[tensafefrogs]

> So instead of encouraging (or mandating?) young folks get trained or educated (or both!), we simply give them money for existing? I don't see how that solves the bigger issue.

No, you give them money to pay rent and eat while they go to school if they want to, or learn whatever new skills they might be interested in instead of having to wait tables.

Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.

[Alupis]

> No, you give them money to pay rent and eat

If every person gets X dollars per month, then over time, everything will cost at least X dollars. We have 78 years of a "grand experiment" to prove this (minimum wage).

Proponents of BI often forget that our economy will not remain how it is today.

Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

> Plenty of people would love to go to school but can't afford to on a minimum wage job.

We do have programs in place that solve this. Yes, you have to pay it back, and it can certainly add up to a large sum if you decide to not work at all and use your loan to pay for food and rent. Perhaps our universities should change the paradigm, and require students to work at minimum part time, as this yields a tremendous amount more than just money... but I digress.

[deciplex]

> Sure, if everyone today had an extra guaranteed $1,000 every month, it would short-term be fantastic. But the economy would eventually adjust, as it always does. Rent would slide upwards, so would goods prices, etc, to the point where we wind up where we are today with minimum wage (perpetually raising it every few years in a never-ending game of cat and mouse, the essential cost of living).

If implemented by idiots, I agree basic income would tend to result in the consequences you describe [1]. It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time. If a person is currently working a job which pays them $1500 / month, then ideally basic income would result in (assuming that we agree on $1000 / month as the minimum subsistence-level income) that same person making $500 / month at the same job, and receiving $1000 / month in basic income.

So to be clear, anyone currently getting a wage exceeding the agreed-upon basic income level, should not see much difference in how much they take home each month.

Properly done, the only price inflation you should see are from people who are seeing more money each month than they were before, because they were previously working at below-subsistence wages. But even then, they were probably receiving other government assistance anyway, and with basic income we'd start phasing that stuff out as well.

[1] Which, I admit, means it stands a good chance of happening that way. Difficulty of proper implementation is an argument against basic income, but it is also reflective of our broken, irresponsible government.

[Alupis]

You make good points.

I don't necessarily oppose BI, but I am very skeptical of it actually working in practice for any nation. We'll have to wait and see how Finland's experiment works in the long term, but also we should recognize Finland is a small nation (5.3 million population, or about 45% of NYC's population) without a major economy like the US. The successes of one small nation don't necessarily translate into successes for large nations.

> It is very important that any implementation of basic income also do away with minimum wage at the same time.

I would argue, and you touched on, that we would have to do more than just drop minimum wage. We'd have to do away with all forms of social welfare safety nets.

There is a good argument that government would actually save money annually by shifting all forms of social welfare into a BI, due to reduced overhead of management, number of concurrent (and sometimes redundant) programs, folks who abuse/scam the system, etc. With a BI, that would be it, nobody gets any more or less, and you're free to spend it how you see fit.

> the only price inflation you should see

I'm not an economist, however I do believe some inflation is natural. This would mean, that over time, BI would have to be increased, just like our current-day minimum wage program. If we can somehow generate a self-sustaining feedback loop on a BI economy, maybe that works.

[douche]

The best thing I can see about a BI system that replaced the myriad of welfare programs we have now is that it (if implemented correctly) would remove a lot of the perverse incentives that keep people at the edge in dependent situations. Anecdata, but I've known people that turned down work or dropped out of the workforce because the extra income would be enough to put their households over the top of certain income "cliffs" that are built into some of the crappy welfare systems they took advantage of - a small bit of extra money wasn't worth crossing that Rubicon of whatever multiple of the poverty line, and losing their heating assistance, or free healthcare, and whatnot.

[Chronic51]

Why do they love to go to school? To learn? No - they can do that with the Internet today. They want a higher paying job, nothing else.