5 ms·

I've noticed the number of articles on "mincome" or "basic income" ramping up quite a bit in places like reddit, and to a lesser extent on HN. I don't necessari

by noarchy 12y ago

I've noticed the number of articles on "mincome" or "basic income" ramping up quite a bit in places like reddit, and to a lesser extent on HN. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but are there groups actively trying to get this idea out on social media, hence all of the articles that I'm seeing? It may be that the idea is gaining organic momentum, on top of that, but I've been wondering about this of late.

waterside81 12y ago
Maybe a bit of both? With income disparity growing, technology supplanting many "blue-collar" jobs, poverty not really being tackled effectively, it's natural for folks to think about alternative means of sustaining our economy.
samspenc 12y ago
I'm wondering who will be sponsoring / supporting this mincome? Won't it be coming out of government taxes - and thus a higher tax rate?
- jedmeyers 12y ago
  I also rarely even see back of a napkin calculations on how much money will be given away, what will be the source of the money, etc.
  - bane 12y ago
    If you see one that doesn't account for labor dropout under a UBI scheme, ignore it. It won't be a realistic model.
    - phaemon 12y ago
      So you keep claiming, but actual trials of mincome/BI/whatever haven't shown a significant dropout of labour. Do you have any evidence for this other than your gut feeling?
      - bane 12y ago
        sigh this is absolutely exhausting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793453
        phaemon 12y ago
        I read those comments. They're exactly what I meant by "you keep claiming this". Claiming it's so is not evidence. Perhaps you missed that in your weariness. My question stands: Do you have any evidence for this other than your gut feeling?
        bane 12y ago
        You can read the Mincome reports yourself. They aren't exactly glowing and most of the reported effects are well within the margin for error in the measurements. BI and UBI has never been tried anywhere in a fully form because it requires everybody on the planet to do it at the same time. The closest we have are economic analogs. For example, resource rich locations that produce wealth at multiples of the labor input. You can study the economics of these places yourself and look at the outcomes. But they basically sum to: people stop working, people collect their money, labor supply needs to be imported from outside the local economy, the people who've stopped working don't exactly spend this new free-time self-actualizing themselves into discovering cures for cancer or unifying the fundamental forces of the universe. If you want evidence, I suggest you open a high-school level history book and start on page 1. If you aren't aware of these cases on your own, but willing to promote nonsense like UBI, you're just being willfully ignorant of history and basic economics. No amount of handwaivery and ignoring poor outcomes based on this or that technicality or goal post move will make cause and effect bend towards making these schemes work. So here's your test: find somebody who's working poor, offer to put them up in your house and feed and clothe them no strings attached. How long before they self-actualize into a high-paid white-collar degree? Repeat this experiment 10,000 times. How many people, given this options, would rather just sit at home all day and surf the internet/watch TV/gossip vs. going out and challenging themselves into a better life? I don't have to answer this, BI advocates do. And they need to present the outcome of this experiment as a real economic model that accurately predicts labor participation and real-world situations. This has never been done and anything outside of this is hand waivy nonsense built on fairy dreams.
    - scarmig 12y ago
      Labor dropout is more likely to be higher under current welfare schemes than a basic income, because of the high marginal tax rates present under the current system vs BI.
  - phaemon 12y ago
    I knocked one together for the UK, if it helps. But it is 'back of napkin'. There are all sorts of details you'd want to fill out. Here: [There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.] tl;dr - About £80 a week seems roughly achievable as a starting point. Firstly, I'd like to say I prefer thinking of this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as the latter suggests it's useless if it doesn't cover a persons cost of living. I think even a small start is better than nothing, and it can be increased up to become a Basic Income in time. I'll refer to it as BI (Basic Income) here though. So, let's see what we've got... The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion. That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit :-) Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far: Who loves me: - Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party. - Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle. - Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job. Who hates me: - Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party. - People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage. - Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally). Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%. That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week. And I think I'll leave it there. We'd need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls (such as pension payments), but as long as it's less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £70 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.
- freshyill 12y ago
  Not necessarily. Wouldn't a minimum income plan also mean the end of other welfare plans?
  - iopq 12y ago
    Yes, necessarily. Because welfare is means-tested.
  - jbuzbee 12y ago
    No. Some folks or kids will still need help after the basic income is spent on booze or gambled away. And some people will choose to live on the streets. Society won't just let them starve in the gutter.
- gaius 12y ago
  No. The welfare system is incredibly expensive to operate! I mean, in terms of the administrative overhead, the armies of bureaucrats, etc. Scrap all that, make a simple, unconditional payment - nothing to administer, no fraud to investigate, and it becomes very affordable - without raising taxes either. But it won't work in the real world, because it will be too easy to buy votes by promising more and more. This basic income needs to be fixed at a level of bare subsistence only. Like here in the UK we have a problem with government housing now - I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but it has morphed into, with at least one spare bedroom, in the area of you choosing for life even if you no longer need it, etc. Thats not fair on the people paying for it, and it's not fair on the people on the waiting list.
  - discardorama 12y ago
    > No. The welfare system is incredibly expensive to operate! I mean, in terms of the administrative overhead, the armies of bureaucrats, etc. Scrap all that, make a simple, unconditional payment - nothing to administer, no fraud to investigate, and it becomes very affordable - without raising taxes either. That's laughably naïve. I live in San Francisco. I have experience interacting with more than my fair share of homeless people. So let me ask you this: what happens when a person deliberately decides to be homeless? Do you just let him suffer on the streets? Or do you offer him shelter and food? The point is: you will still need the welfare services. Things like Child Protective Services, emergency rooms, homeless shelters, etc. etc. So all that UBI does is add an additional $20K/year of taxes on top of what we already pay. People in this country are opposed to universal health insurance, despite the fact that the beneficiaries actually pay into it. What makes you think that they will agree to just cutting $1.5K checks every month to every person? And then: what happens to the immigrants? People will come streaming across the border in droves when word spreads that they can get 1000s of dollars per year for nothing in America! We can't even control the border now; imagine what'll happen then.
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      > People in this country are opposed to universal health insurance The highest hopes to see something implemented in our lifetime come from more civilized countries: Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
- minikites 12y ago
  Taxes are at historic lows, we should raise taxes regardless because infrastructure is crumbling nationwide.
bane 12y ago
You'll also notice that nobody advocating it has even the slightest whiff of an economic model that makes it work. In UBI schemes, money is treated like an endless well of fairy dust that can be sprinkled all over the population and magic will happen. Numbers are thrown out all over the place and realistic actor models on the micro and macro economic levels are never provided. When challenged, they all point to Mincome, which wasn't a UBI experiment, as some kind of evidence. And the evidence from Mincome (when you read the writeup) is that it didn't work very well from the point of a UBI scheme, it achieved approximately zero of the proposed benefits of UBI. But you know, reading and math are hard I guess.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  > money is treated like an endless well of fairy dust that can be sprinkled all over the population and magic will happen Money is an artificial resource meant to create a level of indirection between the buyer and the seller. The amount of money in circulation at a certain point in time does not explain why some people eat better than others. If you want to argue against UBI on the basis that resources are too scarce to be enough for all of us, you need to talk about the actual resources. On the agricultural side, we have overproduction in Europe and in Italy the cultivated terrain is smaller every year.
tempestn 12y ago
It's likely mostly due to the positive feedback loop. I've become interested in the idea of a basic income from reading stories via HN, and I posted this because (which I agree it isn't really a test of basic income) it is related, and I hadn't heard about it before.

by noarchy 12y ago

waterside81 12y ago

Maybe a bit of both? With income disparity growing, technology supplanting many "blue-collar" jobs, poverty not really being tackled effectively, it's natural for folks to think about alternative means of sustaining our economy.

samspenc 12y ago

I'm wondering who will be sponsoring / supporting this mincome? Won't it be coming out of government taxes - and thus a higher tax rate?

jedmeyers 12y ago
I also rarely even see back of a napkin calculations on how much money will be given away, what will be the source of the money, etc.
- bane 12y ago
  If you see one that doesn't account for labor dropout under a UBI scheme, ignore it. It won't be a realistic model.
  - phaemon 12y ago
    So you keep claiming, but actual trials of mincome/BI/whatever haven't shown a significant dropout of labour. Do you have any evidence for this other than your gut feeling?
    - bane 12y ago
      sigh this is absolutely exhausting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8793453
      - phaemon 12y ago
        I read those comments. They're exactly what I meant by "you keep claiming this". Claiming it's so is not evidence. Perhaps you missed that in your weariness. My question stands: Do you have any evidence for this other than your gut feeling?
        bane 12y ago
        You can read the Mincome reports yourself. They aren't exactly glowing and most of the reported effects are well within the margin for error in the measurements. BI and UBI has never been tried anywhere in a fully form because it requires everybody on the planet to do it at the same time. The closest we have are economic analogs. For example, resource rich locations that produce wealth at multiples of the labor input. You can study the economics of these places yourself and look at the outcomes. But they basically sum to: people stop working, people collect their money, labor supply needs to be imported from outside the local economy, the people who've stopped working don't exactly spend this new free-time self-actualizing themselves into discovering cures for cancer or unifying the fundamental forces of the universe. If you want evidence, I suggest you open a high-school level history book and start on page 1. If you aren't aware of these cases on your own, but willing to promote nonsense like UBI, you're just being willfully ignorant of history and basic economics. No amount of handwaivery and ignoring poor outcomes based on this or that technicality or goal post move will make cause and effect bend towards making these schemes work. So here's your test: find somebody who's working poor, offer to put them up in your house and feed and clothe them no strings attached. How long before they self-actualize into a high-paid white-collar degree? Repeat this experiment 10,000 times. How many people, given this options, would rather just sit at home all day and surf the internet/watch TV/gossip vs. going out and challenging themselves into a better life? I don't have to answer this, BI advocates do. And they need to present the outcome of this experiment as a real economic model that accurately predicts labor participation and real-world situations. This has never been done and anything outside of this is hand waivy nonsense built on fairy dreams.
  - scarmig 12y ago
    Labor dropout is more likely to be higher under current welfare schemes than a basic income, because of the high marginal tax rates present under the current system vs BI.
- phaemon 12y ago
  I knocked one together for the UK, if it helps. But it is 'back of napkin'. There are all sorts of details you'd want to fill out. Here: [There were requests for "back of a napkin" calculations, so I've done some for the UK. To convert to USD, just add 50%, as a rough measure.] tl;dr - About £80 a week seems roughly achievable as a starting point. Firstly, I'd like to say I prefer thinking of this as a "Citizen's Dividend" rather than a "Basic Income", as the latter suggests it's useless if it doesn't cover a persons cost of living. I think even a small start is better than nothing, and it can be increased up to become a Basic Income in time. I'll refer to it as BI (Basic Income) here though. So, let's see what we've got... The UK government spends £732 billion. If we subtract £222 billion for Social Protection (we're replacing all of it with our BI), we get £510 billion required. If we add up all government income except Income Tax - Business Rates, Excise, etc - we get £481 billion. That leaves us a shortfall of £29 billion. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume that reductions in crime, the increase in VAT revenue, better health, etc are going to cover that. Let's call it close enough for government work. At the end of the day, we currently borrow £84 billion anyway, so at worst I've slashed the deficit :-) Income Tax brings in £167 billion. UK population I'm going to take at 60 million. So, as a starting point, that gives us a BI of £2,783 annually, or £54 ($80) a week. Well, that's not a bad start! Let's consider what it means for actual people. Thus far: Who loves me: - Right-wingers. I've eliminated (or vastly reduced) the deficit, effectively increased the income tax allowance by £2,783 and given them this amount in cash, while reducing welfare payments to lazy, single-mother immigrants. I should be head of the Conservative party. - Most people on Job Seekers Allowance (unemployment benefit). While I've cut the amount they actually get, I've also cut out all the paperwork, visits to the job centre, taking money off them if they happen to earn something that week, etc etc. Money without the hassle. - Low wage workers. This is a big boost above Working Tax Credit and is hassle free (you don't lose it by earning more). It also allows some degree of security in the event of losing their job. Who hates me: - Left-wingers. While I've helped some low paid workers, I've also slashed benefits, there's no housing support...in short I've cut welfare while giving more money to wealthy people. I should be head of the Conservative party. - People who're claiming several benefits. People who're on sickness benefit. Basically, all the folk who've had their income reduced below a living wage. - Pensioners. The state pension has been cut significantly (and illegally). Ok, I think I need to balance it a bit more. I'm going to reduce the Income Tax allowance from £10,000 (current) to £6,000. This should balance out at the end. I'm going to assume this increases income tax revenue by 25% (I've no idea if this is remotely close. If anyone can be bothered finding out, please let me know). More controversially, I'm also going to increase income tax by 25%, so the basic rate is now 25% rather than 20%. That should give me a total revenue increase of 50% from Income Tax which gives me a BI of £4,175 annually or £80 ($120) per week. And I think I'll leave it there. We'd need to borrow (or cut spending elsewhere) to make up other shortfalls (such as pension payments), but as long as it's less than £50 billion we still come out ahead. It might be more natural to cut the payment to £70 for everyone in order to free up some cash for other payments. In the real world, you wouldn't exclusively reserve Income Tax to one specific spending area anyway, but it makes things simple enough to get a rough measure.
freshyill 12y ago
Not necessarily. Wouldn't a minimum income plan also mean the end of other welfare plans?
- iopq 12y ago
  Yes, necessarily. Because welfare is means-tested.
- jbuzbee 12y ago
  No. Some folks or kids will still need help after the basic income is spent on booze or gambled away. And some people will choose to live on the streets. Society won't just let them starve in the gutter.
gaius 12y ago
No. The welfare system is incredibly expensive to operate! I mean, in terms of the administrative overhead, the armies of bureaucrats, etc. Scrap all that, make a simple, unconditional payment - nothing to administer, no fraud to investigate, and it becomes very affordable - without raising taxes either. But it won't work in the real world, because it will be too easy to buy votes by promising more and more. This basic income needs to be fixed at a level of bare subsistence only. Like here in the UK we have a problem with government housing now - I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but it has morphed into, with at least one spare bedroom, in the area of you choosing for life even if you no longer need it, etc. Thats not fair on the people paying for it, and it's not fair on the people on the waiting list.
- discardorama 12y ago
  > No. The welfare system is incredibly expensive to operate! I mean, in terms of the administrative overhead, the armies of bureaucrats, etc. Scrap all that, make a simple, unconditional payment - nothing to administer, no fraud to investigate, and it becomes very affordable - without raising taxes either. That's laughably naïve. I live in San Francisco. I have experience interacting with more than my fair share of homeless people. So let me ask you this: what happens when a person deliberately decides to be homeless? Do you just let him suffer on the streets? Or do you offer him shelter and food? The point is: you will still need the welfare services. Things like Child Protective Services, emergency rooms, homeless shelters, etc. etc. So all that UBI does is add an additional $20K/year of taxes on top of what we already pay. People in this country are opposed to universal health insurance, despite the fact that the beneficiaries actually pay into it. What makes you think that they will agree to just cutting $1.5K checks every month to every person? And then: what happens to the immigrants? People will come streaming across the border in droves when word spreads that they can get 1000s of dollars per year for nothing in America! We can't even control the border now; imagine what'll happen then.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    > People in this country are opposed to universal health insurance The highest hopes to see something implemented in our lifetime come from more civilized countries: Switzerland, Germany and Austria.
minikites 12y ago
Taxes are at historic lows, we should raise taxes regardless because infrastructure is crumbling nationwide.

bane 12y ago

You'll also notice that nobody advocating it has even the slightest whiff of an economic model that makes it work. In UBI schemes, money is treated like an endless well of fairy dust that can be sprinkled all over the population and magic will happen. Numbers are thrown out all over the place and realistic actor models on the micro and macro economic levels are never provided. When challenged, they all point to Mincome, which wasn't a UBI experiment, as some kind of evidence. And the evidence from Mincome (when you read the writeup) is that it didn't work very well from the point of a UBI scheme, it achieved approximately zero of the proposed benefits of UBI. But you know, reading and math are hard I guess.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago
> money is treated like an endless well of fairy dust that can be sprinkled all over the population and magic will happen Money is an artificial resource meant to create a level of indirection between the buyer and the seller. The amount of money in circulation at a certain point in time does not explain why some people eat better than others. If you want to argue against UBI on the basis that resources are too scarce to be enough for all of us, you need to talk about the actual resources. On the agricultural side, we have overproduction in Europe and in Italy the cultivated terrain is smaller every year.

tempestn 12y ago

It's likely mostly due to the positive feedback loop. I've become interested in the idea of a basic income from reading stories via HN, and I posted this because (which I agree it isn't really a test of basic income) it is related, and I hadn't heard about it before.