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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Who will pay for it?

California tax payers, obviously.

Perhaps the bulk of it will come from folks (and companies?) who have driven real estate prices up to the point no working class person can afford to buy a home in any major city in California.

There may be some negative consequences to that, as well, in the form of some companies or people moving out of California. But, hey, maybe that'd help solve the housing crisis. And, it's also a competitive advantage on some vectors, so maybe it would have a net positive impact on economic growth in the state.

I, honestly, have no idea how it'd work, especially for a state that has managed to have a budget crisis seemingly every year for decades (but, maybe this is just me having a selective memory). But, the CA economy is very, very, big (the biggest, and bigger than many other states combined). If any state could do it, it would be CA.

It'd be interesting, anyway. Somebody has to go first.

> I, honestly, have no idea how it'd work, especially for a state that has managed to have a budget crisis seemingly every year for decades

Those crises were artifacts of requiring a supermajority for passing a budget, which meant as long as parties voted as blocks, the minority party could prevent the majority party from passing any budget; crises were, then, deliberately engineered to extract concessions. Since going to a majority-rule for passing budgets (retaining the supermajority requirement for tax increases), the annual budget crises have disappeared.

All of its residents.

Sans illegal aliens.

Well, even illegal immigrants pay taxes one way or another if they have a job or buy anything.

Of course, they also pay lots of taxes too, including sales tax, and presumably some of that, directly or indirectly, would offset the costs of this kind of program.

In theory they could have a problem with really sick people moving to California for the healthcare, raising their costs. But that takes time, so maybe before it becomes a big problem, other states will do similar things.

Interesting idea.

In practice, I wonder if there'd be a grace period, e.g. your insurance doesn't kick in until you've lived in California a year. However, since so many jobs start your insurance benefits on day 1, I'd expect this would have to as well.

This isn't really an "in theory." Welfare states are fundamentally incompatible with open borders until we live in a world where equivalent levels of welfare are available everywhere. The incentives just don't add up.

On the other hand it could still work if the benefit is only available to Californians who have lived there for X years. Not sure about the legality of this though -- states can discriminate this way for in-state University tuition, but in Zobel v. Williams the Supreme Court ruled that Alaska couldn't pay out Permanent Fund dividends based on how long you had lived in Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund).

If that were true there would be no need for taxes. But in reality poor people will steal from non-poor people. That's what taxes are. "everybody pays" is a worthless statement if you don't include amounts.

A valid concern considering the state is projected to be running on a deficit before long [1]

[1] http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-jerry-brown-budge...

Who pays for healthcare now? Why would it be harder to support in a cheaper system like single payer?

The taxpayers of the state would be the (trivial) cost this bill would incur (basically, the cost of printing it: it's a statement of intent and nothing more) out of existing taxes.

I feel like you know the answer.

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