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Comment by jbrun | Hacker News Reader

If you are in Quebec - join us at http://revenudebase.quebec In Canada: join us at : http://biencanada.ca

What do you think about Jean-Robert Sansfaçon's critique in Le Devoir (http://www.ledevoir.com/economie/actualites-economiques/4624...), where he calculates that to give only 10,000$ per inhabitant in Quebec per year, you would need 68 billion dollars, ~22 times the amount currently spent on social welfare. Also, that would constitute 70% of the current tax revenue of the Quebec government.

Does that take into account that for middle class people it's effectively a wash?

i.e. Your taxes go up $10,000, but you get a $10,000 payment. I haven't seen a cost calculation that explicitly factors this in. I imagine it's still expensive, but perhaps less than it seems?

It's a good article though. A lot of people vastly overestimate current social payment expenditures. They're much lower than I thought, and I am not in the camp that thinks basic income will be costless to implement by replacing social programs.

"Does that take into account that for middle class people it's effectively a wash?"

I guarantee that if/when this gets implemented, it won't be a wash for the middle class. The middle class is where the tax money is, and they'll be the ones bearing the brunt of the bill, as usual.

This is mostly true because we have made forms of non-wage income tax advantaged while capping out how much income we consider during welfare-tax-directed calculations (like social security). This doesn't have to be the case.

You still need an administration that handles all that money coming in and out, probably doubling the amount of money Revenu Québec manages. All that for a poverty line payment of 10k.

Right, but that administration already exists for social payments, except the majority of the administration is in the gatekeeping side: Making sure that the people who are claiming are entitled to it. Remove that administration and you make large savings.

According to the Canadian government [0], if I'm reading it correctly, the money coming in was around $150bn/yr in 2013. So 60bn may be a high but reasonable figure.

edit: more recent stats [0] show 104bn coming in, 5bn spent is social tax breaks, 0.5bn spent in food pensions.

[0] http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/economie/comptes-eco...

[1] http://www.revenuquebec.ca/fr/salle-de-presse/statistiques/r...

Machines will generate enormous excess wealth in the future

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