[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.

[jiggy2011]

I mean people who can't do the basics such as feed or clothe themselves without assistance, not people who want a better car.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're making an emotional argument. Let me try. Why are you condemning the single mother whose job has no access to mass transit and who can't afford to live within walking distance, who therefore has to drive a death trap and endanger her life and the lives of her children?

The problem is that we have limited resources. We can't save everyone. And making emotional arguments gets in the way of doing the most good. Why is it better to spend money on nurses to change the bed pans of the mentally ill than to spend it giving opportunities to those who want to go to medical school, who may one day ultimately cure them?