The Case Against a Basic Income | Hacker News Reader

The Case Against a Basic Income

jacobinmag.com

22 pointsmmirate13 comments

It could work well under conditions of world wide demilitarization, if we stop wasting 90% of our resources on war and preparation for war we could have a pretty massive pie left over.

The US spends far too much on the military, in fact it has the world's largest military, and in some measures larger than the rest of the world combined. But it's only 22% of US government spending, and if you include state and local government spending military spending is less than 20% of total governmental spending.

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2018USbf_...

The article talked about a totally inadequate UK proposal that would cost over 6% of GDP to implement. The US spends more on the military as a percentage of GDP than virtually any other first world nation, but even it only spends 4.5%. If the US eliminated all it's military spending completely, it would still be many hundreds of billions short of the amount needed for the most barebones basic income plan.

Oh, it gets better. Many of our allies have so little military spending precisely because of our military bases on their territory, and our resulting ability to respond to threats with the same speed as their own military. So in some ways, we are, for better or worse, the world's policeman. And if we downsized our military, those nations would need to step theirs up (with accompanying spending increases on their end). Which makes me wonder if the U.S. is getting paid enough for our military services to those allies.

Heavy Lies the Crown

Not to mention that arguing for funding something by defunding an unrelated service only serves to complicate the debate. Modern US govt spending does not need to be balanced, the US govt has shown the ability to run insanely high deficits without US bonds being significantly downgraded.

If the argument was that the US can afford UBI because we can afford the military then that's more reasonable (although not quite correct as you pointed out).

Then only one single crazy national-leader has to not actually demilitarize, and he can then conquer anyone who truly did demilitarize. Which means that the logical thing for anyone is not to demilitarize. Which means that the overall result is we don't demilitarize.

Breaking that equilibrium would require a militarized worldwide government, which also would likely e.g. lack the ability to respect current nations' differing cultures (to summarize the vast body of ways the very concept is ... unnerving at best).

We don't use 90% of our resources on war, per annum the world spends ~2% of GDP on defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Never understood why universal basic income required Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to get free money every month. It's like no one every learned from the biggest economic flaw in the US social security program.

Eh? I thought the flaw in US safety nets was the income-based "cliffs", whereby taking a better job would often decrease a welfare-recipient's overall income due to the decrease in benefits received.

Notably, this flaw is one of the big reasons why the War on Poverty, and socialism/UBI/etc. in general, disempowers the poor and the poorly-educated. Remember, Rome fell to tyranny in part because its citizens became willing to support anyone who would grant them more bread and circuses.

There is a difference in public perception between a welfare state based on public goods, which everyone pays for and everyone benefits from (even if some people are asked to pay more) and a welfare state based on government charity, where only the poorest people benefit. The charity model is one that can make the middle class resent the "undeserving poor" for getting "handouts", while welfare programs based on public goods tend to be very popular.

The welfare state is enormously more expensive. Social Security/Medicare spending dwarfs every other expenditure, and it’s payroll taxes are higher than income taxes for most people. Most people are for reasonable government social programs, i don’t think they have to be given bribes (that they have to pay for) to support them.

There are variants that don't have that property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Part of the problem with Basic income is there are a huge # of variants and frequently when you find two people that agree that we should implement basic income don't actually agree on the variant we should go with.

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