Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI

businessinsider.com

170 pointsbobrenjc93429 comments

"Altman, who favors UBI, said in exchange for a floor, he’d like to see no ceiling on earnings, as some, like presidential hopeful Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, have suggested. And like Friedman, Altman suggested tying the amount of the basic income to a fixed percentage of GDP. “Right now, because people are rightly angry that there's no floor, and that most people have no real chance to be super successful, we sort of say billionaires are inherently evil,” he said. “I think it would be great to say, we as a society will allow trillionaires in exchange for a floor for everyone.”"

The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.

UBI just doesn't solve that, and it especially doesn't solve that when it's being funded by a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay as Yang is proposing.

Honestly, this whole Yang project just strikes me as a weird 10x play by wealthy bay area VC types to get out of paying more progressive income taxes by attempting to bamboozle voters into a regressive tax based UBI they will shoulder the burdon on, so we will forget about major structural problems like wealth concentration.

Regardless, no, I don't think trillionaires should exist and I'm pretty confused why anybody thinks that is going to work out well for them, competition, or democracy.

this is very inflammatory and false. The VAT is not highly regressive. Money is power but poverty stricken people literally have zero money. How are gov't "programs" going to help? democrats love "programs" because it just gives them something to show off. it hardly solves any real problems.

I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"

It is not inflammatory or false. VAT taxes are regressive consumption-based taxes, and poorer people disproportionately bear the costs compared to the wealthy. It's very well established among economists https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive

> I doubt you've lived through any sort of poverty or have felt like the walls were closing in on your life, but people live that everyday. For those that have been through it, it hardly feels like a "weird 10x play"

The poor and working class of this country clearly have a candidate they stand by, and it's Bernie Sanders, who is about to set a record for the largest number of small dollar contributions in US history. You won't find them at $5600 a plate dinners at Sam Altman's mansion in California. To their great credit, the working poor in this country seem much more interested in an agenda that proposes real change to systemic inequality and poverty, rather than just pouring some regressively funded UBI candy coating over the existing broken system and expecting it to not get much, much worse.

on the presupposition that the VAT is flat across all goods. look at Yang's plan. this is not the case. https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

VAT is a tax on goods and services. Wealth inequality comes from people owning future streams of income, not stuff; rentiers, in other words. To the degree that VAT decreases wealth inequality, it's only by harming the net present value of those future income streams. It would be better to have a more equitable distribution of ownership without harming wealth production.

Sharing the gains in some manner is the right goal, no question. The question is what approach will be most effective. Bernie’s corporate accountability plan is thus the perhaps more direct set of proposals instead of something like the FJG and climate plan. Oddly enough, the CAP is not talked about much yet and there’s already dozens of holes in it. Maybe in 1975 it would work but corporations have moved far beyond what Bernie’s plan could accomplish. Admittedly better than nothing but the administrative overhead of this should be pushed with a massive overhaul of our federal regulatory agencies including improving the career paths of those in federal service.

Yang’s got the dynamic of federal bureaucrats down correctly. It’s the same ones I went through and why I left federal service a decade ago. Bernie’s commitment to service is incredibly inspiring but relying upon other people to be more like Bernie is not a plan, nor is relying upon more executives to be like Yang is not a plan either.

I’m not an either/or kind of person and see Bernie and Yang working together on legislation as a real, material step forward.

Sure, and that's why we need a mechanism to redistribute that wealth... like a UBI.

> a highly regressive VAT tax that none of these ultra wealthy people will ever pay.

Yang proposes to exempt basic goods from the VAT, but more importantly, the central appeal of a VAT is that tax evasion is made more difficult!

A VAT naturally creates an audit trail of both parties in every transaction where value is added. If one party is incentivized to report, for example via a tax credit for the end consumer, then everyone else in the chain of crediting is incentivized to do so also.

If you're using a regressive VAT tax to pay for UBI you are not redistributing wealth, you are disproportionately taxing the poor to distribute to themselves (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive) much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium. Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices.

If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.

And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.

> If you're using a regressive VAT tax to pay for UBI you are not redistributing wealth, you are disproportionately taxing the poor to distribute to themselves (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-value-added-tax-regressive) much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium. Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices.

A flat value added tax is regressive, but a VAT itself is not inherently regressive. Imagine if we have a VAT on yachts and nothing else, does that disproportionately affect the rich or the poor?

That's why Yang is proposing to exempt basic goods and raise the rate on some luxury items.

Even under a flat 10% VAT paired with the UBI, you would only be worse off if you spend $120,000 yearly on items with a 100% pass through (the IMF's estimates on the average pass through under a VAT are much lower than this).

> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.

You are going to need to specify a better alternative then. Again, a VAT has inherent properties that make it highly auditable and therefore easier to administer. A wealth tax, in comparison, is much more subject to misreporting because it relies on asset valuation.

> And I'm sorry, but even if this would work, I'm still not going to be sold on the idea that the world should be lorded over by a few trillionaires from California.

Do you want wealth redistribution or not?

Yang wants to give individuals legal ownership of their own data and control over how it is used, so I'm not so sure that most of those California billionaires are all that fond of him anyway.

For sake of argument, could this inadvertently make it more difficult for middle class people to pursue goals outside of basic survival?

It seems to me that many otherwise "normal" middle class people have one area, their hobby, where they own luxury products. That might be a sports car, a horse, a sailboat, ski trips, etc. Might a VAT tax on luxury goods make those products out of reach for the middle class?

While I can understand taxing a billionaire who buys luxury products in every area of their life, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for someone to have one area that they choose to focus their resources.

Taxing transactions other than capital purchases isn't going to make much of a dent in inequality. The reason we have such inequality is from capital income and appreciation. Taxing ordinary income or outgoings won't help much.

Ok, fortunately Yang also wants to increase capital gains taxes to the same rate as income taxes.

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/capital-gain-carried-inter...

It would make more people move to tax havens.

>Imagine if we have a VAT on yachts and nothing else, does that disproportionately affect the rich or the poor?

Nobody? They'll buy yachts abroad.

Yup. Plus talking about 'VAT on yachts' is nonsensical in the context of funding a basic income anyway. There are a lot of economically inactive people to fund and not many yachts being purchased; wealthy dynasties tend to consume only tiny fractions of the economic rents they can extract from the economy each year. Choosing a consumption tax as a means of funding a UBI ensures that the bulk of the net contribution towards funding it will be paid by the large numbers of people who spend most of their incomes on consumption - i.e the middle classes.

VAT is usually much higher in the world. 10% ish would put the US in the lower quartile. So not worth dodging the VAT and then to transport over still

Living in a VAT Post-Soviet country, I am not sure if that argument about "hitting harder the poor" is true, if VAT system is not specially aligned against the poor, which was the case in my country earlier times of Post-Soviet transition, but has changed recently.

The thing about VAT is that it is multilateral, and applies to many types of business-to-business transactions as well to business-to-consumer, so all the suppliers in the chain pay their share, not only the consumer.

And, given by pure numbers, the value provided by VAT paid by business is pretty significant. In some implementations (such as my country one), business share of VAT can not be less than final consumer's VAT, because consumer has paid VAT only once, while any producing business, was paying VAT for any transaction by any supplier.

The argument about aligning VAT against the poor, is that, given corrupt government being in power, some business can easily avoid paying VAT, or pay only small percentage of it.

This was (and, to some extent, still is) the case in my country (Ukraine), due to existence of so-called "VAT Refunds" scheme, which allowed many oligarchs to concentrate big amounts of value during 90s-00s. The scheme is easy as using non-market practices such as paying less VAT than their competitors, and being not punished then due to law loopholes passed by cronies in the state legislation.

The new governments, after 2014 Maidan revolution, being pressured by country's civil community, and also the international community, have started to remove many types of "VAT Refunds" scheme loopholes. That's why many oligarchs already went bust, and many are going to, just because their enterprises are now required to pay their share of VAT, and can not survive competition in changed reality.

So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.

I really appreciate those points.

> So in reality, implementing proper VAT system requires powerful government, and also VAT does not survive lobbyism and cronyism.

This kind of kills the VAT being feasible here in the US. We have crazy amounts of lobbying and legal loopholes and while the US gvt is powerful, that's somewhat antithetical to the founding ideals of that.

> If you're using a regressive VAT tax to pay for UBI you are not redistributing wealth

Sure you are. Joe Teach pays $5000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $5000/year is being transferred to him. Carlton Moneypenny pays $50,000/year in VAT and gets a $10,000/year UBI, $40,000/year is being transferred away from him.

> much of which will be lost as the prices of goods increases to match equilibrium

But then you would collect more VAT at the same rate, which would fund a larger UBI. By the time that reaches steady state it's a wash.

On top of that, VAT is great for people who are in debt (i.e. the poor), because no more income tax means they can pay down their existing debt with money they would have otherwise lost to income tax.

> Amazon won't "pay the tax" it will pass the tax along in the form of higher consumer prices.

The party who pays more of the tax is the party whose alternatives have gotten worse instead of better. For an individual, saving has just gotten more attractive relative to spending, so Amazon will have to keep the price of that stupid knickknack lower in order to get people to still buy it instead of banking the money and collecting interest on it to spend next year.

Meanwhile it's now the case that the tax applies to Amazon and not just their smaller, less international competitors, so Amazon would start losing business to them if they don't keep prices low by eating more of the tax.

> If the primary concern is tax evasion, there are many ways to improve this while still maintaining progressive taxation.

Not really. The primary problem is that shifting profits to other jurisdictions with lower taxes is easy to do and hard to prevent, and then there are no "profits" in the jurisdiction with the progressive tax, which turns the "progressive" tax into a massively regressive tax since the richest pay nothing.

The best way to fix it is to make everyone pay the same rate (so the rich can't avoid it) and then make it progressive by giving everyone a fixed refund (UBI), which gives you the effective rate curve a progressive income tax is supposed to have except that international corporations can't avoid it by declaring profits in Ireland.

It’s funny that we think preventing billionaires is easier than campaign finance reform.

>A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.

This defines pretty much every social system we ever had, unless you propose some sort of decentralized utopia, you need to trust power in the hands of a few. Money is just a vehicle of this particular system.

Decentralized industrialism is the crux of a large swathe of left libertarian ideology, such as anarchosyndicalism.

I agree with you that VAT by itself is regressive, but coupled with UBI it is not even close.

Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you?

I agree with you that money is power, but you are not going to stop the existence of Billionaires and Trillionaires. That would need to be a coordinated global effort.

> Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax.

Can you explain this, as this doesn’t appear to be backed up by IRS stats on effective rates & total revenue.

Relative in the sense that it’s inconsequential relative to capital gains taxes. The very rich don’t make incomes. Nexos for example earns $88k a year in income.

Nexos should be Bezos. Stupid autocorrect.

Wealth is not taxed. If you have a large amount of wealth, you don't need income, and it's likely that — if you do have income — your income represents a very small percentage of your net worth growth over time. Most of it is capital gains, which:

1. Are taxed at a much lower rate, and,

2. Are only taxed when the gains are "realized," e.g. when you sell at a profit.

As a result, if you have a large amount of wealth, your net worth can increase dramatically while being untaxed (if you don't sell) or taxed very low (if you sell some percentage of the gains — and only the sold percentage gets taxed, the rest doesn't). Depending on your investment strategy you can also play games with taxes, e.g. when rebalancing your portfolio, try to mostly sell your shares that have lost value, so that you put a loss on the books rather than a gain and are thus untaxed (or even get tax credits).

That's why Warren Buffett talks about paying less in taxes than his secretary.

It does't make sense to take wealth though.

The only way wealth can increase (in a usuable liquid form at least) is through income, which is already taxed.

If I eat beans and rice for 10 years to help save for a awesome retirement, I should be able to save that money.

I agree that wealth taxes seem difficult to enforce at the least. However, income is not the only way wealth increases: as I mentioned, the primary way wealth increases for the very wealthy is capital gains via investment, which are taxed at a lower rate, and are only taxed on "realization," aka sale (your net worth can increase by a billion dollars, but if you only sell $100k of it, you're taxed on the $100k).

Taxing upon realization also makes sense to me, but the very low long-term capital gains tax makes less sense to me. If you made a million dollars, I don't care if you made it via investment or by working for someone — you should support society in the same degree.

Yes, capital gains are taxed as income (as soon as there is something you can actually pay taxes with).

That they are taxed at a reduced rate is true but doesn't invalidate the fact they are still income.

No, they're not taxed as income. They're taxed as capital gains. There's a set of taxes called "income taxes," and the rules are the same for anything classified as income. Long-term capital gains are not classified as income. Even short-term capital gains are not classified as income, although they're taxed at the same rate as income.

And regardless of semantics, the original point still stands: relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, don't even pay income tax. This is trivially true: if your liquid net worth increases by $1 billion dollars, and you made that money via income, you would be taxed (depending on state) up to nearly 50% of those gains. If you made it via capital gains, you would be taxed at zero. Since very rich people make most of their money via capital gains, what little net worth increases they make via "income" pale in comparison to the gains from capital investments. Thus, they pay effectively no income tax relative to their wealth, which is large. If they make 1.2 billion dollars in liquid net worth, and only 0.2 billion is classified as income, they're paying an effective tax rate of about 12% in CA instead of 49.3% (what they would pay in CA if their gains were categorized as income). If only 0.1 billion was income, they're paying 6%. If they "only" made 50 million dollars of income that year, and the rest was classified as long-term cap gains, they're paying 3% tax.

For the record — I'm not saying we should tax unrealized capital gains! This is a very complex subject and changing the tax code in that way could have far-reaching, potentially very negative side effects on the US economy; for example: we wouldn't tax unrealized illiquid asset gains, right? That would be unfair: if it's illiquid, you may literally be unable to pay the taxes on your supposed gains. But that encourages mass migration of high-net-worth individuals' assets into illiquid assets like real estate (since by and large they don't need immediate access to the capital), and out of liquid assets like company stocks, which would drive up housing costs and reduce available capital for US companies. Not only that — it prioritizes illiquid assets over liquid ones, which is good for rich people who can park money on illiquid assets and don't need to spend it short-term, but bad for everyone else who actually may need to spend their money. Not exactly the outcome we want! In general tax is super hard and rich people will pay very smart people to game the tax code for them.

But capital gains being only up to 18% compared to income at up to 37% at the federal level (with similar breakdowns by state) seems pretty off.

> No, they're not taxed as income. They're taxed as capital gains.

Capital gains are a subset of income, taxed via income tax at, in some cases (mostly, “long-term” gains) preferential rates.

> There's a set of taxes called "income taxes,"

Capital gains are part of those taxes.

> and the rules are the same for anything classified as income

No, they aren't. There are all kinds of special cases with income. Capital gains are one: they are income, included in AGI (adjusted gross income) which effects eligibility for various tax credits and deductions, but in certain, but not all, cases taxed at lower rate than ordinary income, as low as zero percent for the portion of long-term gains within the tax bracket qualified for 12% rate on ordinary income.

Most of the extreme wealth generated in our society is not generated via income. Most of it is generated through property (land, stocks, insurance products, etc). Yang actually addresses this fact. The elite of the world are so effectively globalized now that they are not subject to the tax code of one country. The US is, frankly, not strong enough to take down billionaires single handely.

Water down intellectual property rights, strengthen labor rights, tax land appropriately and a lot of billionaires would just disappear of their own accord.

> Relative to their wealth, Rich people, effectively, do not even pay income tax. The bulk of income tax is paid by the middle class. Does that seem fair to you?

Where are you getting this information? From what I can find, the top 20% of Americans pay 87% of income taxes: https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-20-of-americans-will-pay-87...

That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else. Progressives think that a progressive income tax is progressive, because they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.

Why stop at 20%? Map peoples’ wealth on a normal curve and then look at which parts of the curve pay the bulk of income tax. Saying the top 20% of income earners pay 87% of income taxes says very little, actually, about who, exactly is paying the bulk of income tax relative to wealth. I mean probably most people on hacker news are in the top 20% income earners in the US for crying out loud. Are most of us wealthy? Not relative to how much wealth is out there.

> I’m saying that their effective tax, as a percentage of their wealth is, much lower than everyone else.

Income tax is collected as a percentage of people's income, I'm not sure why you're referencing wealth here. And judging tax as a percentage of wealth is not a very sound approach:

* You have someone that makes $50,000 and has lived frugally and saved up $500,000 over the span of decades.

* You have someone that makes $250,000 a year and spends nearly all of their money as they earn it, and so only has $50,000 saved.

The former will pay $4,342 in federal income taxes (filing as single) and thus pay under 1% of their wealth in income taxes. The latter will pay $58,424 in federal income tax and thus pay over 100% of their wealth in income taxes. Am I to understand that this situation is unfair because the former is paying a smaller percentage of their wealth as compared to the latter, and that the former should be paying more than the latter?

Judging taxes as a function of people's wealth is not a sound approach because people's wealth has much more to do with their financial decisions than their income. Why should frugal people who save more be taxed more heavily than someone who makes as much (or even more) but spends their money?

This portion of your comment seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of income vs. assets:

> ...they view taxation through the lens of income, but the primary source of most wealth (not most peoples’ wealth, but most wealth) is derived from property.

Property (in other words, the assets people own minus their debt) is wealth. Talking about how the source of wealth is derived from property is nonsensical - wealth and property are two words for the same thing: net assets.

Income is the delta of people's wealth. If you have an annual income of $X then your wealth is increasing by at most $X each year. Gains from increased value of assets (capital gains) are another source of wealth. These are taxed, too, but at the time that the assets are sold rather than immediately. Inheritance is another source of wealth and that is taxed as well.

Income is taxed because income, not property, is the source of people's wealth. It's valid to think of "income" as short for "incoming property".

> The problem with having a handful of people be billionaires and trillionaires is that money is power, and with that amount of money you have nearly unlimited power and influence over everyone and everything. A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil, it will and does serve the needs of that few over the needs of the many.

It is kind of right but essentially wrong. In any society with the size of more than hundreds of people, it always has a power structure, and always has a small number of people concentrate power way more than others. It is not a problem with super rich people. Even in all the Communist countries (Soviet Union, Mao's China, etc.) where everyone is super poor and there is no millionaire, power structure and concentration of power still exists and is way more cruel than in a market-driven society.

Of course UBI doesn't solve this, because there is no way to solve this. Even if you nuke the modern world to stone age, power structure and concentration of power will 100% appear again and keep growing when you have a team, a tribe, a city, a nation.

Completely agree. I would rather have hierarchies determined by free-market forces rather than a state-organized system. Corporate monopolies should be deterred by the state, but trying to cap individual success via something like a wealth tax would cause problems for the whole market.

All you're really saying with your post is you'd rather live in an oligarchy (free market players) than a democracy (the state). The free market is in no way fairer or less corrupt than elections, but it is more single-mindedly incentivised by the profit motive. I fail to see the inherent moral victory.

Many people add on the mistake of thinking they will belong to the class of enlightened despots. You haven't said enough for me to tell if you're one of those.

Wouldnt that same argument apply to people fighting for democracy in the age of monarchy? Why try to get rid of the king when he will just be replaced by a president? Dont even bother.

Obviously power structures and concentration of power always exist in some form, but that doesn't mean we should never try to rein it in on occassion.

No. They are not the same. How is it worthless to replace the king with a president? I don't understand your logic.

You cannot achieve that by replacing an almighty king with an almighty government dictating who gets what (which is a prerequisite of UBI).

Doesn't a UBI get rid of actually prevent a government from dictating who gets what?

With current social support programs the government does get to choose who gets what. But with a UBI, every adult would get the same amount, effectively removing the government's ability to choose who gets benefits.

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding what you are saying, I don't know.

> "UBI just doesn't solve that..."

It might not solve is but it's certainly a ding in the arc of the current status quo.

The problem with no floor is it creates fear. Lots of it. When you fear losing your job and/or your home your view of the world gets very narrow. Your options limited. Availability of opportunity and resources cause you to make bad decisions (e.g., blaming minority X or Y for your fate).

It's true UBI will not solve the power imbalance. But it can be a step in the direction of undermining the status quo.

> UBI just doesn't solve that

Doesn't it though? You create a floor, so that anyone with a miserable job can say "screw you" and quit and go start their own business without having to worry about how they're going to make rent before the new business starts making money, and you get a lot more competition. More smaller companies instead of fewer bigger companies. And the big companies would have to pay more to get some people to not do that, so you get less inequality.

How isn't that solving the problem?

Seriously there is NO WAY in the world an UBI will cover the rent - even the rent alone - in any place where it makes sense starting a business.

I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.

Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes), that will only give an equivalent of a minimum wage to everyone (ok 20% above national minimum wage but some states have it higher)... how far does that get you?

Internet makes possible lots of businesses where one does not need to be based in a particular location to be successful.

But it is already a fantasy for >99% of those trying. Competition is too tough and most people are absolutely unprepared and can't be prepared - it means competition with mega corporation and the insane amounts of data and brains they have to optimize themselves. Will be even more of a fantasy if new tens of millions will join.

There are plenty of places in the US with rents in the $100s and you could start a business whether that business is a hotdog stand or a software business.

Could you name them, please? Rents in boring Ohio cities for example, are still $650 for a 1 bedroom unit.

I think they meant "in the hundreds" not "between $100 and $200". Rent for less than $1000.

Yes exactly, thanks.

How are you accounting for the increased economic velocity of a sustained cash injection across the entire country?

But there will be less injection that now right, in case UBI is implemented? No "new" money will appear (unless you suggest printing more and more trillions). This is the same money taken away as taxes. Except now it goes to those in need, instead it will go to everyone: now almost all of that money is consumed and so is indeed a "cash injection", instead the portion of the money - that goes to those already doing OK - will be saved.

Providing a "cash injection" doesn't require the UBI. It only requires taxing the rich. But the rich - yes, they mostly CAN actually leave the country to escape taxation, and operate from elsewhere, they can move their assets - increasingly virtual such as intellectual properly - onto offshore entities too... So there's really no option of taxing the rich.

> No "new" money will appear...

... except that part where $1,000 per month per person in the US comes out to about $4 trillion, which is 100% of all taxes collected.

There is no universe in which this much money can be given to every citizen in the US without creating new money.

The pretty obvious solution would be for more nominal taxes to be collected. It would also replace a very large fraction of existing government spending. Or you might have a one-time election between receiving the UBI and receiving social security, and a lot of people in or near retirement would choose social security and then not have to be provided with a UBI, and everyone else wouldn't have to be provided with social security.

Doing the accounting in a naive way is also misleading with a UBI, because it's effectively a tax credit. If you paid $15,000 in taxes and received a $12,000 UBI, you're really in the same situation as if you paid $3000 in taxes and had no UBI. The fact that you're nominally paying $12,000 more in taxes doesn't actually affect you because you get all that back.

It is closer to $3 trillion because children wouldn't receive the UBI as far as I know. Still a big number for sure.

You completely dodged the question.

I'll rephrase in case I've been unclear.

How, or have, you considered that if everyone gets an extra $1k/mo that a huge swath of Americans will just spend it every month? When they spend that money it does not disappear. Some goes to taxes and gets redistributed there. Some gets taken by the service providers (grocery stores, gas stations, cable/cell companies, etc) some gets vacuumed up into the murky world of private equity, some flows into the black market, etc, etc, etc. That money keeps flowing and keeps generating tax revenue. This is economic velocity.

The question I have is how have you examined this effect and found it to be unlikely to spur an increase in quality of life for tens of millions of Americans?

> Seriously there is NO WAY in the world an UBI will cover the rent - even the rent alone - in any place where it makes sense starting a business.

Wrong. UBI financed by monopoly taxes makes rents go rock bottom. High uncompeted markup prices - Rents - are by definition caused by some kind of monopoly situation, because they are not competed away. You need to tax monopolies and not call it tax but a 'privilege fee' and reinvest the money into infrastructure or resistribute as dividends - which is UBI basically.

There is NO WAY anything like UBI would ever work without curbing monopoly pricing because any money raised by income tax, VAT or any other means freely given to people will end up rising up rents and monopoly prices even higher.

> You need to tax monopolies and not call it tax but a 'privilege fee'

Probably better to just get rid of the monopolies, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions on density so that housing supply can respond to demand.

But you need to destroy democracy in order to be able to do that? Isn't that a too high price to pay? Also it will mean leaving tens of millions of largely elderly or at least 55+ people, bankrupt and destitute, and having to deal with the problem of feeding like 50M+ elderly people, instead of the same amount of young people who now can't afford rents? Is that REALLY worth the trouble? See it's not some imaginary "world jewry" or someone like that who owns all the apartments, it's the same ordinary American people, just older ones. Why forcibly taking money from one large demographic to another - from one who can't really change things for themselves much anymore to those who can - by destroying democracy in the process - is supposed to change anything at all for the better? And how is it even basically 'fair'?

To me it feels both politically impossible, morally unjustifiable, and socially bullshit. "Get too many people very angry for no benefit at all".

No need for melodrama. People often sell a big house and buy a small house when they retire and then use the difference to live on, but reducing housing scarcity makes both costs go down. Which means the reduction in the difference (surplus) is less than the total reduction in the price of the housing, and is a net benefit to the country overall. Meanwhile housing costs have knock on effects for all other costs, so they go down too. Having lower costs is a major benefit for people on a fixed income.

Reducing housing costs helps the indigent elderly at least as much as it does the average person. Who it hurts is the affluent elderly who own a big mansion and would get whacked harder than usual by a reduction in its value, but I'm not sure why I'm supposed to have a lot of sympathy for rich people trying to profit from artificial scarcity.

> Seriously there is NO WAY in the world an UBI will cover the rent - even the rent alone - in any place where it makes sense starting a business.

You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month, to say nothing of arrangements that involve roommates or shared facilities or couples who would then have a second UBI.

> I would imagine an UBI will be mostly used by people to exclude themselves from active workforce to "retire" in low-cost destinations. Because that will be the only thing it will really allow doing.

You're forgetting the possibility for supplemental income. Combine the UBI with a part time job and you could live just outside of New York City and spend the other half of your time on the business for as long as it takes until it makes enough for you to quit the part time job.

There is also a whole lot of work that really doesn't care about location at all. You can do software development in Kansas if you want to, as well as anything else that involves selling your product over the internet.

> Say you impose a super huge 30% income tax (anything above that will cause a revolt in the middle classes, and mass exodus in upper classes)

The marginal rate isn't what causes revolts, it's the effective rate. Middle class people don't care about paying $12,000 in tax if they also get a $12,000 UBI. Upper middle class people aren't going to revolt over a difference between the two of an amount similar to what they pay already for the existing welfare system we would no longer need.

And the whole point of using VAT is that billionaires and international corporations can't avoid it.

> You can get a one bedroom in Austin for less than $800/month

... because there is currently no program in Austin whereby residents each get $1,000 of free money month.

True, if only people in Austin got a $1000 UBI then many people would want to move there for the UBI and rents there would go up by supply and demand.

But if everybody in the country gets the same UBI then people are going to move from where to where exactly?

If the answer is from places with higher housing costs to places with lower housing costs, I think you're going to find that there's more than enough empty space in the middle of nowhere to satisfy all of that demand without significant rent increases.

You’ve misunderstood. I’m not suggesting that the rent would go up because of the increased demand for a living in Austin. I am suggesting that the rent would go up because everybody has at least $1,000 per month of free money, on top of whatever income they earned.

By what mechanism does that cause the rent to go up?

The entire reason people are setting up shop in Austin is that it's so much less expensive than San Francisco. If landlords in Austin tried to raise rents then people would go to Kansas City or Buffalo or Louisville.

Some of the landlords would figure out that it's more profitable to have tenants at lower rents than higher rents and no tenants.

Perhaps the reason is not obvious because of the scale, so lets exaggerate the numbers to make it more obvious:

If everyone in the US was given $1 million per month, do you think that rent in Austin would go up in absolute terms?

If yes, by what mechanism can you imagine this effect is caused?

If no, I don’t know what to say.

The reason it goes up if you give everyone $1M/month is that $1M/month of money for everyone in the country doesn't actually exist. That's ~$330T/month. You couldn't collect that amount in taxes because nobody has it to collect it from; or if you did then nobody would actually be getting $1M/month since they'd just all be paying ~$1M/month in taxes to fund it.

The implied way to do it is, of course, by printing the money. Which would indeed cause inflation in not just rents but everything. But how does that apply to the real case when the money doesn't come from printing it?

> If landlords in Austin tried to raise rents then people would go to Kansas City or Buffalo or Louisville.

In the real world, most people can't just relocate their life on a whim, and the majority of citizens are more-or-less locked into a specific area for long periods of time, for a whole bunch of reasons. (Employer, Spouse, Children, Extended Family, Networks, etc)

It's not impossible to relocate or anything. But most people can't do so, and the few who can usually can't do so easily. It's not like window shopping for cars or clothes, these markets are effectively soft-Monopolies.

If landlords in Austin raised rents, most people would just have to eat it, unless it got to dystopian levels that forced them to relocate.

They still can't, because they're not even local monopolies.

There are a thousand local landlords. If they all decided to double rents, maybe only 5% of the local population would move out, but then 5% of the landlords would have empty properties. They're individually better off to get someone in there at a lower rent than have an empty unit, so they advertise a lower rent and take one of the tenants from a landlord across the street. Now that landlord has the empty unit and they do the same thing.

Which means Kansas City is competition for Austin even if 95% of the people there would never actually move. (Assuming cities where the job market, amenities and so on are similar.)

Also, when rents are higher, there is incentive to build new housing to capture the profits.

Rents only get high when they're not just eager to arbitrarily raise rents but somehow colluding to constrain supply, which is hard for thousands of landlords to do except through zoning. But that's completely independent from how much money the local people have. There are cities that have the same median income and higher rents because the local government imposes housing supply constraints.

Rent prices are still governed by supply and demand (modulo some rent control), not by how much money the tenants have.

Supply and demand happens on both sides of the equation; when it supply increases on the money side, we call it inflation.

> Rent prices are still governed by supply and demand

This is not accurate. Rent prices have little to do with supply and demand, and are primarily driven by how much money tenants have (or more accurately, how much tenants can be bled for before they give up and leave).

This is why rent rises even when supply is greater than demand, and why rents rise even in places where demand is falling dramatically.

Rent prices have everything to do with supply and demand. One of the reasons they're so high in San Francisco is that it's surrounded on three sides by water, which restricts outward supply expansion. And then zoning restricts upward supply expansion. You have much the same issue in Manhattan, which is an island.

How else do you explain housing costs being lower in Austin (available land, less restrictive zoning) than New York City despite Austin having a higher median income?

how much tenants can be bled for before they give up and leave

That's demand.

You're making the mistake of assuming that rents are dependent purely on renters' ability to pay them. Whereas the fact of the matter is that the market is driven largely by housing supply and demand, as it always has been. A $1,000 monthly check is unlikely to move the numbers much.

The only way that works is if UBI is both guaranteed and super high. Like "everyone gets a guaranteed $50k/yr" super high. The UBI Yang and folks are talking about is so low that it doesn't offer any of those benefits.

$1k/month worth of UBI wouldn't even cover average rent for a single person in any of the ~20 most populated cities in the US.

$1k/month doesn't quite even cover the cost of child daycare for a single child, in most of the US.

$1k/month of UBI is barely even ~50% of the current minimum wage in much of the US (a minimum wage that currently is so low, that it doesn't even cover bare-minimum cost of living either). The UBI is so low, it doesn't even give people the freedom to leave the lowest-paying legal job a typical person could have.

Making it guaranteed is implied. Making it huge is completely unnecessary and counterproductive.

$1k/month doesn't cover average rent in the most populated cities because the most populated cities have the highest rents and its purpose is not to make you average, it's to provide a floor. Supplying enough for the lowest rent in the lowest cost of living place is sufficient for that, and if you want more you can go get a job or find some other way to make money -- which the UBI continues to supplement, so it doesn't even have to pay very much.

It's not supposed to make it so you can live a happy life for a hundred years without ever working. It's just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table, and give you a lot more runway when you're trying to start a new business.

> It (UBI @ $1k/month) is just supposed to take starving and freezing to death off the table

My point is that $1k/month does not do this. Hell, minimum wage is approximately 1.5x to 2x greater than UBI (depending on the area), and even it does not quite take "starving and freezing to death" off the table.

"Working Homelessness" is a thing - https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel... and https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless...

Working homelessness is a thing in California because of outrageous housing costs. The problem there isn't insufficient wages, it's insufficient local housing.

You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.

> The problem there isn't insufficient wages

Yes it is.

> it's insufficient local housing

Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing. If you have one you, ipso facto, have the other.

California has insufficient low-end wages (and poverty support programs) given the prices (not just for housing, though that's a particularly significant aspect of the issue) created by the wealth of California's high-end workers and capitalists.

> Insufficient housing given wages and insufficient wages given housing costs are the exact same thing. If you have one you, ipso facto, have the other.

They're not. If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing. It doesn't matter how much money people have because whoever has the most would just bid up housing prices so they can have it and there would be people left at the bottom without it.

Whereas if you had enough housing for twice as many people as actually live there then housing would be very inexpensive and even people not making very much money would be able to afford it, because getting a unit wouldn't require outbidding someone with a lot more money than you.

> If you need housing for two million people and you have housing for one million, and you refuse to build any more housing, you don't have enough housing.

California has several times as many unoccupied housing units as homeless people. California doesn't have a hard shortage of housing units, certain people that need housing in California have insufficient material means to convince the people that own existing unoccupied housing units to rent or sell to them.

Measuring by occupancy rate isn't accounting for landlords withholding units from the market in the expectation that they'll find a tenant/buyer willing to pay more for them later, which is an allocation of supply the same as if someone was living there, and is caused by overall supply constraints creating the expectation of continued high rents.

It also fails on the other end because there are many alternatives to local housing other than homelessness, like selecting less local housing with an unreasonably long commute or living in units designed for fewer occupants in violation of the fire code. You essentially have unaccounted for over-occupancy. People having more money doesn't solve any of those problems without more housing for the money to buy, and interferes with solving homelessness as well because higher wages in general could cause people in those situations to move to existing unoccupied units before the existing homeless do.

> You can live a spartan life on $12,000/year in many places in the midwest and not die of poverty.

I live in the Midwest, and this is simply not an accurate description of Midwest finances. These people who live on $12k/yr are either already asset rich (i.e., own their own house/car/etc) or are having their friends/family/roommates or the state pick up some of their living expenses, in one way or another. If they don't, they are literally dying of poverty.

According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line, even for a single adult with no children living in the Midwest (Michigan).

> According to the US Census Bureau, a $12k/yr income would put you below the poverty line

The federal poverty line for the lower 48 states is $12,490. Is your objection only that you want to make the UBI $12,500 instead of $12,000?

Notice that you could also make up the other $500 by working a minimum wage job for less than two weeks out of the year.

> You create a floor, so that anyone with a miserable job can say "screw you" and quit and go start their own business without having to worry about how they're going to make rent before the new business starts making money, and you get a lot more competition.

No, what you get is more and more people who will say „srew you, why should I go and do stuff when I get money for doing f* all”. The people here on HN and those millionaires / billionaires are an outlier. An average shop clerk, security warden will not go and start their own business after saying „screw you”.

> money is power

Money isn’t power. Power is power. If Putin became bankrupt tonight, he’d still be one of the most powerful people on earth tomorrow morning. Power is the capacity to have others do what you want, including handing you their money when you need it. Case in point: how many million-dollar lottery winners ended up having any nontrivial influence on their community or state? Nearly 0.

Holding all else equal, of course it is the case that giving someone more money increases their ability to something done in the political plane. But it seems to be an article of faith in many people that money can be very simply translated into unlimited amounts of political power in a way that is I think not supported by the evidence.

Which is why Steve Forbes won the presidency in 2000 and Bloomberg or Steyer will take it this year and hold their inaugural ball at the Amazon campus in LIC. :)

As you say, money helps. But there limits to what money can do.

Nitzan and Bichler argue quite convincingly that capital is power - money isn't necessarily power, but money-capital absolutely is.

No amount of capital (economic power) will save you from the power of the state to take it from you, should that idea arise in the minds of those who define the state policy.

Lobbiests + campaign finances

In the world of international trade, only a stupid nation would do that. Systemic fear among the capital-holding class is usually unrelated to the fear of the state. Nevertheless, Nitzan and Bichler argue the ways in which capital uses its political arms to influence policy. One particularly obvious example is the strengthening of IP law, another is the military industry.

Political power and capital are intertwined, but neither is above the other in a direct hierarchical relationship, because both can hold a gun to each other's head. So long as the state keeps the right to property, and it almost always will, capital has nothing to fear.

UBI gives incredible power to the laborer, who has leverage against unfair working conditions, and by default is past the "Safety" level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, allowing them to develop healthy relationships and goals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

how exactly is a ubi not solving rampant poverty? Maybe someone's implementation is flawed but to make an extraordinary claim like UBI can't solve poverty will require extraordinary proof.

Likewise, how is ubi regressive? What would a progressive solution to poverty be?

If the introduction of UBI is coupled with the dismantling of existing social safety net it is effectively the privatization of public welfare, and will result in all the related pitfalls.

It feels like you just strung together dinne fancy words and didn't provide any reasoning.

It boggles to imagine which of those words you found fancy

Yang’s website says the plan will rely on poor people electing not to get other social safety net benefits. People will end up without healthcare and without food if there are not programs in place to address those problems specifically.

> found fancy

I was giving you the benefit

> without healthcare and without food

What? I've never heard him say this and seens like something he wouldn't say given his stance on wellbeing. Also, you can use UBI for food.

The only thing I've heard is people on welfare programs would be able to choose between continuing those or stopping them and switching to UBI. Nothing about healthcare and with these the people get to choose themselves.

From Yang’s campaign website: “Current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally – most would prefer cash with no restriction.”

The point of public healthcare and food programs, among the other programs he’s talking about not having, is that even if you run out of money you can still buy food because the food stamps are reserved for doing so.

I know you all like to imagine everyone is rational like you, but what will you do when someone has spent everything and cannot feed themselves? Or has spent everything because of an emergency and their healthcare coverage lapses and they are ill?

Has anyone actually studied what people do in these scenarios or are you just assuming that people will willingly starve themselves to death en masse at a rate greater than the current just because they get $1k in pity money a month?

Give me a break.

Please don't be a jerk in HN comments, and please don't make unsubstantive negative posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In a survey done by a social worker of n somewhere around 80 nearly all people on public assistance programs preferred the cash instead of public assistance.

Arbitrarily set and legislated into oblivion means testing thresholds and the administrative overhead of checking in constantly plus the shame of assistance appears to be a serious problem. Similar happens with EITC which most people eligible for do not claim.

See also how awful state-run TANF has been in Mississippi. UBI nationwide could be thought of as taking back control of programs from states that have dismantled the nets already.

This is a tough issue that has a lot of dimensions of discussion that won’t be covered respectfully in an HN thread exactly for the gravity of the problem

I agree that the overhead burden is insanely expensive. There's also the cruel, soul destroying experiences on both sides to account for. The staff, paranoid, treating everyone as a leech until proven not. The downtrodden, forced to prove their innocence while drowning in the bad hand life dealt them.

Another effect to consider is where do all the staff go to get new jobs? Many will find the private sector exceptionally difficult to integrate into after decades in public benefits work.

Money can be clawed back by increases to living expenses (eg. rent increases, food cost inflation).

Creating systems which lower the costs of living (eg. public transit, below market public housing) benefit low income persons and aren't as easily erodible.

“A system that will concentrate that much power will be inherently evil”

It’s always puzzling to me when people equate wealth with evil. Why the unnecessary moralizing? Just say “concentrated wealth in the hands of the few has the potential to cause systemic societal harm”

No need to paint it as a battle of good vs evil, it severely diminishes the substance of your point.

Actually a lot of them do very bad things with their money that are very harmful to society, whether it's Bill Gates fraternizing with a convicted child sex trafficker, Peter Thiel platforming for racist demagogue Trump, Vinod Khosla spending unlimited amounts of money to carve out private access to beaches, or running for president and sinking a record setting amount of money on his campaign like Michael Bloomberg is doing. None of these clowns deserve to be billionaires and nothing bad will happen to them or us if a small chunk of their money is used to pay for things like single payer healthcare.

But my point is that no tiny handful of people should be allowed to have that kind of power, whether they're evil or not.

TIL supporting the 2016 Republican presidential candidate was evil.

No, platforming for a racist demagogue that causes pain and suffering to millions of people so you can maybe win some Palantir contracts isn't evil at all, I'm not sure where you got that impression. It's just really solid moral judgement, I'm glad he has billions of dollars to push towards positive agendas like that, it's so good for our society to have children in cages at the border so you can win a chess game against other government defense contractors. Inspiring stuff.

Thiel's political views are long standing and have been no secret.

Perhaps there were other motives, but his views lined up best with Trump.

> None of these clowns deserve to be billionaires and nothing bad will happen to them or us if a small chunk of their money is used to pay for things like single payer healthcare.

A rather large chunk of billionaire's money is used to pay for a huge portion of the government (directly). Not to mention the amount of extra wealth in the world that (some of them) have created, which also turns into tax revenue.

I like the idea of freeing people to be able to quit and get a new job any time, where quitting today means a real threat of losing one's home, transportation, or ability to eat (never mind fueling the cycle of debt that keeps so many down). I think it would be a net benefit if people could tell oppressive employers to fuck off without fear.

However, a welfare state is a real thing to be worried about. My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month. This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land. There are a few elders who would like to teach the young how to do so, but they are not interested. Nobody wants to do better and there is high resentment towards the federal government.

I've seen it in other places. When you are outside the balance of exchange with someone (or some organization), resentment breeds. I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers.

Economically, we would have to produce enough "extra" that a full, regular distribution of that wealth could continue to work with producers continuing to produce, and a growing collection of people who would lose all interest in contributing. We would have to have a way to deal with a dramatic rise in apathetic people. We would have to have a way to deal with producers just leaving the country.

In The Expanse, Earth has a UBI like thing. The whole planet. You get subsistence living, and if you want to be a producer, you start by doing menial work for a period of time to prove you are willing to work hard. It is also sci-fi for a reason :).

Again, I would love to free people from tyrannical employers and the fear and stress of not knowing what next month brings due to finances (I've lived that the majority of my life). I don't see how UBI can work.

Any time such a huge change is introduced into a complex system, it is extremely hard to see all the unintended consequences.

I like the idea of UBI, too. Taking that leap worries me, though, we might be in for a worse time because of it.

Doing nothing may cause an even worse situation.

The human race has existed a long time without UBI.

just as it existed for centuries, millenia, without penicillin and without quinine. This isn’t an argument; a history of subsistence doesn’t mean we can’t think of ways to make it all better.

What is the downside of penicillin for the p50 user?

That's not relevant. The stance of UBI is centered mainly on automation with a side benefit of being able to afford risks and improving quality of life.

> "Doing nothing may cause an even worse situation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Even if it were proven that doing nothing were guaranteed to cause a worse situation, which it isn't, of the myriad of things that could be done, there is no compelling evidence that UBI is the right thing to do.

> Any time such a huge change is introduced into a complex system, it is extremely hard to see all the unintended consequences. I like the idea of UBI, too. Taking that leap worries me, though, we might be in for a worse time because of it.

I definitely think we need to allow time for people's thinking to change, as well as to allow existing systems to adapt, and to respond to new issues as they come up. A brief look at Mao's Great Leap Forward should make anyone really cautious about making such sweeping changes immediately.

I think ideally what would happen is that there would be a planned gradation, where several things would slowly move from where they are now to the targets in sync, maybe changing every year. First year, UBI is $100 / month, minimum page is cut by about $0.75, taxes are adjusted accordingly. Second year, UBI is $200 / month, minimum wage cut again, and so on until UBI is the target "subsitence" value, where you can afford food and a roof over your head without working at all. At that point, minimum wage is done away with entirely.

The thing is, it will take time for people to re-adjust their expectations for how much a job is worth. If all my basic needs are taken care of by UBI, then maybe $1-2/hr is all I need to have a bit of extra spending money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Right. This is also the argument for Earned Income Taxes, which is a cash mechanism without the social or political baggage.

Technology is already introducing huge changes. We take huge leaps all the time without much of an ability to say yes or no.

The good thing is that it's very scalable. Maybe start at lower levels and see what happens?

Ideally we would see more and larger randomized controlled trials, too, but that tends to strike people as unfair.

The problem is comparing the situation in those places in Alaska to what we think it would like without those yearly checks. It seems like it might be worse? But hard to know.

There are studies in other places that are more positive, but they probably aren't generalizable.

A big difference with a program where eligibility is based on citizenship is you could take it with you anywhere in the nation and probably the world. People willing to move should benefit greatly from this but the long-term effects seem hard to predict.

Yeah, there are some major confounding factors in Alaska. I know that at least in the case of my tribe, they didn't forget how to live off the land because the government was giving them money. The government started to consider their coast with their winter houses on it someone else's private property (and still does). The government started restricting their fishing once there was a cannery on the river. The government forced them to go to schools where they weren't allowed to speak their language or practice their culture. And yes, the government eventually started giving them money. But they forgot how to live off the land much earlier, when doing so became illegal. (The introduction of hard liquor predated all of that, and coincided with 1/3 the population dying of new diseases. Also not UBI-caused.)

Thank you for your first hand account.

You can’t draw wide ranging conclusions from that sort of UBI. They’re part of a nation that exists within another nation. They’re facing all sorts of pressures and incentives that would not be present for a US wide UBI.

The need and requirement for a UBI is real. Private sector is simply never going to find a job for everyone who needs to survive. We offer no other way for people to survive. This isn’t a balance sheet calculation. It’s society saying “hey, we can’t just let our own people, as an individual of our society, have only one means of survival. That just creates too many pressures which lead to their suffering and exploitation.”

> Private sector is simply never going to find a job for everyone who needs to survive.

You're technically correct that unemployment will never be 0%.

But it's been < 4% for almost all of 2019.

I should expand that the private economy simply isn’t going to provide everyone everything they need-including work but also things work can’t or doesn’t provide. Plenty of full time employees have substandard health care because their employer contracts with an option of that leaves them hanging. Some employers schedule people for exactly less than what would require them to provide benefits, too. They also count toward your balance sheet unemployment rate. The unemployment metric has wide criticisms that I don’t need to regurgitate. This is why I say these metrics don’t do justice to the inspection.

> substandard health care

Yang proposes nationalized health insurance, outside UBI.

Talking about the unemployment rate without mentioning the labor force participation rate is painting an incomplete picture.

Isn't the labor participation rate irrelevant here though for talking about "job for everyone who needs to survive"?

In the perfect world technology and economics improve so much that no one has to work to survive.

In that sense, the ideal labor participation rate is 0%.

part of the idea of UBI is that it would replace current or future (hypothetical) welfare benefits. at least in theory, it seems better for people on both sides of the equation. for the "producers", it would replace a hodge-podge of inefficient and inscrutable welfare programs with a single number that can be adjusted up/down and easily understood. for those on "the dole", it would be a much more respectful way of providing aid. instead of getting funny money that can only be spent on certain items at the grocery store and having to apply for a tax credit at the end of the year, they just get $x every month to spend as they see fit.

the complacency angle is worth considering, but when I see how much money we waste to (for example) manufacture at least one part of a spaceship in every single US state, I wonder if we wouldn't come out ahead by just paying most of the people for doing nothing and then manufacturing the parts where it actually makes sense.

the main thing I fear is what it would do to rent. I don't understand enough about economics to know how much of a problem this is, but naively it seems like UBI would just shift rents upward in a tight housing market.

Yeah, I think this is a commonly-dodged problem that is dodged precisely because the nature of UBI proponents selects for it. But it's a mistake to think one's personal motivators/use of free time/etc are true of everyone. You cannot extrapolate like that.

> Just as you can find Silicon Valley techies who think Soylent is the only sustenance a person will ever need, intellectuals tend to think everyone could be as content as they would be living life in their heads or inventing their own destiny. Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics.

When I wrote this in 2017, the "intellectuals" I was thinking of was Sama specifically.

https://medium.com/s/free-money/after-universal-basic-income...

Please don’t tie UBI to the failed war on drugs. Alcohol prohibition was ceased for the exact same reason the war on drugs should be ceased. Further, there are even outlawed substances which have anti-addiction affects that are part of the prohibition. It’s the definition of a bad idea insulating itself from better ideas.

People need UBI because the purely survival backed capitalistic system harms society too greatly.

He didn't say anything about the war on drugs, he said it would cause drug epidemics. Getting addicted to drugs has nothing to do with the US' moronic drug policy.

“Most people need to be doing something to feel satisfied and a potential UBI system addresses this need just as inadequately as disability checks do now. Cue drug epidemics.”

That’s an emotional trigger with unsubstantiated link to the supposition. The emotional content is from the war on drugs. People turn to drugs because they’re in a tight spot without a seeming way out. Like how a cornered animal is most dangerous. Or physiology.

People with a UBI will have the ability to engage in more activities that they find worthwhile but without direct, immediate financial consequences-such as artists and mathematicians.

Nothing you just said has anything to do with the war on drugs, which is normally a reference to US policy. If you didn't mean to reference US policy then you should be more specific when you say "war on drugs" on anything in the United States (and this is about a US presidential candidate's would-be policies, so it's unreasonable to assume that isn't what you meant).

I look at UBI as a replacement for a part time minimum wage job, not for working. Meaning it ought to give you about 250 dollars a week. I also view it as a replacement for having minimum wage too - but no one will work for 2.00 and hour either.

UBI will free throws labor force, and make it easier for labor to be more mobile and move to where the jobs are - the other key about UBI is everyone gets it, no matter if wealthy or poor.

> "...the other key about UBI is everyone gets it, no matter if wealthy or poor"

Of course if you have anything above poverty level income, it gets snatched right back plus whole lot more though taxes to cover the other UBI recipients who don't. The "everybody gets UBI" rhetoric doesn't really fool anybody; money doesn't come out of thin air.

We wouldn’t need all the infrastructure to ensure only qualified people get welfare. I’ve heard this would make UBI cheaper than what we do now, considering that it would be essentially taxed away from rich people as you say.

Do you have compelling examples on non-means-tested benefits remaining non-means-tested indefinitely? This doesn't seem to be what happens in the UK. Some government invariably either wants to reduce its expenditure or be seen to be "tough on scroungers" and the start means testing.

> money doesn't come out of thin air.

It can, though. Money is created all the time by banks only having to keep a fraction of their deposits on reserve. You deposit $100, they lend out $80, then you have $100 (in the bank) and someone else has $80 in cash (and an obligation to repay). $180 exists in a real form when at the beginning only $100 existed.

For the US Treasury, the rules are even stranger. Like a bank, they can write checks for whatever they want, as long as they do so in a manner consistent with the law (and laws can be changed). Unlike a bank, there can never be a "run" on the Treasury (no Treasury check can ever bounce for insufficient funds) because they can literally just print more money.

It is entirely possible to just deficit spend your way to a UBI. Many economists would predict this to create inflationary pressure - and indeed it might - but predictable inflation, even at moderate amounts, is beneficial to those who those who carry debts. This can create incentives for investment (you don't want to sit on your money if it's losing value) which may result in actual wealth creation.

Inflationary monetary policy effectively acts as a tax on those who hold currency, yes, but it's not a zero sum game. Plus people who receive these checks will spend it in the economy or deposit it with banks to create more of it. Economics is not well enough understood for there to be a consensus on what this would do in aggregate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying.

Yes, the equality of everyone getting the same amount with UBI is symbolic since you need to look at the overall effect combined with taxes. It's better thought of as a redistribution and insurance program. Most people with average or above income will be getting back their own money, like an income tax refund that happens throughout the year. (Not accounting for this makes the cost look a lot higher than it is.)

Financial security is important though. Paying more in taxes in normal times so you know you'll be okay between jobs would make everyone more secure.

The tends to worry people who think their fellow citizens can't handle financial security and will do crazy things unless forced to worry about money all the time. I think more bad stuff happens due to poverty than due to having some money.

This is factually incorrect, although it's possible you know that and are just overstating your case. Specifically, you have to spend $120k/year on nonessentials to break even with the Freedom Dividend plan. That's a far cry from "anything above poverty level... gets snatched back plus a whole lot more".

That's an estimate and, as programmers, we all know how (un)trustworthy estimates are and how universal cost overruns are, particularly for a government program and especially at the scale UBI would be implemented at. It also seems likely that those estimates are optimistic about continued economic growth; could the US afford to continue UBI in a deep recession or depression?

Moreover, even if things go as planned initially, eventually that $1k a month will start creeping up because of public and other political pressure. The world is not going to stand still.

Even the great European democracies can't afford UBI (and they're not even covering the costs for their own military defense!). There is no reason to believe that the United States can.

"welfare state" is a weak criticism. You're talking about a population that historically faced oppression and displacement. Given the context, doesn't make sense that a monthly check is the cause of alcohol addiction.

Yep, it's an American pastime to blame the poverty experienced by much of the indigenous population on the indigenous population. It makes people feel less guilty to be profiting from the status quo.

Criticism of indigenous folks without first acknowledging the real issues of genocide and disposession is problematic at best, racist at worst.

> problematic at best, racist at worst

any and every discussion related to class on HN

I completely understand where you're coming from, but perhaps you're looking at causation vs correlation. For example, there are many places in the world without a welfare state going through similar issues. The real question is whether that community would be better or exist at all without assistance.

Everything you are saying about Native Americans is contradicted by every study that has been done so far.

https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect...

Yang also discusses this in his book.

Please don't comment hyperbole if you're not able to support your thoughts with data.

> if you're not able to support your thoughts with data

Likewise.

That article is a highly anecdotal puff piece, focusing on a few exceptional inspirational stories from a single tribe. I could find all sorts of non-UBI rags-to-riches stories too.

AFAIK, despite no end of UBI pontification, no real study has even been done about existing native UBI (correct me please).

What we do know is that Native Americans consistently have 25% lower median income [1], double the poverty rate [2] [3], and nearly double the unemployment rate [4] of the rest of the United States.

Either UBI doesn't work, or it does work and without it Native Americans would be almost unbelievably terrible -- even compared to other historically oppressed groups (blacks, Irish, Japanese).

[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/2016-acs-shows-stubbornly-high-nati...

[2] https://theredroad.org/issues/native-american-poverty/

[3] https://census.gov/library/stories/2018/09/poverty-rate-drop...

[4] https://thinkprogress.org/the-unemployment-rate-for-native-a...

The "free money" that Wired article [0] is about isn't for all Native Americans - it's only for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. That tribe splits their casino's profit evenly. Their profit came out to about $12,000/person in 2016 (the same amount that Andrew Yang is proposing for Universal Basic Income [1]).

There are other Native American owned casinos who give their tribe members payouts, but not all of them can. According to Partnership with Native Americans [2], fewer than 15% of Native American tribes operate prosperous casinos.

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/free-money-the-surprising-effect... [1] https://www.yang2020.com/policies/the-freedom-dividend/ [2] http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=pw...

The reservation system has created a uniquely imbalanced system for Native Americans where they often live on land that has neither abundant natural resources nor easy access to money from tourism, industry, or trading in general. In that respect, I think the best comparison would actually be to Americans in the parts of the Appalachians (though parts of the Appalachians have mining or tourism, some parts have neither and are very remote).

Looking at a summary for some of that data, it's a very similar poverty rate in some parts, like Appalachian Kentucky[1] (25%) despite a relatively high rate of employment (compared to native Americans). I can't do a full breakdown from my phone, but I do wonder if there are other pieces of data about well-being that differ between working and non-working poor that are worth considering.

Though it's also hard to quantify what role racism might play in limiting opportunity for Native Americans, which would compound on the issues of being generally isolated from economic opportunities.

[1] https://fahe.org/appalachian-poverty/

Tourism/entertainment in fact is the primary source of the UBI.

So super similar economic conditions then. Enough tourism to create jobs and/or UBI in some parts, but not evenly distributed at all, especially for places that are already disadvantaged due to location.

Per http://www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=pw...

> The National Indian Gaming Commission reports only 242 tribes in 28 states operate casinos (as of 2014). Of these 242, about 88 have less than $3 million in revenue, and 96 have $10-25 million in revenue (enough to give per capita payouts, depending on the needs of each tribe and federal approval). Research shows that casinos need to be within 50 miles of a metro area (with 10,000 or more residents) to be highly profitable such as the few mentioned here. In PWNA’s experience, the rural and remote casinos do not have enough traffic to generate large profits — they do create a few tribal jobs.

Here is a study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...

Their chosen highlights:

>Highlights >The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) has provided UBI averaging $6600 US (2015) dollars for a family of four since 1982.

>The PFD reduced the number of rural Alaska Indigenous people in poverty during 2011–2015 by 22%, down from 46% in 2000.

>The PFD reduced poverty among rural Alaska Indigenous seniors by more than 40%, to rates that are now relatively low.

>Child poverty rates have been increasing; however, the PFD reduced 2011–2015 rural Alaska Native child poverty rates by 25%.

>Errors in official statistics will cause them to understate the actual rise in poverty rates as future PFD amounts decline.

Note that the PFD amounts are about a quarter of what Yang suggests (assuming two parents; number of children is irrelevant to his plan).

The last line of the abstract is "Evidence has not appeared for commonly hypothesized potential adverse social and economic consequences of UBI."

I personally would be curious to know more about what kind of UBI-ish payments have been made, in what amounts, how it varies from group to group, and what are the differences in outcome. I imagine that a lot has to do with the actual amounts received and if there are conditions for receiving it (such as staying on the reservation) and what kind of restrictions might be in place for building up infrastructure or doing other economic activities in addition to surrounding oppressive attitudes. There would be a lot of interesting stuff that could be looked into.

Interesting, thanks.

The highlights are definitely select the best results; there are some less than great things in the body.

This is not really that significant of a result, given that the measure of poverty they used is an income threshold. In other words, the study result found that supplementing income with direct cash payments reduced the percentage of people that fell below the poverty income threshold. Which is an obvious consequence of a uniform increase in people's income.

Exactly. To highlight the difference: the money was coming from people's wallets outside of the measured population.

In other words, they were delivering free lunches.

I don't think anyone is questioning that UBI given to people with 'nothing' will enable them to have 'stuff'.

The question is the social implications towards productive social cooperation: i.e. getting an education, getting a job, improving skills etc..

> My sister works up in Alaska. Tribal members up there have exactly what UBI promises: a baseline check every month....

This sounds like a lot of tribal areas that don't have UBI.

Are you thinking of a specific study that establishes UBI as the cause of this behavior in this case, or are you guessing?

The term for what you’re talking about is typically referred to as an “income effect”. You could(and people do) make the same argument against the existing social safety net. You can already do no work and simply survive off this net. The threat of death probably wasn’t the big motivator for most people. I could imagine UBI feeling qualitatively the same way once implemented. You still have all the positive motivations for working in place, getting monetary compensation, social status, etc. We don’t really know because it’s never been tried but there’s legitimate reason to believe the positives could outweigh these effects.

If we want to free people from tyrannical employers, isn’t free healthcare step one? Perhaps some sort of more available food stamps step two?

I would agree with a lot of the criticism of government should not target too closely etc, but those two programs seems pretty well run compared to the free market alternatives. At least when they are allowed to.

Agreed. Health care would be great first step. If we can’t pull that off I don’t have much hope for UBI.

I think healthcare is a great candidate for a step one.

It's not really the tyranny of bad employers that you want to target through government intervention in the labor market, but the curb the unintended consequences of the good ones, which is also why I don't think UBI is the right weapon to use.

As wages have stagnated and been replaced through other incentives I kind of see ourselves entering a neo-feudalist society. We're not swearing oaths to our employers by any means, but we are being somewhat tied to the land, metaphorically. Healthcare is the lowest hanging fruit politically, but the unintended consequences of all non-monetary benefits should also be on the table.

Like companies building or compensating for housing. Pet insurance. Company doctors/clinics. Child care. All things we want and appreciate, and great to see in a benefits package, and fantastic that companies want to help people with those problems, but it's a bit disconcerting in the long run for the labor market and society if you think about how these things can potentially trap individuals. And how when companies pay for things instead of individuals and pricing gets hidden/warped how the market changes.

Decoupling healthcare would be such a boon for small businesses. I don't understand why this point isn't made more often.

It's frequently the difference between someone being able to start and have a viable business or not. Remove that overhead and I think we'd see a flurry of activity and exploration that wasn't previously possible.

Yep, that's why Yang completely lost me when he dropped Medicare for All. Universal healthcare would dramatically reduce the dependance of workers on exploitative employers and it's way more feasible than UBI. Over 50% of healthcare today in the US is already funded by the government.

He supports healthcare for everyone, that's literally the goal[1]. He just has a different approach to get there. And some argue it's a more realistic approach than Medicare for All, which (at this point) doesn't seem terribly likely to get widespread support and pass.

1. https://www.yang2020.com/policies/medicare-for-all/

None of the stuff Yang is proposing will pass the current Senate, including and especially UBI. Why not drop UBI then as well?

The fact is that he is trying to call his fake health plan "Medicare for All" when it doesn't even have a public option and was recently called out on it, and frankly it makes him look more like a swindler than a serious candidate.

https://twitter.com/ThisWeekABC/status/1211317868555423744

Aye, that is disappointing. It's oddly out of character for him and I think he made a big mistake using that label. Not sure what's going on there and hope they revise that.

As for UBI, I have the same concern and worry he's too far ahead of the zeitgeist for it. Though he makes a strong case when you hear him talk about it and answer questions in depth, even to many across the aisle. And generally I think he'd have a good shot of at least bringing people together enough that they could have a good faith debate. Outside of UBI I suspect he'd make a surprising amount of progress.

Because UBI is the point of his campaign. His and his supporters claims to the contrary notwithstanding[1], Yang is a single issue candidate trying to draw attention and support for UBI. I would be very surprised if he really thought he could win.

[1] Because obviously you should claim you're running to win. Even if you and everyone else knows you have a snowball's chance in hell.

Pretty much. Best thing would be or current entrepreneurs can do is vote for Sanders.

Until there exists medicare/pharmacare/dentalcare/etc for all the big and wealthy entrenched corporations have a massive hiring and retention advantage over everyone else.

Why not also have a guaranteed housing program to go w/ foodstamps? I mean walmart gets major tax relief, why not call in their tax deficit as benefits to people who need it most?

I support UBI, but a stepping stone easily could be:

Better support for freelancers/gig economy workers. Better support for self-employed w/ regards to welfare/health. Jobs guarantee. Single-payer health. Housing assistance, esp. in times of dire need (job transition). Free college education and retraining assistance (maybe gov't grants for dev bootcamps and similar programs).

UBI makes sense in that you get rid of a lot of bureacracy but I don't think we're politically ready just yet. I think after we get M4A and college as a 'right', then we will be a lot closer, plus a lot more genz and millenials will be voting and increasing the progressive voice in D.C.

UBI is not a panacea. It does help move some key micro needles (i.e., employers needing to be more mindful of employees).

On the other hand, at the macro level (read: federal) there is risk. That is, elected officials will mistakenly see it as a replacement for opportunity; as a cure of institutional injustice. The native Americans got screwed. Their culture and pride destroyed. Simply tossing money at them isn't enough. But that's what we've done. We shouldn't be surprised.

> I can see UBI causing more resentment on both sides, the receivers and the payers.

But in this case (Yang's Freedom Dividend), everyone gets it. Doesn't that essentially solve the issue?

No, because high-income people still have to be net payers. Otherwise, where does the money come from?

It is not a problem if rich people resent having to pay money into the government in order to keep the system running. Rich people are only rich because the government maintains the monetary system. Being so rich that one resents the very government that establishes their riches is a feature, not a bug.

Edit: As usual for rapid downvotes on polite posts, do downvoters care to explain themselves? Or is today a day for irrationally defending the rich?

It is generally not the rich that resent it. The rich simply see taxes as a cost of doing business that they should attempt to minimize as they would any cost.

If you look at welfare, those that resent it most are the people that are just over the threshold to receive it. They see themselves as significantly better than those on welfare who are lazy and gaming the system.

Okay, but we're talking about UBI, and in UBI systems, there aren't any people that are just barely over the threshold.

I don't really see folks resenting welfare. I see a whole lot of folks who have probably never experienced welfare, though, and who are ready to judge those who do receive it. I don't consider this a reasonable line of thought, though, but rather an indicator of bigotry and poor empathy.

The rich have no reason to resent the system, they've done quite well through it, and the vast majority will treat any new tax as simply a cost to minimize. From a game-theory POV, they act predictably.

In contrast, low-income locales often do not act logically: https://thefederalist.com/2015/12/01/why-poor-locales-vote-f...

The working poor resent the non-working poor for being lazy and freeloading. As you mentioned, bigotry also plays a role in this. Both groups often resent the government for giving them just enough to subsist but not enough to lift their communities out of poverty.

I don't see UBI as changing any of that. Eliminating the threshold is good, but it won't address this underlying resentment.

Politely, I don't think that you're actually talking to anybody in "the [non-]working poor".

The article you linked commits a dire mistake: They claim that a government that took care of its lazy and poor would encourage the poor to be lazier and the lazy to be poorer, but when has there ever been such a government that actually does care for its lazy and poor? Their claim is without evidence and based upon a style of governance that hasn't yet been tried. In other words, their claim is anti-inductive and generates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Your last two paragraphs are in conflict. UBI would lift people out of poverty in ways that existing welfare programs don't, and it's via the same effect I pointed out before: UBI's effects taper off slowly as people improve their situations, rather than producing more all-or-nothing thresholds which trap people.

The bigotry that I am complaining about is the bigotry that you exhibit: That of putting words and actions in the mouths of the poor. I wonder whether you have ever lived below the poverty line.

Interesting points, thanks for the response. I haven't had the experience of living below the poverty line.

Well, eventually everyone will have the experience of getting UBI when they turn 18, prior to achieving high income. It will just be something everyone has from the start of adulthood and an accepted part of reality.

Which leads to me think that it'd be a temporary issue and will naturally resolve itself over time.

Qatar should be a good case for long-term study: citizens are guaranteed state jobs, land grants and a free education.

No thank you. That's easy to do when 88% of the population are foreign workers, virtually none of whom have a path to citizenship, most of whom are rewarded with relatively low wages, and many of whom face exploitation by various means. It's a feudalistic system that doesn't focus on benefiting the people in Qatar, only the Qatari citizens.

http://priyadsouza.com/population-of-qatar-by-nationality-in...

Sure, but if it can't work in that society, how would it ever work in a more just society?

1. Because every country's economy is not identical to Qatar's. Workers in many countries are more productive (in monetary value, for instance) compared to those in many other countries. Loosely, having workers that bring in more money would allow for needing fewer workers.

2. I don't have a strong opinion on UBI right now, but I don't see how Qatar's exploitative system somehow disqualifies UBI in general. Based on what you described, it doesn't even sound like a universal income: it's neither universal nor disposable income.

So it's too early to tell. But if it does work, then that means under some conditions it can work. If it cannot work, then, there is little hope as their system is kind of handicapped to have a better chance than most.

> This has not stirred people to innovation.

Where does this strawperson come from? UBI has nothing to do with innovation.

I also don't think it will stifle innovation.

I don't understand why this word innovation is mixed with people on UBI.

You do talk about the active drug industry that has sprung up around UBI, so there's innovation there. But I'm not understanding what the claim is.

We are not bringing in UBI to help innovation for either people on it, which it obviously won't, or eco systems around it, which seems like would be a sum loss.

>This has not stirred people to innovation. It has led to a gluttony of drug and alcohol addition and a forgetting of the ways to live off the land.

To be fair though, how much of that is due to the harsh winter conditions and long winter nights? A quick glance of the Google query "Alaska depressed winter" makes it look like it might be more of a weather/sun issue.

Also

>Alaska's alcohol mortality rate is three times the national average

http://www.newsminer.com/news/akrecovery/alaska-still-wrestl...

Altman and Yang are a natural fit because they’re both very invested (Altman literally so) in the narrative that automation is coming for huge numbers of jobs. But the economic statistics just don’t back this up. Total factor productivity, a (rough) measure of the technological contribution to economic production, is growing considerably more slowly than it was during the early 2000s, and much more slowly than during the 1930s, when the Second Industrial Revolution really came for the masses (and helped catalyze a huge labor shift away from agricultural work—but didn’t put all former farmers out of jobs).

Whether it’s automation or something else doesn’t really matter. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc. People in those jobs are the ones that could be most helped by UBI.

Of course you need to think about how to replace shitty jobs with better ones over time, but UBI smooths out societal issues created during those transition times.

those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc

Most of those jobs will be the hardest to automate because Moravec’s Paradox. Automation will wipe out lawyers and accountants long before it reaches sewer maintenance and refuse collection.

I'm not an expert, so I may be mistaken. However, my understanding is that, as it applies to motor skills, Moravec's Paradox applies to skills that require either fine sensing (e.g. manipulating something delicate) or adapting to a complex environment (e.g. navigating a room or painting).

It seems to me, that the success of robots in manufacturing demonstrates that this does not apply to many (but not all) unskilled labor jobs.

It also seems to me that in many cases it may be possible to modify the job to fit the capabilities of a robot rather than the other way around. For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl or give the robot a pipe-style brush that it big enough to clean any bowl.

For example, rather than build a robot that can clean an arbitrary toilet I could either standardize the internal dimensions of the toilet bowl

Sure, this is an argument often made by self-driving car enthusiasts, let’s just remake all the roads, ban all pedestrians and non-self-driving vehicles and so on. But it’s another instance of the same paradox, instead of radically underestimating the computation involved in actions that nature has given us dedicated hardware for, underestimating the vast cost of doing so.

In this case not only would you need to standardise the toilet bowl, but the route through the house to get to the bathroom and what to do about any unexpected obstacles...

The paradox in general applies to everything that humans take for granted that we can do without fully appreciating that it took us a billion years of evolution to get here.

My town went from, I believe, 3 trucks with 3 people each to 2 trucks with 1 person each for garbage collection. The last step will take a long time, but the amount of labor has already been dramatically shrunk.

>there’s a ton of shitty jobs out there, and those shitty jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing, automation, made obsolete, etc

Shitty jobs are not must vulnerable, quite opposite in fact. Automating some 400K/year quant job at hedge fund makes morse sense than automatng MCjob that pays 40K/year. More to that, shitty jobs are hardest to automate (we are nowhere close to good janitor robot, for example).

Also, you can not outsource cleaning toilets or hairdessers, but you can software development or building trading models.

There are "1000's" more 40k/yr jobs than 400k/yr ones. Automating a 40k/yr job that 1000 people do makes more sense than 10 400k ones. In aggregate, there is more money to be saved automating the 40k jobs.

Also, typically lower paying jobs are physical labor jobs, trading time for money, not "thinking" jobs that deal with exceptions to the rules.

Robotics are suppose to automate lower labor physical positions, AI is suppose to replace our thinking and mental positions.

Are there a significant number of physical labor jobs (in high-income countries at least) that do not require 1) intelligent human interaction or 2) detailed visual inspection and fine motor control?

There appears to be a huge hump in difficulty of robotic “automatability” caused by the fact that humans are just so much better at these two tasks than machines are.

“Thinking” jobs that essentially entail transformation of one type of data into another seem no more difficult to automate (if not perhaps even easier) than most manual labor that has not already been automated.

My uninformed guess is that we will automate low- and mid-level “thinking” jobs and the remainder of physical jobs at around the same time, because both require near-human perceiving, communicating, and manipulating capabilities.

Yes, McDonald's automates tasks across a massive labor force, they aren't trying to automate everything that a given employee might do.

Automating bureaucracy could be something that actually creates more jobs. We had to wait 8 months to get a permit to build a deck!

I think your facts are debatable https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1184499999406776326

I think we should be looking at it at the micro level. Every time automation is introduced at the employee level the employee is going to find (or make up) other work to do because otherwise they lose their job.

So we just aren’t going to see the effects of automation. But I bet if you tracked percent of work time used for internet surfing you’d see it going up 5-10% per year.

Labor productivity is a very simple calculation. It’s real GDP divided by total labor hours. Do you see the problem already? Let’s leave aside for a second that even the creator of GDP thought that, as a top level economic metric, it was useless (yes, useless). But, yeah...have the benefits of GDP been spread around evenly in our society? Of course it hasn’t. Our national GDP has probably been, mostly, generated by a small number of people. It’s impossible to tell how, but income inequality is probably a good proxy (though not an extrapolation) of how uneven GDP generation has been.

It is impossible to know. GDP is a team effort, but if you think through some of the examples in tech I think you will realize that the labor productivity metric is lying to us.

A lot of paid labor going on in the US right now is probably not actually all that important to the overall economy, or unevenly important.

Ironically, a lot of the unpaid or highly under compensated labor in our society (teachers, social workers, stay at home parents) are probably adding economic value. One of Yang’s main points is that we need to start valuing this labor.

Even if automation isn't coming for people's job, isn't it time we moved away from this idea that every single person has to work for 40 hours a week for 50 years of their life just to survive?

What about spending time with family, or learning a new language or just enjoying one's time?

When do we reach that magical future where we actually have leisure time and can enjoy the fact we're more advanced than we were a hundred years ago when everyone worked hard?

I'd like to get there now.

You can have that. Acquire more assets.

yeah, and if you are lucky, you'll only have to work 40 hours a week for 50 years to acquire them.

Which brings up his quality of life stance.

It honestly feels like we're paid slaves waiting until we have enough to buy ourselves from our owners.

I find this perspective problematic. I understand it feels like a lack of freedom—indeed you are constrained from doing whatever you want.

As an example, imagine you are on your own, completely outside of society, out of contact with others. You’d need to build and maintain shelter. You’d need to forage or grow food. You’re not free to do whatever you want, until you have accumulated enough resources to not need to do the work to provide what you need for everyday survival.

I don’t think we’d call this slavery, yet it has the same shape as what you describe. Slavery implies coercion or violence limiting freedom, which certainly still exists in the world, but isn’t an apt description of what you describe.

That's a horrible comparison. If I didn't need to have a job I would be volunteering helping the elderly, doing construction work, helping with animal rehabilitation, inventing things (I'm a mechanical engineer), etc. I can't contribute in any of these ways I would enjoy because they either don't enough or are risky.

I think we may be talking past each other. My intent is to explain why I think phrases like “slaves” and “buy ourselves from our owners” is ill-suited for what you’re trying to convey. Indeed, I’m struggling to find the connection between your comment I first responded to and your response here. I think you’re trying to distinguish between what you have to do to live and what you would choose to do if you didn’t have to worry about making a living. That’s certainly a worthwhile point to make, but again, I don’t think that in and of itself is slavery. (I wasn’t at all implying that what you would choose to do was separate yourself from society, given the opportunity—if that’s how you read the example.)

My example may miss the mark, but it wasn’t intended to. Can you help tie them together for me?

>As an example, imagine you are on your own, completely outside of society, out of contact with others. You’d need to build and maintain shelter. You’d need to forage or grow food. You’re not free to do whatever you want, until you have accumulated enough resources to not need to do the work to provide what you need for everyday survival.

This is true, but it's not the only perspective, and it misses out on a lot of normative social theory. J.E. Roemer would argue that because we are part of society, measurements of wellbeing should be taken relative to the wealth generated by society. The question is not if someone would be better off if they withdrew from society with only their own wealth, but if they'd be better off if they withdrew with a per-capita share of society's productive capacity.

>I don’t think we’d call this slavery, yet it has the same shape as what you describe.

Slavery isn't the word for it, but necessity is the word for it. It makes much more sense to talk of the freedom/necessity dichotomy than it does to talk of the freedom/slavery dichotomy.

"The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class."

Certainly. I believe we largely agree.

That depends on your expected standard of living and your pay.

In Utah, the median wage is $15.8/he, which puts you around $32k/year (assuming 250 work days @ 8 hours/day), and the median salary with a bachelor's degree is ~$57k[1]. I'll be looking at the lower figure.

Let's make a few assumptions:

- $15/hr is take home, not gross, and we'll ignore all government programs - single, and living with roommates is acceptable - within range of mass transit, so no car needed - goal is to maintain minimal lifestyle w/o work

It looks like $1200 is a reasonable rent for a 2BR apartment, so $600/month should be doable with one roommate, less with two.

So, here are some expenses:

- rent - $600 - transportation - $85 (unlimited pass for light rail & bus, $200 for commuter rail, but I'm looking within range of the light rail) - food - $300/month (very generous $10/day, cooking for one could cut this in half) - utilities - $100/month (shared utilities)

So, $1100/month for basic expenses. $15/hr would get ~$2500/month. If we increase expenses to $1500, that still means ~$1000/month can go toward retirement. If our aim is $1500/month spending, we can estimate the amount we need to stop working using the 4% rule [2], and I'll include a range to go from 3-4% to account for a longer "retirement" (4% is for 30-year retirement, but expenses could be reduced as well).

Amount needed (today's dollars, 4% rule accounts for inflation):

- 3% - $600k - 4% - $450k

Saving $1k/month for 20 years puts you at ~$500k assuming 7% growth (average growth of stock market after taking inflation into account). This number is approximately in the middle of our range, and 22 years is $600k; monthly investment and return can vary, so 20-25 years seems like a reasonable estimate. If you start at 25, you'd be done by 50, which is way better than the average person, and you can make this less by reducing expenses, increasing income, or utilizing public services.

To make this process easy, we could also use this chart [3], which is based on savings rate. $1k/2.5k = 40% savings rate, which is 22 years according to the chart, which is in line with what I put down here.

The actual story is obviously more complex since I hand-waved medical costs, simplified assumptions, etc, but the general story is valuable. Maybe retiring at 45 isn't practical for everyone, but perhaps working significantly fewer hours is practical. If we simplify our lifestyle, we can be much more financially secure much earlier. I'm sure a savvy individual could earn a bit more (side hustles) and spend a bit less (decrease food expenses, bike instead of taking the bus, etc).

I'm sure the figures look a bit different in various areas, but the root of the matter is that the average person should have a much better outlook than we see on average. I think the solution lies in better education (I doubt the average person understands compound interest), better housing availability (reduce costs), better mass transit, etc.

- [1] https://slchamber.com/median-wage-in-utah/ - [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp - [3] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Answer is: never. The average person in the West has already surpassed the comfort and standard of living of the average monarch a couple centuries ago, but instead of settling we want more: traveling, more and more advanced tech, vast amount of entertainment, etc.

Consider the multi-billion dollar media productions (games, TV series, movies, music, books, etc.) that you can access at the command of your voice vs. the same ol' jester, resident poet or occasional travelling theater company that were the only option for a monarch not so many centuries ago.

I disagree. Try to actually settle down (without winning the startup/rich parents/literal lottery first) and see how it goes. If you haven't raised a nice safety fund and you get sick, you are screwed. If you dont want to live in the middle of nowhere, land owners are going to want a huge chunk of money for that priviledge. Also good luck finding a part time job that pays much better than minimum wage. I know a lot of people who try to do this and there are definitely ways it can happen, but our society is definitely structured to make it difficult.

Tell the person working two jobs, paying more than half of their income to rent/mortgage and living paycheck to paycheck that they should just relax and settle down ...

100 years ago, you were screwed if you got the wrong infection no matter how rich you were. Now we cure that with a $30 course of antibiotics.

Even just the limited healthcare you can get from free clinics and emergency treatment that hospitals are required to provide even if you aren't able to pay would be better than the best care money could buy 100 years ago.

Of course antibiotics and other things have improved since 100 years ago, nobody is arguing otherwise. The argument is that right now we could have cheap antibiotics and less working hours.

The counter argument was that the average person chooses luxury over less working hours, and my counter-counter argument was that this choice isn't actually available to most people. Also, that actually the choice most people have is to work less and live something like 100 years ago with reduced life span, etc, or work a lot and survive.

If you think you have it better than a monarch because you have things and other people are dissatisfied and you dont know why maybe it isn't more stuff that people want.

The point of being a monarch wasn't to have the shiniest toys.

So you are saying that we should feel like monarchs because we have TVs, Netflixes, Games, gadgets, toys etc.

I would argue that many people nowadays feel more like slaves than monarchs since they can hardly even afford healthcare in many cases, they probably won't have a pension due to current demographics, they have to hand over half of their salary to various land lords, tax lords, pension lords, healthcare lords and other various fee lords.

True, It does feel like Feedalism again, but for many not from position of monarchs but serfs.

> So you are saying that we should feel like monarchs

18th century monarchs, yes. (Not 21st century monarchs.)

> hardly even afford healthcare in many cases

Better than leeches though.

> they probably won't have a pension

The reason that's a problem is precisely because health is good.

> hey have to hand over half of their salary to various land lords

Most adults in the U.S. own their own home (modulo mortgage...but even very wealthy people still choose to take mortgages for yet bigger houses). And expensive housing is generally driven voluntary by urbanization.

If you offered me the choice of life as King George III or the average American, I would choose the latter.

> The average person in the West has already surpassed the comfort and standard of living of the average monarch a couple centuries ago

This comparison makes very little sense, because with change in society and social structures, human needs and desires also change. To compare today's person with someone from centuries ago ignores that doctrine. The fact is that kings had the best in society centuries ago, but the majority of people don't have the best in society today. Whether "the best" is accessible is a different matter, but kings had an excellent standard of living in their time period.

It is genuinely confusing why someone would think that saying we live better than a king lived centuries ago is some kind of argument that things shouldn't be further improved. Why, exactly, is the king's standard of living relevant today, other than as a historical curiosity?

Perhaps to put our own desires into perspective. Is an unhappy king of 1000 years past or future helpful for understanding our own path towards happiness? If it shows the futility of material reliance, I'd say yes.

You can have that right now if you’re willing to settle for a 1920’s standard of living.

Yeah - the only thing I can think of worse than not having a plan in place for a future world where all work is automated is implementing that plan before all work is actually automated.

Yeah but I think Yang knows that , and he uses UBI as a symbolic image of the fact that good jobs are going to become increasingly hard to find and that makes most people anxious. It's sort of how trump used "the wall" to appeal to the anxieties of people with insecure jobs. It's a good focus point though, that appeals to reasonable people more than "just tax the rich" (which is shortsighted anyway; what 's the plan when the rich are no more?). My current bet (as a non-american) is that if the democrats manage to select Yang, he will win, otherwise it's going to be a much worse trump 2nd term

Even if that is the case, jobs now change at much more rapid pace than in the past. It used to be that if you trained and worked as a blacksmith (or whatever), you could die a blacksmith. It was their kids that would have to do something else. Which isn't too much of a shock to the system.

This is no longer the case. Now someone within a single lifetime can go through multiple job creation and destruction cycles. So it'd be helpful to have a floor to help deal with the transitions and provide a buffer.

Yang does have an interesting idea for campaign finance reform too. 100$ a year for any citizen to spend on political campaigns. In some ways I think this is bigger than the UBI. If everybody spent this voucher it would be ~23B, almost 4x what was spent on federal races in 2016.

I think it will be more likely that our elected officials make better policy for normal people if their campaign funding also comes from them. In federal budget terms, 23B is cheap to increase political participation / trust.

While it’s entirely possible that corporations / billionaires increase their expenditures to match, having “enough” money is more important than having more money in political campaigns (or so I was taught in school.)

Yeah I really like that you could support what you want as it gives more control to the citizens.

How? It does literally nothing for special interests buying politicians, it just adds MORE money into the system. No thanks.

Side note... not many people here would like the never ending series of populist presidents this would bring if it did work.

Let's say lobbyists pull funding from one sector and push it into another, such as the endless funding for military pulling funding away from other sectors like education, then you as a citizen that wants to support education can decide to put your $100 towards that.

As you pointed out, special interests will just raise the value of a politician so the $100 disappears in value. That or buy out ads to convince people to spend on their corporate sponsored candidates rather than the ones seeking direct support from voters. Both of these already happen, so why wouldn't they happen more? Solving this issue of corruption in campaign finance requires a solution that only publicly financed campaigns can give. Make it so that voting is all that matters in deciding an elected official and sterilize campaign funding so it's not easy to corrupt.

The ratio of special interest funding would have to increase by 80x to outweigh the $100 by a factor of 10:

Currently, the $100 democracy dollars would outweigh special interest politician funding by 8:1, so for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction implies that political favors go up nearly 100x in price. That seems like an easy win to me.

Special interest money absolutely does not need to outweigh the "democracy dollars" contributions in order to be effective. It just needs to be enough to sway the vote of the politicians. Most of the time voters aren't even aware of the agreements their representatives had made with donors. This won't change with "democracy dollars." Politicians will gladly take voter contributions, but they'll continue to take special interest money until the laws change.

Different, but in the spirit of prior art, my state gives $2 per adult to spend on party campaign funds. (This is chosen at tax return time.)

[1] https://incometax.utah.gov/contributions/election-campaign-f...

Great to see tech leaders get behind UBI. Now is the time and Yang is the candidate of a lifetime. I never understood how people buy into the whole "break up the tech giants" argument. It makes no sense, just a great platitude with no real accomplishment. Who wants to use the 2nd best Twitter or Facebook? Not a single person.

Usually "breakup" is a byword for regulate.

However, it's possible to see how Amazon being broken into at least one online retailer, a web services company, and a logistics provider and how that may increase competition in each of those markets.

Further, even in your social example, people used Instagram before Facebook bought them and likely still would if divested, and Snap, Tik Tok and more are going strong as independents.

Amazon needs have it's retail side split into a marketplace operator and a retailer.

I still know people who love Instagram or WhatsApp but they hate Facebook. Little do they know both apps are owned by Facebook, and that's the problem Facebook keeps acquiring their threats, their competitors that's monopoly and seriously they're dangerous. Many people still don't know YouTube is owned by Google. This is a problem!

I'm assuming you're asking in good faith, so I'll point out three problems with your line of thought.

First, you assume that having multiple competitors is pointless if one product is the clear winner. Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now, and the reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation. They would argue that even if breaking up Twitter just resulted in 2nd-best Twitter, the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now.

Second, you assume that there would be a clear "best" product. In truly competitive fields, it's often difficult to point to one product and say, "that's the best, and everyone else is settling for a worse product."

Take iPhone and Android. Why does anyone use the 2nd best phone operating system? Why don't we have one OS? Because there isn't a clear 2nd best operating system. The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases. It seems obvious to me that the smartphone market is broad enough that other niches could be served better by more targeted alternatives to the two major OSes, if those alternatives were allowed to mature to the point where they became competitive.

Finally, you misunderstand what the proposals about breaking up tech companies often entail. Most commonly when people talk about breaking up big-tech, I find they're talking about Warren. Warren's proposals are (roughly speaking) about separating product offerings and platforms. Her plan isn't to take Apple and force them to split up and create a second iOS. Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.

It's not about blindly making a second Apple, it's about trying to remove conflicts of interest from platform maintainers.

I'm not going to say whether or not I think that plan is good. I do think it's pretty unlikely to happen even if Warren is elected. But regardless, it's a very different, much narrower plan with very different goals and implications than what you're describing.

The break up Facebook plan isn’t going to end with two facebooks. They aren’t a phone company.

They may be required to provide interoperability with other networks. This kind of federation is what tech people claim is what makes the internet good.

Then there is the question of if all their sub companies need to be under one banner. Must they own WhatsApp? Instagram?

Seems like they don’t need to but just swallowed up competitors.

Exactly. Whether or not you think that Facebook is a monopoly, none of the Democratic candidates (or at least, none of the candidates that are serious) are talking about making a bunch of Facebook clones.

They're talking about reversing mergers that many people claim were problematic (WhatsApp and Instagram). They're talking about forcing companies to give up the benefit of 1st-party access to the platforms they maintain.

That's a much more narrow, targeted change than saying, "let's just make another Facebook", which is what I see people interpreting it as.

> Proponents of breaking up tech giants would argue that Twitter and Facebook are not actually very good products right now

Based on what criterion?

> reason they're popular is largely due to network effects and anticompetitive behavior, not innovation

Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?

> the existence of competition would force the original Twitter to innovate at a faster pace than it's moving right now

If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo. It's not as if it's technically difficult to create a product similar to twitter, thus any attempt to break up big tech companies would mandate the retirement of the incumbent domain and brand. How would this be implemented practically? Also, what happens to all the user PII? Does it just get copied over to a new corporate entity which in effect doubles the risk of the data being hacked or leaked?

On a more speculative note, I am not sure if it is a given that "innovation" in the realm of social media is necessarily a good thing for the consumer, especially considering that the barometer for social media success is engagement. Social media "innovation" inevitably means "getting more people to look at ads".

> The products are good for different things, and fit different niches and use-cases

Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.

> Her plan is to split Apple so that the company controlling the iOS App Store isn't the same company selling software on that store.

How would this work? Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store? It seems pretty impractical to prohibit a company from selling their own products on a platform they own.

In regards to your last point:

My understanding is that, for example, Valve might be broken up into two companies:

- Valve: Produces video games such as Half Life, TF2, and Portal

- Steam: Sells video games

If Steam then sold Half Life 3, it would no longer be 1st party software because it is made by Valve not Steam.

Granted, that will never happen because Valve will never make Half Life 3. -_-

> that will never happen because Valve will never make Half Life 3.

They just aren’t using the name.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life:_Alyx

> Based on what criterion?

This is obviously subjective, but based on the criterion that the sites don't work very well. Recommendation systems on all of these platforms are abysmal, and they don't seem to be improving -- they seem to be getting worse. Most changes being made on sites like Twitter are poorly received by users. When the last time there was a change on Twitter that everyone liked?

Most of these sites are slow. Gmail is actively getting slower over time, to the point where it now has an extra loading screen. It's not clear to me what features have been added to justify that.

On sites like Youtube, creators are now at the point where they view the website like an existential threat. Youtube provides almost no real mechanisms for creators to fight copyright claims, its monetization rules and promotion algorithms are opaque and difficult to navigate.

Again, it's subjective whether you should look at that kind of stuff and say, "well no one could do it better." I look at platforms like Mastodon and say, "well, clearly some people are doing stuff like moderation and open API access better than sites like Twitter/Facebook." I look at sites like Nitter and think, "well, if one person built this, and even as just a blind proxy it seems to work better than Twitter's site in multiple ways, then Twitter isn't trying very hard."

> Can you give any examples of anticompetitive behavior exhibited by social media companies?

On Facebook: the email dump that came out late 2019[0] is a good place to start. In it, you can see Facebook design "open" data APIs where access was restricted to partners who spent certain amounts of money on ads. Companies that were considered competitive with Facebook's offerings were excluded from that already problematic agreement. If Facebook saw you as a potential threat, you were essentially banned from the platform.

On Instagram: users were threatened with loss of status and verification if they linked to other platforms in their bios[1]. Eventually, the code was changed to detect "add me" links and outright block them from being included on bios at all. This is a very bold, open attempt to hold a userbase hostage, counting on the fact that Instagram/WhatsApp users have too much to lose to go against the policy.

I know you specifically asked about social media, but if I can broaden that out a tiny bit: on Google's front, Chrome is advertised prominently in every one of Google's products, for free. Google offerings are also built to work best in Chrome even to the point of breaking standards[2].

This kind of "by default" push for Chrome on Android devices and in Google products is, in my mind, very reminiscent of the IE antitrust case the Microsoft got slammed with.

We could go on, but I don't want this to get too long. But it really shouldn't be difficult for you to imagine why someone might claim tech giants are anticompetitive, even if you disagree with those reasons. Heck, a new accusation gets posted to HN at least once a week -- just look at the conversations around AMP's search-result placement.

> If the "original" twitter kept the twitter brand and domain, absolutely nothing would change since that would be the equivalent of the status quo.

Based on Facebook's reactions to Instagram, Snapchat, and other similar competitors, this isn't the case. Every time Facebook has felt threatened by a competitor, in the brief period before they bought them, they were forced to uptake user-friendly features. In regards to Snapchat, some of those features were more privacy-friendly than what Facebook was currently offering.

A better argument that I'd be more sympathetic to here would be that Facebook already regularly feels the pressure of competition, and breaking them up isn't necessary. But it seems strange to me to argue that competition wouldn't do anything at all, given that we have a lot of examples of competition making these platforms better.

> Right, but those products exist because they serve a niche in the market, simply breaking up companies doesn't create a niche.

No, but simply having an unserved niche in the market also doesn't mean a product will fill it. That's what people are getting at, that there are niches that would be filled by competing OSes and products if there weren't anticompetetive forces keeping those products from existing.

You need two things for a niche product to exist -- you need a real niche that's unmet, and you need an opportunity to create that product. Proponents of breaking up big-tech argue that we have the first, and not the second.

Once again, I think there is a case to be made that the situation isn't as bad as people say -- that we do have competitors starting to pop up for Facebook/Twitter, and talk about forcing the market is unnecessary right now. I'm not going to get into that argument, but I don't think the people who make it are dumb.

> Would Valve be allowed to sell 1st party software on Steam? Would Google be allowed to sell their software on the play store?

Roughly speaking, that's the intent. Google would be able to sell software on the Play store, but then Google couldn't own the Play store, it would need to be spun out into another company.

Similar rules have been proposed for media companies and ISPs; people argue that a company like T-Mobile shouldn't be able to simultaneously operate an Internet service and merge with a media provider on that service -- that would create a conflict of interest that would threaten Net Neutrality.

This sounds extreme on the software front because we have a pretty long history of companies doing exactly that -- creating a search engine and then using it to promote Chrome, creating a Play store and then using it to make sure that Gmail has prominent placement. People like Warren argue this is just as anticompetitive as an ISP operating a streaming service.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/12/05/email-dum...

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/3/11157124/instagram-blocks-...

[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-exec-says-google-slowed-yo...

How does UBI even work? Won't it just lead to rampant inflation where the basic income is spread thin, eaten up almost entirely by the rising cost of goods? It seems like this in turn will require an even higher basic income, which exacerbates the problem.

Isn't an analogous situation that of private loans for tuition? Tuitions have risen across the board to eat up all the new "free" money in the system.

Won't UBI make goods much more expensive for everyone and also increase our taxes? Wouldn't a better expenditure be providing healthcare?

I'm earnestly curious.

The main cause of inflation is the artificial restriction of supply on certain items from govt/business.

Housing isn't expensive because of the cost of labor/materials, for example. It's expensive because the government literally says "you can't build that here". So the 100 old parcels of land where you want to live have 1000 people bidding for them.

UBI maybe on paper would cause additional inflation in that scenario. But it might also be the catalyst that allows people to move elsewhere for work, such as to a low cost of living area, because UBI can be relied on to survive.

That sounds like a pet theory someone in the bay area comes up with. No economist I’ve read has any such opinion.

Please explain to me how you view how reality works then. I'm not related to SF in any way btw.

The total legal occupancy of SF is smaller than the number of people who want to live there. The city delays the issuance of permits for expanding occupancy.

Increase in the money supply and velocity of money. The money supply has increased dramatically and is why the bull market has been so long. However velocity is very low which has so far limited inflation. UBI would thus likely cause significant inflation.

The bay area is rich and the rents follow suit. They are still limited to the overall supply of money in the area. Obviously increasing supply of real estate would help the issue of course.

Except no new money supply is created, hence little to no inflation.

Every redistributive program that gives the poor more money increases demand for goods that poor people want - that's the whole point!

It's no problem because supply can adjust to compensate - the exception to this is land, which is why a UBI ought to be funded with a land value tax. This is why Yang's UBI isn't very good, because it is sales tax funded (he's too much of a centrist to tackle land and capital, touching either of these things upsets rich people's delicate feelings too much).

An underdiscussed advantage of UBI is that it's good even for those that don't get more out of it overall than they put in, because it spreads income out more evenly over the whole lifecycle (people generally have not enough money early in their careers and during child-bearing, and too much during later life and death).

I think it's smarter to go after automation and consumption than land value tax as of this moment. It's a lot harder to measure the true value of land compared to consumption. Also, the VAT can also be adjusted for non essential goods. Consumption is quite strong in this country. It's wise to target that.

Consumption and automation are beneficial activities. Not smart to tax them.

Excluding others from a valuable natural resource is deeply immoral unless compensation to those excluded is paid.

The difficulty(or not) of measuring the "true value" of that compensation isn't a justifiable reason that we should as close to it as is reasonably possible.

The real downside of Yang's plan is not including children in it which is odd because he talks a lot about a UBI funding the work of parents staying home with their kids.

The ideal scenario in my mind is a property tax, of some kind, that funds a UBI for children. Ideally, this would be at the federal level, but unfortunately property taxes have been deemed unconstitutional. This is likely true for wealth taxes as well.

But there is nothing to prevent states and cities for instituting a property tax -> UBI setup. It would no doubt help greatly with the problem of "buy properties and do nothing with them" aspect of rich foreign investors in some regions.

One of the things that Yang seems focused on is stuff that can actually be done. A wealth tax sounds nice, and he agrees with the spirit, but that is simply not a federal level option at this time. A constitutional amendment would be great to fix this, but that takes a long time and would require people to get out of survival mode to make this happen.

So Yang takes the practical approach of getting money in the hands of everyone now using a tax scheme that seems to be inoffensive to wealthy people. It probably is not, but the only way to really know is to do it.

As for the children, I am hoping this is also just a pragmatic thing. While it is hard to get this country to accept giving free money to other adults, it is even harder to imagine this country supporting giving money to "those people" with "lots of children". This is why schools are funded locally and why a UBI for children would need to be locally funded as well for now, particularly if the desire, as mine is, is to use land taxes.

It depends on how government would get the money for UBI. If it goes ahead and just prints more money then there will be rampant inflation, but if it redirects money from other programs, the prices of some goods may change, but there won't be inflation.

The money will come from a 10% Value Added Tax (VAT). No new money will be printed to pay for the Freedom Dividend so there will be no inflation.

>No new money will be printed to pay for the Freedom Dividend so there will be no inflation.

Wow this is fundamental misunderstanding of what inflation is.

What exactly is the fundamental misunderstanding here? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation says

> Economists generally believe that very high rates of inflation and hyperinflation are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply. Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied.

The freedom dividend can cause low to moderate inflation, if the extra tax is high enough to cause recession. But the only path to hyperinflation is government printing more money.

We are not talking about hyperinflation here.

This is a breakdown of where the money would come from to pay for UBI: https://freedom-dividend.com/

Then there’s the behavioral factor to consider. Will UBI truly relieve pressure and give people a hand up? Or will it result in a large swathe of the population dropping out of the labor force and accepting a life of poverty and marginalization? Could some UBI pushers actually see the latter as the true goal?

Ask any Native American how empowering a UBI-esque system worked out for them.

Not that I’m rejecting the idea of UBI out of hand, but I’m very concerned about the lack of such discussion.

There is a Native American example with UBI (North Carolina, casino-based UBI) and it sounds like it immediately improved outcomes and did not impact working:

https://thecorrespondent.com/4664/why-do-the-poor-make-such-...

Also, would you stop working if you got 12k a year for free? How much do the wealthy make in dividends a year? Do they stop working? Maybe to ensure that the wealthy continue to work, we should prevent any kind of returns on capital investment. Maybe people should only make money through their labor?

But seriously, who wants to do nothing all day long? The UBI money takes away stresses and maybe some will stop working for a boss, but they will find other things to do with their time and, if it is valuable to others, they will profit from it and do it more. So it goes.

As a personal anecdote, I would love volunteering with building homes, helping elderly, or helping animal conservation and rehabilitation efforts. I would also like to work on some inventions (I'm a mechanical engineer). However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner).

> However, volunteering doesn't pay anything and inventing something is really risky, so as a result I can't contribute in such ways to society and instead am working at a job I hate contributing to my deteriorating quality of life and mental health (i feel like a slave working towards having enough money to buy myself from my owner).

I often wonder how many people feel this.

I don't feel quite as dire about it, but I absolutely agree that my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord. Unfortunately, I too have many ideas, yet so little time to work on them.

It's too risky to quit work and embark on my own, so I only get 1/10th of my vision done during the evening and weekend hours I can spare. And even then I'm burning the last remaining cycles of effort I have during the day. It's a slow, painful slog. But I am making progress.

If I were in the flip side position of being a CEO with a product vision and lots of workers to see my ideas through to fruition, how many of my employees would be stuck in the same trough of apparent underutilization and under-fulfillment? If I empowered them to follow their own path and dreams, wouldn't they quit and leave me with nobody to work on my vision?

If you get rid of the perhaps boring and mundane "keeping the lights on" jobs, which are ever so important, then the product dies.

This is a hard problem.

> my best contributions to society will be those I initiate and see to fruition on my own accord

This is pretty much the essence I was getting at and what the goal is to solve

> Who wants to do nothing all day long?

As someone having participated in a support group for people excessively using online/digital media: It might not be a very satisfying life, but it's seems easier than ever to distract yourself while unproductively wasting your time.

For some of those individuals, this was about not wasting their limited time outside work. But a significant share had their lives entirely supported by e.g. gov or parents. And external factors in many cases caused the necessity to change.

I agree with society ensuring people can have their basic needs met. But why does it have to be an unconditional monthly check? Beside strong support offers in areas like psychological, guidance or life advice, I'd prefer the right to trade X hours per week (preferably more like 20ish than the current 40) to your gov to get what you need to live.

It would act as a minimum wage. It would incentivize finding something better, especially if not satisfied with the work assigned by gov to you. It would still guide those living on autopilot towards something at least somewhat productive. And yeah, it would be tricky to implement well :/

Tribal UBI has had mixed outcomes. Payments that are below practical livability seem to help as an augmentation to income and for reducing poverty. In tribes where work is not necessary or limited to a couple months per year to live comfortably (the latter case common for tribes with a large resource extraction business) you see much more evidence of rampant social pathology rather than mere poverty.

Anecdotally, having grown up in and around various tribal communities, people will consistently replace work as a source of purpose with some other purpose of their own devising. Unfortunately, most of the time people will choose a purpose that is socially destructive in the absence of a default purpose that is socially beneficial. A consideration for designing a constructive UBI system is institutionalizing new sources of socially beneficial purpose that can be easily adopted by people that lose work as a purpose. Insufficient thought is put into this latter problem, I have seen little evidence that this will happen organically.

The truth is that nobody can predict with certainty what UBI would do. It’s all speculation.

>How does UBI even work?

If Indian reservations in the USA are any indication, it clearly doesn’t.

There's no UBI for Native Americans in the US.

This is not correct. Some tribes have large sovereign wealth funds and other valuable tribal assets, the income from which is used to fund UBI for members of the tribe. These payments can be substantial, significantly larger than what Yang proposes in some cases.

Many of these tribal UBI systems have been in place for decades, so they are a good laboratory for studying the effects of UBI on population behavior.

The main difference is that money specifically for something, like tuition, disappears if it is not used. The UBI money can be spent on anything or not spent at all.

For example, imagine a government subsidy for smartphones that gives up to 2k for any phone you buy. The predictable effect of that is all phones would be at least 2k because there is no downside to the customers paying 2k. It would probably be 2k + pre-subsidy prices for many phones, particularly the high priced ones.

But if you just give everyone 2k in money, then why would they all want to spend it on smartphones? Maybe the price goes up a bit since there is more flexibility in spending, but there is not a specific pressure on that category alone. It gets spread out to the entire field of the economy including savings and investments.

Competition is still in place. The amount of the UBI also matters, of course. If everyone got a million dollars, a 1k phone would be a trivial price and could easily be raised in price dramatically. Basically, the spreading across the people would no longer dissipate the upward price pressure effectively. Targeting the level at basic poverty level seems like a reasonable first step to try to end poverty without spiking the prices.

As for healthcare in our current system, this might also address a lot of it. There is, of course, the removal of survival stress conditions and food deserts (by making poor regions not poor) which improves the health of people directly. But the UBI is also money that can be used for both insurance premiums and the max out of pocket levels. Much of the currently uninsured are not the desperate poor (Medicaid covers most of them), but are people in either states that did not expand Medicaid and are too poor to qualify for Obamacare subsidies or are just above the cutoffs and can't afford the full premiums. While directly changing how the subsidies work could fix that, the UBI is another approach that avoids a healthcare legislative debacle. For reference, in my state, an individual without subsidy can get health insurance for somewhere between 3-4k a year.

The other aspect of healthcare costs for consumers is the deductible/out-of-pocket. At least for the plans I see, 6kish is the max for out of pocket costs and that is half the proposed UBI. So this would seem to greatly solve the health insurance problem for US citizens. In summary, someone who needed the UBI for both premiums and out of pocket would be entirely covered with maybe 1-2k left over. Not ideal, but this is a worst case scenario.

Most UBI advocates, including Yang, do not believe that a UBI alone fixes the healthcare industry mess, but I believe it does help plug in the holes in a way that can avoid the healthcare debate dysfunction in our politics.

> How does UBI even work? Won't it just lead to rampant inflation where the basic income is spread thin, eaten up almost entirely by the rising cost of goods?

In the long run UBI promotes innovation and competition. Therefore those industries with competition would not suffer from rampant inflation.

Businesses without competition (monopolies) would on the other hand experience huge inflation simply because there is no pressure to keep the price down. This would be the case of natural monopolies (eg. banks or networks such as telecommunication, railroads, water systems) and government guaranteed monopolies (pharma, US healthcare, various overregulated industries).

If you break them up, they’re forced to develop common protocols. Who wants to use the 2nd best email client? A lot of people, it turns out.

Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?

Do the Chinese YouTube’s have positive cash flow? I don’t even know if youtube has positive cash flow.

I was curious about Youtube too, apparently around 2015 they started breaking even.

I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing.

https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le...

I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.

There's no law of nature that data/eyeballs-based monetization (including advertising) has to remain viable everywhere that it is today. I find it entirely plausible that 10 years from now people will have to directly pay for more of the services that they use.

You're already seeing this with the increased number of paywalls around publication content. I expect we'll see more subscriptions and services just shutting down if people aren't willing to pay.

> 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views.

Why can't they start deleting old videos?

Certainly one plausible future is that, if your video isn't making them money after some period, you either pay them some ongoing fee to keep it live or they delete it. After all, that's the model for most other hosted content.

That YouTube is a free hoster for video content wasn't inevitable and isn't guaranteed going forward into the indefinite future.

Yang wants to give everyone legal ownership of their own data. That is going to be more disruptive to the tech industry than antitrust rulings against a few companies.

What does that actually mean in practice? From a technical perspective, thanks to GDPR, Facebook and other sites now let you download your data (even outside EU), but it hasn't led to a resurgence of competition in social networks. From a legal perspective, you do own the content you provide to Facebook, you only provide them a non-exclusive license to use it.

I feel like because he's new and trying to shake things up that people are holding him to way higher of a standard than other candidates. Other candidates have been throwing things out there like wanting to provide healthcare to everyone (just one example) and as far as I've seen they've provided no plans for how they will make this happen. Yet for Yang everyone wants to see every detail of it. I also feel like this may be lead by organizations that don't like that he's shaking things up (apparently the DNC told him not to even mention the threat of automation because they don't want to scare people, as if putting our heads in the sand gets anything done).

> the western world just one?

* Dailymotion (France)

* Flickr (United States)

* Metacafe (United States)

* IGTV (United States)

* Photobucket (United Sates)

* Twitch (United States)

* Veoh (United States/Israel)

* Vevo (United States)

* Vimeo (United States)

Vimeo in particular has about one-quarter the "market share" as Youtube [1]

[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video/youtube-m...

My main issue with UBI is that businesses will aggressively raise prices to capture that money. Not every business will, but most will, so you can be damn sure everyone's rent is going to increase at the highest rate legally permissible all around the country.

Yes, prices will likely go up. However, they will not capture all of that money. And UBI will allow people to have more choice in where they live. UBI will give you the flexibility to move somewhere new and figure things out when you get there, rather than having to have a job lined up immediately. This should, at the margin, decrease the lock in effect of big cities, and maybe even cause rents to decline over time.

I'm hoping UBI exists in 10-20 years. I could take on my parents' home on that kind of salary without thinking, and just dub along as a subsistence farmer/ occasional contractor.

Is this an issue with UBI though? Of course the prices will go up because of supply/demand changes. And thus 12k/year won’t go as far as it does now. That’s not a bad thing though. The people who are at rock bottom still > 0. Leeches won’t be able to do nothing and exist off 12k. For most rent payers, their life will remain the same as it is today: the economy will reach a new equilibrium and their lives will be no better financially. But that’s by design- this isn’t meant to be a free ride through life.

A $3T program that doesn't "dramatically affect" the lives of "most renters" for the better will be a hard sell.

In fact, it would make the lives of the middle/lower class worse off because the tax is in the form of VAT and the removal of welfare benefits.

There is already a UBI in place for veterans who suffered one of a number of qualifying disabling conditions during as a result of military service. Veterans can receive nearly $4000/mo if they are 100% service connected. Some veterans have significant disabilities like missing limbs and others qualify for things like arthritis or tinnitus. Many (in my estimation most) of them could work but choose not to once they get this basic income.

Do they lose that income if they start to work?

I don't believe so

I’m confident that we can all agree that large corporations are efficient at extracting value from the economy (not to suggest that they don’t also add value).

If we were to take the current system, with no changes made to the rules, and send it forward 100 years in a time machine, I’m confident we can also agree that consolidation by large corporations will have increased significantly during this period of time.

If we can increase the velocity of the economy, I’m confident we can agree that this would have a similar effect as the aforementioned time machine scenario.

Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy.

If you’re with me this far, then you have come to the conclusion, for yourself, that UBI will increase the velocity of the economy and further consolidate wealth into the hands of large corporations.

Has it not occurred to you that there could be reasons, other than philanthropy, that many of the proponents of UBI are millionaires/billionaires, large corporations, and both of these in their roles at economic think tanks?

Multiple parties can benefit from UBI.

You also handwave and make a load of assumptions in each of your statements.

What are the statements I’ve made that are not A) rooted in generally accepted economic theories or B) syllogism based on the other statements?

I don’t expect you’ll reply :]

Of course not, you made so many statements it's not worth my time at all. Care to provide sources for all your generally accepted economic theories ?

> Indiscriminate injection of capital into an economy necessarily increases the velocity of the economy.

Only if you get it from the same place that provides free lunches.

Andrew Yang is too early with the UBI, which in this case means he’s wrong. We still need humans to make things and the future. A negative income tax would work better now and would be a better segue to UBI.

$12K/year is hardly a free ride to a life of no work. There will be a tiny minority that somehow game it and live off that, but for the vast majority it’s a cushion and not a replacement for work at all.

I wish for your assessment of human nature to be accurate, but I’m quite doubtful.

What do you even mean? The average income in this country is ~45k. If that is what he was proposing than maybe we’d have an issue, I guess, but I doubt it. Everyone is so sure that people on UBI would stop working, and there is no evidence to back it up. In the studies that have shown people who stop working it is usually caregivers, which I would argue is a positive thing.

The median US individual income ($31,099) is a better metric to use since the average is more weighted by extremes that don't represent the "typical" experience of people.

[1] According to google from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

You should look into welfare payments in Australia. It's about the easiest to get and most generous on the planet, and a small percentage of people do choose to be lazy and life off it.

But the very vast majority don't.

Why are you doubtful? Are people born into wealth generally lazy?

he's not too early. the conditions out there are really bad in the middle of the country. a negative income tax is ultimately regressive at its incentives are likely to keep people in poverty.

There are videos of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHuyuzcjSrw

How can a US Dollar based UBI solve the problems of automation when the Super Admins of the US Dollar are explicitly pursuing the opposite goal?

According to the Federal Reserve website, 2/3 of their main goals are:

1. Seeking to maximize employment

2. Maintaining stable prices

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-economic-goals-does...

Automation and ephemeralization minimize employment and prices, but the money system seeks the opposite. Until these contradictions are reconciled, how can a US Dollar based UBI not fail?

You're right that it probably will lead to inflation. The only question is how much, because the fed right now is having a hard time providing inflation into the economy. The fed just pumped 500 billion in not QE, QE in the last month; but you wouldn't have noticed based on consumer price inflation.

Automation should naturally lead to deflation for many goods and services

Simple proposition, but the Federal Reserve is not part of the US Government. Perhaps it’s time that system be re-evaluated?

Indeed, the Federal Reserve is over 100 years old. However, I fear the Fed is such a powerful and entrenched legacy system that it is extremely unlikely for it to be politically re-evaluated unless there were some sort of catastrophic system failure.

Is anyone interested in starting a member-owned "General Automation Corp" to just go ahead and UBI ourselves without waiting for politics?

I'm seriously you guys.

Bootstrap off some desert land, convert it into e.g. Village Homes[0] (but up to date) using Permaculture, et. al. including local carbon-neutral fuel production integrated into the ecosystem[1], lease/sell units, rinse and repeat.

Alongside that, develop a kind of super-RepRap[2] to manufacture e.g. the contents of a Daiso store[3].

(BTW, no cult shit, no radical new lifestyles, just a small town built as if the last few centuries of progress actually happened: food production, power capture & storage, automation, etc... You know: Star Trek TNG sans fictional technology.)

Anybody?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes

[1] http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/

[2] https://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap

[3] Not all human problems can be solved by a few ounces of plastic or metal, but those that can, can be solved at Daiso for $1.50.

If you invent a time machine, go back to places like Taos in the 1960s, lots hippy communes that are now weird architecture AirBNBs. History repeats itself, reality always wins.

Sorry, I have no idea how your comment connects with what I wrote.

It’s been tried before. Lots of times. The reality of “let’s form our own utopia town/city/commune” always loses out to reality of primal human interests.

Ah, no, that's exactly what I don't want to do, more-or-less for just that reason.

Just riffing...

It would be a kind of vertically-integrated real estate development company, along with some manufacturing and tech/software company-ish.

Essentially, it's a terraforming company and the eco-cities it makes are the product.

We have the technology: Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language" et. al.; Permaculture (applied ecology if you prefer), including carbon-neutral integrated alcohol fuel production (also, tug on this thread: "New Alchemy Institute" "living machines" [1] ); Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution" for inspiration and large-scale efficiency[0]; etc... (Those are just my own "favorite hits".)

The idea is both 1) sell/lease cheaply ("affordable housing") to alleviate economic pressure, and 2) provide a steady income to members to offset economic obsolescence.

(I maintain that UBI makes sense only in the context of wide-spread inability for the "average person" to compete in the job market. And I think that's already happening. I mean, if I wasn't good at computers I don't know wtf I could do to make a living. I'd probably be homeless!)

I don't want this hypothetical company to be political or ideological (not even Hippie ideology) just economic (to the extent that that's realistic, eh?) We can work out the politics of everything once people have a place to live and a steady "three square meals a day", and it's ecologically harmonious, which is another way to say cheap and bountiful.

Frankly, I'm not qualified to run this sort of thing. I'm a recluse, with ways different than your own. But it seems to me that it would be sooooo easy, and that there are enough people and enough "free-floating" capital to make it happen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project

> It is moon-crater-shaped: the crater's truncated cone top opening is a half-mile in diameter, rim-to-rim, while the truncated mountain itself is a mile in diameter at its base ring. The city has a one-mile (1.6 km)-diameter geodesic, quarter-sphere transparent umbrella mounted high above it to permit full, all-around viewing below the umbrella's bottom perimeter. The top of the dome roof is 1,000 feet (300 m) high. The bottom rim of the umbrella dome is 500 feet (150 m) above the surrounding terrain

Some more information and a couple of pictures of the model at: https://solutions.synearth.net/a-community-dwelling-machine/

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22New+Alchemy+Institute%22++%22li...

Yang's proposal doesn't seem like UBI to me. A key component of UBI being the U - i.e that it is universal. However, Yang wants to pay for it, in part, by adding new taxes. In order for some people to make money, others must, on net, lose money.

To actually have a UBI I think the government needs something valuable, and can then sell that valuable and distribute the money equally. For example, in Alaska, the state has the rights to oil. The state of Alaska sells that right to private companies and splits the proceeds with the citizens. That's a UBI in a way that taxation and redistribution is not.

Automation could play a role with UBI. I imagine that eventually industries could reach complete automation. When that happens, in my view, they should be nationalized. The government should run the automated industries and pay the proceeds to the public. The more we automate, the more basic income everyone will get. This also answers the "Why not 2,000 a month, or 30,000?" Objection to Yang, by having a natural brake - we'll give as much basic income as we can. And it gives an incentive to keep automating.

I agree, but about the part about nationalization of companies. Historically it tended to produce bad outcomes. People just don't put the same effort if they don't own it.

What actually works is government stepping in by producing a competitor when it sees oligopolies developing and the participating companies not innovating further but just undermining each other or colluding to undermine interests of their customers.

For example in the early railroads there were tons of companies building their own railroads instead of coopearing with others to reuse. Telecommunication networks tend to get stuck similarly. That's how AT&T was created to have a single infrastructure entity and lot of competition on top of that infrastructure. Similar situation can be observed in social networks today. The business model for them is not that great unless you infect them with advertisement. Twitter struggled a lot with monetization because it feels more like a infrastructure project similar to roads or phone lines. Perhaps it is time for government to create competing social network or just pump support money to a community created one.

If instead of the federal government paying the Egyptian military millions of dollars, or building billion dollar buildings in Iraq, they were were giving out micro payments to citizens, I don’t see how that could be worse than our current model of spending.

UBI is not going to fix our problems. You would do more good rebuilding the million SROs we've torn down in recent decades.

Small, affordable residential spaces in walkable neighborhoods mostly don't exist in the US. Injecting funds won't change that fundamental fact.

Most likely, passing out UBI will actually make it harder to solve underlying problems of that sort because rich people, who have zero need of UBI, will have a new excuse to ignore such problems. UBI will become a reason to say "Quit your bitching!" without having fixed anything.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Welfare is a tax, and a much needed one since the alternative costs even more. I don't really see how a universal basic income (UBI) solves much of anything that other welfare programs couldn't solve more effectively. If the argument is that it's easier to just give everyone $1,000, then I think you're a lazy policymaker.

Welfare programs are horribly inefficient and full of perverse incentives.

But I doubt UBI is any better overall.

In the U.S. native tribes have effectively had UBI for years and years, whether from government settlements, or casino windfalls (granted, sometimes with limitations on mobility...but hopefully this system would work without just giving it to urban landlords).

The economies of many native tribes are notorious troubled.

> many native tribes are notorious troubled

Victims of genocide have additional complicating factors, eh?

Giving people the money directly, for them to use where it's needed in their particular case, is far more efficient than any program could ever possibly be. It's just the math and physics of it. Programs have all sorts of overhead and need to be generalized. They introduce inefficiency by default. And the larger it is, the more inefficient it becomes. That's just how it works with any organization. Even in the private sector (startup vs corporation).

With UBI, are they a citizen and 18+? Send check. Not much overhead there.

I'd love to know exactly how you figure it's more efficient. Sure, it's more efficient for the bureaucrats, but for the market as a whole? If you give me $1,000 a month, I can promise you I won't just be spending it on my needs every month. Even people in massive debt don't always spend towards their needs effectively.

> There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Sure there is. In fact, all lunch was free until we invented money and farming.

The Sun is a free lunch. "It's raining soup, grab a bucket!"

The sun still requires space to harvest, much like anything.

Well if we can't agree that each person gets enough [space for enough] sunlight for free just because of birth and gravity, then what is there to talk about?

Keep in mind that, if we can beat gravity just a little bit, there's a lot of space, eh? I mean, nothing but, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

Um, no I don't think we all agree about how much space birth entitles you to...

But there are some fundamental rights. I'd rather address those directly, rather than give everyone $1,000 and hope for the best.

I'm just pointing out that, as Bucky Fuller liked to say, the Universe is set up for our success, including a huge power plant in the sky. In other words, scarcity is a choice at this point in history and we should be choosing abundance instead.

Everything I've read about UBI in experiments sounds great. But I've never heard anyone address the idea that when everyone is getting it, my landlord or some other rent seeker also knows this information, and simply raises my rent by however much I'm getting from the government because they know I can pay it and everyone else in the industry has done the same.

The solution to that is remove the rent seeking by introducing new supply of housing. Or regulating it like utilities.

It's not UBI, it's a rolling stimulus package :)

That money is going to spent. For startups, 100 bucks, 300 bucks, 800 bucks. Some of that is going to go to subscriptions. That's for the digital service economy.

And it's good for early startups - because if someone has spare change, they're going to be willing to take a chance on an up and coming app.

In a way very true but also subsidized by the wealthy's spending habits. To mention UBI without the accompanying VAT would not properly show how progressive this system can be with higher taxes applied to non essential goods.

People concerned with it wiping out safety nets needs to understand how under equipped and under utilized they are for numerous reasons. The average benefits also average to only about $500/month. UBI is a new economic floor in which we can mobilize large swaths of the population and revitalize small towns that are falling apart. The shift in economic power will be massive and it's incredible to think about.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/five-things-you-m...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...

If history is any indication, the recipients are likely to become just more complacent and detached. I fail to see how people would become “mobilized” and towns revitalized when they have even less incentive to leave the house.

If anything, I see UBI shifting power even more into the hands of the elites, as massive numbers of the lower classes drop out of the workforce and no longer care about anything the politicians or big businesses do, so long as the cash keeps flowing.

This could very well be the intent.

Take a look at any Native American reservation, or any caged animal for that matter. Hardly vibrant.

The government would need to get money somewhere for the UBI program.

It can only do so either through taxation, or by printing money, as the government is not a value-generation enterprise.

If UBI gets its funding by taxation, UBI can't work economically (not to say it wouldn't be "UBI"). Even if you tax all the rich people, it won't provide enough money for the program. Besides, you can't really tax the rich, the moment you declare an aggressive taxation regime on them, they fly their money out of the country (and possibly their businesses too, which would generate poverty). If the assumption is that it would tax "everyone but the poor" then it's not universal "income", it's just another "social program" paid by the middle class.

If UBI is funded by printing money, then it's a debt generation engine. The USA is already heavily indebted due to at least 100 years of irresponsible governments spending a lot more than what they made through taxes. UBI would only make matters worse, and could easily lead to a currency crash within at most a couple decades (which would wipe out retirement funds, savings, etc. therefore generating poverty and causing social unrest)

You tax coorperations, not rich individuals.

Although if you sit down and work it out I’m not sure it makes sense quite yet. UBS though probably could.

When you tax corporations, they don't simply make less profits, they embed the tax losses in their prices and pay less to workers. You, as a consumer or employee, end up paying that tax.

I think you're oversimplifying how companies determine prices and wages. Yes, corporate taxes are one consideration. There's also competition, regulations, distribution costs, and commodity prices. Passing along your costs directly to consumers is a great way to give up market share to a more efficient or creative competitor.

If taxes are applied to all corporations, competition is not a factor to be considered.

That's an interesting statement. Why not?

If all companies are taxed equally, it [obviously] means taxes incur on their balance sheets equally.

Therefore, in order to meet their growth, profitability, etc. requirements, they'd all have to embed taxes in their prices.

If one company becomes "smarter" and more competitive, it's not going to be because taxes created an incentive for them, it would be because they are just doing what they always do: to increase the means of production through entrepreneurship -- which turns out to be the "invisible hand" that exterminates poverty.

Public schooling is probably the most valuable thing humanity has ever done.

What if public schooling and taxation didn't exist, do you think that we'd be doing better than we are today?

> the government is not a value-generation enterprise

This is incorrect. The value generated by providing a stable framework in which people can go about their daily lives is incredible. It's hard to measure this value, of course, but our modern way of life is impossible without this framework.

Without prices it's not possible to measure the "value" of goods or services. Which is the same thing as saying that without prices there's no "value" generated.

The government makes its own money (generating inflation, which is taxation on savings), and takes money from people through taxation in various ways. It then spends that money in any way it wants, without a price system to signal where that money should be spent. Therefore, it ends up generating "malinvestments", where money is poured in the government functions, social programs, war, "economic incentive" programs, etc. according to the current political agenda, which is generally of low time preference (as politicians have to keep promising on things they can deliver within their mandates).

The modern state (which dates from the 1700's) might have had its historical justification on the basis of making management costs smaller (as in: property records, basic infrastructure, etc.). But as time goes by and technology improves, making both management and transaction costs diminish, the need for a centralized state becomes less important. The problem, however, is that governments want to persist (as they have a large amount of politicians and public workers), and instead of lowering taxes and being less invasive over time, they are progressively doing the opposite.

> Without prices it's not possible to measure the "value" of goods or services. Which is the same thing as saying that without prices there's no "value" generated.

It's really, really not the same. Just because you can't measure something properly, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Just how absurd that thought is becomes obvious when you translate it to a different topic: Magnetic fields did not spontaneously begin to exist when humans started to be able to measure them accurately, for example.

What it does mean is that we don't have as good an understanding of the concept of value as we have of electro-magnetism. That's not surprising, of course, since the inherent complexity of the notion of value is much greater.

FWIW, I think UBI only makes sense in a context where most people cannot compete in the economic system (against corporations with automation) and so the alternative (to just giving them money) is some kind of nightmare (take your pick.)

I haven’t read all of the literature on basic income, but my (admittedly semi-educated) impression is that one potential downside is that it fosters dependence on the state and is thus not anti-fragile.

I’m just thinking out loud here, but: what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs. For example, a small greenhouse device that can grow enough food to sustain a family. Or a 3D printer that can turn raw materials into clothing or shelter. In terms of cash needs, you could create a sort of minimum-wage Uber-style online mechanical Turk system that allows one to put in work and generate cash. You would theoretically get the benefits of basic income without having them be controlled by an external actor.

I don’t know enough about farming, 3D printing or biology to know whether this is feasible, but it seems within the realm of possibility. Have any economists explored options like this?

> what if instead of a flat cash payment, the basic income program provided free technologies that covered basic needs

What if, instead of yammering about UBI, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur, went out and started a company to make such technologies? The way to innovate is to innovate, not to try to milk money out of the government.

The whole discussion about UBI misses this basic point: to make it easier for people to make a living, you don't give them more money, you make the basic needs of life cheaper. And why doesn't that happen? Because the government keeps putting its thumb on the scale and preventing people from doing it. For example, the government subsidizes large agribusinesses instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs find cheaper ways of providing people with food. The government prints money and gives it to banks for mortgage loans to keep home prices high while rigging building codes so the only method of construction that's feasible is two by fours and drywall, instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs figure out cheaper and more durable methods of construction for homes.

One other important point: a cheaper cost of living is essential for UBI to be affordable. Right now most UBI proposals require around $1000 a month per person to enable people to live in a somewhat sustainable manner. Those proposals are simply unaffordable relative to our GDP and tax base. The only way we can make them work is by deceasing the cost of living so that we can decease the UBI. A UBI of $300 a month is much easier to fit in the budget.

> For example, the government subsidizes large agribusinesses instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs find cheaper ways of providing people with food.

The primary subsidy afforded to farmers is effectively assistance in paying insurance premiums. Insurance that exists to keep farms afloat during bad years in an environment that is highly volatile. The intent is not to make food cheaper (although that may happen as a side effect), but rather to ensure there are still farmers around next year to grow the next crop.

I am not sure that really limits the desire of innovators and entrepreneurs to seek out ways to provide cheaper food. I would argue that there is still great incentive to do exactly that. Someone who can successfully do so is in a great position to become the next large agribusiness. Those who have large agribusinesses today do so because they were the innovators and entrepreneurs of the past who figured out how to sharpen their pencil to a finer point than their neighbours.

The insurance system probably limits innovation in finding ways to survive bad years independent of government support, but I'm not sure how much that relates to the particular topic at hand.

> The primary subsidy afforded to farmers is effectively assistance in paying insurance premiums.

But the vast majority of the subsidy goes not to small individual farmers, who might need such insurance (although even on the assumption that they do, private sector insurance companies and speculators could provide it more efficiently than the government does), but to large agribusinesses who have more than enough resources and diversity to self-insure. So the entities who are getting the subsidy don't actually need it. But it makes a great way for politicians to stealthily transfer wealth to their donors and supporters.

> The intent is not to make food cheaper (although that may happen as a side effect)

It doesn't make food cheaper, it makes it more expensive and creates a mismatch between supply and demand.

> I am not sure that really limits the desire of innovators and entrepreneurs to seek out ways to provide cheaper food.

It might not limit the desire, but it certainly limits the ability. It's hard to compete with large businesses that get government subsidies they don't actually need.

> But the vast majority of the subsidy goes not to small individual farmers, who might need such insurance

You are quite right that there is no preferential treatment for smaller farmers. It is simply for each dollar in premiums required, 60¢ is paid for by the farmer, 40¢ is paid by the government. It is true that those who pay the most in premiums (i.e. the largest farms) will receive the most in subsidies. It is designed to be a fair system without preference for any particular farm.

> large agribusinesses who have more than enough resources and diversity to self-insure.

On the flip side, small farmers have off-farm jobs so a loss on the farm is not likely to sink them. They still have their day job to pay the bills.

> private sector insurance companies and speculators could provide it more efficiently than the government does

I'm a tad bit skeptical. Private insurance has done well to serve individual events like a house fire or automobile accident, but when things happen on a grand scale like a major flood or widespread fire, it seems they fall back to government bailouts. The trouble with insurance on the farm is that it isn't usually just one farmer with failure. It is all the farmers at the same time. Private insurance hasn't proven a model to handle such cases, and if you're going to rely on the government to step in anyway as we've seen many times in the private insurance space when disaster strikes a large area, why not codify that action?

> It's hard to compete with large businesses that get government subsidies they don't actually need.

I am quite interested in your elaboration on this as I am not seeing how large businesses are advantaged by the subsidy in a way that small business are not. Proportionately, the subsidy given to each farmer is equal.

> for each dollar in premiums required, 60¢ is paid for by the farmer, 40¢ is paid by the government

I have no idea where you are getting this from. There are no actual "premiums". There is no actual insurance involved. The "insurance" is, as you originally said, "effective"--for certain crops, if their market price is below a certain price set by the government, the government pays farmers the difference as a subsidy. But only for certain crops, and those crops (the biggest one is corn) are mostly grown by large agribusinesses, not small farms. (The corn subsidy is even worse because much of the corn produced doesn't get eaten, it gets turned into ethanol to put in gasoline, for no good reason.)

> small farmers have off-farm jobs

I don't know which small farmers you are talking about. Most small farms are family owned businesses and provide the entire income for the family members who participate. Family members who have off-farm jobs are the ones who have left the farm and switched to other careers.

> Private insurance has done well to serve individual events like a house fire or automobile accident, but when things happen on a grand scale like a major flood or widespread fire, it seems they fall back to government bailouts.

First, while that may be true, it doesn't mean the government provides the insurance more efficiently.

Second, private insurance companies are often restricted by the government in the premiums they can charge. For example, while flood insurance in regions which flood frequently is not cheap, it is cheaper than it would be in a free market, because in a free market the premiums would be based solely on actuarial data on the frequency of flooding and the expected losses from flooding, which would go up as more things of value were built in such areas. But the government, due to political pressure, doesn't allow the premiums to get that high, which means that people who choose to live in such areas, or companies that choose to build infrastructure there, don't see the full costs involved and so have less incentive to find somewhere else to go.

> I am not seeing how large businesses are advantaged by the subsidy in a way that small business are not

They are advantaged by being able to lobby to have the subsidies go to crops that they can more easily grow. But they are further advantaged by the mere existence of the subsidies, since they don't need them while smaller farms might.

> I have no idea where you are getting this from.

Experience. I am a farmer.

> if their market price is below a certain price set by the government, the government pays farmers the difference as a subsidy.

Yes. This is insurance. A claim is made if the price fails to meet the insured value. There is also insurance against production output, which covers things like weather events. This is where the vast majority of the subsidy dollars go. Farmers pay 60% of the cost, the government pays 40% of the cost. As such, like I mentioned, for every dollar required in insurance premiums, you pay 60¢, the government pays 40¢.

> I don't know which small farmers you are talking about

The data indicates most farmers have off-farm jobs, myself included. I can certainly talk about my small farm, if you wish. Let's face it, unless you have a large farm, there simply isn't much work to do. You need an off-farm job to remain viable. The customer isn't going to pay you to sit on HN all day long. They will pay enough to justify the time you do spend farming, but the rest of your time is up to you to figure out how to make it pay.

> because in a free market the premiums would be based solely on actuarial data on the frequency of flooding and the expected losses from flooding

It is interesting you mention data, as that is the primary reason why the government operates this insurance system. It gives reason for farmers to report what they are going to produce ahead of time, allowing the government (and private sector) to make informed decisions.

> They are advantaged by being able to lobby to have the subsidies go to crops that they can more easily grow.

I'm not sure what you mean? The subsidies give no preference to what you want to grow. It is simply a matter of you paying 60¢ on every dollar or premium required to insure you. The reason corn producers receive the most subsidies, which is likely what you are thinking of, is simply because corn is the most frequently grown crop – by a large margin. More acres means greater overall risk, and therefore more overall insurance premiums. Which means that the 40¢ on each premium dollar equals a greater amount than a crop with lesser premium demands.

If you want to grow tomatoes, you'll still get 40¢ on every premium dollar you need to spend to enrol in the insurance system. The reason you'll probably choose corn over tomatoes is simply because the market for corn is tremendously larger. It is mostly eaten by animals and cars, which dwarf the number of humans eating tomatoes by orders of magnitude, not to mention much more easily shipped across the entire world. The market for tomatoes is highly localized due to shipping issues (before reaching the processor) and a fairly tough sell in comparison due to the much smaller market.

> Experience. I am a farmer.

Fair enough.

> This is insurance.

Not by any reasonable definition of that word. It's a subsidy. The fact that you "file a claim" is just a way of using words to obfuscate what is really going on.

> There is also insurance against production output, which covers things like weather events.

This isn't really insurance either, because weather events that affect farm output are not rare (neither are price fluctuations, for that matter), and insurance is only supposed to insure against rare events. (Not to mention that risks that affect everybody, instead of just a small percentage of people, are not really insurable, as you yourself have already pointed out.)

> for every dollar required in insurance premiums, you pay 60¢, the government pays 40¢

What premiums?

Also, it makes no sense for the entity that is insuring you (the government) to pay part of your premium.

> The subsidies give no preference to what you want to grow.

Yes, they do, since there are only subsidies for certain crops.

> unless you have a large farm, there simply isn't much work to do. You need an off-farm job to remain viable. The customer isn't going to pay you to sit on HN all day long. They will pay enough to justify the time you do spend farming, but the rest of your time is up to you to figure out how to make it pay.

In other words, you are confirming that small farmers are at a disadvantage compared to large agribusinesses. Do you think large agribusinesses complain that customers don't pay enough for them to make a living at farming?

To some extent this could be due to economies of scale, but given modern technology I have difficulty believing that that alone is enough to account for the obvious disparity between your description of how tough it is for small farms to stay in business, and the position of large agribusinesses. If the government is supposed to be helping farmers stay in business, it clearly is not doing a very good job.

> What premiums?

The money you have to pay to enrol in the insurance system? I'm not sure I understand what you are asking here. The agriculture policy was reconfigured a number of years ago. My farming career is admittedly too young to know how the way things used to be, but perhaps that is our point of contention? That you're remembering the way things used to be?

> This isn't really insurance

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

> because weather events that affect farm output are not rare

In aggregate across the entire country, sure. I doubt an individual farmer will have many claims in their career. Disastrous weather events aren't that common when observed within a single area. Areas that are naturally risker, of course, pay higher premiums. This is no different than any other type of insurance. When observed across the entire country, people make claims each and every day within the private sector insurance system.

> Yes, they do, since there are only subsidies for certain crops.

But the insurance – and thus the subsidy on the premium – is available for anything you'd ever want to grow. I guess if you want to start farming ragweed you might be out of luck. Is that something you see viability in or are we simply looking at made up hypotheticals that have no bearing in reality?

Besides, if you do want to start growing ragweed for whatever reason, since there is no government insurance available you can buy your insurance from the private sector at much lower cost, as you stated earlier in this thread. No need for a subsidy in the first place thanks to the efficiency of the private sector.

> In other words, you are confirming that small farmers are at a disadvantage compared to large agribusinesses.

I suppose that in terms of economies of scale, larger farmers have an advantage. The insurance system (and thus the subsidies we speak of) seems quite fair to me, however. There is no preference given to any farmer. You pay 60% of your cost no matter how big or how small your farm is. If you want to give preference to smaller farmers, I guess I'll take it, but I'm okay with things being fair. It is only fair.

> Do you think large agribusinesses complain that customers don't pay enough for them to make a living at farming?

I'm not sure why anyone would complain, to be honest. On a per-hour basis, on average, it pays better than software development, my other career. But it only takes me a couple of months out of the year to do all the work. Why would I sit around doing nothing the rest of the time? That seems rather silly. Why would you, the person who eats my food, want to pay me to sit around 10 months of the year when I'm happy to have another job to keep me busy? The big farmers have to keep busy in order to make ends meet. Should there be preference given to smaller farmers? And if so, shouldn't the consumer make that choice on their own by choosing to buy from the smaller farmers?

> The money you have to pay to enrol in the insurance system?

What money is that? I'm looking for some reference that explains to me what "insurance system" you are talking about, because so far I have not found one. Everything I have found talks about subsidies, not insurance.

> If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Which is exactly my point: what you are describing does not walk or quack like insurance. It walks and quacks like a subsidy.

> the insurance – and thus the subsidy on the premium – is available for anything you'd ever want to grow.

Again, I am looking for some kind of reference that says this, because so far everything I have found talks about subsidies for certain crops only.

> I'm not sure why anyone would complain, to be honest.

Lots of small farmers are complaining, so perhaps you are an outlier.

"while rigging building codes so the only method of construction that's feasible is two by fours and drywall, instead of letting innovators and entrepreneurs figure out cheaper and more durable methods of construction for homes."

It turns out that 2x4 construction on a slab is one of the cheapest and most durable methods of construction around. Building codes are built from lives lost, and are not trivial to replace or improve on (similar to lessons learned in aircraft design).

Building codes are purchased in lives. It would of course be cheaper to build favelas.

> It turns out that 2x4 construction on a slab is one of the cheapest and most durable methods of construction around.

That the ordinary person knows of, yes. But that's a far cry from being the cheapest and most durable method possible.

> Building codes are built from lives lost

To some extent they are. But they also are an excellent vehicle for regulatory capture. The safety aspects don't need to be controlled by the government; see below.

> It would of course be cheaper to build favelas.

Would you buy one? In a free market, the construction industry would build what people wanted to buy. If people don't want to buy unsafe homes, nobody will be able to make money building unsafe homes. If people want assurance that their homes are safe (and even if they don't, their insurance companies will), there will be a market for third party home inspectors and standards organizations to provide it. Other industries have had no problem coming up with safety standards without government regulation; a good example is the Underwriters Laboratories standards for electrical devices.

I’d argue that giving out this free technology still creates the dependency you’re trying to avoid.

Realistically, a lot of people aren’t going to know how to use this technology up front, so what are they gonna do?

What if the technology breaks and needs to be fixed? Do people rely on the state for maintenance? You’re still paying for it either way.

In your first example, it sounds like the ultimate goal is grow enough food to sustain the family. But which is easier to actually accomplish that goal: an existing market that accepts cash, or some fantastical technology which would inevitably come with its own complexities, given the nature of the problem it tries to solve?

I don’t think fixing broken technology requires the ongoing involvement of the state. If (gasoline) car manufacturers all disappeared tomorrow, mechanics would still be able to maintain them. The goal is to reduce dependency and increase independence. The way to do that is by creating a distributed, public knowledge and skills base.

> I don’t think fixing broken technology requires the ongoing involvement of the state

If said technology served to meet universal basic needs, the state would have to be involved somehow. Otherwise, how would someone destitute be able to pay a mechanic to fix the machine that makes the food? That money would have to come from somewhere, and if we're guaranteeing that everyone has a right to a working food-making machine, then it's hard to see how private interests keep those machines running.

The idea that we could just give everyone a food-making machine and solve state dependency issues just seems so shortsighted in how technology and government really works. I struggle to think of a single consumer appliance that doesn't require some kind of maintenance, which would have to be paid for somehow.

I think you’re focusing in on the specific example too much. The general point is to create a system that has the benefits of basic income without creating a dependent underclass.

I don’t think it’s inconceivable to posit that a government could kickstart a program like the one I described, help it grow into a self-sustaining market, and then no longer provide monetary support. Of course this will never happen as the state has zero incentive to deliberately make people independent.

I do think it’s inconceivable for two reasons.

1) Such a system would require some kind of maintenance and administration, which costs money. If you have a concrete example of a self-sustaining universal system that accomplishes this object, feel free to bring it forward. I can’t think of a single example of a social program or system that operates without administration at any kind of large scale. You can only argue it’s possible by being specific about how exactly it’s possible. Name one government program that still functions today and doesn’t receive any monetary support.

2) With AI and automation, we’re on track to eliminate the need for much of our human output. The ability to earn a steady income is already being challenged today (just look at how poorly gig workers are paid and treated), and will continue to get harder for those who lack the skills. A system which exists to provide universal services will create a dependent class, regardless of how they receive their benefit. Getting food or something else as opposed to cash doesn’t make them any less dependent. You’ve just changed the output of the service. Not to mention what a target such a system would be for privatization. It’s not like private interests are always looking out for the best outcome for the public either, just look at TurboTax capturing the tax return market.

Using a concept from software engineering, why can't they just partially roll this out by percentage or by state? Try swapping current benefits w/ equivalent UBI in a handful of states and study what happens?

The most exciting thing about UBI is how versatile its benefits are for human resilience.

Work conditions unfair? you have a much easier time quitting knowing you won't be stuck with 0 income.

Politics overrun with corporate money? flush it out with grassroots donations now that you have some pocket money.

Sick of the day to day grind? take your money to a community that fits with your personality now that every community is getting a massive cash injection

Worried about a president like Trump cutting your SNAP benefits again? Opt-in to UBI and never worry about your funds getting cut without the entire country getting infuriated.

People rarely feel this level of freedom. I've only felt this level of security recently but I believe everyone deserves this. I was only lucky to have made it this far from the opportunities given to me by my parents and the support I had when I couldn't stop fucking up. People need to be able to take risks and have retries. Without it, you get people working jobs they hate while envying lives they'll never have.

Right, I think this is the most underrated consequence of UBI.

I think another is the creative boom it could create. People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success. That could create a whole new class of artists that couldn’t be possible otherwise.

> "People would have room to create art, music, writing without feeling like they will become homeless without early success."

We haven't exactly seen an explosion of creative works coming from those on public assistance already. When is this hypothetical wave of creativity supposed to kick in?

Yes, free money magically appearing would make life easier for the individuals receiving it (at least, in the short term). No one is arguing otherwise. The concern is that it may have even greater negative effects on the economy as a whole.

As for right now, the US economy as a whole is looking great. GDP number is good, stock market at high, etc but for most ordinary people those means nothing, they still suffer.

What's to stop companies from just upping their prices to absorb the $1k given to us? We need a real UBI scheme, this policy won't solve anything.

All companies won't do this because they're looking to maximize their profits. One of the key factors that consumers look at is the price of a product, so if 3 competitors raise prices (due to UBI) and one keeps it the same or lowers their prices, in a well functioning market I would expect that competitor to start to take over more marketshare.

With unemployment rate at below 4%, where is the evidence that we have enough automation to warrant UBI?

UBI is just an excuse to do the real fix, and that's tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share.

It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%, and Amazon has it at 0%. That's the real problem! Yang wants to give people #1kBro so they can shut up about the real issue here is tax fairness.

Good idea. How about a flat tax with no loopholes? Seems fair to me.

What's the rationale for a flat tax over progressive? I believe that an ideal tax system should properly reflect that the value of a marginal dollar is inversely correlated with income/wealth in a nonlinear fashion. But I'm open to having my mind changed.

One point is that "fairness" is highly subjective. One can perform many contortions to justify their own definition of what they perceive as "fair".

Personally I like a flat tax because it drastically simplifies the tax system and removes the loop holes that wealthy people who can afford accountants use to achieve the lower effective tax rate stated in the root comment. It also deletes the tax prep Industry and a significant majority of the IRS, these Ultimately act as drag in our economy for arguably a net negative benefit.

$10,000 of a million is worth less to the millionaire than $10 to the poor person with only a thousand to their name.

A flat tax isn't fair unless every other form of expense was flat as well. Which means rent would have to be some percent of your income and the same for power, healthcare and so forth.

The loopholes and complexity you mention are completely orthogonal to the tax progression, though.

The tax progression is pretty much the simplest part of any tax code anywhere in the world already, so targeting that as the thing to simplify is either stupid or hypocritical.

The loopholes and complexity lies in the fact that, in order to account for people who are self-employed, you typically want to allow subtracting certain kinds of expenses from people's incomes for the purpose of tax computations. That's where the mess starts because then people start playing games with how those expenses are classified and structured, and wealthier people can afford to employ expert players of those games, making the whole game unfair from the very beginning. That in itself should be justification for a progressive tax code.

It'd be awesome if we could remove those subtractions from the tax code, because that would be the way to really simplify things. Unfortunately, it's also a really bad idea because it would severely punish low-margin activities, and from a societal point of view, we actually want most economic activity to be low-margin (because that provides the highest value to the end-user/consumer).

So we're stuck in a world where we'd like to simplify the tax code, but doing so requires diving deep into the nitty-gritty details of how it all works. And for people who have that knowledge, it's more profitable to play the game by selling their knowledge to the aforementioned rich people so most of them end up doing that instead of taking up the thankless political work of actually simplifying things. At least, that's how the incentives are playing out today.

It really depends on the metric you are using to measure fairness. Yes, a flat tax is fair on a purely dollar level, but it is completely unfair from utility standpoint in that the worse off suffer greater reductions in utility. The key thing to remember when thinking about the utility of money is that the utility of money is not linear. Going from $50,000 a year to $25,000 a year very significantly degrades your quality of life while going from $2,000,000 to $1,000,000 will have a much more minor impact.

This is what causes the main issue with flat taxes. The problem is that at the end of the day, flat taxes are simply very inefficient in that they cause much more suffering for less revenue compared to progressive taxes.

Depends heavily on your state, which no federal tax is ever going to fix. I'm always going to be less taxed than in Maine, so long as NH has no income tax. Not to mention sales tax.

I agree with your overall point that this result is backwards to what people probably want. That being said the situation is hardly ridiculous.

Eg, To a pretty reasonable first approximation, all of Amazon's income is either going to be (1) distributed to shareholders and trigger income/capital gains tax or (2) invested in making goods cheaper for amazon's customers.

It isn't immediately obvious that it is a good idea to tax a system designed to get goods to people cheaply. The money Amazon reinvests in itself is in the short term all about making life better for its customers, not its owners. In the long term that reverses, but the reversal triggers additional tax events.

> It's ridiculous my tax rate is over 30% while wealthy people has it at 15%

The wealthy will be paying much more tax than you though. In raw amounts, the wealthy are doing much more to run the government financially than you are by orders of magnitude.

It isn't immediately laughable. A billionaire is making an absurd contribution vs. other taxpayers even at a 5%. And again, that part of their money isn't going towards themselves, it is difficult to consume that much in real resources in a year. It is likely going to investing in things that other people want.

There is no obviously-right or obviously-wrong with tax. Systems are complicated.

In reality Amazon is accumulating cash faster than it can spend it, same as the rest of big tech. If it had things to reinvest it into it wouldn't be such a problem

Once your business is accumulating cash faster than it can spend it, it's time to pay a dividend.

> The wealthy will be paying much more tax than you though. In raw amounts, the wealthy are doing much more to run the government financially than you are by orders of magnitude

This also has a disproportionate effect on the rest of the government, however. The wealthy clamor for tax cuts because they already pay more than everyone else (and as long as income disparity exists, this is going to be a fact, so it's not really much of an argument) which in turn means said tax cuts can break the bank so to speak. Which results in cuts to systems that the poor and less wealthy rely on to live, things such as basic schooling or financial aid.

In turn, that money that they do get tends to go towards things that entrench their power. Politicians, mainstream media, things such as that. I personally have not heard a strong argument for not taxing the wealthy and corporations more, because for all the tax cuts we've seen we're still in dire straits when it comes to dealing with poverty and healthcare. So clearly something isn't trickling down here.

We know that income isn't tax at the same rate of capital gains tax right?

Also maybe worth looking at how big of a tax break Amazon got for their R&D budget who only benefits... Amazon.

The thing that matters here is the rate, the tax rate and America has it wrong, I consume the same % as a wealthy person, my class collaborated way more (raw amount and rate) to the society than the wealthy.

Amazon's tax rate is not 0%. Their payroll tax bill for any given month is more than any and all of the taxes you will pay in your lifetime. To say nothing of the many other taxes they pay.

Payroll taxes are for the most part paid by the employer on behalf of the employee. That's not Amazon's tax bill. Amazon's tax bill is what they would pay over their profits at year end and they do what they can to pay nothing at all, like almost all other multi-nationals.

Payroll tax, including the nominally “employer” portion, is really a tax on worker pay (the employer portion just makes the rate seem lower; for an honest accounting, it would be counted in both employee pay and employee taxes) as it comes out of what the employer is willing to pay for the work.

It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.

It's functionally shows up as a cost, but that doesn't make it a tax.

Consider: if a company had no profits at all, then for some period of time it would still (1) pay its employees (2) pay the payroll tax on behalf of those employees. The amount of payroll tax is 100% determined by employee compensation, not corporate profit (even if those two are indirectly connected).

You're more or less arguing that employee compensation is a tax too, since it also "raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits".

Employee compensation does indeed raise the price the company has to pay. However, it doesn’t end up in government coffers, making it not a tax. This isn’t rocket science.

> It effectively raises the price the company has to pay and thus lowers profits.

Just like any other tax on employee income does, yes; unlike taxes on company profits, and like other taxes on employee income, it's effect on the company can be minimized by finding (or developing) and adopting less labor-cost intensive business methods even if they are higher (before tax) total cost.

You can say nothing about the many other taxes they pay because there aren't any that are more than round-off error. What, they pay sales tax when they buy pencils?

Property tax is a round-off error?

I would absolutely expect that the total amount Amazon paid in property taxes in 2019 to be round-off error compared to their income, yes. Particularly because local governments seem happy to reduce their property taxes to zero or even negative percentages, but even if that didn't happen.

$2.4 billion in subsidies for these taxes, says one accounting: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/technology/amazon-new-yor...

A bunch of warehouses by the airports do not actually create any large property tax bill.

My problem with UBI is

1. It's not fair work-sharing, if people can live on it.

2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.

I propose another solution. Accessible, high paying jobs. If someone is unskilled, train them. Once they are skilled, guide them to useful work.

I have my own problems with UBI, but as far as 'fair work sharing', the presumption would be that the work is done 99% by machines, where you don't need to be 'fair' & the remaining 1% could be highly compensated.

Consider absolute numbers. Suppose monthly food expenses drop to $100. That's 2-3 hours of work for each person to eat monthly. X 330M = 1 billion hours per month. And that's just food. In practice, fair work sharing still seems critical, unless you have a better example in mind.

> 2. There's no economic mechanism that guarantees we'll have enough money to fund it every month.

This isn't true, since the state can always just create more money.

The real limitation is in real resources and production capacity, and if a UBI was implemented by creating more money than the existing production capacity can sustain, it would likely drive up the rate of inflation.

If the UBI is set to a fixed nominal value, this would eventually balance out, possibly resulting in a corresponding UBI real value that is insufficient for people to live on. (What level of real value is sustainable is an empirical question.)

I agree with you that creating demand for labor is a better approach if done well. Ideally, you'd create a conceptually infinite demand for labor to ensure there's no involuntary unemployment. Of course, there's then the risk of increasing the rate of inflation via that labor demand, which you can fix by fixing the price at which the labor demand becomes infinite.

That's the direction that the "employer of last resort / job guarantee" proposals go in, though those also get flack from some people for being like workfare.

Agreed money printing solves the gross income promise. I meant real income as the problem as well.

UBI, guaranteed jobs, seems all these solutions fundamentally require sufficient money flow to work. People spending slowly (rich or poor) means low tax/biz revenue causing program failure. I think the key problem is how we can guarantee the economy to sustain X velocity of money.

This forces the bag holders to pay more. What happens when companies expenses increase? They increase their costs, cut jobs, cut benefits, and in very rare cases take short term losses to implement one of the former methods.

There are not enough high paying jobs. Period. Hard stop. There won't ever be.

Now, we need gas station attendants, room cleaners, baggers, bus drivers. These jobs will be replaced by much less expensive robots. Just like switchboard operators, seamstresses, tailors, cobblers, shoe shiners, appliance repairmen have all largely been replaced.

Pray tell, what high paying jobs will these people be given when they're put out of work? Who will pay to train them? How will they afford to live during the 2-120mos of training they'll need to get these high pain paying jobs?

UBI should be funded by a proportional tax on every product and the man hours of work it replaces. A calculator can do in 15 minutes what an average American would spend a day doing. Just as an example everyone should immediately grok. Then scale these up and require companies applying for patents, patent renewals, or business licenses to figure out how long it would take to do a job without their tool by comparing to other available alternatives. A positive net benefit of this is all the new jobs made figuring out how damn hard shit is to do without tools. Companies can then use their numbers to advertise.

Mind you, both our solutions are wholly unrealistic.

I'm doubtful of any tax-based plan as a longterm solution. Here's why. Money needs to flow in a circle for a sustainability. But we can't force people to spend all their money monthly and even then tax is not 100% so net negative monthly shortage risk. Maybe we need a spend it or lose it basic-credit system.

About high paying jobs, suppose we pay 100$/hr for people to monitor the machines, up to a cap of 1K$/mth.

Here's one of the semi startrek-esque longterm solution that works reliably but not yet possible. Suppose basic goods productivity improves 10000X. Then a small number of people can produce the basics for everyone without any money issues involved.

Just to be clear. You're doubtful that this will work so we shouldn't try, and should continue to watch people living and dying on the streets from the comforts of the lavish accommodations?

Then you go on to propose fantastical, never gonna happen, jobs just poofing into existence at some indeterminate date in the future? Perhaps when enough people have died on the streets as to make UBI palatable over more food and housing riots? That's where we are headed if we can't start fixing these problems there will be riots.

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