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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

I thought the post said it?

$12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with.

But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that.

How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too?

I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.

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I'm living on less than $12k in Oakland while also self-funding a homebuilding startup. What do you mean "can't do anything"? I have to be careful when I do a work day with my partner, because I can't always afford it, so progress is slow, but it's working. It's happening. He wanted to work this weekend, but I'm just barely going to make rent so we have to wait. We're doing a work day next weekend though.

It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough.

I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off.

Good luck with your efforts!

No car. I only use public transit a few times a week. I walk a lot. It's not hard to eat for $100-200 a month if you cook for yourself. You're right it's a sacrifice, but it's doable. It would not be doable on $0, and that's the difference basic income makes.

I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.

"It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough."

Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?

If you've spent so much time on this discussion, you should know that only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes.

>only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes.

This will never fly politically. You think lower-middle class people (the vast majority of the country) are going to agree to that?

Good luck selling that one pal

I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway.

If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.

It's fantasy thinking based on the fallacious worldview that life isn't a competition.

Life isn't a competition.

Of course it is. That's why it's guided by natural selection and territorial acquisition.

If you're a gazelle, or a lion, maybe. If you're human, you've benefited from millennia of cooperative work invested by your predecessors and peers.

That's an ideology, not a fact. There is lots of evidence of cooperation, symbiosis, and eusocial behavior, all of which differ from pure competition and complicate things. Nature can be very competitive, but a lot of the time it's also lazy and harmonious and prefers slack over maxing out efficiency.

Sexual selection is a competition. Life is more than that for some, but certainly not all humans.

In the theoretical world of nearly complete automation, the price of goods would drop precipitously.

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