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What you can do to truly contribute to making Basic Income happen is to actually get yourself ready to support it. I'll explain what I mean by this. I think th

by jgon 12y ago

What you can do to truly contribute to making Basic Income happen is to actually get yourself ready to support it. I'll explain what I mean by this. I think that a lot of people hear Basic Income, and if they have some form of compassion for their fellow man and an awareness of computers currently allow and where they are headed, they understand that pretty soon we'll have to figure out a way of living in which a large portion of the population, or at least a large enough amount to comprise a real threat to social stability, will be unemployable. Completely. There will be no job that actually contributes to moving our society forward that either a machine or another person with greater abilities will not be better suited for. There will literally be no place in the economy for them to contribute. So what do we do with these people? Well we say that they get a Basic Income, enough money to live, and not just survive, but live. We're not going to be able to consign a hundred million people to lives of depredation, so Basic Income is going to have to cover the basics and some of the stuff that makes life good. In a lot of these discussions there are examples of the money currently spent on the welfare bureaucracy and how all that money can be rolled into BI, and I think that a lot of people stop listening there, convincing themselves that we'll be able to create a BI, provide for people who can no longer work, and nothing in their lives will have to change. And my gut tells me that this is dead wrong. So what can you do to contribute to making BI happen? Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free. You can start making yourself comfortable with the idea that taxes will have to go up. Definitely on the ultra rich and the very rich, but also on us programmers, sitting here on HN and complaining about making 180k a year because San Francisco. BI is going to mean that the people we put out of work get taken care of, but its also going to mean that you'll be driving a camry and not a tesla. Because we are the top 5%, and even if the 1% and the 0.1% are definitely going to have to be taxed way way more, we are going to have to do our part for the 95% below us. You've got to square yourself with the possibility that having a job will be something that very few people get, and that you will not be rewarded with incredible riches for doing so. BI will probably bring a bunch of us a lot closer together, and hey if we're lucky it might even be awesome Star Trek style. But to get there we're going to have to sacrifice to take care of our fellow man, and it won't all just magically take care of itself. If you start preparing for this now, hopefully you won't be like so many of the baby boomers I see, my parents and their friends included, who pay lip service to taking care of their fellow man, but whose actions in the voting booth betray these principles, as they just can't bring themselves to make even a small sacrifice in their current living condition. That's what I try to work on every day, making sure that I am not so addicted to my lifestyle and material goods that when BI and a 90% marginal top tax rate are on the ballot, I don't blink and find myself voting for the man who promises "tax cuts and forget about the other guy". That, I think, is the biggest thing you can do to make BI happen.

john_b 12y ago
> "Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free." Virtually every discussion of basic income on the internet these days avoids doing even the most basic arithmetic. So I'll give a very oversimplified set of calculations below. The details can be nitpicked ad nauseum, but this is essentially Feynman-style estimation, so please see the forest and not just the trees. First, some facts: According to the BLS, the lowest quintile of Americans spent $12,955 on goods and services in 2014 [1]. The US adult population in 2014 is about 242.5 million people [2]. So if we wanted to provide a guaranteed unconditional income equal to the average yearly expenditures of the bottom quintile of Americans, the cost would total about 3.14 trillion dollars. Total U.S. tax revenue in 2014 was 3.2 trillion dollars [3]. So a basic income program that merely provides poverty-level income for all Americans is going to cost all of our current federal tax revenue, and we are already running a federal defecit. This is plainly not feasible without vastly increasing tax revenue. You could argue that state and local revenue could pick up the slack, but states and municipalities are generally under severe budgetary pressures as well and have even less power to raise additional revenue. Even if all tax revenue in the US from any source is considered accessible for a basic income program, that pile of money is only about $6 trillion, so a poverty-level basic income program is going to consume half of all tax revenue collected from any source in the US. All of this is an optimistic calculation. It doesn't account for the contraction of the economy (and thus tax revenue) that would occur due to people ceasing part time work or other low paying jobs. Or the increasing amount of federal revenue directed to servicing our national debt [4], which will make any basic income system increasingly unaffordable in the future (absent corresponding economic growth). You could alleviate some of that economic contraction by taxing the basic income itself (possibly conditionally, based on economic circumstances), but then you are providing a post-tax basic income that doesn't even meet the poverty level. The fact is that the demographics of the United States simply prohibit any meaningful basic income system from working at the present time. It simply won't work without increasing tax revenues to levels that will destroy the economy. And this is ignoring the political obstacles that would have to be overcome (such as placing most of the additional tax burden on the 1%). Our existing welfare systems, inefficient and bloated as they are, at least attempt to target those who are most at need. If you try to make a basic income system that essentially replaces existing welfare programs by taxing most of the basic income back from people who exceed certain economic threshholds, you are doing little more than inefficiently adjusting tax brackets. It's a nice dream, but somebody has to pay for it and right now nobody can. [1] ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2008/quintile.txt [2] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult#detailed/1/any/false/36,868,867,133,38/39,40,41/416,417 http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat... [3] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US [4] http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_20150203110744.jpg http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_...

by jgon 12y ago

john_b 12y ago

> "Well you can realize that taking care of those people is not going to be free." Virtually every discussion of basic income on the internet these days avoids doing even the most basic arithmetic. So I'll give a very oversimplified set of calculations below. The details can be nitpicked ad nauseum, but this is essentially Feynman-style estimation, so please see the forest and not just the trees. First, some facts: According to the BLS, the lowest quintile of Americans spent $12,955 on goods and services in 2014 [1]. The US adult population in 2014 is about 242.5 million people [2]. So if we wanted to provide a guaranteed unconditional income equal to the average yearly expenditures of the bottom quintile of Americans, the cost would total about 3.14 trillion dollars. Total U.S. tax revenue in 2014 was 3.2 trillion dollars [3]. So a basic income program that merely provides poverty-level income for all Americans is going to cost all of our current federal tax revenue, and we are already running a federal defecit. This is plainly not feasible without vastly increasing tax revenue. You could argue that state and local revenue could pick up the slack, but states and municipalities are generally under severe budgetary pressures as well and have even less power to raise additional revenue. Even if all tax revenue in the US from any source is considered accessible for a basic income program, that pile of money is only about $6 trillion, so a poverty-level basic income program is going to consume half of all tax revenue collected from any source in the US. All of this is an optimistic calculation. It doesn't account for the contraction of the economy (and thus tax revenue) that would occur due to people ceasing part time work or other low paying jobs. Or the increasing amount of federal revenue directed to servicing our national debt [4], which will make any basic income system increasingly unaffordable in the future (absent corresponding economic growth). You could alleviate some of that economic contraction by taxing the basic income itself (possibly conditionally, based on economic circumstances), but then you are providing a post-tax basic income that doesn't even meet the poverty level. The fact is that the demographics of the United States simply prohibit any meaningful basic income system from working at the present time. It simply won't work without increasing tax revenues to levels that will destroy the economy. And this is ignoring the political obstacles that would have to be overcome (such as placing most of the additional tax burden on the 1%). Our existing welfare systems, inefficient and bloated as they are, at least attempt to target those who are most at need. If you try to make a basic income system that essentially replaces existing welfare programs by taxing most of the basic income back from people who exceed certain economic threshholds, you are doing little more than inefficiently adjusting tax brackets. It's a nice dream, but somebody has to pay for it and right now nobody can. [1] ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2008/quintile.txt [2] http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-population-by-child-and-adult#detailed/1/any/false/36,868,867,133,38/39,40,41/416,417 http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/99-total-populat... [3] http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2014US [4] http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_20150203110744.jpg http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-GT738_ristid_G_...