Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

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You write:

> almost everyone already has a home

> My personal doubts on Basic Income is that people would use the money any more effectively than they do their present money

I am not so sure your statements here are accurate. There are roughly 600,000 people in the US who are homeless on any given night (the number who are homeless at some point in the year is much higher). That doesn't include the huge number (probably several times as big) who are "couch surfing": staying with family or friends because they have no housing. And a huge portion of these are children; I doubt these children have sufficient income for a home.

As for your second statement, I cannot point to specific statistics, but all of the information I have seen suggests that most poor people are actually extremely efficient with their money -- that the problem is mostly one of not having enough income, not one of poor spending choices.

And it is because of these that a basic income program (or "citizens' dividend") would, indeed, make a difference. It would actually change the income distribution by setting a floor on the minimum amount of income any particular person can have.

[1] https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/ahar-2013-p...

It's important to make a distinction between the chronically homeless (who frequently have addiction issues or mental health problems) and the short-term homeless when talking about these sorts of issues, IMHO.

Chronic homeless make up ~15% of the national population (stat from http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/chronic_homelessness which cites 2014 version of the HUD report you do, but their link is broken, in full disclosure) For those folks, what's needed is guaranteed housing with wraparound services (healthcare/counseling/meals, etc), not more income as that's not the driving force for most.

The short-term homeless would also benefit from some of that but many would also be able to safely use basic income.

In any case, I think it's important to make the above distinction explicitly as different people have different notions of "homelessness" and we end up talking past each other if we don't make it explicit.

>most poor people are actually extremely efficient with their money

The stats seems to point in that direction, yes, direct cash transfers is an incredibly powerful way of fighting poverty.

http://freakonomics.com/2013/11/19/whats-the-best-way-to-del...

The United States is a big country; 600,00 people is about 0.002 of the population, meaning that 99.8% have a place to sleep.

Oh yeah, that's the spirit. Who cares about more than half a million people?! I mean, Wyoming has less than that, just ignore them too! There are like three dozen of cities with population larger than that, so anyone who has less, should just be ignored too, who cares about their problems. I love you people with all your ignorant relativism, but if you were one of those, I am fairly sure that the likelihood of you changing your views is quite high. Maybe not "99.8%", but high.

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