

Ask HN: Need advise on introducing a basic income - halotrope

I know this sounds a little far fetched but I would really like to introduce a basic income in germany. I would like that every citizen get about 1000€ per month, no questions asked. Since there is about 80M people in germany it would need 80B € per month to finance that. I would very much like to solve this problem with technology and dodge politics. Any Ideas?
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dragonwriter
> Since there is about 80M people in germany it would need 80B € per month to
> finance that. I would very much like to solve this problem with technology
> and dodge politics.

IF you want do it with technology and dodge politics, then you need to create
an enterprise that generates 80 billion euro [0] in monthly revenue above what
is necessary to maintain the enterprise, and then sends out the money.

Good luck coming up with the technological solution which provides nearly a
trillion euro in annual profits, and can continue doing so (and growing with
population and inflation) while distributing all that to the people of
Germany.

[0] actually, more, because you need funding for the money distribution part,
too.

~~~
halotrope
Thank you for your feedback. I have though of a lot of ways how it would not
work out. This is why I am asking HN if someone would have a practical idea
that might work. I always have the feeling that the people here are of much
great creativity and intelligence than me.

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loumf
You need the taxation power of a state to force rich people to pay for it.
That's how basic income works -- everyone gets 1000€, but some people pay more
than 1000€ in extra tax. The net is 0.

How to use technology to do this:

1\. Make up a scheme where 70% get net positive income (make models, etc)

2\. Make up persuasive material (interactive visualizations?)

3\. Spread it

4\. Harness the enthusiasm into actions

Ultimately use this to elect people who will pass it.

~~~
halotrope
Hi, thats frankly a good idea for introduction. However I think to make this
work it would be unwise to tax the rich as they have de facto a lot of
influence and would I would assume have the power to stop something like this.
I have thought about baking something like a community tax directly into the
currencies so that everyone would benefit for a very tiny fraction of the
economic prosperity of a whole country e.g

~~~
dragonwriter
If you aren't disproportionately taxing the rich to fund it, and you are
giving everyone the same amount of money, then you are either (in net)
redistributing upward from the poor to the rich, or you are doing nothing.

~~~
halotrope
Well right now the rich and poor are equally taxed with value added tax of 19%
for everything they consume here (except for food and book 7%) whick means
that it would be technically possible since it is already happening, right?
VAT in Germany is generating about 20bn a month in revenue

~~~
loumf
There is nothing equal about it. The poor are paying a higher percent of their
income in VAT and the average rich person is probably paying more actual euros
than the average poor person.

You need an income/wealth based approach to get more tax. If you keep raising
the VAT, you eventually stop economic activity (or push it to black markets)

~~~
halotrope
I think this is happening in greece at the moment to some extend. True. Again
I was much rather asking for some potentially crazy way to implement this that
I could not think of.

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BjoernKW
I'm 100% with you on supporting the idea of a basic income. Not every problem
can be solved by technology alone, though (in fact I'd say there are very few
problems that can be solved by technology alone).

I think loumf's suggestion probably is the best way for harnessing technology
to achieve a basic income but ultimately it will require political action and
political support.

We're talking about a really huge amount of money and a tremendous change in
most people's lives here. Even those who'd likely benefit from a basic income
often are averse to it (if they know about the concept at all, that is)
because it challenges both traditional capitalist and socialist views of how
the world should work. So, convincing people really is the problem here.
Creating persuasive visualizations and spreading those with the help of
technology perhaps is your best bet at contributing your share.

You might want to talk to the people of the local Pirate Party about your
ideas. The Pirate Party after all is the only noteworthy party in Germany
which supports a basic income (though they admittedly have lost their way
since the last elections and need to get their act together if they want to
play any role at all again).

~~~
halotrope
You are probably right about needing politics at some point as well as the
fact that convincing people is hard. For some reason it seems to be perceived
as a flavour of communism which is framed very badly historically even if the
idea in the form of a negative income tax for low earners originated in
capitalist / libertarian circles. Regarding the pirate party I think their
motives are noble and their use of technology for more openness and
transparency is a good approach but ultimately the people in there seem to be
involved with themselves and their affairs to an extend that makes it next to
impossible to perceive them as an viable agent of change.

~~~
BjoernKW
> but ultimately the people in there seem to be involved with themselves and
> their affairs to an extend that makes it next to impossible to perceive them
> as an viable agent of change

They're still the best option though. The other parties have by and large long
since foregone wanting to shape the future for the better. They're mostly
bureaucrats and administrators with a general lack of a positive vision.

It's no use complaining. If you want to bring about change you'll need to get
involved yourself. Besides, the Pirate Party had some successes recently
regarding copyright and freedom of panorama laws so to some extent they
already are a viable agent of change.

------
partisan
Sorry, I am not able to contribute a solution to your question. I don't think
you can do this without politics being involved, otherwise you are asking
everyone to participate instead of mandating that everyone does.

Doesn't basic income cause inflation? It ensures that everyone can have the
basics, if they choose to use it that way, but will drive up prices on the
basics because demand increases. Am I missing something?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Doesn't basic income cause inflation?

Almost certainly.

> It ensures that everyone can have the basics, if they choose to use it that
> way

Maybe, depending on the level its set at.

> but will drive up prices on the basics because demand increases.

Sure.

> Am I missing something?

Nothing _explicit_ , though "causing inflation" may not be problematic
depending on the levels. Certainly it causes price level increases in goods
that are disproportionately in demand in the segment of the population
receiving a net redistribution in income (assuming its tax-funded, that's not
everybody.) But as long as the proportional increase in prices is less than
the proportional increase in available funds among the net recipients, its
still making things more affordable.

Whether that will be the case at any given level of BI depends on the
productive capacity of the economy, and the behavior changes induced by BI.
(That's one reason that any real BI probably needs to start lower and
gradually scale up until the best sustainable point is found, and then
gradually adjust for changing economic conditions -- overshooting
significantly would be rather disruptive, from inflation and related effects,
in the short term.)

~~~
halotrope
There where plans on taxing the stock exchanges and financial transactions. If
this money would be taken and redistributed for a start it would not affect
the purchasing power of any natural person.

~~~
dragonwriter
That's only true if no natural person derives income from the operation of
stock exchanges and financial transactions, which would seem to be quite
distant from the truth.

~~~
halotrope
Well investing in the stock market is not as popular as in the us where a
dividend paying index etf might be in most of the 401k's

~~~
dragonwriter
Sure, and I'm not saying that its necessarily going to be taxing a wide swath
of the population, just that some actual people are going to be paying the
cost.

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2noame
You'll likely find this valuable then if you haven't already read it:

[http://www.unternimm-die-
zukunft.de/media/medialibrary/2013/...](http://www.unternimm-die-
zukunft.de/media/medialibrary/2013/02/studie_zum_bedingungslosen_grundeinkommen.pdf).

~~~
halotrope
Oh thank you! I did not. I did not read a whole lot about it to be fair.
Wanted to preserve beginners mind about that. But will give this a spin.

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drdeca
You might be interested in the "circle" project some people are building on
Ethereum, or perhaps a variant of it.

[https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/2228/circles-
universal...](https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/2228/circles-universal-
basic-income)

I think it might work better if trust was a number from 0 to 1 instead of a
boolean, which would allow for different exchange rates, which would be useful
if e.g. different sub economies formed separately with a different price for
certain goods, so that the prices of the things with the different units
aren't forced to change when the the two parts of the economy join into one.

I don't think I explained that well. To make a concrete example, suppose there
are two collections of people/accounts, where each person/acc in a group
trusts each other one in the same group (so that they can exchange their types
of currencies automatically at a 1:1 rate). Suppose that in each of the two
groups, there is a person who sells chicken drumsticks. If they are selling
them at significantly different prices, then it seems there could be a problem
if the two groups try to connect, because then one person could buy the
currency in which the chicken costs less, buy the chicken, sell the chicken
where it costs more, getting back more money, repeatedly, as an arbitrage
thing. If it was just chicken this might not be a problem, as the two main
chicken sellers would just settle on a common price for chicken, but if there
were many types of goods, such that there was initially a source of arbitrage
for every type of good produced in both communities, that seems like it would
lead to problems.

A solution, I think, would be for when the two communities connect, by
extending "trust", instead of establishing automatic 1:1 exchange, instead it
could be made so that when a person trusts another person, they make it so
that the other person can purchase up to a certain amount of their type of
currency, at a cost of some amount that they choose of the trusted person's
currency (an exchange rate).

In this case the exchange rates would be potentially asymetric, and there
would be questions of "what is the cheapest exchange rate path to get
personcurrency A from personcurrency B?"

and theres also possibilities of arbitrage in the trust trading of currency
stuff, but the limit per time would probably reduce that I guess, and I think
it would probably self correct (be EMH). IDK if that would be worse or better
than with many types of goods and the exchange rate between currencies being
forced to be 1:1, but I think it would probably be not as bad? I am not sure.

I'm fairly ignorant in this, but I thought the circles idea was interesting,
and thought that a modification might be useful as described above. maybe.

~~~
halotrope
Oh thats interesting. From what I understand they solve the problem of initial
distribution which would then not be dependant on something like state
controlled registrations/id anymore. I will have a deeper look.

