
Spain is moving to permanently establish universal basic income - ingve
https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-universal-basic-income-coronavirus-yang-ubi-permanent-first-europe-2020-4
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iso1631
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795358)
(57 comments, 20 hours ago)

I think the general view is "some ministers in Spain would like to implement
UBI"

How that works, especially with freedom of movement from the rest of the EU,
is anyones guess

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fastball
Presumably it would be citizens rather than residents.

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chrisseaton
I'm not sure that would be legal, would it?

I think there was a test case in 2015 that said you could have _tests_ that a
resident was not there just to claim benefit, but I think the point was that
it was illegal to just completely restrict a benefit to your own citizens.

~~~
skywal_l
It would probably be modeled the same way as social benefits are modeled. A
mixed of citizenship and residency...

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fsflover
Comment from the other discussion:

bwb 1 day ago

I am in Spain and Bloomberg is just translating the comments of a far left
party that has no ability to do that. Bad reporting.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792359)

~~~
pfortuny
Thanks for clarifying this. I also live in Spain and daydreaming is too good
to begin describing this “move”.

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s9w
Nadia Calviño.. I read that name recently. Oh wait

> "Europe must respond united to the crisis," Nadia Calvino said in an
> interview with radio station Onda Cero. "I don't give up. We still think
> that, eventually, there must be a system of debt sharing, be they eurobonds,
> coronabonds or reconstruction bonds."

[https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/01/world/europe/01re...](https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/01/world/europe/01reuters-
health-coronavirus-spain-debt.html)

~~~
ohmaigad
Having a shared debt but not shared fiscal policies across the board. What
could go wrong.

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p2detar
With EU’s declining population growth, UBI may very well be the way out of
impossible retirement plans in the future. Something that IMO millennials in
the EU will face sooner or later. I don’t claim to know all the economic
implications of UBI, but I’m really convinced that as an EU citizen and
millennial my retirement is questionable to say the least.

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leto_ii
> I’m really convinced that as an EU citizen and millennial my retirement is
> questionable to say the least.

Hear, hear! :D

I share your condition and concerns.

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toomuchtodo
US citizen here. Can y'all go into detail? If you have universal healthcare,
and you've paid off a residence, what shortfall and outsized expenses do you
project in retirement?

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mercer
I'm also interested to hear more, but FWIW as an EU-resident and millennial
with a bunch of millennial and lots of 'zoomer' friends:

1) out of everyone I know, working- to middle-class, only three people 'own' a
house. One of them inherited it from their father, and the other recently
bought one with a mortgage and has an unusually stable job. Of the rest of
us/them, I'd say a good 70% live in a flatshare (regardless of whether they're
in their twenties of thirties), 20% live in a small apartment with their
partner, and the remaining 10% or so have some kind of studio apartment
because they make decent money or because their student organization provided
them with cheap housing.

2) with the exception of those who have jobs where a pension is built up
automatically, none have bothered. Which is probably about 80% of them (100+
people). And in conversation the general assumption is that any kind of
pension will probably not exist by the time we need them, so why bother (not
saying I agree, btw).

That said, I'd say my social network skews toward working class and educated-
but-not-STEM. And urban, which favors the precariat.

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rufusroflpunch
Isn’t one of the central selling point of UBI that it would replace the
existing welfare state with one single payment? What’s the likelihood that
countries that implement this just tack it on the existing welfare state as
yet another payment? I’m putting that is almost a certainty.

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ginko
> I’m putting that is almost a certainty.

Why? States aren't made of infinite money.

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lordnacho
We're about to test whether they are. If we somehow manage to print all this
money and nothing bad happens, then why not?

I have some doubts about whether it can work, but if it does, we should think
about the new economic reality.

At the moment though, I get the image of Wily E Coyote running over the cliff
edge, but he hasn't looked down yet.

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HideousKojima
>We're about to test whether they are. If we somehow manage to print all this
money and nothing bad happens, then why not?

Fortunately, other states already have tried this, and shown that it causes
immense economic harm. Specifically, we have the examples of Venezuela
(53,798,500% inflation since 2016), Zimbabwe (peaked at 79,600,000,000% _per
month_ ), and Weimar Germany ( _merely_ 29,500% per month at its peak).

So you should be asking, what if we manage to print all this money and
something truly terrible, horrible, and damaging to the lives of everyone in
the country happens? And what if it's something easily predicted by almost any
economist and with massive historical precedents? And what if it sets the
stage for genocidal dictators and the most violent war in history, as it did
in the case of Weimar Germany?

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_nalply
Counterpoint: Quantitative easing. Instead of giving money to banks give them
to the people.

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HideousKojima
Quantitative Easing is the fed buying bonds, bonds that must be repaid. It's
not free money, it's loans.

~~~
_nalply
Right. I am somewhat clueless but this feels like the FED helping banks not
people?

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HideousKojima
Every single UBI proposal I've seen has failed to work even with back of the
envelope math, even when using generous assumptions and estimates. They end up
either 1) Gutting existing entitlements by a huge amount (and current
receipients of those entitlements get far less under UBI than they did before)
2) Raise taxes by an obscene amount that destroys most if not all of the
benefit of a UBI for the middle class and most of the lower class (and that's
before you get into potential economic effects) 3) Provides such a paltry
amount that it fails to support the basic needs of the average person/family
4) Depend on massive amounts of money printing and/or debt well in excess of
most nations' current debts, or 5) Some combination of the above.

People vastly overestimate how much money the wealthy have even if we taxed
them at 100% and somehow prevented them and their wealth from fleeing to some
tax haven somewhere.

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dangus
Which proposals don’t work? What math are you speaking of? Do you have any
data to back up your claim?

I only mean to push back on this because your comment seems to be dismissive
of the entire concept while seeming to closely align with the interests of the
kinds of people who don’t want it (the wealthy).

I find the idea of just not bothering to tax wealth because they’ll just find
a tax haven elsewhere to be defeatist nonsense. It’s not hard to craft
legislation that forces the wealthy to pay.

If we are overestimating how much wealth the wealthy possess, how is it that
three people own more wealth than over half of the entire United States?

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/09/gates-bezos-buffett-have-
mor...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/09/gates-bezos-buffett-have-more-wealth-
than-half-the-us-combined.html)

Excess wealth needs to be taxed because being excessively wealthy is bad for
society as a whole, just like we tax alcohol and cigarettes.

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HideousKojima
Show me a proposal for the US (since I'm most familiar with tax rates,
existing benefits, etc. there) and I'll show you how the math doesn't add up.

Edit: As far as the three wealthiest in the US owning that much, it still
amounts to very little per capita if redistributed to the entire population.
You could give every individual in the US a _one-time_ payment of about
$3,000, after which there'd be no more money to take from them. The top 1%
only have about $25 trillion in combined wealth, which would be enough to fund
a UBI of ~$3,000 a month for two years, after which you'd run out of money.
And that's pretending that a massive looting of the holdings of the nation's
wealthiest wouldn't have any significant economic side effects (and that they
wouldn't all just flee to tax havens). And that's ignoring that a good chunk
of that wealth is not held in liquid assets.

~~~
dangus
Where do you get $3,000 a month from? I’m sure if you set the dollar value
high enough the math doesn’t work out.

~~~
HideousKojima
>Where do you get $3,000 a month from?

The combined wealth of the entire 1% is ~$25 trillion. Population of the US
~330 million. Equally distributed and paid out over 24 months comes out to
~3,156. If you _only_ give it to adults (~255 million) the numbers aren't much
better.

$3,000 a month is barely enough to get by in several major cities. It'd be
fine out in the countryside, but in San Francisco, NYC, and several other
major cities it would be barely enough to get a studio apartment and barely
enough food to eat.

If it's not universal then it's a misnomer. And it's just another
welfare/entitlement program then.

>It’s also amazing that the top 1% can just find everyone in the United States
for two whole years. Doesn’t that just prove my point that inequality is a
huge problem?

No, not particularly? Why does that matter, other than the usual arguments
about wealth in the hands of the poor leading to more marginal consumption and
therefore possibly leading to more economic growth?

>Preventing tax haven flee is easy. The US already does this, charging income
tax to high income expats. If those expats don’t pay they have big issues if
they ever set foot in the country again.

And if you tax them at 100%, or whatever obscenely high rate you're proposing,
they _won 't_ ever set foot in the country again, and won't have any desire to
do so. And they can avoid worries about extradition etc. by simply renouncing
their US citizenship before their tax burden becomes too great, something that
_already happens_ even with our current tax rates

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nogabebop23
So a universal basic income that:

"mostly aimed at families, but differentiating between their circumstances."

Sounds really universal. How is this not typical income redistribution where
someone picks the winners and losers?

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tgafpc2
Until they run out of money and realize the EU is too broke to bail them out.

