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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

America is both rich & poor at the same time. We have one of the most productive and efficient workforces on the planet, yet we are $17 trillion in debt. This can only be because we spent our money poorly - making bad decisions about where it should go.

That debt can only be retired if we have a plan to stop increasing it, and to make payments to reduce the principal. The article says that the BIG would do this, but provides no rationale as to how this might happen. Would the BIG replace the myriad existing income programs? I don't see how - $10k is $834 a month, which not much more than the monthly food bill for a family. It would be to their advantage to continue on the old programs, as they'd get more money each month.

The other danger is that the $10k wouldn't stay $10k for very long. Soon, there would be impassioned pleas from the politicians that "We have to help these people" by increasing it to provide a living wage.

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"This can only be because we spent our money poorly - ..."

Irresponsible spending is not the only way to accumulate $17 trillion in debt.

As long as the real interest rate is negative, it's perfectly rational for the US government to keep increasing debt, as long as the debt is at a level where the US could reasonably pay down most of the principle that becomes due each year if the US loses the ability to roll the debt forward at rates below inflation. Currently, yield on the 10-year is about 2.75% and US real effective exchange rate inflation is just over 3%.

Back in... 2003? I remember one bank offering credit cards with no annual fee and zero interest for the first year. I got a credit card for $2,500, maxxed it out on tax-deductible charity donations I was going to make anyway, paid it off a year later, and never touched the card again. One friend told me there was a loophole in the bank's promotion for rolling debt from another credit card, where you could for free turn that credit limit into a one year interest-free personal loan. Depending on one's risk appetite, one would then either buy US treasuries, 6 month CDs, or some high grade commercial paper. As long as one had enough savings to easily stomach a $2,500 loss if things went sour, it was perfectly rational to max out one of these credit cards for an arbitrage opportunity of about 200 bps. (* This should not be construed as investment advice or solicitation for any investment.) Then again, that's a fair amount of work for a free $50.

Now, it seems the US government doesn't have a plan for dealing with this debt if the world stops charging the US insanely low interest rates on its debt. That's irresponsible spending.

Debt isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of a good plan to reduce debt when the world stops paying the US 25 bps for the privilege of holding US debt.

60% of the US national debt matures in three years or less. It isn't rational to expose yourself to that much interest rate risk, but the people taking on this risky debt on behalf of the rest of us won't be the ones responsible for paying it if interest rates spike.

"for a family"

Slightly unrelated: Of course children should receive BI. Why won't they?

Of course, legal care must be taken so 10% of a family first child's BI, 33% of second child's BI, 50% for thirg child's BI (and so on) go to some special saving account then used to finance housing or education for those children. Or else a "family" collecting BI for their five children, living off it and then give children a boot after they grow up will become a social problem.

Why should the .gov chose a winner as in "used to finance housing or education for those children"?

Why not demand a savings account for iphones to make apple rich? The fundamental problem is housing and (excessive) education is a non-productive activity.

I don't see any benefit for society as a whole, in a supply/demand situation, to make relators and school administrators wealthy, while making it financially much more difficult / impossible for kids from small families to compete. What philosophical reasoning behind a kid with only one bro/sis has to live in the poor ghetto or be unable to afford college, in comparison a kid with ten bro/sis will have far more money in his account and be better off for his/her entire life merely because his parents were more fertile? There's an obvious financial reason under this system for college admins and housing builders to encourage huge families, because they'll be able to suck more money out of them.

Another interesting effect of inflating higher ed prices would be the elimination via unaffordability for adult education. No more going back to school to learn X if the tuition for X has been exploded such that only children with 18 years of savings and 10 siblings can afford it. I'm not sure as a cultural trend that using the hammer of .gov policy to discourage lifetime learning (insert cliche about the economy being faster than ever, blah blah) is a wise social goal.

Whoa whoa okay, let's put it in some savings account that is divided to all children equally once they're 18. They are then free to spend it as they want.

This is to avoid inheritance problem: One- or two-kids families usually can conjure more help for grown-up children than big families, while big families receive more financial help but tend to eat thru it saving nothing. We need to defer some of that financial help till children grow up.

Why exactly does an 18-year old with a guaranteed income need 18 years' worth of savings invested for them? I don't think you really understand the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

The idea is that you can live and eat without the rigamarole of food stamps/qualifying for a benefit program etc. Introducing complexity such as investment programs and sliding scales for families is not productive and, in my view, counter to the underlying principle.

It wouldn't be 18 years' worth of savings, more like 5 years of savings. That would let the child buy some home or attend so college.

That's a bonus. the main thing that we get by this is discourage child farms by withholding some of BIG. And we can't just take some part of BIG because that would be, like, human rights violation.

I have a better way to discourage child farms: only pay BIG to adults.

But then those adults will have children and complain that the state is anti-child. I know this because people already do that, on less evidence.

You'll have no children then. Having children is a crushing expense, magnified by the fact that most benefits will be scraped in the favour of BI. So, nobody have children and they accept a consumerist lifestyle and then bitch about their misspent life when it's too late, and birth rate plummets, and then your economy tanks.

Take a look at world demographics for a second. The top 10 countries by birthrate are poor-as-dirt African nations. Surprise, they didn't sit down and say "I'm not having any more children until the government guarantees me $10,000/year for each baby".

Yes, maybe you won't have children born purely as a cynical money-grabbing exercise. But people who actually want children (aka the people you want having children) will have them regardless.

They may have to budget for them or, I don't know, get a job.

Why do you assume people want children so much that they will sink into poverty just to have them while working their ass off thus never getting to actually see these children?

What if only 10% of people actually want children in post-job society? What if birth rate plummets to .5? What's your plan?

I politely bring your africa argument down because neither of us live there and you don't want me raising martian examples.

First, note that the world population is still exploding, and the us still has a 2.2 birthrate.

If basic income only for adults did drive people not to have kids (where you don't get as much welfare as a child costs now, so it is still a net negative today, yet parents have kids anyway) then you would have to then conflate with cultrual and societal rejection of those who don't procreate.

Even if you got into a situation where you had a sub 2 natural birthrate and were concerned about your long term population sustainability, you are looking post 2050 at the earliest. Why not just use genetic engineering to create human templates and just grow generations in labs, a la Brave New World? Why not raise them in some collectively researched and agreed upon environment to try to grow them into creatively thinking intellectual socially capable human beings? Do you really need to organize your social reproductive structure around random pair bonding that gets funky and creates amalgams of the parents, who said parents then raise, with 13 years of state funded daycare in a factory environment?

It is worth noting, though, that African birth rates are still high for a competitive advantage reason - without state elderly welfare programs, you heavily depend on having children that reach adulthood with enough productivity to care for you when you can no longer work fields. It is really modern where some countries don't have children as their retirement account.

It is also worth noting that female empowerment and education more directly correlate with lower birthrates than any amount of fiscal policy. US birthrates haven't changed much between 80s monthly check per baby welfare and modern unemployment programs, but European birthrates tanked when women were getting state guaranteed higher education.

All the time I wasn't talking about USA specifically.

And, as far as I understand, birth rates of the "people who you want to have kids" - people with education living near a large city - have already plummeted. Which is compensated by people who don't quite fit the society but instead reproduce to get something from the society.

Why will there be a cultural and societal rejection? A lot of people don't have babies already (or defer it until it's too late) and it's okay for everyone. Anyway, when you've got a nuclear family or a single person, it's not easy to reject or influence them - they'll give you a finger and start a new WoW gaming session.

And when you've got a society where childless family is the norm, it won't be easy to reverse until it's too late.

If you're ready to breeding humans in labs like cattle, why would you object to wiping out human populations we don't like? Surely, humans have rights, but only the wild ones. Humans grown in labs are property. Random pair bonding is what gives you a society. Anything else gives you androids that usually malfunct.

And the only reason we're talking about BI is because we think that people have rights and we have to cope with those.

What we're not in Africa is a fact. Female empowerment and education is also a fact. Let's think what are our next steps? Hint: it doesn't involve trying to make a few steps back.

Cultural. Where I live, parents and grandparents ostricize their grandchildren without a family by 30.

And even if you didn't have a cultural reason, incentivizing reproduction is extremely short sighted in an overpopulated world. Uplift Africa rather than reproduce here. The transition to a sustainable population is another topic, but it is an inveitable problem that must be solved, and we are no where near capable of having 8 billion US (or even the less egregous European nations) level of consumption and pollution without running out of resources, livable space, and breathable air well below that threshold.

Cultural things change rapidly once cultural meets financial.

Do those parents and grandparents really support their grandchildren or they only want them happen and then do nothing about it?

Anyway, children living near a large city are more capable than ever of giving them the finger, and that's what they going to do. See in the concurrent thread, "If they decide to have children" - meaning your default is to not have children.

World may be overpopulated, but is North America overpopulated? I guess it actually isn't. Most of places outside South Asia aren't overpopulated. Having some population growth and economy growth and no fears that social security would implode is better than having decline and being in panic like Japan does.

"is North America overpopulated?"

There's an abstract sense of overpopulated (sometimes described as turn all of texas into Manhattan and abandon the rest of the planet and texas would still only be half full)

And then there's carrying capacity sense of overpopulated. Both food, and west of the Mississippi, water, is actually the limiting reagent (Los Vegas will be simply out of water in a generation or so...). There's already a cultural impedance bump when westerners talk to easterners WRT water "waste".

Mexico is tremendously overpopulated from a carrying capacity standpoint. Canada is in pretty good shape. USA in between.

In poor countries, children are an economic win because they can be made to work for their parents. In rich countries, children are an economic loss because they can't be (both by law and because child labor is not in demand).

WRT the Whoa Whoa thing, the biggest problem with social engineering is most people think we're at a space age era of it, whereas its virtually impossible to evaluate fully but we're probably closer at social engineering tasks to the invention of the wheel than the invention of the starship.

A reasonable conclusion is making things as simple as humanly possible seems to be reasonable. The longer and more complicated the regs, the more likely to be gamed and screwed up and unintended consequences.

Given that, I'd stick with "Were you breathing this month? Yes, you say? OK here's your basic income... good luck see ya next time". More or less. There are still ways to game it, just much harder.

Not sure if you read all of the linked article but it proposes a basic income for adults only. This makes sense to me; children don't have a clue about money. Although if a child were say, emancipated from her family (living independently) perhaps she should receive a basic income?

Pay it to the family. They have their parents' rights yet, don't they.

I think there are many, many problems with this concept.

Children have vastly lower living expenses than adults (or more correctly - the basic marginal cost of adding a child to a household is negligible).

There is no reliable way to ensure that income is actually spent on that child.

It is apparent that some parents (for want of a better word) already see children as a benefits-magnet.

This gives a viable alternative to working a productive job and earning a good wage: pump out 9 kids by the age of 21 and enjoy a sweet $100k salary until they come of age themselves. You may safely neglect them in the meantime and pass any costs thereof, such as incarceration or hospitalisation, onto the state.

I think a much better approach is to limit a basic income to adults (or those financially independent of guardians) and give every child a Finnish-style baby box.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22751415

Limits the financial impact of a child, and has very minimal opportunity for abuse.

Everybody have vastly different living expenses. Accounting for that expenses is the thing we're trying to avoid when replacing every kind of pension and benefit with one BIG. Why would we want to revert it 180 degrees when talking about children?

The whole point of what I wrote is avoiding the use of children as benefits-magnet by withhelding part of their BIG into savings. Pumping out 9 kids won't work because you'll get just 3 BIGs for them - the rest will go into savings. Then, having a child or two will actually be very financially rewarding because it's what is good for society.

BTW

"or more correctly - the basic marginal cost of adding a child to a household is negligible"

Seriously?? Are we talking about agrarian society or about modern countries?

You won't have your child in a studio, so naturally you'll need a very different home that costs (or rents for) a very different amount of money. And it all goes downhill from here. Mom or dad need extensive period of staying with their child off work, then find a babysitter and pay her, I'd say a first child accounts for more than +50% of a family spendings.

Basic Income should be for survival and basic necessities, nothing more. If a couple wants kids, one of them should work and make more money (the other one could stay at home). I don't think an entire family living off BIG is a good idea.

BIG should be able to offset their drop in ability to make money due to having a child.

"If a couple wants kids" - we have a problem right here. How is it suddently "if"? Somebody gave birth to both persons in that couple, and to their parents, and before that - why would they be the ones who break this chain?

They should surely have kids when they want to do so and they should not be put in disadvantaged position by having kids - which, well, does happen in almost every developed country and in many less-developed ones. Therefore, BIG for children.

Surely they should also work, but you know, their employer doesn't care whether they have children or not, so it should be compensated somehow.

Heck, I think women should receive BIG from the month their become pregnant. Delivering the baby is very financially-intensive process, no doubt.

I think having children is a choice, not an obligation nor a positive right (I'm not going to stop anyone from having children). Also, it's a pretty expensive choice. If others choose to have children, I'd prefer not to have to support them financially (through taxes).

In addition, as several other commenters pointed out, if you increase the BIG per child, you risk enabling people who have large families just to get the money. That much, much worse than asking people who want kids to provide for their own.

If having children is a choice that a sufficient number of people not take, you're going to starve when you get old.

Nobody asks whether you want to support the ill, the disabled and children, you just do that. You cough up cash because they are already there and you have no alternative.

You really don't.

I've recited my solution of preventing people who have large families to live off their children, it's kind of sad you don't bother to argue with it.

"You're going to starve when you get old" completely contradicts the basic premise of this discussion. We're talking about BIG in the context of an increasingly automated world, where fewer and fewer people need to work. This includes caring for the elderly (30 years from now, that might be completely automated). If I'll get my own share of BIG when I'm old, why would I care about children?

There's some choice involved in whether to have children... until you have them.

There's also some choice involved in whether you are making enough money to support your children -- but not that much.

We might get to the point someday where we want to encourage a higher birthdate, like say much of Europe, Japan, Korea, Singapore. This could be a decent way of doing that.

You misunderstand the nature of public debt. We still haven't paid off the Civil War.

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