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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

You're presenting everything as ideal case. $12k a year means $1k a month to live. You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for. You won't have a choice. Go break down the budget at $1k a month. You'll find that people on government welfare often already live better than that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/12/...

...earning $10,000 a year (which was about half the federal poverty level that year)...

The state with the highest total value of welfare benefits was Hawaii, at $49,175. The lowest was Mississippi, at $16,984. Welfare packages in only 10 states, plus Washington, D.C., exceeded Grothman’s threshold of $35,000.

Note, that's an article showing that a representative was exaggerating how much welfare recipients receive; those are the numbers refuting his claim.

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> You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for. You won't have a choice.

You won't have a choice between all the different things you have to choose from?

> Go break down the budget at $1k a month. You'll find that people on government welfare often already live better than that.

And the same people are completely screwed if they want to do one dollar better than that because as soon as they get a job most of the benefits evaporate. Which is why they stay unemployed.

If you are raising two kids, isn't it kinda obvious that your BI payout is 3 * $12k = $36k?

Anything different just doesn't make sense in my opinion.

You also seem to discard the value of work (on a 10 hr workweek perhaps)

That's not at all obvious. You'll have people screaming about welfare queens, for example. Never mind the fact that some of this screaming comes from a racist place of giving money away to brown people, it does need to be addressed in order to gain broad acceptance.

One way to defend against the welfare queen argument might be to recognize that there are economies of scale in child-rearing, and pay out adult/2 for the first child, adult/4 for the second child, etc, never going above one whole adult worth of BMI income no matter how many children you have.

You see how you have solutions before you even recite a problem. It's usually like that.

WRT welfare queens, now it would make sense to have family intact.

> You'll be buying lots of cheap carrots and potatoes and rice because that's all you'll have money for.

You are kinda ignorant, your food expenses will be less than $1 a day if you only buy cheap food like that. I've lived on less than $1k a month most of my life, totally doable, you can buy good healthy food for around $4 a day if you cook yourself.

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