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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

Social programs generally are not considered as income and do not preclude you from being eligible for other social programs (i.e. the benefits stack). This creates the unfortunate situation that some people that don't work at all receive more annual income (in kind) from the government than their working neighbors. It works out to nearly $60k per year in benefits.

I support the idea of a basic income that strives to create an equitable situation for the working class.

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>The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

It also artificially eliminates jobs that need to exist via austerity (e.g. not building necessary infrastructure), offshoring (moving manufacturing jobs abroad) and massive transfers of wealth to the already wealthy (e.g. wall street bailouts).

The techno-utopian notion of us approaching a post-work society glosses over these three things in a major way.

The solution to beat this problem is to reduce the benefits in a gradient as people make more of their own income. Here's the key: Benefits must be reduced more slowly than the increase in income. I.e. at all possible incomes, it must always be the case that if an individual were to make $1 more income, benefit reduction is significantly less than $1.

Absolutely - and UBI would free people who want to work from having to find dead-end jobs. They would have the financial freedom to pursue education, volunteering or educational unpaid internships.

This idea of a "dead-end job" is foreign to me. Only privileged, spoiled people talk like this. All job experience is valuable and will teach you lessons if you let it. If you can't look at even an entry-level job as a chance to gather experience and use it as a stepping stone to something better, and you'd rather sit back and be idle and privileged with some welfare check over working then you're the problem, not the economy.

Clearly you have never worked at mc.donalds.

No but I have been a busboy. And I did work my way through college while working a lot of other so-called "dead-end jobs".

No, dead-end jobs are very much a real phenomenon. Working as a janitor is not a stepping stone to anything except more minimum wage janitorial work.

Meanwhile as a software engineer, the work you do can be put on your resume and used as leverage for better opportunities.

Not unless you make it so. No one who's ever determined to educate themselves or earn their way to a better position has ever been stuck as a janitor their whole lives.

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