[mgrpowers]

Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person. I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston.

I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.

I'm a huge basic income fan and would like to contribute to the conversation I just don't know where to start.

[hardcandy]

Basic income probably couldn't be adjusted for cost of living differences or else a bunch of perverse incentives would be introduced. One of the things I like about a flat nation-wide basic income is that it would instead incentivize people to move to cheap areas and revitalize them. You could imagine a lot of rural areas and small towns being revitalized with a surge of young people experimenting with co-ops and semi communal living.

[dragonwriter]

> Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person.

There are many different proposals which tend to roughly share long-term goals but differ in short-term approaches.

> I've mostly seen 12-18k per person but that obviously wouldn't fly in San Francisco or Boston.

What do you mean, "wouldn't fly"? UBI aims to ultimately replace most [0] other social safety net programs with a single cash-payment system which doesn't get reduced when people find outside income and isn't constrained in what you can spend it on, so that people that have basic support but can supplement with work without being penalized.

Most proponents do not see it as guaranteeing the ability to live comfortably on UBI alone in the most expensive places in the country to live.

> I recently drove through Kansas and stopped in Quinter, population 955. The per capita income is $15,588 so around $15m for just income not including health insurance/etc. How do we go about justifying basic income for a city this size whose primary export is corn.

I'm not sure what you think the cities current per capita income has to do with either the cost or justification of UBI.

[0] Or possibly all, details will vary between different versions of the idea.

[_rpd]

> Does anyone have any examples on what the total cost would be per person.

One problem is that are two versions: the conservative version[1] in which all social security programs are abolished and the current social security budget is simply divided among all adult citizens, and the socialist version[2] in which a "living wage" is financed by high taxes (and sometimes by printing money, although I'm not sure how seriously this is proposed).

The conservative version is revenue neutral, but the socialist version has serious inflationary problems that are rarely discussed and quickly turn into discussions of the merits of various price fixing schemes when they aren't outright dismissed.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-aren...

[2] https://www.popularresistance.org/the-case-for-universal-bas...

[WorldMaker]

One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINCOME

The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly) and attempt to extrapolate what/how you would expand the program to cover every citizen. For instance, examining the impact of fixed incomes on the elderly versus the cost of living in various parts of the country and how the elderly today are already coping with such issues.

Another direction I've been trying to keep an eye on and follow as best I can is the discussions and work going on in (fringe) economics under the name "Modern Monetary Theory":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

[dragonwriter]

> One place I find it useful to start is with the one empirical attempt to actually try basic income, the Canadian Mincome Experiment

Mincome was not an unconditional basic income, which is what the recent "basic income" efforts have been about. It was a means-tested social benefit program (though with perhaps lighter administrative overhead, since it was a strictly cash-benefit program with only outside income affecting grant eligibility, rather than the rather complex set of factors typical of social benefit programs.)

Most of the benefits claimed from UBI are tied pretty specifically to the unconditional aspect. OTOH, its results are interesting in that even with the reduction in benefits for outside income ($0.50 benefit reduction on each $1 of outside income), only teenagers and new mothers worked substantially less. This is interesting in considering UBI, since UBI has less reduction in incentive to work (no reduction in benefit for outside income).

> The other direction is to look at today's Social Security (basic income for the elderly)

Social Security isn't even approximately a basic income -- benefits are determined by tax payments (ultimately, by income earned in jobs subject to Social Security tax.)

[WorldMaker]

Thanks for some technical distinctions. It's useful here to compare the boring reality with the ideal vision, which is again why these are useful directions to look.