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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

>In the UK, a back-of-a-napkin calculation showed that all current benefits equally divided into a single BI would be around £4K,

Does that back-of-a-napkin calculation include the savings you'd get by shutting down most of the government bureaucracy involved in administration of current benefits and not paying salaries to all those government workers? In any country, a huge amount of the money spent on benefits are used just for administration. With UBI, you can get rid of all those workers and use the money for UBI instead.

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>a huge amount of the money spent on benefits are used just for administration.

I think a lot of people way overestimate the administrative costs. For example U.S. Social Security administrative costs are around 6 billion a year. Sounds like a lot but it's only 0.7% of the total cost of the program[1]. Sure there's a handful of different programs all with their own costs, but it's maybe 20-50 billion a year. That's not that much considering UBI might increase spending by trillions.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

SSA gives away money, administers programs and adjudicates disability claims. It’s nothing, relatively speaking.

The lifting for social services is at the state and county level. There’s probably 3 million people engaged in that function, depending on what you scope into it. I betcha there are 10,000 people just doing children’s services in NYC.

>I betcha there are 10,000 people just doing children’s services in NYC

Ok, but we aren't talking about UBI replacing CSA or really any of the local services are we? It's not like child abuse is going to disappear because everyone gets a UBI check. A lot of the state and county level social services are not going to be obsoleted because of UBI. I would think it's more of a federal/national program meant to replace federal/national social services.

It's all inter-related from a funding POV. All service delivery for social services is via county government in the US.

Even something like CPS is significantly funded via other programs. They perform functions like managing foster care, early intervention, medicaid enrollment, etc and draw administrative funding that is shared among programs.

It doesn't mean the UBI is bad, just that you cannot bank all of the "legacy" spending.

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