work" would move to a volunteer model.
shard972 13y ago
> Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more. What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money. What would be the way to deal with this?
- Tuna-Fish 13y ago
  Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system. I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Which, it should be noted, it is pretty much economically impossible not to do except in the very short term, barring vast increases in productivity (or decreases in people's expectations of acceptable living standards.) > There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? And, even if you can, how do you do it when he still needs to work full-time to pay his existing bills?
- 13y ago

by nawitus 13y ago

rdl 13y ago

In reality I think you'd see people moving from collecting social security/SSDI/etc. and getting paid in cash under the table to collecting BI and working in licit jobs and paying some taxes/having some employment protections. You might also lose some people who "can't work" for economic reasons of UI/SSDI/etc. and volunteer instead to the paid workforce.

dnautics 13y ago

>I believe with basic guarantee many people who are unemployed would start working. Social security in many countries mean that it's rational to either work many hours per week or work zero hours per week. Basic income means that every hour worked or dollar earned increases your standard of living, thus creating a higher incentive to work. I am what in the US you would consider a "strong libertarian" - and I would say, I would be in favor of instituting a basic income if we got rid of the minimum wage.

innguest 13y ago
Seconded. I'm also a believer in basic income as an otherwise staunch libertarian, purely based on how much sense it makes.
ballard 13y ago
Under-the-table arrangements are like the majority of BitTorrent traffic, economies that occur despite rules because there is net utility. People still pay taxes and still license (not own) retail movies.
incompatible 13y ago
A basic income would hardly be libertarian. Although I also tend to libertarian, I do see a role for government in addressing cases of market failure, or where the market fails to meet certain moral standards. An example would be if somebody working in the best job they can find doesn't earn enough to pay for basic accommodation and food. The government would provide the safety net in this case. However there must still be some incentive for people in this situation to try and find better work (or perhaps move to a better location). Otherwise, you have people simply taking whatever job they find the most enjoyable, living off the government subsidy, and leaving other less desirable jobs unfilled(paying slightly better, so according to the market more important, but leaving the employee no better off due to the government subsidy.) It's particularly silly with the current system that you can legally work for nothing, be a volunteer or an unpaid intern, but you can't work for $1 per hour. If you make low paid work illegal, you make the low paid unemployed. Perhaps some day all of this "scarcity economics" will be moot, if we could invent the star-trek style replicator, I suspect "work" would move to a volunteer model.

shard972 13y ago

> Why should a citizen living on basic income would want to work? To get paid more. What in the case that the person doesn't want to get paid more? They can live comfortably enough on what is given to them and value the free time more than the extra money. What would be the way to deal with this?

Tuna-Fish 13y ago
Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Note that having everyone want to work is not necessary or even necessarily desirable, you just need to be able to maintain a low enough dependency ratio that the working people don't have to sacrifice much more than what they gain from such system. I personally think that the employment market for next few decades will continue to be characterized by endemic structural unemployment. We will continue to destroy jobs faster than they are created, through automation and efficiency improvements. What's going away especially quickly are the "middle-difficulty" kind of jobs -- between highly trained specialists and burger flippers. For a simple example, self-driving cars will soon revolutionize long-distance trucking. They won't eliminate the jobs completely, but they will significantly reduce their number. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? Maybe as a society we could just allow people like him the possibility of not working at that point?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Essentially, by keeping the basic income guarantee sufficiently low that most people don't want to do that. Which, it should be noted, it is pretty much economically impossible not to do except in the very short term, barring vast increases in productivity (or decreases in people's expectations of acceptable living standards.) > There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA. How do you retrain a 55-year old truck driver to be a software engineer? If you can't, should he go work at Burger King for a much lower wage instead? And, even if you can, how do you do it when he still needs to work full-time to pay his existing bills?
13y ago