
The Mincome Experiment of 1974-79 - Nowyouknow
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-mincome-experiment-dauphin
======
jnbiche
Where true basic income differs from this experiment by Canada is that true
basic income should be for every adult, regardless of income, race, marital
status, sexuality, etc. Not just for poor people, as with Mincome in this
Canadian town.

A few arguments for:

1) It becomes a defacto emergency lifeline when a ostensibly middle class
person loses their job or suffers an extremely expensive illness. In the US,
it can take forever to get on disability. With true basic income, there's no
need to worry about getting on disability, since you already have a basic
income (and yes, this means that disability should be eliminated if this
passes).

2) It becomes much less expensive to administer. No massive bureaucracy
started up and growing larger just to weed out candidates for some shitty
benefit. You're an adult person? Great, you're in!

3) When everyone gets it, it's much more politically feasible to start and
maintain. No more questions of "them" doing this or "they" ripping off the
hard working man.

4) It allows even healthy middle class people to take risks that might have a
big payoff, such as starting up a new business, or embarking on a quest to
invent some new technique. Or build an open source project!

~~~
intopieces
I like this idea a lot, but what would stop goods/housing from rising in price
to meet the influx of free money?

~~~
ergothus
That was my initial response when I first heard this concept a few years ago,
and the answer is somewhat surprising (Note: I'm not an economist, so please
someone correct me if I get anything wrong here):

3 things can alter those prices: A change in supply, a change in demand, or
general inflation/deflation.

The supply doesn't inherently change in this plan, nor does demand (*assuming
everyone is getting these goods today.) And there's no inflation, as this is
just redistribution, not printing new money.

~~~
GauntletWizard
If you think inflation's only source is 'printing money', you may not be
qualified to speak on economic issues. Liquidity, the monetary supply, and the
cost of exchange are quite a bit more complex than that, and far more prone to
being manipulated and falling over, as both the Housing Crisis and Libor
Scandal taught us.

~~~
innguest
I'm sorry but you are wrong. Inflation is nothing but the increase of money
supply without an equivalent increase in production.

What you are doing is being a good Keynesian and trying to make people believe
that this stuff is too complicated for them to even start having an opinion on
it. That strategy is condescending and not productive, and encourages
helplessness in people.

~~~
lowboy
> Inflation is nothing but the increase of money supply without an equivalent
> increase in production

Wouldn't that mean that inflation would also be caused by a decrease in
production without an equivalent decrease in the money supply?

~~~
czr80
Yes. Google "stagflation".

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JonFish85
Let's do some back of the envelope math here.

316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion
dollars a year.

The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no
chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of
that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion
dollars.

So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth
of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the
top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their
money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.

At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class.
The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion.
If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.

Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a
check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in
this case, it's terribly inefficient.

On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale,
it would be a disaster.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States)
[2] [http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/](http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/)

~~~
maxerickson
$30,000 is a pretty big number.

If you made it $8,000, a family of 4 would still be above today's poverty line
(which is still arbitrary, but it seems like a better "minimal income" than
one that gives everybody approximately the current median personal income).

$9 trillion / (30/8) = $2.4 trillion.

~~~
JonFish85
According to [1], for a family of 4 the poverty line is just under $24k?

[1]
[http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm](http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/14poverty.cfm)

~~~
maxerickson
Uh-huh. 4*8=32.

You used 316 million as one of your multipliers, that presumably includes
children.

~~~
sosuke
I think there would need to be some structure around children, what an
incentive to make babies! $8k per baby per year, the Duggar family would be
making $168k per year! I'd rather it be something as an adult. So the number
of people 18 years or older is 242,470,820 [0]. Double the $8k to meet that
poverty line as a couple. So at $16k per adult you come out to just under $3.9
trillion a year.

Edit: from the poverty data [1] you could say that only ~45 million people get
the full $8k, the rest starts to taper off at the 50 cents to a dollar pace.
That means this would cost considerably less. $360 billion is the minimum. The
cost out would be $3.9 trillion, but those extra $8k checks would be collected
at tax time. A one job two adult household, the job holder would have to pay
back all the $8k, but the partner wouldn't if they didn't make any money.

[0]
[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

[1]
[https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/](https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/)

~~~
maxerickson
Maybe. I think people mostly see children as a responsibility though, so I
wonder if the problem would live up to the concern.

I wonder if you could try to measure the differences in birth rates for people
receiving the EIC, comparing across numbers of children (at some income levels
the first child provides ~2x the benefit as the third).

edit: Searching "EITC birth rates" shows that people have looked at it.

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_delirium
Previous discussion of Mincome, prompted by a different article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192)

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clavalle
I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have
private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with
better record keeping.

Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage'
level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the
1000 people needed about half that to get to that level.

$20m/year plus administrative costs, let's say $5m. $25m for the experiment.
Say we run it for a guarantee of 5 years, so that is $125 million.

Too bad. A bit beyond a kickstarter level.

Maybe somebody could supplement it with a reality show.

~~~
monort
There is was a negative income tax experiment in 70s in Seattle:

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html)

~~~
clavalle
That article is very negative on the whole idea and is short on facts of the
experiment and long on conclusions.

One point it made that had me thinking was that it would be impossible to
cover enough of the population because the poverty line is so close to median
income.

Well, what if we didn't cover everyone? What if we picked areas that are
having a particularly rough time and used a negative income tax to prime the
pump?

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raisedbyninjas
I don't understand the notion regarding feedback from participants in the
experiment. Evelyn Forget said that opinions from respondents may skew
positive because those with negative experiences would be less likely to reach
out to her. I was under the impression that consumers with negative
experiences provide feedback far more often than satisfied consumers. Has that
been debunked or am I missing some factor?

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vlunkr
Can someone explain to me how basic income could work? I'm really interested,
not trying to start a battle. The biggest question: Where does the money come
from? Massive taxes on the wealthy? You can't just pull a salary for everyone
out of thin air. In the case of this town in Canada, the project was probably
funded by taxes from other parts of the country, and could not have worked
universally.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It's not as expensive as you think, if you run the numbers. Most of the money
comes from dismantling welfare, social security, food stamps, et cetera. Tax
rates on the middle class are increased enough to cancel out the basic income
benefit, so that washes out. As long as the poor isn't the majority of your
population, it's not a large tax increase on the rich.

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mchanson
Hope we start experimenting with this in the US also. Maybe at a state level.

~~~
Zikes
It would have to be in an extremely liberal area. Socialism is still a four
letter word in the US, and this is the epitome of socialist initiatives.

~~~
ad_hominem
It seems like reducing socialism to me. Instead of the gov't hand-picking
(centrally planning) benefactors of tax dollars, e.g. defense contractors or
oil/ag subsidies, it's being returned to the people (and _all_ the people -
not just some according to their need or whatever).

~~~
JonFish85
It's probably an ever bigger problem than that. Regardless of liberal or
conservative, if you want to raise taxes essentially across the board (which
you'd have to do--even taking all of the wealth of "the 1%" would fund this
project for maybe a year) you're going to have a really tough time convincing
people that their taxes are going to be raised 500% or whatever it would end
up being.

Just back-of-the envelope numbers, if 300 million Americans received $30k/yr,
that's $9 trillion dollars per year that has to come from someplace. My guess
would be that the majority of people would end up handing that $30k right back
in the form of taxes. And at that point, it becomes an exercise in the
government giving people money, then having to get it back via taxes, so then
what is the point? Is it easier to give 10 people $10 or to give 100 people
$10, then take $900 of it back?

~~~
dsp1234
_Is it easier to give 10 people $10 or to give 100 people $10, then take $900
of it back?_

If 100 people is the totality of the population, the cost of bureaucracy for
monitoring which of those 10 people actually get the $10 (specifically
ensuring a low fraud level) is near or greater than $100, and the social
stigma of getting that $10 in the first place is reduced or eliminated, then
yes, it could be "easier".

In other words, would it make sense to give everyone the same amount, and take
it back from some in taxes, when weighing the cost of the current levels of
enforcement and the possible social good done through reduced stigmatization
of the poor.

