[jaibot]

Combined with some progressive taxation this works out to be massively more efficient and helpful than most other forms of welfare. Replace foodstamps/subsidized housing/unemployment-insurance/myriad-of-other-safety-net-programs with a basic guaranteed income and everyone is better off. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income .

[berrypicker]

For those interested, a good way to implement this was proposed by Milton Friedman

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

which indeed works out to be better than government sponsored programs.

Progressive taxation has nothing to do with it though, it's not required at all.

[jaibot]

Milton Friedman proposed negative income tax _in addition to_ guaranteed income. Worth noting that the US has partially implemented negative income tax (we call it EITC) - it's working really well and should probably be expanded (probably worth taking money from other welfare programs if it comes to that).

[dragonwriter]

EITC is not a negative income tax. In a negative income tax, below a certain level, each marginal dollar of reduced income produces an additional negative amount of income tax (or, equivalently, positive amount of refundable credit.)

EITC is a work incentive program that provides additional income tax credit with increasing labor income up to a certain amount -- the feature for which it is named as a tax credit for earned income -- and then tails off above a certain point. In the range from the peak to the tail off, it might be mistaken for a negative income tax, but that's true of any tax credit (or even, really, a tax deduction) that has a soft cap. But that's not really the basic design or function is, and, while the EITC may work fairly well, there's no good argument I can see that the negative-income-like portion of the top end of the EITC benefit curve is a contributor to its beneficial functioning, except perhaps if you consider it only against having a sharp cut-off where the benefit drops from the maximum to $0.

[SEMW]

Correct link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income. GMI is different.

[jiggy2011]

The problem is that not everybody's costs are the same. A disabled person may have much higher living costs due to needing additional care and special equipment to help them, they also have less chance of gaining employment in order to increase that income.

Also consider costs of living/housing etc. For example an unemployed programmer might be better off staying somewhere like SF where costs are higher because they are more likely to get a job there.

The risk would be that you ended up with low cost of living slum areas where the unemployed would congregate , separate from the productive economy.

[AnthonyMouse]

>The problem is that not everybody's costs are the same. A disabled person may have much higher living costs due to needing additional care and special equipment to help them, they also have less chance of gaining employment in order to increase that income.

This would seem to be the case regardless of the type of government assistance provided. Suppose we provide enough that a disabled person can live a dignified, if spartan, life. Should we deny that same level of support to someone else, who may be more able to contribute to society, just because that person is not disabled?

> Also consider costs of living/housing etc. For example an unemployed programmer might be better off staying somewhere like SF where costs are higher because they are more likely to get a job there.

That's the reason why the cost of living/housing is higher there. Increasing government subsidies in areas with higher costs cause the costs to increase even more, because recipients of government assistance then have that money with which to pay, increasing demand without increasing supply and therefore raising prices. Meanwhile only the poorest of the poor remain in the lower subsidized areas because they can't afford to live in more desirable areas even with some government assistance, causing those areas to degrade even more. This is the same logic that leads to the mortgage interest tax credit which benefits mortgage lenders much more than homeowners (and screws over renters even more) -- you're subsidizing the sellers of housing and loans more than the buyers because you're increasing the demand rather than the supply. If you want to help the poor live in San Francisco, subsidize the construction of affordable new high density housing and mass transit there, so that the cost goes down rather than up.

> The risk would be that you ended up with low cost of living slum areas where the unemployed would congregate, separate from the productive economy.

That's what happens already. If anything a basic income can disrupt such behavior, because it allows people living in poorer areas to take better risks, and provides them an increased incentive to seek employment because taking a job doesn't result in the discontinuation of government benefits.

[jiggy2011]

The point is more than a disabled person will require a higher subsidy to attain the same standard of living. The differences can be enormous.

A non-disabled person can walk or cycle around the city to pick-up groceries whereas a disabled person might need a specially modified vehicle or may require the services of another person. Subsidizing everyone to the same amount as required by the most disabled of people would be unsustainable.

I guess by the second point I mean the short term unemployed more than the "poor" per se. Consider a person who has just graduated from a university in SF and wants to remain there while they look for a job in SV. If they can't afford this , they might have to move to a poor area with less opportunity.

Optimistically it might produce more opportunities elsewhere if there is an influx of educated people, but pessimistically it might mean that those who are independently wealthy are the only ones who can take the risk of living in SF.

[AnthonyMouse]

The "most disabled person" who is not independently wealthy is not going to achieve the same standard of living as the average person. If you need a special vehicle and you can't afford it, you can live across the street from a grocery store and get a job working there.

You're basically talking about the "heart transplant problem." Suppose you have zero dollars and no job and you need a heart transplant which will cost $200,000, which will cause you to live for another two years, or else you will die today. The government can't afford to pay for that -- people can say "death panels" all day long but the fact is that with the current state of medicine and technology we cannot save everyone, and it is not productive to bankrupt the government paying for measures that are more expensive than they are effective. Moreover, the fairest way to distribute government services is to give the same amount to everyone. If you need more than that amount, seek charity. There is a point past which government cannot fix every problem, and we can't calibrate society to the level of the "most disabled person."

> I guess by the second point I mean the short term unemployed more than the "poor" per se. Consider a person who has just graduated from a university in SF and wants to remain there while they look for a job in SV. If they can't afford this , they might have to move to a poor area with less opportunity.

So how is that different with a basic income than it is today?

[jiggy2011]

If you are severely disabled it's really not a case of "just live opposite the grocery store and work there". Many disabilities will mean that a person simply can't perform economically productive work at all. If you have a degree of means testing you can afford to provide for these people because they are a relatively small % of the population.

In the UK for example we have disabled people who receive more in total government assistance than many able people would when working a full time job. For example they might need full time carers. Relying on charity will favor those who can best play that game, which will by definition make things harder for people with certain disabilities, particularly mental disabilities of less "popular" ones.

> So how is that different with a basic income than it is today?

If you give people different amounts of housing based on the relative costs of housing in different areas then they will not have to move to a different area and can stay where they are more likely to find work.

[AnthonyMouse]

>If you have a degree of means testing you can afford to provide for these people because they are a relatively small % of the population.

The problem is that they're not, because you're just picking some subset of the population and saying they're more needy than everyone else without actually providing any proof of that. Why aren't the victims of automobile collisions just as needy of that money so that they can buy more expensive safer vehicles? Why don't indigent cancer patients "need" the same level of care that Steve Jobs got?

You can pick some arbitrary subset of the population and say that we can afford to provide for them because they're a small percentage, but you can't pick that population in any just or rational way because everybody needs something -- everybody dies and would benefit if the government had given them more resources to fight the thing that killed them.

> Relying on charity will favor those who can best play that game, which will by definition make things harder for people with certain disabilities, particularly mental disabilities of less "popular" ones.

Charity is exactly as much a "game" as applying for government benefits is. If you feel for the plight of the mentally ill, by all means donate money to the charities that help those people, and join together with everyone who thinks the government should be helping them out of proportion to the rest of the population to do likewise.

[jaibot]

Good points, especially the varying cost-of-living associated with medical conditions. The obvious gets-us-most-of-the-way-there solution is to have those costs covered by a generous healthcare system as a separate matter from guaranteed income.

Living in SF is a good, like a car or a degree. All of those things help you get a job, but it should be up to you which of those you choose to invest in. Throwing in cost-of-living adjustments is equivalent to a guaranteed income except that the government requires you to spend $X on housing - it's strictly worse for everyone.

[dllthomas]

"The risk would be that you ended up with low cost of living slum areas where the unemployed would congregate , separate from the productive economy."

But in this case, they would be able to offer each other money for providing each other services. Congregations of people would inherently be able to realize some demand, which is not presently the case (or that demand is filtered through bureaucrats).

[jiggy2011]

Maybe, but the same could probably be said about the favelas in Brazil. It probably makes some sense to subsidize people to live in the area where there is currently the most opportunity for them.

[dllthomas]

"Maybe, but the same could probably be said about the favelas in Brazil."

I'm not really sure what you are saying here. My understanding of the favelas is that there is a great deal of economic activity going on there, and a lot of people working actively to better their situations. Limited resources coupled with sparse, unequally applied regulation and rule of law leads to some bad situations, but those in the favelas are living in the favelas primarily to have access to the economic activity of the city. Resources go to the favelas only in proportion to the earning power of the residents, which dynamic basic income specifically changes, and it is this change specifically that I am saying is likely to produce better results.

It's totally possible you were saying something I'm missing; if so, please clarify.

"It probably makes some sense to subsidize people to live in the area where there is currently the most opportunity for them."

Physical location matters, but it matters less than it ever has before. Ideally, we want more places with opportunity, not ever higher rents in SF and Manhattan.

[rattray]

Universal health care is prevalent in Europe and might alleviate the effect of 1).

The situation you describe in 2) is the status quo, no? UBI would mean more money for those who've been looking for a job for a long time.

[sz4kerto]

I might agree. However, most people will want basic income as an extra, not as a replacement. I would bet a significant amount on that (i.e. basic income being popular only until poor people figure out what are they going to lose).

The masses don't like taking care of themselves. Not even if they get 'free' money for that.

[AnthonyMouse]

Any proposed government program that causes the net wealth of any distinct group of people to increase or decrease is going to be supported or opposed by various people for self-interested reasons. But the point is not to to wage war over who steals money from someone else and gives it to themselves by way of government bureaucracy, the point is to do something that results in a net benefit to society, for example by reducing the disincentive to work created by the discontinuation of government benefits when one finds gainful employment. The net result of that is to reduce unemployment and underemployment, which increases the tax base and allows a given level of government services to be provided at a lower tax rate (or an increased level of government services to be provided at the same tax rate, depending on your policy preferences).

[JackFr]

> Combined with some progressive taxation this works out to be massively more efficient and helpful than most other forms of welfare.

That seems to be a conclusion without any premises, woefully short on data and implicit but imprecise definitions of 'efficient', 'helpful' and 'welfare'.

[KiwiCoder]

Guaranteed minimum income is based on need, basic income is based on citizenship.

[benihana]

>Combined with some progressive taxation this works out to be massively more efficient and helpful than most other forms of welfare.

Is this empirically proven somewhere? Or is that what its proponents are saying? Forgive me if I'm a little cynical when someone tells me an idea they support is a much better form of welfare than what we currently have but doesn't back it up with proof.

[dragonwriter]

"Efficiency" is ambiguous. In terms of (benefit dollars delivered)/(benefit dollars delivered + administrative costs) its almost true-by-definition, since the absence of means testing removes most of the source of administrative requirements in traditional welfare programs.

In terms of effectiveness at achieving the goals of welfare programs, it is far less clear, though there are pretty clear arguments that certain features of basic income -- particularly the lack of disincentives to outside income -- are beneficial in that regard. OTOH, there are also pretty clear arguments that the lack of need-based focus -- which is intimately tied to the lack of disincentives -- are potentially negative, especially when replacing welfare programs whose existing qualifications are based around special needs (e.g., programs qualified by particular disabilities) that increase costs rather than simple lack of resources (e.g., income/asset-qualified poverty support programs.)

[MarcusVorenus]

How would you go about getting supporting evidence for something that hasn't been tried yet? At the very least we would save a ton of money on bureaucracy and corruption.

[dragonwriter]

> How would you go about getting supporting evidence for something that hasn't been tried yet?

You would get supporting evidence for each of a set of propositions, from which the efficiency (however that is operationalized in context) of the particular plan being proposed follows.

The whole point of the scientific method is that it allows us to have justifiable (even if not certain) evidence-based predictions of things that haven't been tried yet.

[JackFr]

Why? Do you think the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the social services industry would sit idly by while their jobs are eliminated? Of course not. And that is the real reason it will never be implemented. For this to be palatable to the right, it's got to credibly eliminate a large existing bureaucracy -- something which might be palatable to the left, but for the specific interest of that bureaucracy.