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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

It’s unfortunate that we can’t seriously consider universal basic income in the United States. If we provided every adult citizen with $13K annually during their working years, it could offer support to those unable to find meaningful employment without forcing them to declare themselves disabled just to survive. That label can take a real toll on a person’s psyche and limit their belief in their ability to grow or find better opportunities. We also have to be realistic and realize AI is positioned to replace a significant number of jobs in the next decade. A safety net like UBI will only become more essential moving forward.

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That would require a total rethinking of our economic system. I doubt this will happen without any catalyst like war or revolution.

Not necessarily. The US government already spends >2000$ per adult per month. It would require a total rethinking of the role of government.

Spends on what? It's not like you can disband the military, not build roads and bridges and eliminate medicaid just because you send out a $1000/mo UBI payment.

If you want to consider just social assistance then the US government spends about $950B annually, and that works out to $2800 per year per citizen. To make it a livable amount you'd have to at minimum 5x that expenditure (and a lot more than that in urban areas).

The comment I was replying to proposed a UBI of $13,000/year or roughly what many people on disability currently live on. That would cost around $3.4 trillion annually, leaving over $3 trillion for everything else, including roads and the military. Of course, you'd still need to make cuts somewhere - likely from existing entitlement programs.

I just posted the number that entitlement programs currently use, and it is under $1T. So you're basically saying "it's easy to implement UBI, we just need an extra 2.4T/yr lying around somewhere" (which is equivalent to 1/3 our total budget). Scale it up to realistic numbers (no one is surviving on just $13K/yr, plenty of people need more than just average support e.g. for medical conditions) and you're easily talking $5T+.

It wouldn't be very comfortable, but yes - it's possible to live on that amount. Many people on disability do so today. If it's not enough and you're unable to work, you'd have to rely on savings, family, or charity. And yes, the idea would for UBI to account for over 50% of current government spending and to get rid of most existing government programs (except core functions like military and law enforcement). That’s why I ended my original comment with "it would require a total rethinking of the role of government."

By the way, I think you're overlooking the strongest criticism of my UBI proposal: that it would reduce the incentive to work, potentially lowering labor participation and, in turn, government tax revenue, which could make the system unsustainable. It's hard to predict whether that would be a real problem or not.

How can you not see that if everyone gets X amount of UBI, the cost of everything goes up until you can no longer live on X.

It is such basic economics I just can't believe we even have these debates.

It is something I would have thought of when I lived with my parents as a clueless teenager.

That's not how it works - inflation is a function of money supply, not of how it is distributed. Do you consider Milton Friedman a "clueless teenager"? I admire your self-assurance by the way...

If everyone gets $13k a year the price of everything will go up until people will no longer be able to live on $13k a year. Then you have to raise the UBI amount and then raise even more money by the government. Repeat.

To me, it is a non-starter unless you also had a massive housing build out to drive the cost of housing/rent down. We can't do that now though so that is also a non-starter.

Then even if you did massively build out housing, most the UBI will still be captured by rent/housing as some areas will become extremely low status and people will use the UBI to move to higher status areas.

All UBI really does if everyone gets it is change what $0 means. Not to mention, if you replace what people are getting currently from the government with UBI they are getting totally fucked. People on disability would get completely fucked since they are getting a basic income now but even though the UBI would be more in total, that will just purchase much less if everyone is getting the same amount.

Or we'd have to raise taxes by 2.4T dollars. Which isn't as extreme as it sounds, since we're at the same time giving everybody money. If 2/3 of the amount of UBI is paid for with increased taxes, the average taxpayer will come out ahead. "We're raising your taxes by $10,000" doesn't sound as bad as when accompanied by "and here's a cheque for $13,000". Bill Gates' taxes will go up a lot more than $13,000, but the average taxpayer will see a very small benefit.

The other benefit of raising taxes is that it will control inflation.

And $13K/year isn't enough to live on, yet many disabled people do just that. 4 people each getting $13K can probably live together on that. Living alone is a luxury.

And with UBI, there are no limitations on you supplementing your income on the side. One of the biggest criticisms of UBI is that everybody will stop working. If UBI is $13K/year pretty much only those who are unable to work will not supplement their income with work.

Or I could just keep my money instead of sending it to the government just so they can send it back to me. Cut out the middleman.

That's called a negative income tax, and it can be almost the same as a UBI. There are pros and cons. For instance, if you lose your job, you have to wait until next April before you get your NIT money.

> no one is surviving on just $13K/yr

There are many countries around the world where that would be normal, or even a sign of affluence.

We aren’t talking about many countries around the world, just one

If someone is saving money to make a downpayment on a house, they don't stop spending money on food. They will likely eat out less, buy less expensive foods, watch for sales, cut down on food waste, or find other means to reallocate some of their budget for food to savings for that downpayment. Yet they will not stop eating.

I'm not the type of person who blindly supports UBI. I think that it would be disasterous to implement it without rethinking how the economy should work and how UBI is going to address social woes. That said, I do think that it will be necessary in the long run. Money, may it be earned or granted, is a tool for people to make decisions. Traditional social programs pretty much does the opposite. It removes autonomy. It removes accountability. It doesn't much matter whether it is social housing (something physical) or conditional grants of money (which is a major focus of this article).

> and a lot more than that in urban areas

Or, if the UBI is insufficient, you could work or move someplace less expensive.

Most anything else would feel unfair (as a result of being so) and tend to drive a cycle of inflation in the expensive urban areas rather than working against it.

I agree. Some libertarian economists noticed that endless growth demands slavery-like conditions and the economic collapse one way or another. They are trying to back away without using the s-word and invent half-baked solutions like UBI.

UBI by itself will not solve the problems. It will only drive exorbitant inflation. Implementing UBI requires socializing many institutions and nationalizing big companies. People who control the biggest portions of the economy will not give their power up without a war.

> Some libertarian economists noticed that endless growth demands slavery-like conditions and the economic collapse one way or another.

Which economists? That doesn't sound libertarian at all. Libertarians who support UBI typically do so because they see it as a pragmatic alternative to inefficient welfare systems. They certainly wouldn't support abandoning market based economics.

Not just a total rethinking, but rather a total redevelopment to find an economic system that is just as stable as capitalism in a free market (without fiat).

Socialism fails 100% of the time given sufficient time, UBI is tied to socialism.

If your food production yield is dependent on maintaining your supply chain which fails under socialism, you basically run into a hysteresis trap under socialism where this fails, and everyone starves to death.

Its like the ending of Daybreakers, where blood becomes increasingly scarce, and the dynamics of it all force some unwilling sacrifices which start a chain reaction.

Just an FYI, Money-printing/non-reserve debt issuance is a catalyst for war/ revolution.

More safety equates to less people willing to work slave jobs for slave wages. They're just gonna make disability bucks harder to access.

Even with 100k / month basic income, the landlords would simply raise their rents to 200k / month. Because why would they give up their generational wealth?

In this model, does the current existence of people in poverty basically serve as a ballast that gives everyone else's "above poverty" money a higher, stable value?

Would it ever be possible to not have poverty without making everyone's money worthless?

You can always increase the labor by making more people and making more of them participate in the market. That is good because you can then start flattening the differences in income by taxation, so everyone gets richer (can afford more services) and you can also control the economic disparities.

The assets story is a different beast. They tend to be finite and the worse the economic disparities curve is the higher their price becomes.

How many condos are there andjacent to upper east side of Central Park? Let’s say 100. That number is fixed, and 1 million people on this planet want one. If they all had the same salary the rental price of the condos would be close their (same) monthly salary. Now because the economic disparity is huge there is a super low number of people that have super high income, but they are still more than 100. So these lets say 1,000 /1,000,000. These thousand folks can drive the rental of these condos to almost infinity.

those unable to find meaningful employment

I don't want to pay to feed freeloaders. If you want to, that's what charities are for.

If you hate the handicapped at least have the decency to kill them not let them starve on the streets.

And afterwards introduce genetic screening so that only Ubermensch are born.

What they do or not do is none of my business.

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