
A New Social Contract with Basic Income - dirtyaura
http://continuations.com/post/160187779815/may-day-2017-a-new-social-contract-with-basic
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Danihan
Not entirely mine, but a good summary of why basic income is likely to remain
a pipe dream:

$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions.
That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's
practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do
anything with. Even with that, people would still work massive hours to obtain
the best house on the block.

But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300
million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic
income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting
welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That
stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.

How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for
healthcare to pay for basic income, too?

I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable,
especially in a political climate anything like today. There could be a
complete paradigm shift in the future, where machines literally take care of
all needs in an automated way, but that's such a strange reality that welfare
is honestly about the last problem we'd need to discuss.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Why not discontinue basic income after someone makes, say, $50K per year? That
would cut the cost of it.

Actually it should taper off, if you make 48K and get a raise to 50K, you just
got screwed.

~~~
Pamar
Because then you have two types of citizens: those that are considered
"parasites" because live entirely off the Basic Income, and those that not get
it anymore.

(The fundamental idea behind B.I. is that anyone should get it, the poorest
guy in the neighborhood should get exactly as much as Bill Gates - there is
some debate about convicts and/or minors, even if in the latter case most seem
to agree that the money goes to the parents/caregivers).

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Why would Bill Gates need it? Ask him and he'd probably say, "keep it."

~~~
Pamar
That's the point: he gets it even if he does not need it and if it is a
negligible amount of his own personal income/fortune.

Universal means just that: everyone gets it. No matter if they need it or not.
Maybe you could read up something about the Alaska Fund Dividend to get an
idea of how this is supposed to work in practice (the AFD is of course limited
to Alaska, and way lower than the suggested 12000 USD target, but still gives
an idea of how it is regulated and paid out in practice).

~~~
gremlinsinc
Agreed, the benefit also being == bureaucracy = jobs = costs. AI
printing/cutting/mailing checks to everyone in America every month like clock
work, or direct depositing can be totally automated and not cost much at all
and lower the cost to administer -- w/ GBI you'll be able to close every
welfare building, layoff all welfare/gov't program staff for the poor, and
save a lot of money that way.

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Animats
It's encouraging to 1) see a VC writing about this, and 2) them realizing that
they see the problem but don't know the answer.

We've tried the "basic income" thing. It was called welfare in the US and the
dole in the UK. It led to third-generation welfare mothers and housing
projects such as Pruitt-Igoe and the Robert Taylor Homes. People have to do
something to get an income. Maybe not something economically useful. But
something.

~~~
scarmig
So, since this seems to be a big stumbling block for people: welfare and the
dole are fundamentally different from a UBI. A UBI is unconditional, which
doesn't have the kind of adverse incentive effects that high effective
marginal tax rates introduce. It's as similar to welfare as paying government
salaries to public employees is. Which is to say, not at all.

~~~
Animats
Realistically, paying enough money to live on to everybody is unaffordable for
the next few decades. Welfare is affordable.

~~~
scarmig
It's not unaffordable in a meaningful sense: the USA could certainly afford
it, by raising taxes to levels that highly taxed countries do.

Another way to think of it: the UBI is about guaranteeing everyone can
maintain some basic level of consumption to survive. Right now, the vast
majority of Americans consume enough to survive and more. It's an accounting
question: who's actually paying for the people to survive? Indirectly it's the
government. This is just manifesting those costs transparently, and also doing
some shifting of a substantial number of costs from charity, hospitals, and
family to the government. As a society, though, it won't increase consumption
by enough to exceed our ability to produce the goods and services consumed
("unaffordable").

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frgtpsswrdlame
Why can't we have a Basic Job Guarantee? Perhaps it's just part of the
protestant work ethic we Americans are marinated in but I think most people
actually do want to do productive work. Being unemployed or on welfare just
plain old doesn't feel good. Of course some people are fine lounging but I
think they're probably a minority.

~~~
twblalock
How would you achieve this? I can only think of a few ways:

\- The government can force companies to give jobs to people they would not
otherwise hire

\- The government can invent unnecessary jobs and then hire people to do them.
(The jobs would have to be unnecessary in order to be invented, because if
they were necessary, they would already exist.)

Both of these solutions are terrible, and I can't think of any others that are
qualitatively different -- you either put people in existing jobs or create
new jobs.

The point of UBI, according to most of its proponents, is that it deals with a
future of automation in which many people will not be able to find work.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
It would be the second and even though they may not be necessary, they would
still be beneficial.

See this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee)

[http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf](http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_732.pdf)

The rest of the world is finally catching up the advantage we made for
ourselves post-WWII and combining that with technological change we're going
to be facing a labor market with a lot of (at least frictionally) unemployed
people. In that case you do what FDR did and hand them a shovel and tell them
to improve their community.

