[reddytowns]

One thing I don't understand about basic income is how to deal with children. If the parents get the basic income of a child, then that will incentivize some people to have more kids simply to get more money.

If you don't give basic income for kids, then people with a lot of kids won't be able to live.

Of course, you can adjust the amount between the too extremes of full basic income and no basic income for kids, but just because you have a target standard of living and give the parents money to meet that for the kids, doesn't mean the parents aren't going to turn around and spend that money on themselves. They might not care that their kids are in poverty as long as they get the drugs/alcohol/new car/fashionable clothes or whatever.

As you already stated, bureaucratic welfare programs don't work, so what is the solution here?

I've never seen this discussed, and it seems like a major oversight of the basic income proponents.

[cobaltblue]

There already are tax and welfare benefits to having children, and indeed it does incentivize having them when you really can't afford them. It doesn't seem sustainable long term, but we'll see. I don't think it's a problem with basic income any more than the current system. The bigger issue I find with basic income is that proposals typically don't include any mention of price control on the seller side and purchase control on the buyer side. Poor people are often trapped there because every local actor selling them stuff is trying to maximize rent extraction, and they continually buy things that are expensive and bad for them (case in point the recent cigarette article). Landlords get a lot of money from rent extraction, since they're paid in rent directly. It's even worse with universal, unconditional basic income. If as a landlord I hear everyone in my apartment complex is now getting an unconditional basic income of $20k/yr, guess what, next year rent prices are going up by around $20k, with lowered adjustments to account for other actors (like local food suppliers) also competing for this extra $20k/person/yr. This is basically the same thing that has happened to student loans. Without authoritarian measures to restrict economic freedom, which in addition to being authoritarian must also be good measures so as to not backfire as every other centrally planned economy has, basic income has no real chance at a large scale. In America in particular, authoritarian anything is a no-go.

[jordanthoms]

A landlord may try to increase rent knowing that the tenants now have a basic income, however that creates an opportunity for someone else to provide housing at a cheaper price - it's no different from any other market, as long as you don't have massive supply-side restrictions like in some major cities.

[dredmorbius]

Housing has significant switching costs. It's not as if you can simply switch to buying a different brand of bread.

You've got to search for an alternate location, consider schools, work, commutes. Neighbors. Etc.

I can see major arguments for managing rent as a social function.

Though that depends heavily on supply and demand factors as well.

[mjevans]

The best way of fixing this is to make sure that there is an over-supply of housing (located NEAR the jobs) and to make it as easy as possible to move.

Economic incentives should encourage local, suitable (even for apartments) housing in an area to be approximately equal to the number of jobs in that area (then pad up slightly for BIG if that's also an 'employer').

[xenadu02]

No one who has children (and raised them without a nanny) would ever think this way. Kids are far too much work. $50k/yr wouldn't be enough

[afarrell]

Pay people to get IUDs or vascectomies. Some might argue that this is corrosive, but:

1) If a single mother/father only spent 1 hour a week taking care of their kid, they would surely be punished for neglect. So we are willing to literally coerce people who choose to be parents into working at least 52*18...938 hours. At a minimum wage of $5.35, that is at least $5,000 of coercion.

2) If we have a workable basic income, then someone shouldn't find themselves in the desperate position of having a medical procedure done to make ends meet unless we don't have universal healthcare.

[pavedwalden]

I've never bought the idea that welfare recipients would bear children strategically. Surely after the first child, they'd realize that this was a difficult way to increase their top-line income. Not sure where I'd look for data on this, but my gut feeling is that poor people who have a bunch of poorly-cared-for-children get pregnant because they're bad at planning ahead, not because they've been inventivized by a subsidy.

[NathanLands]

Growing up in Alabama, I met tons of poor people that did exactly that and they'd tell you about it.

[dclowd9901]

I think you're mistakingly assuming the kind of person who would do this would provide a similar (or any kind of) quality of life to their kids that you would.

I know of 3 small children in my own life whose parents collect welfare, and are meth addicted.

[mixmastamyk]

Second and third children are not as difficult as they keep each other busy.

[undersuit]

My ideas of basic income always end up with the first implementation of basic income to be an amount of money just barely above what is needed to keep an individual above poverty. We have to ease society into this transition, and just like we shouldn't give the BI in one lump yearly sum(especially since most basic income proposals include almost completely gutting other safety nets) we shouldn't make perverse incentives to collect additional BI by neglecting their children.

Maybe for the first 20 years of the program every child affords a parent some additional BI based on the child's age. Raising a child when health care is inexpensive(my vision of BI does include pretty much free health care), job's are optional, and schooling is free makes the most expensive times to be early in the child's life when they are constantly outgrowing their clothing and beds and using up diapers at an impressive rate.

Eventually the amount of BI awarded becomes sufficient for most family situations(Star Trek post-scarcity style) or other factors like perfect birth control allow us to remove the child BI bonus.

[JamesBarney]

All I came up was pay for services instead of income for children.

Imagine the minimum income for children was diverted into services. So the government buys free clothes, school breakfasts+lunches, and medical insurance. This decreases the cost for a poor family to raise a child which allows you to give less money per child, and reduces the incentives for child farming.

[niels_olson]

> that will incentivize some people to have more kids simply to get more money.

This sounds like the edge case a non-parent would bring up. People who make poor life choices make them for far less insightful reasons that time-value calculus.

It would take an unbelievable amount of money for me to have another kid. It would be cheaper to buy my retirement.

[nitrogen]

Provide free contraceptives alongside the free money.