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by overdrivetg 3800 days ago
Good overview. I think one thing that gets left out is how do you handle systemic sustainability: ie "if everyone quit their jobs and went on BI, there would be no one working to pay taxes to pay for the BI expenses".

This could just be solved by having a total BI payout pegged at a fixed % of overall tax revenues. As more people earn less and pay less taxes, BI payouts also decrease as they are split among more people so the burden on the remaining taxpayers doesn't overwhelm them.

Then we could adjust that % every year (or not) based on actual conditions, how generous / prosperous / stingy we as a society are feeling, plus it gives a mechanism by which automation productivity gains can get rolled back into a BI program to (warning: utopian thinking ahead) eventually fund fewer workers overall, plus workers who work fewer hours, but we still have economic/automation gains rolled (via ongoing taxation) back into the BI support.

This basically shores up the "moral hazard" counterargument to BI proposals (which is the first thing that comes up for me after the "how do you pay for it" thing Max solved).
1 comments
MaxGhenis 3800 days ago
Pegging BI to tax revenue or GDP seems like a good idea to me, though I'd prefer to start with something revenue-neutral like I lay out. As it eliminates welfare cliffs, it seems self-evident that it would not reduce employment. Many other studies on cash transfers have found that they don't reduce work incentives, except for specific populations like new mothers and teenagers, but more evidence with slowly-rolled-out programs would help address this.

Speaking of utopia, what I'd really prefer is for BI to be funded as 100% of land value tax and pollution/carbon taxes. But that could be for another article. Even if nobody's working and everything's automated, we'll still need natural resources to house people and build things, so this would be sustainable.

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overdrivetg 3800 days ago
Yes, totally agreed (/probably poorly described) - start revenue neutral as you have, then the following year just use the % of GDP from this year as the initial "set point". Then you get both: revenue-neutral cold start plus a % pegged to GDP moving forward.

Good idea wrt land-value and pollution/sustainability taxes too, makes total sense.

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