[JonFish85]

Once people saw the cost of the program, I think it would cause a great deal of outrage. I've done the back-of-the-envelope math here on HN several times, so I don't really care to do it again, but essentially it would dwarf our current budget (which is already spending beyond income).

The cost is enormous. I believe if you taxed everyone whose net worth is over $1b at a 100% rate, you could pay for this program for just under 2 years.

And if you're talking about "everyone gets the same amount", remember that you have to collect it back, so you have the overhead of giving a person $1 just to collect it back again.

[minthd]

The key for this to be possible is a big reduction in the cost of living. Robots,automation and other tech , combined with the right regulations, could possible reduce cost of living by 80%-90%. Under those assumptions, won't basic income become possible ?

[refurb]

reduce cost of living by 80%-90%

Relatively speaking, our cost of living has already been reduced by 80-90% since the late 1800's. The problem is, wealth is relative, not absolute.

[minthd]

True, but given no other job, decent living conditions(but not being rich) plus lots of free time won't be such a bad deal for many.

[frobozz]

Have you factored in the reduction in cost from the removal of means-testing and other red tape? If it starts at the same level as current unemployment benefits, and the income tax threshold is lowered by the same amount, then it would be cheaper.

[JonFish85]

Here's the copy-paste of my post a couple of months ago:

Let's do some back of the envelope math here.

316 million Americans, at a $30k/year money sample works out to be $9 trillion dollars a year.

The budget that Obama just proposed is $4 trillion dollars (and that has no chance of getting implemented in full). Even if we say you can cut half of that out (Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc), let's call it $2 trillion dollars.

So we need $11 trillion dollars of tax money to fund this. The total net worth of US private people is $67 trillion or so[1]. The aggregate net worth of the top 400 people in the USA is $2.3 trillion[2]. You could take all of their money, and still not even come close to paying for the program for ONE YEAR.

At that point, you start having to come down hard on the upper middle class. The top 25% owns roughly 73% of the wealth in the country, or ~$48 trillion. If you tax their NET WORTH at 25%, you could fund the program for a year.

Pretty quickly you're going to run into a situation where you're cutting a check to everyone, then collecting the money (and more) back in taxes. And in this case, it's terribly inefficient.

On a small scale, a program like this probably works well. On a large scale, it would be a disaster.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_Unite.... [2] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/

[chimprich]

Where did you get the figure of $30k/person from? My understanding of basic income is that you'd get only a very, well, basic level of income from it somewhat equivalent to basic unemployment benefits now. In the UK you get something like £65 JSA + £70 Housing Benefit a week which works out something like $10k/year. That's $3 trillion according to your figures[1], or a total budget of $5 trillion. That's a substantial increase to be sure and would be a massive social change but rather more feasible to fund.

[1] In reality you presumably don't pay a full amount to minors.

[JoeAltmaier]

Actually printing money is pretty cheap. The issue isn't the imaginary points; its the goods and services. Can we produce what people want and need, without them working in factories? I think that answer is Yes.

[zanny]

This is something that people against basic income fail to acknowledge, that basic income is not a strict expense. It is redistribution. You cannot just line item it as a tax expense because if you implement it properly (automated, no bureaucracy, no middle men - best done by detaching the funding and payout) you are effectively adding your 1k or whatever a month per person right back into the economy.

And for most people, the stimulus of spending 1k vastly eclipses the recession of a billionaire losing 1k. The market pressure of demand by those who had none would generate so much economic growth it offsets a huge portion of the tax "cost" of basic income.

The real cost is not the figure in how much you take to give back. It is the opportunity cost - how much potential growth is lost depressing the rich in relation to how much growth is generated stimulating the poor.

And almost every economic report in history shows that is always a positive correlation. That the richer and more equal you make a society the more prosperous it is.

I think HN is a great reflection of that. SV is awash in venture capital, people are getting millions thrown at the most stupid ideas, because we are economically out of sync in this country, where the elites have too much and the masses have too little. This means that the rich are throwing money at random at things hoping to find new ways to get money out of the masses, but when the masses have so little they generate so little market pressure its impossible to gage what they want.

Likewise, you could have the inverse problem - where the masses have huge demand for things, but there is no venture capital left to kickstart meeting that demand. But honestly that sounds completely ridiculous today - in the age of the Internet I see no reason a wholly wealth-equal society could not just kickstart their own VC, because the only difference between one million people giving a dollar and one person giving a million dollars is the immediacy of your responsibility - your VC backer today is a lot more personal than a million funders, but I think Kickstarter and similar projects have shown how the model and work and fail.

But yes, if you talk about universal basic income / citizens dividend / negative income tax / etc in the wrong way, you will trigger all these culturally instinctual emotional responses in people against it.

But it is not like the military, or medicare (or NHS), where pretty much that "cost" is the cost. You spend money on something and hope for the benefits - non-monetary - to outweigh the expenses. In the later case you are hoping that taking care of your people is worth it over making them fend for themselves, but you are actually paying that bill with tax dollars.

Meanwhile, other projects like social security and UBI are just monetary redistribution. SS is much more inefficient than a well implemented UBI, but a huge portion of the money going into that program is redistribution. So you cannot talk about them as these black hole money traps when they are not, unless of course you are the opponent to their implementation.