[kalvin]

I think if you could see close-up how these systems work now, you'd be convinced that it's completely not worth the cost in practice to try and figure out who "deserves" each of the many, many special benefits/allowances/exemptions available (plus it's incredibly difficult for potential recipients to figure out what they're eligible for, plus it imposes those costs on the people who aren't eligible, but end up having to jump through all the same hoops.)

This is just my experience after working for ~1000 hours on healthcare.gov w/other YC alumni (relatively nonideological-liberal-or-libertarian engineer bias), but I think it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead, along with unintentional side effects, edge cases, and bad incentives.

(This isn't why healthcare.gov had major issues, it's just another problem.)

That said, there's no way politically a basic income is going to fly anytime soon. So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

[yummyfajitas]

...it's become increasingly clear to all of us that the implementation of well-meaning policies intended to separate the deserving from the undeserving ends up adding an incredible amount of complexity and overhead,...

Unless the overhead is truly massive (read: 5x more than the actual benefits), it doesn't matter. It's still vastly cheaper to pay only a small set of deserving people than to pay everyone.

Consider a BI paying 300M people $20k. Cost is $6 trillion.

Consider a targeted program paying 50M people $20k, no overhead. Cost is $1 trillion.

You need an overhead cost of 500% of benefits for a basic income to be cost competitive.

Can any BI proponents provide even a back of the envelope calculation suggesting how BI could possibly be competitive?

[nkoren]

It's not about the immediate cost. It's about the fact that conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

Listen to this investigation into Disability benefits.[1] Listen to how the people who receive these benefits genuinely need the stable income that they provide, but are then prohibited from working part-time, tutoring, even volunteering for their community, for fear of losing the only available form of security. Listen to how trapped they become by the system. For them, being trapped by a conditional benefits program is better than the alternative -- anything is better than starvation -- but it is still a dehumanising and self-perpetuating institution.

The flipside to making benefits conditional is that we require employers to provide social support (eg., via minimum wage, etc). By setting an expensive threshold below which employers cannot create jobs, we impose enormous costs on industry and minimize job creation. A basic income should go hand-in-hand with the elimination of minimum wage. By removing the requirement that jobs must provide base-level income support, we would enable the creation of more jobs.

Between eliminating the steep marginal tax rates on the poor, and removing the steep threshold to job creation due to minimum wage, we would eliminate the two biggest factors in chronic poverty traps. So if you want to do a real calculation on the costs of our current policies, be sure to include the cost to industry of the minimum wage, as well as the Net Present Value of the future costs of letting the current poverty-trap system continue to grow.

1: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/490/t...

[yummyfajitas]

...conditional social support creates poverty traps, by imposing the steepest marginal tax rates (sometimes exceeding 100%) on the poorest people in society.

There are cheaper policies than BI which don't do this. One example is Basic Job - if you need a job real bad the government gives you a really bad job.

This has no poverty traps, and (unlike BI) has no disincentive for work. You also get to avoid spending money on people who don't need it, and additionally society can derive some marginal benefit from the work people do (e.g. public spaces can be cleaner).

[nkoren]

Of course it has poverty traps. I live in the UK, where I get to see how the "workfare" programme creates poverty traps all the time.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by getting more education and practicing skills that are valuable to employers. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

If you want to get out of poverty, a good way to do that is by taking part-time and piecemeal work to build up your experience. A Basic Job often conflicts with that.

A government study of workfare programmes in the UK, Canada, and US[1] concluded that: "There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers."

Oftentimes the poor are those who most need to spend time taking care of children or the elderly -- types of work which are tremendously valuable to society despite not being part of the wage labour system. A basic job conflicts with that.

Furthermore, Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes. What you consistently miss in your argument against Basic Income is that it is something which everybody receives. Most people contribute to it, but all people receive a benefit from it. The "cost" is not the total cost of the programme, but the difference between what you pay and what you receive.

1: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130128102031/htt...

[yummyfajitas]

I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

Basic Job programmes have vast bureaucratic overhead and are far more expensive to implement than Basic Incomes.

Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Incidentally, your study merely shows there is very little evidence of anything due to workfare being poorly implemented and rapidly abandoned. For example, NYC had only 2800 people on workfare in 2003. Additionally, it claims that about half of people on workfare don't actually work and merely loaf about the work site (but presumably continue receiving benefits).

Obviously a BJ won't work if you turn it into a de-facto BI or welfare system.

[nkoren]

> I don't understand - how does a Basic Job prevent you from either going to school or taking part time work? No one is obligated to work a Basic Job. It's just what you do if you are unable to find anything better.

With this comment, it becomes difficult to see how you're arguing in good faith. If your Basic Job tells you to work at a particular time of day -- and classes and/or a part-time job are in the middle of this work schedule -- then they conflict. Sure, you can go to school and/or take the part-time job instead, but then you starve.

How is it that you're incapable of understanding that this creates a conflict?

> Back of the envelope calculation, please.

Okay, using your straw-man scenario, there are 50M people requiring $20k worth of income. That costs $1T upfront (same as if we provided the $20k Basic Income to all 300M people). Now with our Basic Job, we're basically asking people to do work that they don't want to do -- since as you point out, if they're not closely supervised then they won't do the work.

So let's assume we need a poorly-paid supervisor for every 12 basic-jobbers, a somewhat better-paid line manager for every 20 supervisors, a somewhat well-paid district manager for every 50 line managers, and an actually well-paid regional manager for every 100 district supervisors. Furthermore, lets assume that all these jobs come from the ranks of the currently-unemployed, so that they're not pure overhead but are providing support in and of themselves.

  Job description   $/year   No. of people   Total cost
  Basic Jobber      20k      45,973,453      919.5B
  Supervisor        30k      3,831,121       114.9B
  Line Manager      40k      191,556         7.7B
  District Manager  60k      3,831           0.2B
  Regional Manager  100k     383             -

...This would be an overhead of about 4.2%, compared to the effectively zero overhead which a Basic Income requires (all you need for BI is one-time-only verification of citizenship, and careful monitoring of when people die so that the payments stop. You don't need to employ millions of people to do that). So this would cost roughly $420M more than an equivalent Basic Income program, while simultaneously preventing 50M people from doing something more useful with their lives.

[ThomPete]

You cant live from a job that the government doesnt already consider worhthy of paying a salary for.

It doesnt work and never have. Denmark tried this too it does nothing cause it doesnt solve the basic problem.

There is not enough jobs for all of us and will increasingly be so.

BI is the best solution we know of and we should try it.

[scotchmi_st]

Basic Job will likely leave you little time to train in an area where you could be more productive for society. Basic Pay is designed to provide you the time to do that. Sure there has to be a bit of trust that you're going to not just sit on your arse, but very few people actually want to do that (despite what a lot of people think), and it's psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life.

A lot of the comments here also ignore a lot of the factors that Basic Pay would provide which aren't directly measurable- increases to areas such as science and the arts which, while not tied to anything concrete like GDP or a country's economy, are indisputedly important to society.

[eanzenberg]

False.

BI would not provide increases to science nor art. It would dilute them. I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition! There's a reason why only a tiny fraction of actors, musicians, and artists earn a living. That living is what society thinks of their art.

Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Note: A few years ago I was a graduate student (24k/yr living) in Boston who made time to play drums. You can express your art (or science) without a handout.

[llamataboot]

Funny, that $24k a year that allowed you to play drums (along side your graduate studies) is about in the range of what people generally propose for a basic income

[JoeAltmaier]

But the reality is that we don't NEED everybody to work, or soon won't. The comforts of life will become a civil right. What then? Old Puritan work ethic becomes obsolete. Any thoughts on 'right behavior' in a post-work economy?

[tripzilch]

> Further, plenty of people on social programs are quite content with sitting on their ass. And some deservedly so, due to true disabilities. An able-bodied adult has no moral right to income which they did not earn. That is theft from the truly deserving individuals who either were born with extreme hardships, or became disabled.

Trust me when I say that the truly deserving individuals with true disabilities do not want to sit on their asses, deservedly or not.

The part where it's "psychologically healthy to want to make the most of your life" holds just as much for them as for everybody (and it's arguably even more important for them). It doesn't take a very long time of sitting on your ass to realize this, either.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I get enough emails as it is from whacko's who think they've upturned Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or created some perpetual motion machine. If society valued these people's output they would be financially rewarded already. There's already incentives in present society, called capitalism and competition!

If you can't differentiate between capitalism and scientific peer-review as separate processes for separating wheat and chaff, why should I take your word on the ethics underlying fundamental economics, ie: that "he who does not work deserves not to eat"?

[ja30278]

Exactly so.

I don't understand why the 'Basic Job' idea doesn't get more traction. For all of the talk about a 'post work' world, I still see plenty of work that needs doing, every day.

[chongli]

Excellent! Give everyone a shovel. Half the people can dig the hole, the other half will fill it in again!

Seriously, make-work is a horrible idea and a gigantic waste of resources. Basic income frees people to live their lives and contribute to society in ways that are undervalued by the labour market such as writing, creating art and music or caring for children, the elderly or chronically ill.

How many people might choose to start a small business if they have the security of a basic income? It seems to me like a potentially staggering number of people.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing. There's a fundamental conceptual problem with it:

Imagine I, for whatever reason, accept a Basic Job from the government. The job is, by design, bad. I'd rather not do it. So my dream scenario is that I officially hold a Basic Job and draw its meager salary, but instead of doing whatever work it supposedly entails I sit at home and watch TV.

This scenario isn't just an improvement in my life -- it's also an improvement for everyone handling me! The work doesn't need to get done; it's only there as a penalty for me, to encourage me not to draw the Basic Salary if I don't really, truly need it. So when I save myself some effort by not showing up for work, I also save my handlers effort that might have gone into overseeing me. Just as it's easier for me to stay home, it's easier for them to pretend I didn't than to track whether or not I did anything. So overseeing Basic Job is conceptually pretty difficult.

I don't claim that this is more or less difficult to deal with than the problems of any other welfare system, but it is an obvious and fundamental flaw in the concept, and might help explain why it's hard for Basic Job to get traction. On a shallower level, the concept of "pay someone to dig a hole today and fill it in tomorrow" (a.k.a. The Basic Job Concept), has been the go-to example for exactly what we don't want government to do for a long, long time. That can also make it difficult to get traction.

[yummyfajitas]

Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. BJ is work that is not worth doing at current market prices. I.e., picking up garbage in the park might be worth $4/hour, but minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If we spend $7.25 more and get $4.00 worth of value out of it, we lost $3.25.

If we are already spending $7.25 on welfare/BI and getting nothing in return, we are losing $7.25. If we demand that recipients work for their money we lose only $3.25. As long as the BJ workers are not destructive, we lose less money than we otherwise would with welfare or a BI.

Also, the jobs need not be "dig a hole and fill it in" - they can also be "walk around town and find potholes to fill tomorrow" or "there is garbage on the streets, go clean it up". It's not as if we have a shortage of things that would be beneficial if we did them. They just might not be worth doing at current prices.

[dllthomas]

"Well, Basic Job is sort of by definition work that doesn't need doing."

Not at all. There are things that provide economic value that is hard to capture. Determining what those things are and how to value them is going to be messy, though.

[this_user]

This has been done in the German Democratic Republic. They had a "right to work" article in their constitution that was basically fully implemented. Almost everyone who could work except for older pupils and university students had a job. In fact, not working despite being able to do so was an offence punishable with up to two years in prison.

Arguably the only good thing that came of this was that equal pay for men and women was also assured by their constitution.

[3pt14159]

Basic Job is stupid because it leads to silliness like building bridges with hand labor instead of machines.

[yummyfajitas]

If labor is abundant and machines are scarce, why is this stupid?

[Tycho]

I think it's a sort of taboo idea because of Victorian work houses.

[jiggy2011]

Can you be fired from your basic job? What happens then?

[TrainedMonkey]

You are basically out of a job.

[nkoren]

Actually, your math is entirely wrong.

Let's use the same numbers as you: 300M people, $20k each, only 50M people who actually "need" it.

In the BI scenario, 250M people are paying for the cost of program (since the 50M who actually "need" it presumably can't pay). That's $6B / 250m = $24,000 per person. However, each of those people is also receiving $20,000 worth of BI. Therefore, the cost to them is $24,000 - $20,000 = $4,000 per person. $4000 * 250M = $1B -- exactly the same as your conditional benefits program, except now there's vastly less overhead and no poverty trap.

[eanzenberg]

How do you decide the "50M who actually 'need' it" with vastly less overhead? There is a cost to run the IRS and determine (correctly) peoples income.

Furthermore, a 4k tax on 250M of the U.S. could be crippling to a good chunk of them. If your true point is redistribution of wealth, our tax system already does that and can do it more. But that's a different discussion..

[nkoren]

You don't decide. The point of Basic Income is that it's unconditional and universal. If somebody can prove they're a citizen, they get the BI, no need to determine their income.

As for a $4k tax being "crippling to a good chunk of them" -- no, you misunderstand the nature of BI. If we're paying $20k worth of BI in this scenario, then the mean income should be about $40k (since a good level for BI -- in basically any economy -- is about 50% of the mean). We could then support a flat $20k/person BI with a flat 50% earned-income tax. This means that the payments and receipts, per person would look like this:

  Income    Tax   +BI    Net    Effective tax rate
  $0       -$0    $20k   $20k   N/A
  $10k     -$5k   $20k   $15k   N/A
  $20k     -$10k  $20k   $10k   N/A
  $30k     -$15k  $20k   $5k    N/A
  $40k     -$20k  $20k   $0     N/A
  $50k     -$25k  $20k  -$5k    10%
  $60k     -$30k  $20k  -$10k   15%
  ...
  $100k    -$50k  $20k  -$30k   30%
  ...
  $1,000k  -$500k $20k  -$490k  49%

As you can see, people making the mean income or less would make nothing at all. People making moderately more than the mean income would pay a little bit, but no more than they currently pay to support benefits programs. The only people paying a lot would be the people who could afford it.

[eanzenberg]

No.

Explain why after spending 10 years in school my tax burden should increase by 30k (making it an effective 60% rate not counting 10% sales tax in CA) to give to able bodied people who choose not to get off their ass. I guarantee you society is better off letting me keep what I earned rather than giving it to a completely untested individual. I didn't work my ass off for you.

[yungchin]

It's called "paying it forward". Assuming, of course, that some form of BI would be in place, you would have spent those 10 years in school supported by a BI. So paying those taxes, you're making sure that people just like you can afford to spend 10 years in school and become great and awesome too.

PS: I hardly ever meet any of those "able bodied people who choose not to get off their ass" - they mostly show up in discussions like these - and I suspect they're a tiny minority. Let's not adjust policies to punish that tiny minority if, in the process, everybody else gets punished too.

[dllthomas]

"(since a good level for BI -- in basically any economy -- is about 50% of the mean)."

How do you arrive at this?

[sitkack]

Someone needs to turn this into an animated chart. It looks like you are taking away someones first dollar earned?

[dllthomas]

"It looks like you are taking away someones first dollar earned?"

I don't see where you're getting that. Presuming the numbers haven't changed since you commented, it looks to me like taking away half of every dollar earned.

[chongli]

How do you decide the "50M who actually 'need' it" with vastly less overhead?

We already do this with income tax forms.

Furthermore, a 4k tax on 250M of the U.S. could be crippling to a good chunk of them. If your true point is redistribution of wealth, our tax system already does that and can do it more. But that's a different discussion..

That's what this is. It's very similar to Milton Friedman's negative income tax bracket.

[davmre]

Naturally you have to "raise taxes" (in a nominal sense) at the same time you add a basic income, so that the added income is cancelled out for middle-class and wealthy people, and the net amount of redistribution stays more or less constant.

It's still a big win, since you've taken all of the various benefits agencies and collapsed their roles into that of the IRS or equivalent tax agency, which has to exist anyway to fund other government functions.

[freefrancisco]

If it's really more efficient than the current system, it should be fundable from the existing entitlements. Just dismantle the programs, fire all the bureaucrats running them, and divert all these funds toward the basic income. If it requires another tax then it's not an alternative, it is an expansion of the welfare state.

[richardjordan]

No. It's not more net taxes. It's a change in the tax rate so the basic income is clawed back at the high end. Doesn't change tax out of pocket.

[31reasons]

Its like applying plaster to an uneven wall. The dents gets filled with plaster but the bumps stays at the same level! Its much better than giving tax breaks since you need income to begin with.

[chimeracoder]

Two things:

> Its much better than giving tax breaks since you need income to begin with.

1. There is a difference between refundable and non-refundable tax credits. A big misconception is that tax breaks only help those who already have income exceeding the size of the credit, which is not necessarily true.

Second,

> Its like applying plaster to an uneven wall. The dents gets filled with plaster but the bumps stays at the same level!

In this analogy, where is the plaster coming from? It can't just come from nowhere[0].

[0] ("Just print more" isn't the answer, because that increasing the money supply doesn't actually "create" money (in the colloquial sense) - it's just a redistribution method that redistributes by changing the relative value of outstanding debt.)

[yummyfajitas]

Back of the envelope calculation please - that will clarify your vague words and reveal many arithmetic errors (if such are present).

[msellout]

"In 2013, the total Social Security expenditures were $1.3 trillion, 8.4% of the $16.3 trillion GNP (2013) and 37% of the Federal expenditures of $3.684 trillion" (Wikipedia). Medicare adds another half billion, rapidly increasing.

We could get between $6k and $7k annually per citizen by swapping those plans for a basic income. If children don't count, we could bump that to maybe $10k. Obviously, this change would need to be taken gradually to not cause too much disruption.

To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes. Increasing consumption taxes would be fair. Since the flat credits is very progressive, it's OK to pay for it with a regressive sales or value-added tax.

[yummyfajitas]

To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes.

I'm glad we are in agreement that a BI will cost a lot more than the current targeted welfare state. (Or alternately will require a drastic cut in benefits for the current crop of non-workers.)

[BvS]

It costs more on a nominal basis but if implemented right nobody will have less money in their pocket even after taxes.

If you didn't earn any money before you will get what was spend on you before + the saved overhead (+ a lot of wasted time and hassle). If you made a lot of money before you will still get a free handout but you also have to pay higher taxes so in the end you should have about the same amount. Obviously it will not be exactly the same for everybody but that doesn't mean it will be less fair.

Besides the saved overhead another major advantage of a bi would be to streamline incentive. Currently it can happen that if you start earning money you will lose a lot of benefits. This can lead to an implicit tax rate of > 50% for very poor people and therefore disincentives work.

[polarix]

Why increase consumption taxes? Why add friction? Wouldn't it be better to tax the assets at rest -- real estate, property.

[tempestn]

Aren't income taxes a logical fit here? You would still have graduated tax brackets, so you wouldn't have an enormous cliff once you started earning, but all tax brackets could be increased such that the middle class end up about the same, and the poor are better off. With the added efficiencies described by the parent comment, this should even be possible without reducing net income to those in the higher brackets, but it might be desirable to do that to some extent as well for greater redistribution.

[ArkyBeagle]

It's arguably better to tax Ricardian rents - if you can.

[dojomouse]

You're assuming that the remaining $4trillion is lost. It's not. It goes to other people who will spend it on other things worth, in total, $4tril... even though some of them may need it less.

The benefit they derive from the increased flexibility that $20k could easily exceed $20k by itself - you've probably seen the research on how people make bad decisions when they are financially unstable. And all that benefit is raw positive.

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive. Simply giving them $20k doesn't count as a 'cost' in itself - it all comes full circle.

[yummyfajitas]

I don't understand. Can you provide a back of the envelope calculation to explain your thoughts?

For a BI to be bad from the perspective you're talking about it has to actively make people less productive.

You mean like a 10% reduction in work hours? https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

[thehenster]

It’s the redistribution that you’re missing.

300M * $20k does equal $6 trillion but it is returned to the tax payer who stumped up the $6 trillion.

The 50M who aren’t contributing tax represent an actual cost of $1 trillion. The remaining $5 trillion is redistributed.

250M people contribute $20k. 300M people receive $16.6k.

300M * $20k - $6 trillion == $0

[growupkids]

I'm sure you didn't mean this, but let's be clear the 6T is not returned to the tax payer that stumped it. Since this isn't generated wealth, just redistributed, it's a cost to someone. Someone's getting 20k, and someone's paying for it. And some people are going to be paying a lot more than 20k, and some people won't be paying in anything.

[thehenster]

The money does go back to the tax payers.. Its redistributed amongst the tax payers. Its pretty much the core concept.

You thought that I thought they just sent the cheques back in the post? That would be bizarre indeed!

"250M people contribute $20k. 300M people receive $16.6k."

[phaemon]

No, more work hours != more productivity. The very article you linked to illustrates that.

[ArkyBeagle]

What does "competitive" mean? Against what? More realistically, figure $20k to 15 million - much less trouble. A mere $0.3T :) But it'll go close to 100% to the Metric Formerly Known as M3 and dissipate.

My framework and Maslow-hammer is the PPST framework from Tyler Cowan by way of Arnold Kling - Patterns of Sustainable Substitution and Trade. In this, the bulls get bigger and the china shops get smaller; people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now.

I think (from interviewing) there's a strong element of laziness, narcissism and incredulous cognitive dissonance to this, but whatever. If we hire and they're good, then the story we told ourselves about how special we were fails.

The U6 gap since 2007 is real now for seven years. It harder every day to call it a blip.

If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive, the money flows back through the economy and doesn't harm anyone. The accounting, however, is horrendous. I don't have an answer for that.

[yummyfajitas]

"Competitive" means "against alternate policy proposals". For example, Basic Job/Employer of last resort, or the current welfare state.

...people don't have jobs for the reason that employers can't or won't figure out how to hire because business is too hard now.

People don't have jobs because they are unwilling to work at low wages. This is pretty well established empirically, is the foundation of Keynesian economics, and is even accepted by both Cowen and Kling.

Further evidence for this: US companies are still outsourcing and expanding overseas.

If you give dole money to people such that it does not drive them from doing something productive...

The little data we have about BI suggests it reduces productive work hours by about 10%. For comparison, the great recession resulted in a 1% drop. As usual in articles on this topic, original sources uncited.

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

[ArkyBeagle]

Agreed; sticky wages is also part of PSST, but the new thing is perceived fragility of potential hiring companies.

Overseas expansion could be any of a number of things besides wages, it's waning and it fails frequently. Something like the manufacturers aggregated through Alibaba seems different from setting up bespoke manufacturing overseas.

Thanks for the link.

[mberning]

Only about 200m people are over the age of 18 and 20k per person seems high. 200M at 10k per year is around 2 trillion. Seems doable if we are willing to scrap things like social security.

[yummyfajitas]

10k/year for 50m is 500b. Throw in 100% overhead and targeted welfare providing equivalent benefits is still half the price of BI.

Note that the current level of welfare is $20k/person so you are advocating a massive reduction of consumption for the welfare class. (I don't object, just pointing it out.)

[stormbrew]

It didn't say people on welfare get $20k/person. They don't get anywhere near that. That's how much the government spends to administrate giving them welfare (including managing means testing to prevent people from abusing it) as well as the welfare itself.

I'm pretty sure US welfare is somewhere around $500-900/mo, and if you get a job (thus, work towards becoming a 'productive member of society') you may lose it.

[yummyfajitas]

People on welfare (including section 8, food stamps, etc) do in fact get $20k/person.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs...

Consumption data agrees.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

[mcv]

The number of deserving people isn't small, it's large. It is very nearly everyone.

Unemployed people get something, disabled people get something, old people get something, and working get salary, pay taxes on them, get deductions or lower tax brackets, etc. All of that would be replaced by BI.

It's not just about saving overhead costs, it's also about making sure people always get ahead by working. Suppose you're on wellfare, but you might be able to work part-time against minimum income. That added income gets deducted from your wellfare and if it doesn't work out, you might not get it back. So you stand nothing to gain, and a lot to lose. Why even try? With BI, every additional hour you work, increases your income.

[ThomPete]

You have to factor a multitude of other things in.

Such as capital gains, tax deductions, very low corporate taxes, the actual control etc.

The overhead is many times more than you seem to indicate when it comes to targeted programs.

[drabiega]

That's not the cost of the program. The net cost of a BI is actually much lower than the net cost of the targeted program. The actual cost of the program is the expense of administration, how much resources are used by the government in running the program.

[msellout]

Consumer spending will increase and therefore also tax revenues. More importantly, we can cut other programs to recover the difference.

Edit: rough calculation in other comment

[growupkids]

Exactly how does consumer spending increase if it's just redistribution? And assuming it does, why is that good? What about consumer savings being reduced due to less net income for the earners?

I'm having trouble seeing how this could work. If gross income generated, not redistributed, doesn't change (this doesn't create more work completed, it just moves income to someone else). then how is new wealth generated? It seems like spending would likely be the same, if not be reduced due to friction and overhead which would reduce net income across the board (wealth redistribution isn't free, so if new wealth isn't generated, then net income seems like it must go down, and aggregate spending would also go down).

[yummyfajitas]

I can't see any plausible way that these numbers will even approach the ballpark of $5 trillion. Back of the envelope calculation please.

[thaumasiotes]

There's something very striking (to me) about your back-of-the-envelope numbers here.

Are we really endorsing the idea that one person in six should be on welfare?

[jiggy2011]

I'm not convinced that Basic income would necessarily deal with edge cases all that much better. A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want.

But there are problems in that not everyone can live off the same amount of money. This is especially true with disabled or very ill people who are the most likely to be unable to obtain employment. They also require more money to maintain the same living standard, often much more in the case of people who require full time care etc.

[stormbrew]

The government assistance for these situations is often not enough to live on as it is (at least where I live), so I'm not sure how moving to this would be a negative. Also consider how difficult it is for someone with a chronic illness to actually find and access the myriad of services that provide the support they need, and at the end of they day it's still usually not enough.

It would be a shame to not move to something better for those people simply because it isn't perfect.

[growupkids]

Additionally, the cost of living varies widely, for example, in the US. Between climate differences (it costs more to stay warm in Alaska in the winter than it does in Florida), logistical differences (fuel costs more in Hawaii than it does in Texas), to real estate costs (housing is more expensive in SF, CA than in Norfolk, VA), to transportation costs (parking in NY is more expensive than in Jacksonville, FL), etc.

So the amount of income necessary to survive is going to vary by location, sometimes substantially. So a universal income wouldn't be tenable either, as one dollar doesn't buy the same things everywhere. How would you calculate what that should be without market forces?

[Houshalter]

Well so what? If you are going to consume more of the economy's resources to choose to live in a more expensive place, then you should have to pay for it.

Conversely, why should we give less to people who live in more affordable places?

[aarkling]

I think the difference is it may be more expensive to live in a city but may still make sense because of the availability of jobs and higher income. With basic income the income aspect of choosing a place to live is weakened.

[cbhl]

I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools.

For the particular example of disabled or very ill people, universal government-sponsored health care might help, although that has its own side-effects that are perhaps undesirable. (I believe that people are more incentivized to do medical research in the US than in Canada, in part because Canada's nationalized health care encourages people to stick with existing, inexpensive treatments in most cases.)

[JoshTriplett]

> I suspect that if the US implemented basic income, people would still expect government-funding mandatory primary and high schools.

There's a local "maximum" in the policy evolution process here, due to the difficulty of changing umpteen things at once. I always vote against any new policy proposal that says "we're going to add this tax and remove this other one" unless both happen in the same bill, because otherwise the removal tends to not happen. (For instance, "replacing" an income tax with a sales tax in two steps can easily fail at step 2 and end up with both.)

[jgj]

In the mystical future world where a GBI has been implemented charity still exists, and much of the capital once dedicated to assisting those in poverty-absent-illness can now be directed to those who need help in addition to the GBI.

[jiggy2011]

But if charity were reliable enough to rely on for livelihood wouldn't it make sense to remove any form of welfare or basic income?

[jgj]

I think the reliability of charity in this case would increase as the number of people who need it decrease. I don't think we can rely on charity to solve everyone's financial woes, else said woes would already be solved. But when the percentage of people in need of charity grows smaller, the impact of the same pool of charity increases for those left in need.

[jiggy2011]

But isn't the point of BI that everyone has enough for their basic needs? It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).

[bryanlarsen]

There are plenty of people whose basic needs are substantially larger than the average citizen. For instance, many people need expensive motorized wheel chairs, which would be difficult to purchase on BI. Currently, the state provides motorized wheel chairs to many, but there are many stories of this program being abused. It's quite possible that a charity could step in here to supplement BI to make chairs affordable, and could do better and more efficient needs testing than the state.

[jgj]

> It would seem unfair at that point to tell some people try and get charity funding (which might dry up at any point).

This is already the status quo. Less people being reliant on charity is a good thing.

[bcheung]

According to Maslow's Hierarchy, at least as I interpret it, charity increases as an individual is able to meet their lower needs. How you go about getting more individuals to that level is a matter of debate that is difficult to give any definitive answers to.

[wycx]

And how many philanthropists practice charity by giving away money no questions asked?

[bcheung]

That's not a philanthropist. That's a fool!

[kaliblack]

> A simple basic income implies that you provide everybody with the same minimum income and they cut back on public services etc to the minimum since in theory people can now buy what they want.

I haven't seen the reduction in services implied anywhere. It may, however, be a reality when implemented, but the intention isn't simply to change how government funds are spent on the poor. Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.

[ahoy]

I have only ever heard basic income proposed as the former implementation, never the latter.

[bryanlarsen]

The two formulations are similar. If you just print money to give to everybody, you cause inflation, which is a tax on liquid wealth. The wealthy have ways to hedge against inflation, so it's basically a tax on the middle class.

[bcheung]

If the original argument proposes wealth distribution it would cause inflation and deflation at the same time. Inflation of lower end goods and services because the poor will have more money, and deflation in the higher end goods and services because the wealthy will have less. i.e., things get more expensive for the poor, and cheaper for the rich. ;)

If we are talking about printing money, it would be similar. The lower end goods and services would get more expensive and the higher end goods and services would stay about the same.

[msellout]

What are these magical ways to hedge against inflation that wealthy have access to and middle class don't? By definition, inflation equates to higher salaries for the middle class.

[bcheung]

Commodities, stocks, options, derivatives, and real estate are the most common. But I think they aren't limited to the wealthy per say. The wealthy just know much more about them and have higher percentages of their net worth in these types of things.

You can make money if the market goes up, you can make money if the market goes down, and you can make money if the market doesn't go anywhere.

[glomph]

Or you could raise taxes on the wealthy...

[ArkyBeagle]

"Just print money" does not cause unconditional inflation. It depends on initial conditions.

[whatevsbro]

> Generally, the aim is to redistribute wealth from the 'rich'.

What if they leave? Should people be punished for being rich?

[contingencies]

They are welcome to leave. Yes, they should be punished because society needs a disincentive for gross personal hoarding.

[growupkids]

Define hoarding.

[contingencies]

Fair point. Obviously an easy definition would be one that's fuzzy and increases with distance above the mean... very much like we have now for income tax, but instead for assets held.

[whatevsbro]

Do you realize that the more rich people leave, the fewer rich people there'll be left to plunder?

That, in turn, means that the remaining rich people would have to be taxed even harder to compensate for some of them leaving, which would then motivate even more of them to leave, and there you have a feedback loop that leads to the Basic Income party being over.

[dojomouse]

Basic income doesn't have to be all or nothing. You can supplement with targeted aid. Just should be able to get away with a lot less effort since you only need to cover the obvious extreme cases.

[damonpace]

This basic premise(MVP) exists on American Indian reservations, quasi-sovereign states. The BIA and the Tribe distributes an equal share of funds from either the government or gaming to each tribal member. As long as you can prove you are a tribe member, you get the funds.

Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live. I grew up surrounded by them in Arizona and went to school with many Native Americans in both primary & high school. It's not a great way to live and the reason so many are leaving the reservations.

[mistermann]

I suspect that situation has more variables involved than simply a minimum basic income.

[disc]

In fairness, don't most situations in life?

[msellout]

Most situations do not involve genocide.

[gwern]

> Feel free to visit any of these reservations and see the kind of lives they live.

And is this squalor & dysfunctionality entirely absent in reservations without significant revenue to distribute?

[patja]

I agree we would really benefit from a radical simplification our entitlements. Going through the simplified and unified but still arcane ACA application process personally brought this home for me, especially when I realized it is a system that can become a single entry point to multiple varied entitlement programs that formerly each had their own different qualification rules. Digging into it I saw that one of the goals behind it was to get more of the people who are entitled to Medicaid into Medicaid, the biggest barrier being that it takes a college degree and several days of dedicated work to navigate your way through the application process (I exaggerate, but not by much)

I also agree that we are decades away from sufficient public outrage to fuel the political machine to make these changes. Much like the flat tax, it makes sense to most people but will never happen due to the strong motivation of current rent-seekers to maintain the status quo.

While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"

[andrewfong]

> While I would much prefer a basic income to an increase in the minimum wage, I am torn by the fear that it would turn us into the world of Neal Stephenson's Anathem or Mike Judge's Idiocracy. I support Voltaire's assertion that "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need"

You could grant basic income only to people who are employed, similar to how the EITC is administered. This kills some of the administrative overhead advantages, but not all of it, as verification of employment is still less of an overhead than need verification (it's basically built into the income tax system by default). It's also more likely to fly politically.

Incidentally, this also suggests a feasible political path forward for implementing true basic income -- start with EITC expansion, then slowly roll back the employment verification.

[jes5199]

okay, I have a pitch for an MVP.

It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be bigger.

That's the whole algorithm.

I think it's self-balancing - if I, as a software developer, have the opportunity to withdraw a small sum, I won't bother - I don't need an extra $5 or $50 or $500, really. But to someone in a lower income bracket, that might be a significant amount of money.

[TaulantRamabaja]

incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance.

Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before.

To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be one centralized social network such as Facebook, simply because the cost of centralization is lower than that OF decentralization (think diaspora). However, the cost of switching to another service doesn't make sense to a single user, hence rent seeking becomes possible. Telcos are another good example. To change this paradime the cost of decentralization has to be significantly lower than the cost of centralization, even to each individual user.

So the real problem isn't that all people are not paying into such an insurance contract, rather that the rent seekers are able to seek out rent at increasing scale while contributing ever less to society. Any BI fund would logically need to be funded by taxing the rent seekers rather than normal people who's productivity gains normally don;t lead to rent seeking due to more liquid markets for employees.

Taxing land, monopolies, money (through demurrage rather than inflation) and adding all of those funds to BI would make a lot more sense. Think Norway Sovereign Fund or the Alaska Fund.

[jes5199]

While I agree with you that rent-seekers have more concentrated wealth than us merely overpaid people, I don't know how to voluntarily separate those people from their money.

[devdas]

Tax wealth and capital rather than income. You want to tax gain in capital rather than direct income (just reverse the capital gains and income tax rates, and gains are realised when stock prices go up, rather than when you sell if your stock values are above a certain small number).

[JoeAltmaier]

Sounds like 'vat' or something. Very European.

Tax codes don't make sense, because they get diddled every year to meet some Senator's (Lobbyist's) pet purpose. Stir and bake for 100 years, and we have the baroque mess we're in.

As somebody famous said, taxation is the art of 'getting the most feathers from the goose, with the least squawking'. Noting in there about making sense or being fair.

Taxing wealth is similar to the old idea of the property tax, used 100's of years ago to encourage working idle lands in the hands of useless absentee-landlord lords and ladies. Worked pretty good. Maybe its time to do the same for bank accounts, investments etc.

[TaulantRamabaja]

Land and money are most likely more efficiently taxable than almost anything else. Land doesn't move and property rights toward land are anyway only virtual claims within some sort of state ledger/database. Money as we know it exists only exclusively in the banking system which ultimately depends on central banking and centralized databases which can be taxed through demurrage. Demurrage has strong theoretical and practical support (1). So does Land value tax (2). Both have very positive anti-inflationary second order effects.

Other monopolies which can easily be taxed are natural resource extraction businesses.

Taxing modern monopolies such as Facebook or IP/Patent based businesses is a lot more tricky.

However, once you tax money, land, and monopolies, there is no sense in VAT, income tax, corporate tax or any of the other net-negative taxes. Minimum wage, to some extend even pregnancy leave would become obsolete. Laws protecting workers from getting fired could become more lose. This combined with some sort of UBI would extremely streamline the entire state apparatus and cut out the potential for power grabs by politicians. It would make business a lot more dynamic.

This scheme would also make business formation and entrepreneurship incredibly easy. Imagine 3 guys who have this great idea but can't just barricade themselves in a basement and built a product atm, with UBI they can. Once they have an actual company going they have easier access to capital because large capital holders have pressure to put it back into the economy and hold stocks rather than cash or land/property. Due to UBI more people have cash to actually buy their widget. The 3 founders could hire a lot easier because people can easily switch employers without the fear of red tape such as losing healthcare or some other nonsense. Hiring freelancers/consultants to help should also be a lot easier because there is going to be plenty of people out there who do it just for the projects and who don't have the pressure to get the next gig. Firing people would be easy because of the presumably easier employment laws. You might even be more competitive in the global marketplace because you just got rid of almost all taxes for the startup. You might only have to pay capital gains taxes on your stock gains, but you got a lot faster to that point without ANY risk. That's pretty much the wet dream of any VC, fast generation of companies, fast traction, access to further capital, easy hiring, super fast closure and multiples. Then the cycle begins again.

(1) http://www.lietaer.com/2010/03/the-worgl-experiment/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

[incomethax]

This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.

[growupkids]

I like this idea, it certainly makes it fair. If you support the idea, you pay for it. I suspect this would likely fail though, if you didn't have some disincentive for withdrawals then it only takes a tipping point of free loaders to bankrupt the system.

Still, I love the idea of making it's voluntary. It certainly would allow the BI proponents to put their money where the mouth is. I suspect what makes BI unlikely to succeed is when it's proposed as mandatory wealth redistribution, since it's never as far as I know been done successfully and the consequences of failure are potentially massive, the risks would seem to outweigh the hypothetical rewards.

Would a voluntary pay in system, you could prove it works or doesn't work without forcing anyone else to take the risk. I wonder if a local community could do this for it's residents?

[_Robbie]

Is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

My proposal is an e-currency with a time based demurrage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency)) fee. The demurrage fees would be paid out equally to all consumers. The demurrage fee pay outs would be equivalent to a basic income. Since it is an e-currency, it would be independent of governments.

Why would businesses accept such a currency? In the future wealth inequality will probably cause economic demand to shrink. By accepting these types of currencies, businesses could grow while remaining profitable.

[otoburb]

There's an altcoin based on time-based demurrage fee called Freicoin[1].

[1] http://freico.in/

[_Robbie]

I did see this. However, with Freicoin the demurrage fee is only used to pay the miners. In my proposal the fees would be paid back to all consumers.

[RoboTeddy]

> ...is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

I don't know, but technology like http://ethereum.org may make it possible to move some things from the realm of states into software. For example, given data feeds of births/deaths/retirements, it might be possible to implement a software contract for voluntary social security that pays contributing participants an annuity from retirement until death.

[TaulantRamabaja]

This would need an extremely robust real world identity system. If this was left to governments somehow, then the identity system itself would become the single point of failure and the main way to game the system through corruption. This is already the case in developing countries where deaths are purposely not recorded in order for the relatives to collect pensions and other contributions.

Building such an identity system algorithmically on top of a social network also doesn't seem to make sense because this can be cheated too.

One solution that might work would be to prove that you are a conscious person to a system like ethereum through a "Ghost Key" like in Ghost in the Shell. Assuming that there is a way to "fingerprint" each person's ghost, such as creating a hash of something that doesn't change, that could be like e key to such funds. I highly doubt that there is something constant in the human connectome though.

[saraid216]

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with? Or is this solely in the realm of public policy?

Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

[JoshTriplett]

> Scale it down? Seems pretty obvious to me. If you can make it happen in one city, you have a foothold.

It doesn't work scaled down, though. (I'd argue that it's a bug in existing policy voting and adoption frameworks that it can be enacted when scaled up, but that's a different argument.)

You can't sensibly enact a policy like this if it draws its funds from the taxes of people who aren't within the city in question (and it would be horribly unjust if you could). So you're talking about paying for a basic income within a city by adding a substantial tax to the residents of that city. That would result in a substantial motivation for any mobile business or person to relocate (and higher-income people are often more mobile), and for any new business to set up shop elsewhere.

Cities are small enough that it's entirely possible to relocate if your local government becomes too obtrusive. A policy like this only "works" if you have a scale large enough that the majority of people opposed to the policy are nonetheless forced into it by virtue of finding it less awful than moving.

The burden of moving to a new country is high enough to deter it for all but the most egregious issues; the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a country is far higher than the degree of bad policy required to motivate leaving a city or even a state. As a result, the average person will likely find themselves far less aligned with the policies of their country than their city or state.

[TheLegace]

But doesn't that also mean that the rich have more mobility to move to another country with much lower taxes or just hide them like they do now? Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion? Let alone the costs of lobbying (which must be expensive) and the negative costs from the consequences of said lobbying(Iraq War). Not to mention the costs of lost productivity due to monopolies(Comcast).

I guess the more important question is does it even make a difference no matter what you do. The rich will find some way to break down the system sooner or later. This seems exactly what happened in the last 30-40 years.

The answer doesn't seem to be financial, it's social. And maybe it will take an entire generation to suffer(somewhat comparable to the Greatest Generation) to truly appreciate being poor and disenfranchised.

[saraid216]

I can't answer the rest, but

> Are there even any estimates on how much money is lost due to tax evasion?

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

Googling also yields some results that ballpark in the same area.

[bcheung]

Check out the Sea Steading Institute. They are pushing towards colonizing the ocean and allow groups to form their own nations. If we can form tons of new nations to test out new ideas of government we will quickly learn what works and what doesn't.

[CamperBob2]

Mostly we'll learn what governments are better at taking over others.

[bcheung]

"There are no governments. Only corporations." ;)

[CamperBob2]

Or my favorite phrasing, "Any sufficiently dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government."

[bcheung]

I like that line. I'm stealing it.

[stcredzero]

So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

Generally, any communal institution either develops rules and mechanisms to prevent freeloading, or has an authority who acts to prevent such. Almost all of them succumb to a "Tragedy of the Commons" dynamic in terms of some aspect of quality of life.

That said, there are some institutions that are identified as being communal that last and even prosper somehow.

Many also cite things like the Cabrini Green projects as an example of how removing the stake someone has in society by guaranteeing their rent/income is somehow inherently dehumanizing. To fully address such a hypothesis, one would have to control for factors such as social class and social stigma attached to such benefits.

[bcheung]

The Sea Steading Institute aims to lower the barrier of entry to creating your own sovereign nation. One of the core ideas is that if we have lots of small nations people can do these experiments and find out.

[herokusaki]

How close are they to a "demo version"?

[zavi]

> So since this is HN... is there any way to get to an MVP without having a sovereign state to experiment with?

Seasteading might be an answer to your question.

[sitkack]

We could start be removing the complexity that is payouts and incentives from the government from taxation. The IRS should only be in charge of collecting taxes. Some other office, the Office of Government Payments would handle all monetary disbursements from the GOV. Getting money back for painting your garage white? Bought a solar powered riding lawn mower? All that stuff from the person to the biggest corporation would have to file the proper paperwork outlining why they deserve or qualify for a disbursement. As it currently stands taxation and disbursements / incentivization is conflated and thus hidden from view its breadth and complexity.

[yetanotherphd]

In Australia we have a single system, where the test for qualifying for welfare is almost entirely based on (1) total assets and (2) income. This disproves the theory that excessive complexity is inherent in welfare systems.

[bertil]

The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims (outside of records associated to a constantly used unique identifier) and the entitlements are significant. It works rather well there, but it generally comes with a pre-existing massive social pressure that prevents any abuse; Finland might be the exception to that social monitor (people really do anything and no one would care) but still has an administration with strong ‘socialist’ or equalitarian concerns. I’m embroiled myself in a weird administration imbroglio, and they have shined so far, but I’ll let you know.

More important than an isolated case in a jar, what you need to care about is immigration: any Southern European nationalist will decry your policy as a potential tsunami from Africa. The lack of tension between the oil-money-infused Norway and its neighbours are striking when you compare that to Irak and Kuwait; at best, they associate the higher-priced-better-quality Statoil gas station with Norwegian snobism (I didn’t notice any snobism).

The significant economic success of Finland seems to favor the model. It helps that their chosen field of specialty, video games, is a complex, creative endeavour where success is fleeting and hard to reproduce, revenues are spectacularly unbalanced and business models a constant struggle. This means that most of the ‘idle’ youngsters are actually creating something: playing and learning what makes games cool, or starting their own fan-art, mods, league, reprise… the stepping stones of creativity.

Same thing in more Southern countries: it seems to cost roughly the same to pay someone to stay at home and grow their garden rather than to pay an industrial conglomerate to stay and keep on hiring them. Job insurance is regularly described as the largest Angel fund.

The closest to an MVP you’ll get might be a small state, say Iceland, that has something similar already. The real issue is not product, but interoperability: what happens when you have migrants, double-nationals, and is it safe to end up with a generation that grew up not knowing anyone who works at all?

You might consider a different form of it, with some voluntary civil service to teach basic skills (say, open to elderly and handicapped, substitutable with pregnancy or child-rearing) and make that life revenue a retirement from service, or stipend.

[contingencies]

The closest example of something similar that I can think of are Nordic countries: there is very little verification on your claims

Late last year I was in Denmark, where ATMs are rare and plastic is king. I was reliably informed that the government didn't like people using cash and that as a business owner if you used more than a few thousand kroner per year you were audited. Furthermore, when you put in tax returns the government would cross-reference it routinely with your mobile phone location .. without a warrant.

The upshot is this: sure, you can have a nanny-state utopia, but it means totalitarianism.

[bertil]

Use a few [hundred dollars] -- for what?

[contingencies]

I dunno, something liberating and non government approved, like binge recreational drug consumption or anonymous object/service acquisition?

[bertil]

Oh, for unjustified expenses? I pass those as personal expenses, and get they out of my corporate accounts.

Sounds tight, but Denmark has a history of corporate corruption in the 70-80s they are trying to curb.

More importantly, not sure how that is related to individual benefits; on the contrary: seems like they are focusing on tax dodging.

[contingencies]

It's related because if the price you pay for fuzzy utopian governance with near-total compliance is totalitarianism, it's not worth it. Further, if you're setting up paralegal business flows in corporations to avoid personal tracking, then it's but an illustration of the same.

[intortus]

Something like this could work:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm

Actually, it couldn't, except maybe for a small population. The trick is convincing a local government with major poverty issues to take a risk it probably doesn't think it can afford.

[hyp0]

> a sovereign state to experiment with?

some scandinavian countries are close to this, in some respects. some oil countries too

some native peoples, within nations, also (tho other issues complicate it)

[pgeorgi]

some MVPs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome in Canada

http://www.socialjustice.ie/content/basic-income-schemes-28-... report on all kinds of experiments in Africa