[foolmeonce]

The best way to do taxes' progressive support in reverse is to give everyone basic income, food stamps, and insurance and then offset that in the progressive tax rate.

Aside from removing stigma from using the universal minimums it solves the problem of losing 3X your income when combining separate state food program, city housing, and medical programs. That remains a problem even when individual programs move away from thresholds.

[alex_smart]

How do you suppose basic income can work in countries like India that don't have the resources that are available to a first world country?

Even 2 dollars a day of basic income would complete exhaust the government budget.

[MrsPeaches]

India does have something akin to basic income for rural households.

Fair, it's not just free money but it is a guarantee of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/observatory/mahatma-gandhi-nat...

[alex_smart]

The government is only able to provide a total of around 54 crore person days of employment through this scheme. That is less than half crore people in a country of 130 crore people availing this "guarantee" of at least 100 days of work a year.

https://www.nrega.nic.in/netnrega/mgnrega_new/Nrega_StateRep...

[mkr-hn]

I think there's something like an inverse relationship between how many jobs are available and how much people need support. The US is actually among the top manufacturers still, but very little of it is still done by humans, so it doesn't create enough jobs. Even the jobs that remain for most people (retail/service) will eventually be automated away. There is plenty of money for UBI if the people who've benefited pay their fair share back into the systems that enabled those lopsided gains.

Some kind of support is needed in this case because none of the gains from all that efficiency are going to people who need money just to survive. It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.

[alex_smart]

Please spend some time in a city in a third world country. I can't imagine a better way to cure for that level of inaccuracy of worldview.

I suggest Kolkata. The sight of frail old ladies barely covered by a single tattered sheet of cloth living on the footpath and begging for your alms has a way of communicating the reality of the world that nothing I can write could ever possibly match.

[mkr-hn]

I can't possibly afford the trip, so I'll have to take your word for it.

[alex_smart]

The minimum wage in the USA is $7 an hour. In India, 10% of people live below $2 a day. In the state where I come from (population >100 million), that number is over 33%.

Even if you find yourself less fortunate compared to other people in your country, please have some empathy for the scale of problems in other, less developed countries.

[mkr-hn]

You're reading too much into what I said. Nothing in it suggests a lack of empathy. I made no qualitative statements beyond the bit about rich people needing to pay back into the system that made their wealth possible. There is absolutely no judgement of any people in developing countries.

[petermcneeley]

Maybe basic income only applies to "first world countries". Maybe there is a notion of plenty that only applies to modern industrial societies with high resource/population ratios. Maybe India just isnt ready?

[alex_smart]

Of course that is what I believe. Should have been clear from the way I phrased the question.

There was nothing in the context that suggested that this this discussion was only about the poor in developed countries. After all, most of the world's poor actually live (unsurprisingly) in poor to low-medium income countries. Perhaps this is something that I should be mindful of in the future?

As someone born in a "third world country" I am obviously very interested personally in these problems. In the state I was born in, one out of three people is still below the poverty line (which is like 2 USD a day). To me it seems that for us it is much more practical to learn from whatever the fuck China is doing rather than a method whose primary appeal is ideological.

[david-gpu]

People would prefer to choose how to allocate their income rather than forcing them to allocate a certain percentage to food via food stamps.

Also, in the same way that a universal basic income removes a layer of bureaucratic overhead, having universal healthcare also removes the burden of middlepeople handling insurance claims.