I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say.
But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe's twelfth "my car broke down" case of the year?
Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help.
That's where family and charity hopefully take over.
At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing guarantee" fund.... and then we've just recreated the existing system.
That's the best argument against BI I've heard, and one I'd love to hear rebuttals to.
You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian. The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger. The liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size.
As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI.
Personally I believe the liberal position has both moral and practical superiority. It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later.
>> "The liberal would prefer to keep universal healthcare and food programs and put cash on top, making the total distribution to the poor larger."
I'd definitely say I look at it from a liberal (non-libertarian perspective) but I don't agree with your statement. I believe universal, free health care should be available but not a food program. The money you get as your BI should cover basic living requirements - rent, food, clothing, heat. I come from a country which has free health care (NHS) which I think should remain in place. If citizens had no choice but to pay for health care then the BI should be higher to cover that cost (although I think cost of health care would rise and people would end up screwed - hence why we should have a free system). So put simply your BI should be enough for you to live 'comfortably'. That doesn't mean with a nice TV and steak for dinner every night - it means clean, warm shelter, healthy home cooked meals, adequate health care etc. The essentials for living. If you want anything more you can work. We're putting more trust in people by giving them the money without any conditions on it but I believe if there aren't extra safety nets and BI is equal to or greater than current welfare payments people will learn quickly. Their financial position doesn't change, just the trust put in them.
Health care is a fundamentally different kind of expense. Housing, food, clothing, basic necessities are pretty stable expenses in the short run. An income of a particular size could be judged to be more or less sufficient for the needs of that expense or not.
Healthcare is a lottery. If you're 30 years old, your healthcare needs for the year might be $0 or $1,000,000. Trying to make basic income cover that doesn't make sense.
Healthcare for an individual is a lottery. For a population, it generally isn't. In other words, the total expense to provide healthcare for everybody is a pretty stable expense, which is why it makes more sense to handle at the national level, with the individuals who 'lose' the health lottery being subsidized by those who do not.
The common complaint I've seen against this (aside from general complaints against redistribution) is that it forces the general populace to pay for the poor health choices of smokers and other such bad habits. I think this is a relatively minor issue, but if necessary, penalty taxes/fees can alleviate the concerns of people legitimately bothered by this.
A real lottery for a population isn't "a lottery" in that sense either. The lottery business is reliable just like the health insurance business and for the same reason.
The thing about having the government pay for healthcare at the national level is that it would also incentivize prevention of diseases, as a way to cut costs over the long term. At least that's what's supposed to happen without too strong Big Pharma lobbying that would prefer the population to be as sick as possible.
How does that happen? Doesn't this imply government interference in people's lives (eat this, eat that, exercise etc.,)? Given that such advice is frequently shown to be wrong, this is problematic.
The NHS doesn't seem to incentivize prevention of diabetes in the UK. To quote 'UK Diabetes': "Diabetes is the fastest growing health threat of our times and an urgent public health issue. Since 1996, the number of people living with diabetes has more than doubled. If nothing changes, it is estimated that over five million people in the UK will have diabetes.". This disease largely results from personal choices often made on the basis of misleading information.
Just keep in mind that we will likely never reach the ideal balance between the voice of the people and megaphone of money.
The impact of lobbyists and money is a necessary consideration in any discussion of political solutions to problems.
> I think this is a relatively minor issue, but if necessary, penalty taxes/fees can alleviate the concerns of people legitimately bothered by this.
It is not minor at all. Depending on how you look at it, smoking either costs the health care industry billions (in treatment of the living) or saves them billions (on premature death). Compound this by: diet, exercise, stress, and socialization problems and you see that the lottery has a lot of knobs and buttons, most of which will only be effective if people get effective health care their entire life.
>Third, Collins and Lapsley estimate the net costs of smoking, taking into account both those costs that are made greater and those that are reduced because of current and past tobacco use. For example, smoking increases some health care costs because of the higher prevalence of diseases caused by smoking (in smokers and ex-smokers who are still alive). These are the gross health care costs attributable to smoking. However, certain other health care costs are lower than they otherwise would be because of the premature deaths of many people who smoked over the past 40 years. These people did not live to use health care that they otherwise would have, so Collins and Lapsley subtract the costs that would have been incurred from the gross health care costs attributable to smoking in order to estimate the net cost. Similarly, in terms of labour (production) costs first costs that are made greater by smoking are estimated. For example, the time spent undertaking domestic duties because a home-maker is ill or has died prematurely is costed assuming domestic help will be hired. Then, savings due to reduced consumption—for example, household spending on food and clothing—are subtracted because these costs will be lower when there are fewer people in the household as a result of smokers dying earlier.
>Collins and Lapsley estimated that in 2004–05 the total cost of smoking in Australia was $31.5 billion
That would be an interesting analysis: savings of premature deaths from smoking vs long terms costs of people that smoke and don't die and costs of treating those early deaths before they die. Intuition says the costs probably outweigh the benefits there. Even so it feels pretty macabre (and species threatening at the extreme [1]) to consider someone dying before they need medical care a savings.
[1] Considering killing someone before they're born saves the cost of them and any children they would statistically have. So if we wiped out everyone we'd save all the money ever spent on healthcare.
The high taxes for cigarettes (and similarly alcohol) should also be taken into account when considering net gains/losses. According to this [1] in the uk at least the taxes more than cover it for tobacco
Here in the US the taxes are much lower for a large portion of the country [1] so it probably doesn't come out so much in favor. Though long term health care is also more expensive here so it might all come out as even or similar enough.
It creates enormous social pressure to increase cigarette and alcohol taxes. In Canada both are quite high and the general population supports it due to the public healthcare burdens.
For health issues I think this type of pressure is a positive social force.
How is [1] distinct from rational control of population (eg birth control by default), which will presumably be necessary to avoid food and resource waste (or war/starvation)? Health care seems to be just another factor affecting population cap.
[1] Differs from normal population control in it's extreme application of reducing costs by any means. Also population control has additional concerns beyond just reducing costs by not having people to deal with like sustainability of resource consumption and to me there's a large difference between a person never being born and dying early. Really my [1] wasn't meant to be seriously at all.
Another way to think about this is if a person comes into existence, then BI demands their immediate universal right to the resources to sustain their life comfortably without any contribution from that body.
So really, those who multiply the fastest win the resource war of the future? Or having kids is somehow constrained now through other hoops, like a "procreation license."
> Or having kids is somehow constrained now through other hoops, like a "procreation license."
Possibly, though better educated and better off people tend to have fewer children so there are other ways to limit population beyond strict China or Ender's Game style limits.
Or maybe asteroid mining will finally break and crash the whole materials economy making everything but space, food, and water extremely cheap.
My point is this: universal BI requires some level of population control (to prevent poverty and misery), and eventually some level of reproductive planning.
Really we'll need either population control or (more likely and) to drastically limit consumption (or the impact of it maybe more closed cycle recycling) with or without BI.
> The common complaint I've seen against this (aside from general complaints against redistribution) is that it forces the general populace to pay for the poor health choices of smokers and other such bad habits.
If you want your 21st century healthcare, you also gotta let go of outdated notions such as that addiction is a "poor health choice" (seriously kind of makes me angry typing that).
> For a population, it generally isn't. In other words, the total expense to provide healthcare for everybody is a pretty stable expense.
The one does not follow from the other. Just because it's predictable does not mean it's stable: you can modulate demand by, for example, making people jump through bureaucratic hoops or wait in long queues to get care.
> The one does not follow from the other. Just because it's predictable does not mean it's stable: you can modulate demand by, for example, making people jump through bureaucratic hoops or wait in long queues to get care.
...as we have seen in far too many countries with universal healthcare (leading those with the means to seek healthcare from other, more market-driven systems...which in turn leads to those without the means to receiving sub-standard care, or quality care subject to bureaucracy and long queues.)
In short, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. (But this is quite the tangent from the BI discussion - wherever your opinion falls on the matter, universal healthcare is an entirely different thing indeed.)
It's a lottery at most ages. Age 39 health care costs: $0. Age 40 health care costs: $45,000. Due to a single incident of slipping and falling on an icy sidewalk. I carry insurance because (1) you never know when something big might happen and (2) I have to just in case the Republicans ever get their wish to "repeal Obamacare" and suddenly my kidney donation to my dad becomes a pre-existing condition again.
#1 is a legit reason for insurance. I'm having a hard time with #2 though. You elected to have a condition that others might have to eventually pay for. Now this was an extension of your dad's condition, so really his insurance company (pool) should pay for your condition's expenses, but with the help of Obamacare, all insurance companies are going to share in these expenses and raise their rates, and they can raise the rates more than their actual costs, because with all the new regulations, how many plans can you really choose from? So we now see healthcare providers laughing all the way to the bank, and a new form of guaranteed income for the insurance workforce. #1 and #2 shouldn't be in the same system. That's what needs to be repealed.
The rules around "pre-existing conditions" are completely asinine. Under the old rules that Republicans would like to go back to, I'm covered as long as I don't have any period that I didn't have insurance since donating the kidney. However, if I temporarily lose health insurance and then get health insurance again, that kidney donation 16 years ago magically becomes a pre-existing condition again for a period of multiple years. Even though nothing at all happened in that short period I went without health insurance.
The kicker is, health insurance companies will use any pre-existing condition to get out of paying for just about everything. So, for example, if I wound up getting poly-cystic kidney disease, my insurance company would use the fact that I donated a kidney as a pre-existing condition to get out of paying for it. Even though it's completely unrelated and can't cause PKD. It's an out in their mind and they're going to take it.
Health insurance and medical care in the US is absurdly corrupt. That's why I wasn't allowed to leave the hospital without buying a walking boot from their provider. And their provider billed my insurance company $700. And the insurance company paid them $400. And then the provider billed me $100 and threatened to send me to collections if I didn't pay them. All for a walking boot that didn't fit, that I didn't use, and that I could have purchased from Amazon.com for $53 with free shipping.
> but with the help of Obamacare, all insurance companies are going to share in these expenses and raise their rates, and they can raise the rates more than their actual costs
Only if they are below the maximum premium profit-to-cost ratio (20/80), otherwise, they are going to have to refund the excess anyway, due to other provisions of the ACA.
I really think the MLR cap was the biggest improvement Obamacare brought. It means keeping a genuinely expensive patient might mean your shareholders get to take home more money, so the incentive is "keep their business" rather than "treat them well enough that they can't successfully sue you for more than you'd have spent on them anyway."
Except that, on the whole, an individual in the US who 'loses' that lottery is going to cost themselves/their insurance significantly more than an identical individual in another country with the exact same condition, due to multiple levels of negotiation, backroom dealing, 'in-network', overcharges, etc.
That 30 year old individual with the $1m healthcare bill for the year in a for-profit system might well have only cost a public system (e.g. in Canada) $200k for the same standard of care, but with less additional financial stress impacting their ability to recover from their illness, and with no bills, phone calls, rejections, negotiations, and arguments after the fact.
It's just another example of how a uniform, public system works better.
Disagree. I had a valve replaced, and researched extensively what my experience was like vs. that in other countries. I received an unquestionably higher standard of care. I had my choice of valve, doctor, hospital, I had nearly zero wait (a few weeks from diagnosis to surgery, and only because I asked for the time -- in my circumstance there was a double digit chance of death, and I needed to ... process), and the nursing care that I received after surgery in the ICU was literally one-on-one - there was a nurse assigned to me. I had a bed that massaged and hammered the goop out of my lungs, I had tasty food (when I could eat again), and I had some say in when I would be discharged. The only thing that wasn't absolutely first-class was that I had a shared room with two beds post-ICU, but even that's becoming uncommon in the US.
After reading on the experiences of people from European countries and Canada in the 'OMG I had a valve replaced' forum (yes, there's a site just for that -- valvereplacement.org), the level of care that I received was significantly better than what is typical of public health systems.
Oh, and last week I needed to see the doc for a sore throat, and I was in the same day. Queues are a regular thing in public systems.
I think there are a lot of data points missing in this anecdote.
What do you pay for health insurance? How many people in the lower levels of society could afford to pay what you pay for healthcare? Do you have an employer that provides you with healthcare benefits?
I agree that healthcare in many countries could be greatly improved, but at least in many of those systems you could just walk into an hospital to start the process.
My employer offers a few options for health insurance. At the time I was a young and healthy 29 year old (or so I thought) so I was enrolled in the low cost high deductible option. It costs less than $200/month between both the employer and employee portion of the contribution for that plan today -- at the time (in 2009), it was less than $150/month, but our costs went up significantly with the advent of Obamacare. Total medical bill came to about $350k, down to $250k with insurance co's negotiate rates, of which I was responsible for approximately $5k. I was sitting on a pile of cashed earmarked for a mortgage downpayment at the time ... so I didn't have to go into debt over it, but even if I had, for most people $5k isn't a bankruptcy event type debt.
For a significant number of Americans, a $5k bill might as well be a $200k bill. A lot of people are living month-to-month on far less, and I wouldn't be surprised if most people couldn't actually afford that, or couldn't even manage to acquire $5k in debt, let alone pay it off.
The reality is that you're in a privileged position, and it may not seem like it to you but there are a huge number of people out there for whom your situation would be effectively a bankruptcy trigger. And that's even assuming that their company lets them off work long enough to get treatment and recovery, which, in at-will states, doesn't seem like a thing that's likely to happen for a lot of the working-class.
I'm from Europe and I know of a lot of people who wouldn't be able to front a $5K bill. With the US system I would still think there are many who would fall below that line as well. Free healthcare as exists in some european countries actually helps those people.
More anecdotes: every single urgent care center I visited is 2hr+ wait; then I opened my Blue Shield CA online doctor registry and called some — do not accept new patients or available in a month.
For rich people/folks with wonderful insurances the other countries with public healthcare have private care in private hospitals, and it's of the same class — with one-on-one nurses and good food.
Sure, but, like, changing the fundamental cost structure of our health care system seems like a pretty big add to the already absurdly big policy change of a basic income.
(Which is not to say that I disagree with you, though I do think that there are actually three different cost categories of health care:
1. Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs.
2. One-time catastrophes, like "I broke my arm" or "I got pneumonia." Probably best dealt with as insurance.
3. Long-term or lifelong large expenses, like "I have HIV" or "I have MS." Probably best dealt with as a government program.
But then you'll have a lot of problems with the boundary cases.)
Just want to point out that making routine/preventative care an out-of-pocket cost is probably one of the worst things you can do. I expect there's a reason many companies emphasize and encourage their employees take advantage of 100% free preventive care under their insurance plans. You can save a ton of money later by catching and treating issues early, and even a small personal cost can encourage people to ignore warning signs and not seek aid until the problem has become severe and expensive.
Yeah, this is deeply off-topic, but my reading of the evidence is that preventative or diagnostic care is typically not cost-effective or even outcome-enhancing, with a few specific exceptions like vaccinations.
I have heard this as well, but I think the point still stands. Things like annual physical's might not be a net positive, but you don't want to deter people from going to the doctor when they think something could be wrong.
Interesting. I'd love to see support for this view. Everything I've heard suggests the opposite. Especially if you consider worker productivity in addition to healthcare costs.
It's a complex subject, and a few articles aren't the final word one way or the other. My opinion is based on various things I've read over the past couple of decades (most of which I can't summon up right now) and conversations with various medical professionals in my family and social circle, and my overall worldview (as anyone's must be).
Ok, this is interesting. Some of this fits my intuitions, and some was a surprise to me, so yes, this does modify my view, but only slightly.
It seems there are preventative measures that are cost effective, and there are others that are not. So really, this indicates a need to determine a threshold. Perhaps we determine that we can afford to pay up to $50,000 per QALY, and cover any care that falls within that limit. So, we'd have coverage based on its efficiency rather than whether it is considered preventative or treatment or maintenance. The idea being to get the maximum amount of healthy years of life out of whatever amount of money we as society are willing to put toward healthcare. This could also be extended to programs outside of direct care, like some of those articles suggest, which encourage and support healthy activity in a way that still falls within the $/QALY target.
Of course, I expect it would be a bear to fairly study every possible treatment and program to determine its efficiency, especially factoring in a changing environment which is bound to change the efficiency of any given treatment from year to year.
Still, at a minimum, we should be grabbing those low-hanging fruits, where we can gain healthy years for a very low cost.
I'm going to say this because I'm in a similar situation now.
For weeks, I've been having pains in my chest, back and sides. I know for sure something is wrong. And I fear I may be dying.
But being unsure where my next meal will come from, I can't even visit a clinic to get a test done.
I keep praying to get some money so I can go check myself before I leave my young family without a caregiver.
So yes, whatever you guys argue here today. Make sure people like me in future can be cared for. And that they don't have to worry about food, shelter, Healthcare.
However, that small personal costs may very well help not fill up a queue to the doctor for mundane, trivial crap that would have gone away in a day or two. Care quality is improved when the doctors are less stressed and can spend more time with their patients.
Free-as-in-beer health care ensure more people going to the doctor for more crap, reducing availability and quality for the average person.
I expect there's a reason many companies emphasize and encourage their employees take advantage of 100% free preventive care under their insurance plans.
Yeah, it is called brainwashing. I worked in insurance and was all tickled to see them offering "wellness" benefits. I was all "Oh, yay, the world is turning into a better and more clued place!" Then I went to the meetings. These were purely a sales gimmick. That's it.
You encourage people to go to their annual check up and they feel like you actually care. It breeds employee loyalty. It mostly does very little for actual health outcomes. If you actually want better health, you are better off promoting exercise, healthy eating, sanitation, etc. in place of preventive medical screenings.
> 1. Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs.
This is a pretty terrible idea. Even programs in the current day that are trying to make consumers feel their healthcare costs (like HSAs and their required high-deductible PPO plans) often or always cover preventative care at 100%.
Preventative care is precisely the kind of care that people are most likely to skip to save on some money, and at the system-level this just means much more costly healthcare. Regardless of how you structure your healthcare system, increasing the cost of the actual care itself is a horrible idea.
> Sure, but, like, changing the fundamental cost structure of our health care system seems like a pretty big add to the already absurdly big policy change of a basic income.
We already have a national individual mandate for health insurance with specific coverage rules which has made decisions about this; essentially, a mature BI would cover expected out-of-pocket costs plus insurance premiums in that system.
(That's not to say further reform of that system isn't possible or desirable, with or without BI, just that, given the existing system, there seems to be a fairly natural way that healthcare within that system fits into BI.)
Sorry, I misunderstood your previous comment to mean that you thought we should go to an India-like "out of pocket" system plus (optional) health insurance to handle catastrophic costs. Rereading, your intent is clear.
(Not sure why I jumped to that conclusion, except that perhaps a basic income system appeals to the same economic minimalism that an out-of-pocket health cost system does.)
> Routine/preventative/minor care. Probably best dealt with as out-of-pocket costs.
This seems like a terrible idea. If someone, for example, notices a new mole, they are much less likely to get it checked out if it is an out-of-pocket expense. Obviously, most of the time it'll be fine, but it could also be skin cancer that was easily treatable but has now metastasised and will be hugely expensive to treat.
I would suggest the idea of private insurance is actually completely non-functional without such heavy regulation that you might as well just institute public provision — which also has the benefit that it does not heavily incentivize over-provision.
With a competitive insurance market, you charge people a premium related to their expected healthcare costs. Some people have chronic diseases, and their expected healthcare costs are way beyond what they can likely afford.
However you regulate, insurance companies will always try to find a way to cream off the lowest risk customers to offer them the cheapest deal, progressively chipping away at the idea of collective insurance until it breaks.
Private health insurance is broken not only in practice but also in theory.
For sure - it's kind of absurd because healthcare costs are an inevitability.
With car and home insurance, the products can go their entire lifecycle without burning down, being robbed, or smashing into a tree.
With healthcare, a person is going to need it, and it incapacitates them when they don't get it. Personally I'm for treating healthcare as we treat most regional monopolies that everyone needs - make it a public utility. You'll need healthcare just like you'll need water and electricity.
> With healthcare, a person is going to need it [...]
Not really, at least not at the current stage of technology.
During most of your life, healthcare is more like a lottery, ie you might never need it.
When you are old, something will eventually get you. And a lot of health care costs are spend on these end-of-life conditions. Alas, our massive spending at the end doesn't actually help very much: they mostly give you a few more month of suffering. (For things like cancer etc.)
For a lot of people hospice care is both cheaper and provides a better quality of life. (Some in-law of mine went from hospital care to hospice care when the cancer treatments got worse than the disease.)
So you're saying that you don't eventually need healthcare, except for when everyone needs it then it's the most expensive?
That's like saying you don't really need electricity until later in the day, when it's more in demand for everyone. Should we treat electricity use as a lottery?
In fact, people should be using healthcare more, as a preventative measure (for reasons you just said), but because we treat it like car accidents and house fires and lotteries it's stuck in remedial mode.
>When faced with a terminal illness, medical professionals, who know the limits of modern medicine, often opt out of life-prolonging treatment. An American doctor explains why the best death can be the least medicated – and the art of dying peacefully, at home
To be clear, there are a few different kinds of health care along multiple dimensions, like
- price
- expected mean utility (as measured in quality adjusted life-years gained)
- variance of utility (which I am ignoring here)
I am saying that at current state of technology, if we exclude the expensive stuff with near zero or even negative utility, the remaining demand for big items fits an insurance model rather well.
Yes, I agree that we should probably do more preventive interventions---like exercise, decent nutrition, vaccinations, etc. These are mostly cheap.
And even though they are good for people already, the insurance company might very well decide to just pay for them (and perhaps even pay people extra on top with discounts etcs to nudge them even more) to save itself money in the long run.
EDIT: There's of course also expensive treatments that provide a lot of quality adjusted life years, but the need for these are more like a lottery. (Eg treatment after a car accident or massive burn, or certain treatable cancers.)
So why not explicitly pass a subsidy (e.g. through the tax code) for the chronically ill? Disguising such transfers through regulatory costs is both inefficient and dishonest. It's also very unclear whether society would choose to subsidize all sick people. For example, those who are sick and rich enough to afford their insurance premiums (or who were lucky enough to obtain long-term coverage before they got an expensive medical condition, so their premiums are low), might not merit such transfers. If women have higher expected lifetime health costs due to pregnancy-related care, society might or might not want to have healthcare-related subsidies that amount to a transfer payment from men to women.
The proper way to make these sorts of decisions is by passing laws that make the transfer payments explicit, not disguising them in byzantine insurance regulations.
The system that exists now in the US is broken and already exactly what is described.
Those with money pay too much for insurance because those without insurance are only covered at the last stages, when it becomes inhumane (by anyone's definition) to deny them care (which is also the most drastic and expensive level of care for a problem) which is then 'written off' and padded in to the 'prices' asked for other services.
A LOT of medical costs are actually sunk fixed op-ex. Big expensive machines that cost deferentially little to use or not (but always coast a lot to have the option of using), drugs and other supplies that have shelf lifes, etc.
Labwork presently requires a lot of humans, but much of it could also be converted to automation and human review, lowering the per unit cost; if there were incentive to make such technology.
It's also a major bit of administrative overhead to have to haggle with different insurance companies, hound patients for billing, and in general worry IF someone will pay and how much.
Sorry to basically just negate your post but I do believe that you missed answering the last question in explaining details.
The poster asked, how would the provision of basic income further turn healthcare supply in the US to a negative sum game as compared to private insurance supplemented with corporate and government benefits?
Your response does a fair job of detailing some of the current issues with the US healthcare system but does not mention how basic income would make these issues worse. Would you kindly link the two for those of us who are not making the connection?
You're correct, I was explaining why it was /already/ a negative sum game.
I suppose the closest parallel is what I recall hearing happened to auto-insurance rates when those became mandatory.
Another close parallel would be what would happen if everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area were to suddenly receive an additional 500 USD/month housing allowance for living in the area. I would expect occupancy prices to go up by ~500 USD and the general quality of housing anyone current has to remain the same otherwise.
(And incidentally, that's a great argument for replacing almost all taxes with taxes on land rent: any extra money people have left over after paying taxes etc goes to bid up housing costs. Lower taxes and you get higher housing costs. A land tax can recover the lost revenue---and it's really hard to hide land and evade the tax.)
and looking at the After-tax Lease & R&D adjusted margin, The software industry is at 24% (8th place) and the Insurance industry is at 11.51% (37th place).
You can drive the cost of healthcare up without having large margins
Just like Hollywood never makes a profit, you can't use profit margin to measure what the cost savings would be in moving to national healthcare system.
Healthcare can be universally provided via BI w/o having single payer government universal healthcare. Individuals can choose (not) to buy health insurance with their BI payments. Thus getting coverage or not as they see fit. Its a bit of a gamble because it turns everyone into an actuarial (do i feel lucky this year? should i buy insurance? Am I higher or lower risk than the cost of insurance?) .. But, it also allows market forces to drive down the cost of insurance and healthcare provision.
The problem with that is that it requires not treating people who are uninsured and unable to pay for care. "Sorry you got hit by a drunk driver, but we think that the risk is too great that you and the guy who hit you won't ever pay the $100,000 it would cost to fix you." That's pretty unpalatable.
Also people with pre-existing expensive conditions would need to pay a lot more.
Either, because insurance companies charge them more.
Or, if insurance companies are not allowed to charge them a special price, healthy people will be reluctant to pay for (now) overpriced (for them) insurance.
One clever technical way out is to have your parents buy insurance for you before you are even conceived. This way, because neither the buyer nor the seller of insurance knows what's coming, it's not a market for lemons. (And if the parents genes make this kind of insurance too expensive, because it's expected that you inherit some defects, perhaps they should rethink their decision to procreate with each other. (Just like couples with sickle-cell-anemia on both sides are already advised.))
But of course, people will not be that farsighted, and we don't want to penalize people for their parents making stupid decisions, like not to buy insurance, more than necessary.
So in actual life, a basic version of an NHS like system plus optional extra insurance you can buy seems like the most sensible policy.
I see what you're saying, but how can one get a market forces involved so that the price of care isnt super high and that users have some choice.
I have lived in a country with universal healthcare. Its not that cheap, my portion of taxes that went to healthcare was about the same as the highest cost Kaiser plan. But Kaiser (thus far) is leaps and bounds better than the care received.
Where I am from you make an appointment with a doctor, and they will almost certainly be 30-60 minutes late for it. Then when you do get in the room with them, they will give you 15 minutes max because thats all the government pays for. Similarly every person I know who needed something done is on a waiting list. For months and a small number for years.
People complain about the cost of US healthcare, but if you can pay for it then it does seem excellent.
I disagree on this. BI is not supposed to solve the healthcare issue. Right now most people have some money, but some of them still gamble with their life, or healthcare cost is still too high for them. That won't change if they have some extra money every month.
You can make the same argument about almost every government benefit/wealth transfer; food stamps fall under this category, as does a housing allowance, etc.
Even the world's crappiest healthcare plan protects against the worst case. I know - I had a major health event at age 29, and I had absolutely garbage insurance. $350,000 in hospital bills later, with approximately only $7k out of pocket, I was all fixed up (as well as current medical tech allows, at least) and my heart was a click-click-clicking away. Insurance with deductibles in that range for a single (and ~double that for a family) is really relatively cheap.
The thing I'd like to see is government services that will optionally replace portions of your Basic Income.
If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI.
The same options should be available for all the necessities (clothes, food, water, shelter, communications, and savings). The sum of these government services should sum to your total BI grant, so if you opt-in to all government services you have the basics of survival totally covered but receive no direct BI.
This makes sense to me because I have a feeling most people who would need to rely on BI also have a problem managing money.
As an example, I once had a homeless guy ask me for money outside a grocery store. I suggested that we go inside and get him whatever food he wanted, and he said he'd wait for me outside. Sure enough he was gone by the time I returned. I'm fairly certain he only wanted the money for alcohol or drugs. That kind of person doesn't save money for food, they beg for food and use the money for other purposes.
If you made the program automatically adjust your BI down when you started accepting food from government programs, that would basically act as the government stepping in for people who just aren't able to handle money.
As a counter-example, I had a similar experience with a mother and her daughter, except that they were still there when I came back out and were thankful for the food. I'm not saying that they're not bad at managing money (maybe they are), but there are more than one group contained within the label "that kind of person".
I've had other experiences with homeless men turning down food when I offered it. I know that my father-in-law would be (and has been, in the past) happy on the street, using his money for cigarettes and gambling with his friends. There are a lot of different kinds of people that would need to be accounted for and different motivations.
But the alcoholic might need the drink more than food, and the drug addict might need the drugs more than a place to live. Perhaps not being sick for a couple more hours is the best thing for them at that moment. I'm not suggesting that you are under some moral obligation to buy them drugs, only that not giving them anything is not a moral position in itself.
So what if he did buy booze with it? I buy booze with my money and there's nothing wrong with that. If someone asks me for money, and I feel inclined to give it, the money becomes theirs, and why shouldn't they spend it on whatever seems like the best choice for their circumstances? And what gives me the right to decide what that best choice would be? I'm not living that life. Maybe a bottle of whiskey really would offer the most comfort per dollar. That's pretty sad, but why judge the person making the choice? Judge the situation offering them that choice instead.
I don't want them to destroy their bodies. I don't want them to fuel black markets with my money, and this is speaking as an occasional consumer of mind altering substances not available in pharmacies.
Further, I don't have much money. I cannot afford a lot of stuff for myself. So I can only help with necessities. And I don't want to judge whether any given person is lying.
In conclusion, I never hand out money. But I've bought quite a few bags of groceries for strangers.
Well, that seems reasonable. I'm just not OK with the whole "deserving poor" idea that seems to be baked into American political philosophy when it comes to homelessness and poverty support, because I don't want to have control over other people's lives any more than I want them to have control over mine.
Freedom isn't freedom without the option to fuck up.
The problem is that the US system has such incredibly low social mobility that it prevents any alternative to fucking up.
The mythology of personal choice applied to situations over which hardly anyone has actual personal control is perniciously misleading.
The "undeserving poor" - feckless, addicted, irresponsible - is just as much of a cliche as the opposite.
In fact, BI research shows that most people don't waste the money. They use it to improve their lives - sometimes by starting small businesses that wouldn't be possible without BI.
Your response is phrased in the form of a rebuttal, but I think I agree with everything you are saying, so far as I understand it, which leaves me to wonder if I didn't explain myself clearly.
I believe that the concept of "deserving" or "undeserving" poverty is not just unhelpful but actually misleading, and creates a great deal of unnecessary confusion. It is more useful to ignore the personal details and look at the systems. We can't change other people; we can rarely change ourselves; but we can certainly change systems, because they are human creations in the first place. So that's how we should approach poverty.
I am in favor of basic income as an improvement on and replacement for other forms of social support, for a variety of reasons: it seems like a more efficient way to move money around, it seems like a more effective way to distribute resources to people in need of them, and it seems overall like a more egalitarian, less judgemental way of dealing with a whole complex of problems which currently create a great deal of suffering. It is simple enough to feel like good engineering. It is fair enough to feel sustainable. It is non-ideological enough that I feel reasonably sure it would be difficult to use it as a mechanism of social control against weirdo outliers, like I am, but who aren't fortunate enough to have access to the same resources I do.
By "option to fuck up" I mean simply the freedom to do something other than mainstream opinion thinks you should. In these examples, people clearly believe it would be a bad idea for someone begging on the street to use the money they earn to buy alcohol. Well, on average, that's probably true. But just because someone is in a desperate way, I don't believe that gives me (or you, or anyone) the right to tell them what choices they should make. It's still their life. If I am willing to hand the guy on the street corner my spare $5, I have to be willing to accept that he's going to do whatever he thinks best with that money. If I can't be happy with that I shouldn't give him the money. But I believe that each person generally is the best judge of what is best for themself; I'd like it if the society around me would leave me free to make my own choices, not because I'm successful enough not to have to beg for money on the street, but because that's how I think we should all treat each other all the time, regardless of circumstances.
In general, I favor freedom of determination; if your randomly selected person wants to spend their BI on drugs or alcohol, fine. But the persistently homeless are not at all a representative sample population. There are a number of intersecting problems, especially mental health and addiction, that place them among the least credible cases for self-determination. We can argue about where the cutoff is, but there will always be people out at the end of the bell curve that need more active intervention.
And that's without even getting into the problem of perverse incentives involved in giving money to people for asking for it.
Then why all the philosophy about what "kind of person" he was and whether he would use the money "for other purposes"?
If someone asks me for money, and I give them money, it becomes their money, and it is none of my business what they choose to do with it, any more than it is any of their business (or yours!) what I would have done with it if I kept it.
Otherwise, you're not really giving them help, you're taking some amount of control over their life.
"If someone asks me for money, and I give them money, it becomes their money, and it is none of my business what they choose to do with it"
It isn't if your idea of help is unconditional donation. But is there anything wrong if I see donations as investments (in society) with expected returns on the same? Would I be wrong in trying to maximize my returns?
Where did I mention that my objective was maximizing my influence? The objective is improvement in the society. My influence has nothing to do with it.
The point is, just giving money does not absolve us of our moral responsibility. If I donate with an objective of social good, not just with the idea of dispensing my spare wealth, it is my right and duty to see that my investments give the maximal return, i.e. maximal social good.
Of course I can be wrong/ suboptimal in my investment strategies but then I can improve.
On the other hand, if you were paying part of the bill for his treatment, you'd also be incentivized to help him out in ways that might prevent that fate. I believe that, at the end of the day, we're all in this together. So to me, clarifying that economically is a feature of public healthcare, not a bug.
This has always struck me as one of the stronger arguments against the idea of public healthcare, which otherwise seems like a good idea. I feel quite certain that this tool of social control would be used against me, to dissuade me from engaging in some of the dangerous activities which give me great pleasure, and am therefore extremely reluctant to accept the argument that this is a legitimate use of power against other dangerous activities I don't happen to prefer.
> I have a feeling most people who would need to rely on BI also have a problem managing money.
I think this depends on what you mean by "rely on". I could see many people who are very capable of managing their money relying on BI to allow them to take behaviors that would be risky in the absence of BI. For example, a college student who is choosing between starting a small business or interviewing at larger companies may significantly rely on the BI when deciding to start their business.
However I agree that, when viewing BI as a safety net, those who would need it are disproportionately likely to also need help managing the money.
> dozens of high-quality evaluations of cash transfer programs spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America and including both unconditional and conditional cash transfer
The richer the society you live in, the more it becomes lbhe snhyg[1] that you are poor. Imagine how hard you would have to work to be homeless in the world of Star Trek TNG, for example.
[1] I rot13'd that text because it's not the best expression, and it might knock some people off, but I don't have time to euphemize things for adults.
Yeesh just put it in scare quotes next time. Rot13 doesn't make it any less offensive to those who would be offended and just makes it more annoying to read for everyone.
Understandable point of view comming from a man selling books how to change your behaviour towards money :p In general I can't even begin to take the statement serious though.
Dave Ramsey has ascribed to an unbelievably unrealistic view of peoples' responsibilities for their financial outcomes, as well as what they should sacrifice to be solvent. All this coming from a huckster who sells rainbow snake oil.
We live in a world now where we get half the porridge our parents did, and he's teaching us how to starve and hide porridge in our pockets for rainy days. He's part of the problem and a distraction.
The thing is that with Basic Income these no longer need to be Government Services, they can be private services if the government just guarantees private organizations opt-in access to a piece of the paycheck prior to its distribution.
Essentially, allow people to pre-commit to paying for a specific expense to a private organization which has to provide that service. They can opt out later on, but only before their next basic income check.
Also, I think there should be some sort of auto-enrollment system. So if you're found homeless, having blown all your BI check on booze, you'd be automatically enrolled in the top housing provider.
"Top" is relative, you can be at least given the choice of provider, but I am absolutely certain in a UBI scenario offering your UBI for simple living provided for you would be a huge industry, and would also account for anyone who cannot manage money like OP says just fine.
The problem with this is that it negates one of the biggest benefits of BI -- getting rid of red tape and bloat.
Printing and mailing checks can be done almost fully automated and would close down millions of welfare buildings, and give people back dignity.
There's a stigma that you get when you're on public assistance or welfare. It creates a feeling of less self-worth. This causes you to believe that the best job you'll ever get is McDonald's - so why even try to better your circumstance.
GBI on the other hand goes to everyone - even the wealthy. The message is that we're all equal and it's basically a reverse citizen tax on the government to ensure everyone can live and grow in nurtured environments.
The world I see in the next 20 years - there will be no more truck drivers. Fast food restaurants will be run by 1 manager alone. Gas stations will be ran by self-serve kiosks, and be fully automated, as will be grocery stores - including re-stocking. Other jobs that will be gone: Surgeons / Doctors (probably not fully but the need will be a lot less because of AI like Watson, where you once needed 30+ doctors in a hospital you might need only 3 or 4.), construction workers, trash trucks, oil rig workers, fishing, pilots, military (replaced by drones / droids), manufacturing, etc...
We will move from a society where it's expected that everyone work 40+ hours and sometimes two jobs to meet basic needs to a society where work is optional, and 20 hours is the norm. More focus and time is spent with family and having experiences that truly enrich one's life. GBI gives people the freedom to also pursue entrepreneurism, startup ideas, music, art, writing, and any other number of hobbies and past times that could enrich society in general. Studies have shown that truly happy people aren't the ones who have the most 'stuff' it's the people who experience the most that life has to offer (i.e. traveling, events, concerts, etc...)
For us to get to GBI we need to hurry up the automation revolution -- I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and progressive democrat who's FOR robots at Wendy's and McDonald's as well as a $15+min wage... I see it coming. 40% of jobs will be gone by 2030 and never replaced. The faster we tip the scale and hit the dirt the faster government will need to respond or there will be riots when people are starving and losing jobs left and right. It needs to get worse before it can get better essentially.
If you think that a McDonalds will be run by one person in the next 20 years, I would wager you haven't worked at one. Unless you develop a robot that can scrub build-up from a urinal, unplug a toilet that was overflowing with feces and toilet paper, scrape ice off a sidewalk, wash a window, test a burger patty for the correct internal temperature, scrub built up scum off the inside of an ice machine, and dust off the plants in the lobby, all at a reasonable price, then no, we won't have robotic fast food with 1 employee. There are a world of single role task that robotics can handle, but there's also innumerable tasks that a human is better suited to handle, despite being menial jobs.
This fantasy that AI/robotics/self-driving vehicles is just around the corner is like fusion power - perpetually 15 years in the future. It'll happen, eventually Moore's law will make it possible, but it's not as close as people think.
And your comment about "The faster we tip the scale" is almost inhumane considering the impact. It needs to get worse before it can get better? I suppose that goes with "Never let a crisis go to waste..."
I think the McDonalds of the future may look more like a vending machine than a restaurant. Of the the things you listed, only "test a burger patty for the correct internal temperature" is actually related to producing McDonalds food, and that is certainly automatable.
But that aside, if all that's left is basic cleaning then McDonalds could simply contract a cleaning service. I'd guess that a single team could service at least 10 fast food restaurants a day. And then how many years before running the cleaning service only requires one person?
<We will move from a society where it's expected that everyone work 40+ hours and sometimes two jobs to meet basic needs to a society where work is optional, and 20 hours is the norm.>
"We'll lose a bundle on each recipient, but we'll make it up in volume."
> More focus and time is spent with family and having experiences that truly enrich one's life.
i guess if someone is on basic income then he will not be able to afford a family of his own; raising kids is quite expensive. A basic income receiver will also be out of luck if he has to support a member of his family who got into trouble, if your family is unable to be a potential source of security and everyone is alone on his own then the concept of family will become more brittle.
To me basic income sounds like a way to create a dependent underclass - very dependent on the state for that matter (and will probably vote for the party that is most likely to continue with the basic income policy - so it will likely be a politically agitated group).
And that's not quite conductive to the idea of personal happiness...
Basic income is an attempt to deal with a growing number of people who are unemployable in the modern economy. I think a better way would be to find meaningful work for these people - maybe in such areas as caring for disabled and elderly or in education (i think we are out of luck with automating these tasks). This approach would be harder and costs more to implement than just dealing out the welfare checks, so it will probably not be adopted...
> To me basic income sounds like a way to create a dependent underclass - very dependent on the state for that matter (and will probably vote for the party that is most likely to continue with the basic income policy - so it will likely be a politically agitated group). And that's not quite conductive to the idea of personal happiness...
We already have that - and it's currently very hard for people on welfare and/or disability to ever pull themselves out of it. With basic income it becomes possible to start working 1 hour a week, then 2, then 3..., without having to worry about losing your benefits or getting in tax trouble.
> Basic income is an attempt to deal with a growing number of people who are unemployable in the modern economy. I think a better way would be to find meaningful work for these people - maybe in such areas as caring for disabled and elderly or in education (i think we are out of luck with automating these tasks).
If people find those things fulfilling to do themselves, they will do them (and basic income allows them to do it unpaid). If other people want them to do those things, they will pay for it. If no-one wants them to do those things, there's no value in them doing it.
> If people find those things fulfilling to do themselves, they will do them (and basic income allows them to do it unpaid). If other people want them to do those things, they will pay for it. If no-one wants them to do those things, there's no value in them doing it.
So it will bring down salaries - why bother with paying a salary when you can get volunteers on basic income for free?
Unpaid work by basic income receivers is an interesting question on its own - on the side of the employee there would be the question of motivation; on the side of the employer there would be questions of reliability - can one trust an unpaid employee to appear at work reliably and in time ?
I think it's not a source but a removal of distortions. If there are a lot of people with PhDs but what society really needs is a few ditch diggers, then it's right that ditch diggers be highly paid. If theoretical research is "difficult" but fun and rewarding and ditch digging is "easy" but boring and stigmatized, it's right that ditch diggers be paid more than researchers - and note that this will also mean more effort is devoted to automating ditch digging than automating research.
I don't think that the same number of people will still feel motivated to acquire a PhD if they know that in any event ditch digging will get you more money to begin with.
If people don't want to get a PhD, and we don't have much need for people with PhDs, then reducing the number of people who get a PhD sounds like mission accomplished.
Why would it be better for the government to provide this than the existing food distribution and supply chain?
Not unlikely scenario: some department is created to handle these necessities, they hire a bunch of people for terrible admin jobs, and they still sub-contract a bunch of the specific work to private companies.
> Why would it be better for the government to provide this than the existing food distribution and supply chain?
It probably isn't, but one possibility is that the government would be such a huge customer, that they have significant negotiating power. Per-unit costs would consequently be much lower.
The agencies required to maintain all these services will come at a cost though; and I bet that removes the "Well, we won't have to maintain thousands of agencies for giving these specific kinds of aid" argument in favor of BI.
That having been said, I personally like this idea a lot. Maybe the balance between the two can be adjusted by cutting out (the market rate + agency cost) out of your BI – i.e. If a month's cheap food is $200 at cost, if you participate in a food stamp program, it takes $250 out of your BI (since a bunch of people have to be employed to verify things about it).
That way, people will be more motivated to not use the government agencies since they get a better deal by just saving that amount out of their BI.
Hm, except that this seems to penalize people at the bottom who cannot adequately manage their own finances and I'm not sure I'm completely comfortable with that.
In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front! (there are other similar scenarios, where poor people are penalized because they haven't a positive credit report)
I don't know the answer though; I think what ncallaway suggested was to provide it at-cost which seems fair (also, the bulk-buying power of a food kitchen means that it should not really cost any more - in fact it may cost less than doing it yourself)
People who can't manage their own finances also tend to do badly at acquiring program support when aid comes in other forms too. However, it might be an improvement in overall effectiveness for charities to operate in models which charge part of the money from a basic income stream to administer aid (it greatly simplifies effort for charities which would normally have to devote a lot of attention to just getting together funding).
On the other hand, being able to 'sign over' a portion of one's basic income might open up all sorts of other abuses. (e.g. some sort of payday loan company that says, sign over your Basic Income for a year and I'll give you a lump sum right now...)
I would make it illegal and unenforceable for BI to be used as collateral for any financial transactions. Much in the same way that your IRA cannot be used to secure a loan [1], I would prohibit BI funds from being used to secure loans in any way.
I think BI definitely presupposes adequate management of your own finances. At some point it is a bit of a carrot and stick approach – maybe something like if you are on the food program for more than 3 years, then you start paying more for it, or something of the sort? I'm not sure.
> In the UK currently, we do that by things like having pre-pay meters for electricity - but the pre-pay electricity costs more even though you paid for it up front!
Given this information, I don't see how it is similar. It seems more like stupidity of the part of British Gas or whoever. Are the prepay meters used by poorer families who get subsidies paid directly into those meters or something?
No, they are often present in properties where the tenants have had trouble paying the bills in the past for whatever reason. As I understand it, they are very difficult to get rid of even for new occupants.
The electricity supplier gets more for the same electricity at no risk. Thats not actually stupid.. but in my opinion, it is in some way evil.
> The electricity supplier gets more for the same electricity at no risk. Thats not actually stupid..
Yeah, I meant stupid as in, 'No person would take that "deal" if they could help it.' I guess the people who are taking this deal are forced to take it, and that does make it pretty bad (especially if you are a brand-new tenant who isn't actually connected to the previous one who had trouble paying).
Here in the US, my electric coop offers a pre-pay plan for those who can't afford a deposit or who have had their electric shutoff (or anyone else that wants it). I don't think it is any more expensive than the post paid service, though. They also offer a budget billing where they average your last 12 months of service and bill you the same amount each month.
> I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI.
Doesn't this already exist? You can exchange $X for food at stores, restaurants, etc. Why make a program that just turns the government into a grocery store?
The difference is that this comes out the BI before it is given to you as cash. $X is a fixed-price out of the BI, that provides a fixed amount of foodstuffs.
That is, if my monthly BI payment is $800 I can opt to receive a monthly BI payment of $600 and also be guaranteed to receive enough basic foodstuffs to survive for the month.
I would also set these up to draw off the next month's BI payment, effectively allowing you access to short-term credit for groceries. If we are in mid-june and I've run-out of money, I can start the government foods program immediately, taking the funding out of my July BI check.
These services would be intended for people who are having a hard-time managing their finances in a responsible-way. Grocery stores neither help people manage their money or provide short-term credit solutions.
> That is, if my monthly BI payment is $800 I can opt to receive a monthly BI payment of $600 and also be guaranteed to receive enough basic foodstuffs to survive for the month.
This is not necessary. Just distribute the money weekly (or daily) and let people figure out what to spend it on. If they would rather buy cigarettes than food, let them. When they're hungry they'll buy food.
That sounds like asking for trouble. Like payday loans - starts as a good idea that can help people, ends up as a system with the effect of luring people into massive dept.
Sure. The problem with a PayDay loan is that it replaces future capital with capital today.
For the small percent of people who have serial problems managing their capital, giving them capital is the worst thing you can do. This causes people to get trapped in a cycle.
The key difference here is you replace future-capital with the goods or services directly. It's much harder to turn food and/or rent back into capital, and then mismanage it.
I see what you're saying, although... Based on that explanation, I'd expect to see a much more diminished frequency / intensity of the PayDay loan issue, but...
...if Something Happens and you run out of cash this month, why would you expect to a) not have Something Happen next month or b) have enough surplus next month to repay the "loan"?
Well, I guess you'd want to peg the BI at "average cost of living plus buffer", so that the person always has enough liquidity to cover, say, a standard deviation of Oh Shit over the course of N months. Or, keep safety nets as nets (rather than traps) so that Oh Shit, Something Happened events don't cause this issue.
At what point do we stop? Current safety nets aren't enough, so let's try basic income, but some people will mismanage their money, so let's do their shopping for them.
The way I see it there will always be some percentage of people that mismanage whatever capital they have (be it earned or given), and have financial hardship that leads to a lack of food and housing.
With current safety nets, we have perhaps 15% [1] of Americans that for whatever reason lack the capital to have an adequate supply of food.
With Basic Income, perhaps we reduce that number down to 1%, but we still need to take care of that 1%.
With the government services program that I suggested (and there are many other models, and I'd be happy to discuss other models), maybe you get that number down to 0.3%. Yet, as a country, we still need to take care of those people.
Personally, when it comes to feeding and housing people, my answer to "At what point do we stop" is: Never.
UBI does have the advantage of making every single government program funded equally by everyone. An alternative to any government cost is a higher dividend cheque to all.
To use your idea though, you could join a voluntary mutualized/cooperative consumer union that buys food in bulk discounts to distribute to members, or pools 5-20 peoples UBI to buy a very large house.
How funny, we have the same idea, but I think it's going to be market driven, but kind of like obamacare, where its opt-out with a basic provider given to everyone.
The two types of people might squelch their vocalization when writing arguments in support of the BI. But both would vote in favour of the status quo against the other side's proposal if given the opportunity: liberals don't want a meagre BI to replace most of the welfare state and most existing low income tax credits and libertarians certainly don't want high taxes to pay for a generous BI in addition to most existing programmes.
It's a serious problem, no doubt. I would still probably vote for a meager BI because I feel it's easier to turn the knob up later than it is to get everything done at once.
I appreciate your candor. But for the libertarian side of things (where I see it myself), I think there's a real fear that this would happen: we're being sold on a promise of greater efficiency, less space for corruption, etc., but in the end, we wind up bringing back in all that baggage anyway.
Frequent libertarian here too – as I've started working with low-income populations in my day job, I've had many of my fundamental assumptions challenged – at this point, I'd say, more than sticking to ideals, I want to see data – if these programs solve well defined problems, there's a case for them. If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them?
> If not, then what are they doing and how can we fix or eliminate them?
That's part of the problem. Government programs don't need to fix or eliminate problems. Once they've been launched, it's virtually impossible to get rid of them. We're stuck with the War On Drugs, the TSA, ethanol subsidies, and on and on and on.
Fixing bad programs is very difficult, and once we've set something in motion, even if it was a really bad idea, it's all but impossible to pull it back.
EDIT: freudian slip - I typed "government problems" in my first para, where I should have written (and have changed to) "government programs".
All three of the programs you name are untouchable because they are funnelling money directly to powerful political stakeholders. Being real blunt here, poor people don't make political contributions and they hardly even vote. For the most part, they are easy political marks and cuts to general-population social programs happen regularly.
There are notable exceptions, like senior citizens - which is why we haven't done anything about the unfunded expediture on the Medicare prescription coverage.
While I won't discount your claim about hidden agendas behind much bureaucracy, I don't think you can really apply this to two of my three examples. For ethanol subsidies, sure. But it'll be much more difficult to make the same argument about the War on Drugs or the TSA. In these two cases, how is money being funneled to powerful political stakeholders?
Police departments and corrections officers of all types. The TSA is a giant jobs program for workers no one else will hire, and the body scanners are produced by a company owned by the Secretary of Homeland Security that mandated their purchase.
It should be obvious that government agencies lack the incentive (generally profit and the competitiveness necessary to maintain it) to meaningfully address and/or eliminate problems. Nor do they experience any significant downside to failure. They aren't legally accountable to shareholders and it certainly isn't their life savings that they stand to lose. Worse-case scenario, they're reassigned.
Government agencies aren't expected to innovate, they're legally required to carry out the will of Congress and do absolutely nothing else but the will of Congress.
Most of the "failures" you see are the result of a dysfunctional political system. For example, the Post Office was looking to branch out into services like bill payments, identity verification, banking, etc but Congress forbid them from doing it. Not to mention the crazy requirements Congress set for pre-funding their retirees. No private company has to do that - most of them are pushing their funding obligations off to the future. Underfunding retirement isn't a good idea by any means, but the playing field is most definitely not level here, both in terms of responsibilities or ability to pivot.
It's wildly unfair to blast government agencies for not innovating. They don't have a CEO or a board, they have Congress calling the shots. Of course they aren't agile. And even worse, half of Congress thinks the entire concept of government services is illegitimate and is actively engaged in sabotaging and defunding those services. There's not really a parallel in the private world where a CEO is destroying a company because he thinks it shouldn't exist.
As a left libertarian I fall firmly in the camp you call "liberal", for the reason that provisioning about universal healthcare is not just about cost, but about liberty.
If one sees protection of life as a moral imperative - because without life there can't be any liberty - then allowing someone to purchase priority over those who need healthcare most is already morally dicey; allowing them to do so without ensuring there is a well funded alternative a big problem (and no, doctors etc. are not an infinite supply that just grows to handle an increased demand).
To me, the right libertarian property centric view does not maximise liberty because it guarantees a resource distribution that deprives a lot of people of essential means. BI could help somewhat with that, but it would likely always be a bandaid - the bare minimum that keeps people quiet.
Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts.
If you are given liberty you can still make foolish choices that lead to a loss of life or shortening of your life.
Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person.
A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views.
The right to life is a moral imperative, but the protection of life is something completely different and is a slippery slope.
> Being taken care of is security. They are completely different concepts.
They are different, but closely related. The lack of security, health and life drastically reduce your choices. It is meaningless to have the right to make a choice, if the means and abilities to make that choice is inaccessible to you.
We can not give everyone the means and ability to be able to make every choice, but that does not mean there are not certain choices that are so basic that they are essential if we are to not make a mockery of claiming to want to ensure liberty.
> Also, if someone else is forced to provide for the other person they definitely don't have liberty, they are basically a slave to another person.
I would fuly support your ability to "secede", so to speak, from society. As long as you then were to accept that society can choose not to deal with you, as forcing rest of society to deal with you would equally deprive them of liberty, and as long as you control no more than an even proportion of land and other scarce resources.
Ultimately, if you truly want to maximise liberty for yourself as well as others, it means choosing to give up some of your own to integrate into wider society.
> A basic income system like that proposed by Georgists,Geo-Libertarians, and I think Thomas Paine (Agrarian Justice) is compatible with both left and right libertarian views.
It's compatible with some left libertarian views. More widely, it is compatible with the views of many left libertarians that even so see it as undesirable because it's basically a repeat of Bismark's "state socialism": Bismark created the first relatively modern welfare system explicitly as an attempt at pulling the rug from under the revolutionary movements in Germany at the time (at the same time as he outlawed dozens of parties and newspapers). His goal was to reduce the appetite for revolution, to prevent the socialists from going much further.
Basic income, similarly, is a half-assed measure at guaranteeing a bare minimum in the face of mounting fears that automation will in the coming years sooner or later make demands for larger reforms grow stronger (basically we're seeing mounting fears that Marx description of end-stage capitalism was correct when he assumed that capitalists will essentially run out of new markets to expand into and find that ultimately their only way of driving down prices is to drive down employment costs, and thus at the same time reduce their markets).
As such, it is "compatible" in the sense that it is - subject to issues about provisioning of scarce resources, such as healthcare provisioning - not worse than most current systems. But it is also not all that much better.
This is the reason why you tend to see far more support for basic income coming out of classical liberal groups than left libertarian / socialist groups.
Agreed. It does not address the high concentrations of wealth which allow a small minorty of people to be in direct control of the majority of our resources and economic activity.
> You'll find there are two voices for BI, the liberal and the liberatian.
Actually, I think the two main groups are both libertarian, though there's a left-libertarian and a right-libertarian viewpoint, with the libertarians that aren't strongly left- or right- splitting between them.
I personally prefer keeping the existing means-tested programs but counting UBI as income when considering eligibility, such that with growing UBI [0] you eventually reach the point where the income floor is above the eligibility level for the means-tested programs, allowing them to be discontinued.
[0] I also prefer basically tying UBI to a tax stream that should grow with economic growth, with mechanisms to provide reserves so that you don't have UBI drop with cyclical recessions.
This whole thread is odd to me. My understanding of libertarian philosophy is that welfare in any form (BI or not) is not within the state's jurisdiction. Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum?
> Where does that view go on the right/left spectrum?
Its a not-uncommon libertarian view that's probably more common the farther right you go (but you'll also find some left-libertarians who believe it; heck, you'll find left-libertarians that are almost completely opposed to the existence of the state as such)
"left", "right", and "libertarian" are all pretty broad groups within which there is lots of individual variation.
Consider: a world where everyone is entitled to a basic income (and hopefully also guaranteed healthcare) has a lot to offer for libertarians:
Fewer desperate people means you have the liberty to walk streets at night without the fear of being mugged. You are less likely to be panhandled by homeless people missing body parts because they couldn't afford their medical bills. Assuming BI suffices for the myriad of society's problems and replaces government solutions, it is an effective way to contain the state's scope and ambitions, since any "deserved" welfare scheme rests on the ideas that there are "correct" ways to live and "incorrect" ways that require welfare to fix. Basic income does away with that idea by providing what people need as the basis for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while not mandating a particular way to live (such as drug testing for food stamps or work/-searching requirements for the unemployed who would be shown the door if they preferred to live as an unpaid community volunteer). This is why BI is often attributed as a conservative idea.
There is a completely valid subset of libertarianism (which includes social libertarians) that would argue for economic liberty, and how your liberty can be impeded by finances just as much as by the gunpoint of the state.
It is often modernly invoked in the exclusive context of when taxes or state programs harm people enough to put them into financial insecurity, but it applies to private finance as well, and is principally rooted in the hierarchy of needs, which can also be considered a growing degree of freedom - if you are stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, you are prisoner to it.
Agreed. Right-leaning libertarians strongly value the non-aggression principle. If the BI is to be funded via coercive means (e.g. income tax) it is morally impermissible and utterly incompatible.
However I don't doubt that some will accept it on a pragmatic basis, with the hope or expectation that it will lead to an overall reduction in violations of the NAP.
> I personally prefer keeping the existing means-tested programs but counting UBI as income when considering eligibility, such that with growing UBI [0] you eventually reach the point where the income floor is above the eligibility level for the means-tested programs, allowing them to be discontinued.
It might be better to directly subtract the benefits from any such program from the UBI. Then the only people who will even bother signing up for the other programs are the people whose total benefits from the existing programs exceed the UBI, which should be almost nobody. Then having demonstrated that fact in practice, those programs can be discontinued for lack of any real use and the savings can be used to provide slightly more UBI.
> Actually, I think the two main groups are both libertarian, though there's a left-libertarian and a right-libertarian viewpoint
That's an interesting distinction, I think of myself as pretty liberal but maybe I'm more of a left-libertarian after all.
I generally support UBI (at least for now, I'll certainly re-evaluate my position as more studies like this one are done). And there are other traditionally "liberal" ideas that don't sit right with me, like supporting the old guard of e.g. taxi medallion owners, hotel owners, landlords & property owners (by opposing market-rate housing development), etc. even when the new alternative is actually better for the average lower/middle class citizen.
Healthcare != food. As a liberal and a libertarian, I'd like to see BI replace welfare for basic living expenses like food, shelter, and transportation. Healthcare is different. It can be very cheap, or suddenly very expensive.
Part of the motivation for BI is that it's the least expensive means to the end of not having homeless people starving in the street (among other ends). Likewise, universal health care is the least expensive way to keep working-age adults from dying or being crippled by treatable health conditions.
I mentioned "cheapest". The American private insurance model is clearly not the cheapest. Americans pay about twice as much as other industrialized nations for health care, with the added bonus of many people not being covered. Worse, because the insurance system is employer-centric, many people are trapped in jobs they hate for fear of losing their insurance, starting your own business without a spouse who provides insurance is incredibly risky and maybe impossible, and small businesses are at a massive cost disadvantage relative to big corporations because of the administrative overhead of health insurance.
The current American system is completely idiotic. It's incredibly expensive, it's inconsistent and unreliable, and it undermines the basic American value of working where you want or starting your own business.
"It's going to be cheaper to make sure people have bread and vaccinations despite themselves than it's going to be to solve the resulting issues later."
The limited research so far seems to show people generally make good decisions when given money without stipulation, and the idea we need to tell them how to spend their money "despite themselves" is probably very misguided.
Of course, more research is needed, which is exactly what the YCombinator program is planning to do.
People can make good decisions, but one health care provider (e.g. the government, in most countries) can provide health care and purchase supplies more efficiently than individuals can.
Specifically, the American system is flawed because 'shopping around' between different providers whose sole purpose for existing is to make and maximize profits just results in you picking someone who's taking the least advantage of you. A single payer, for example in Canada, you go to any doctor, clinic, hospital, pharmacy, etc. and you get the thing. The health authority pays a fixed amount to the provider (and they make a good living, make no mistake), and the health authority attempts to maximize the value it gets from every dollar without compromising patient care, and following the mandate that everyone should have the same access to care.
> As an aside, if you pay attention you'll see the two types of people will squelch their vocalizations in the interest of a short term alliance in support of BI.
I don't think so, replacing one with the other sure, but adding a basic income atop all the other programs is a no-go for most libertarians. Otherwise you're just feeding the beast.
I agree with universal healthcare being separate from BI. I would also favor all of this being a kind of hybrid federal-local system. I'd also be receptive to having minimums. Like a minimum amount of basic healthcare (rather than unlimited). Also, for housing, give people a fair chance at finding a job wherever they got laid of from their previous longest term relevant job, but if they fail, move the resources to a more affordable area (after say, two years). Food, provide very basics (avoiding starvation) anything above these minimums would be covered by BI.
Why? Because some people will succumb to bad decisions and I'd rather the consequences be softened by a set of minimums.
> the liberatian would prefer to simply move the complex paternalistic safety net into a simpler cash payment which doesn't disincentivize work while not increasing it's size.
I dont think all libertarians are partisans of BI.
Universal healthcare is simply more efficient. The NHS delivers the same outcomes (longevity, infant mortality, etc.) as the American health system at less than half the cost (healthcare spending / % GDP).
Fully private provision of insurance for any events that follow a non-normal distribution (as most, but not all healthcare costs do) simply does not work, has never worked and will never work.
"Universal healthcare is simply more efficient. The NHS delivers the same outcomes (longevity, infant mortality, etc.) as the American health system at less than half the cost (healthcare spending / % GDP)"
This is completely false.
Both 'longevity' and 'infant mortality' are absolutely not measures if the quality of the healthcare system.
I've lived in Canada, US, Germany, France.
The best healthcare system is by far the US - however - it's very expensive, and it doesn't cover everyone, which are both big problems.
The quality of care for those who are covered in the US is unrivalled.
Of course, don't get the wrong insurance, you could be out o luck, and out on the street ...
Whenever anyone proposes universal healthcare in the US, I tell them two stories:
1) My aunt is an oncology nurse in a major city. A high percentage of her patients are from Canada, because they can get treated here for their cancer, and are unable to get those treatments in Canada (or can't get them in a timely manner). Of course, these are only the patients who can afford to pay it out of pocket or have supplemental health insurance.
2) My dad developed a rare lung disease and was treated by the VA (which is government run healthcare for veterans of the US Armed Forces). They determined he needed a lung transplant to survive. It took them 18 months to run the tests necessary to determine if he was a candidate for a transplant, and due to the progressive nature of the disease, by the time they were done running their tests, a panel in DC determined he was no longer a viable candidate for a transplant, and sent him off to die[1]. As a last-ditch effort, he reached out to Mayo Clinic, who agreed to see him. They ran the same tests in 3 days, and determined that he was a candidate for a transplant. He got a new lung, and lived for three more years. I strongly suspect the delay in treatment cut his life short, but I'm not a doctor.
I do not want universal healthcare.
[1] People make fun of Sarah Palin and her "death panels", but they're a very real thing no matter what they're called.
RE: #1 so a system that works similarly to ours today (if you can afford better health care, you get better health care) that ALSO helps those who can't afford even basic healthcare... is somehow worse than what we have today? You lost me.
Also, I don't think a person on the face of the planet has suggested that the VA would be a good system to model nationalized health care on.
The cost of US healthcare is also what made it possible for the rest of the world to afford cheap healtcare. The US does the vast majority of the R&D and everyone else benefits.
> The quality of care for those who are covered in the US is unrivalled.
I would be interested in more specifics about this. It's hard to find statistics that provide a clear comparison of quality between healthcare systems.
You're cherry picking. You've presented one stat where the US system comes out well ahead of the UK system (which is far from the only socialized health care system). But so what? It's true that the American health care system is not literally the worst at everything. But yes, when all is said and done, if you look at the data in aggregate [0], socialized medicine provides far more bang for the buck than the American system does.
The US usually does quite well: often times somewhat better than some countries with socialized health care, usually somewhat worse than some others; it's rare that there's a dramatic difference between it and other first world countries. But, of course, where there is a dramatic difference is in costs: the US often spends twice as much per capita [1].
Moreover, the way those costs are distributed is socially destructive in the US in a way that they simply aren't in any other country. No one in Canada goes bankrupt due to medical bills; in the US, roughly 2 million people do a year, and another 56 million struggle to pay their bills [2].
in the US, roughly 2 million people do [bankrupt due to medical bills] a year, and another 56 million struggle to pay their bills
This is misinterpreting the data. The vast majority of this is the problems caused by lost income - an inability to work while ill, not because of the medical bills themselves.
I guess I should knuckle down and look at the survey methodology to see for sure. But given my time constraints, I'll just note that while I acknowledge the ambiguity, I read that statement as closer to "we don't count people that missed out on a better job or promotion" (emphasizing the word "opportunity", I guess), rather than saying "we discounted all foregone income".
The study cited by your CNBC article is simply flawed and doesn't measure what innumerate reporters think it measures.
To measure the number of bankruptcies due to medical causes, you compute P(bankruptcy|medical cause) - P(bankruptcy|no medical cause). The study measures P(medical cause|bankruptcy).
Here, "medical cause" = "spent $1001 or more on medicine out of pocket". The classic example of a medical bankruptcy is Michael Vick, the NFL quarterback who went bankrupt after going to jail for dogfighting (due I'm sure to his medical bills).
The study cited by that CNBC article is not the PNHP study criticized by McCardle [0], although its bankruptcy numbers are derived from it (it also uses numbers from the CDC and the Commonwealth Fund). I encourage you take a look at the original press release [1] (also linked to in the CNBC article), which has any number of other damning statistics besides the bankruptcy numbers that you and McCardle take issue with.
Without getting into it here, I don't think McCardle's "debunking" is very persuasive, but you're right that the PNHP study (and thus at least the bankruptcy numbers in the NerdWallet Health report) has serious problems; I hadn't read it, and just as you point out, the PNHP authors conflate numbers to get them as high as possible: around 62%, whereas "when asked about problems that contributed very much or somewhat to their bankruptcy [...] 54.9%
cited medical or drug costs". But while 54.9% is lower, it's...not a whole lot lower. Even if the numbers were halved, say, by taking the 29% of people who wholly attributed their bankruptcy to their own medical bills (not their family's), that's nowhere near an order of magnitude different: a million people going through bankruptcy due to medical bills is better than two million but is just as disgraceful, and simply not going to happen in countries with socialized medicine...so I think my original point still stands.
The nerdwallet article directly copies their medical bankruptcy numbers from the article McCardle cites. Since they added no value to this, criticizing the original source is adequate.
whereas "when asked about problems that contributed very much or somewhat to their bankruptcy [...] 54.9% cited medical or drug costs". But while 54.9% is lower, it's...not a whole lot lower.
So what? This number is again not the true figure. The true figure is #bankruptcies in real life - #bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes. The study doesn't compute this.
Nearly 100% of people who went bankrupt could cite that they paid at least $1001 in taxes and could attribute their bankruptcy to that in a subjective survey if they wanted. Does this mean that it's a "damning statistic" and "disgraceful" that most people pay $1001 in taxes?
Furthermore, bankruptcy for medical reasons (like being unable to work - which the study does include) does happen in countries with socialized medicine. These numbers - and the implications innumerate reporters drew from them - are simply indefensible.
Yes, the bankruptcy statistics are from the PNHS study. What about the other numbers from the CDC and the Commonwealth Fund? They also damn the US private healthcare system, and so far you've been ignoring them.
It's impossible to determine "#bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes", because it's impossible to determine a number that only exists in a counterfactual. Absent this, subjective surveys give us an approximation that's broadly useful; literally anyone can lie or misattribute just about anything on any subjective survey, but that hardly makes them useless. There's no sense in being interested in "the true figure" exactly unless we have reason to believe that it varies dramatically (say, by an order of magnitude) from our best approximations, and outliers like a criminal millionaire football player are hardly that; what matters is an idea of the impact of medical costs on people's financial security, and the study absolutely provides that.
Exactly what realistically obtainable data could persuade you that medical bills contribute to financial instability and bankruptcy in the US?
The PNHS study showed that among medical bankruptcies, people on average paid ~$17k out-of-pocket on medical bills. Would those people have gone bankrupt even without having to drop that much money on bills? Maybe! It's impossible to know for sure. But here's a study that says 76% of Americans live paycheque to paycheque [0]; what happens when you drop an unexpected $17000 bill on them? You're fighting an uphill battle against common sense, here.
And from the other direction: a blog post with some numbers showing that people do indeed go bankrupt in countries with single-payer or socialized medicine [1]. Based on the blog title and the writing, this is, I suppose, is supposed to be a rebuttal against arguments for the public system, but the actual numbers - exactly as imprecise and subjective as the American PNHS numbers, mind - are 5%-15% instead of 30%-60%. That's still too high and still disgraceful, but a dramatic improvement nevertheless.
I'm disputing only your claim of causality: No one in Canada goes bankrupt due to medical bills; in the US, roughly 2 million people do a year
It's impossible to determine "#bankruptcies there would be absent medical causes", because it's impossible to determine a number that only exists in a counterfactual.
If you were correct that calculating counterfactuals is impossible, then the study in question would be trivially wrong. So would all claims of global warming (earth warmed relative to a counterfactual), all macroeconomic claims about alternate policy proposals (bigger stimulus would have been better), VAM for teacher evaluation, pollution impact studies, etc.
Exactly what realistically obtainable data could persuade you that medical bills contribute to financial instability and bankruptcy in the US?
I'd like a model that accurately predicts bankruptcy probabilities in people who had no "major medical cause" (i.e. medical expenses under $1001). Then I'd apply that model to people with major medical cause and compute #actual bankruptcies - #predicted bankruptcies for the group that did have medical expenses in excess of $1001. This is basic science.
You are right that causality is hard to measure. That doesn't mean we take a totally wrong quantity and pretend it's the right thing. We just admit ignorance.
Now your turn. What evidence (if any) would cause you to believe that taxes in excess of $1001 cause at least 90% of bankruptcies and that this is "too high" and "disgraceful"?
It's impossible to precisely calculate "the true figure" of a counterfactual, which is what you appeared to demand. It's obviously not impossible to estimate it or approximate it, particularly when we have things like physical laws, historical correlations, basic reasoning, or even self-reported data to guide us. None of these are "the true figure", although physical laws tend to work pretty well, and despite that are not necessarily totally wrong, within some margin of error. (I'm not sure if macroeconomic claims are the best way of demonstrating the possibility of calculating counterfactuals, at any rate!)
Anyway: if you showed me a study that interviewed a statistically appropriate number and distribution of bankrupt debtors and found that over 50% claimed that a high tax bill was the cause of or contributed to their bankruptcy, I'd agree that taxes probably needed to come down.
Still, a tax bill is fundamentally different from a medical bill, in that your tax bill is ultimately a fact of life: it's something you're aware of ahead of time, and the assumption that you have to pay it is baked into the salary you take, and, in principle, into the rate chosen by legislators. You can plan for it and account for it in a way that you can't catastrophe, and outside of extenuating factors, failure to do so likely indicates pretty severe financial irresponsibility if tax rates are at all reasonable. That's probably why people wouldn't be too likely to claim that tax (or groceries, or rent...) caused their bankruptcy - even if a person is living paycheque to paycheque, they might be scraping by, and then wham: suddenly they get diagnosed with cancer or get struck by lightning and half their annual salary goes to the hospital in one moment, they're going to say that those medical bills caused the bankruptcy, not the expenses that they'd already accounted and planned for. Which I don't think is necessarily wrong: if I knock a glass off a table, in terms of blame, my action is what caused it to fall and drop, and chalking it up to gravity or the glass being in the way is somehow wrong, in terms of our understanding of the idea of fault.
A better comparison might be a tax hike causing bankruptcy. And yeah, if the federal government declared that a person with an annual income of 45k (the average of the people in the PNHS study) suddenly owed 17k more in taxes and people went bankrupt trying to pay it and blamed it on the hike, I would 100% be on their side (and yours, I'm guessing). You wouldn't even need to show me a study, to be honest. I would probably also say that instead of taxing these people just scraping by, they should tax the rich instead, who can easily afford it, and use that to subsidize for the poor, which is incidentally how I think health care should work.
No, but they may be a good approximation. P(B|A) is not a good approximation to P(A|B) - P(A|!B), no matter how much you wish it were.
Anyway: if you showed me a study that interviewed a statistically appropriate number and distribution of bankrupt debtors and found that over 50% claimed that a high tax bill was the cause of or contributed to their bankruptcy, I'd agree that taxes probably needed to come down.
So subjective preferences matter more than objective figures (like costs in excess of $1001)? Interesting.
That's probably why people wouldn't be too likely to claim that tax (or groceries, or rent...) caused their bankruptcy - even if a person is living paycheque to paycheque,...
Yes. The person doesn't want to admit that their spendthrift ways are cause of their problems. They instead choose something that they can nominally pretend is not their fault.
I've seen this in action. I know a guy with a $100-200k/year income, gigantic home, second home, third investment property, spendthrift wife, 2 cars, and living "paycheck to paycheck". He's in serious financial trouble, hundreds of thousands in debt. He also blames unexpected medical expenses (probably under $20k) for his troubles - certainly easier than blaming himself.
You seem to be defending this claim, by saying that Warren's criteria are reasonable.
The fact an expense of 40% of your annual compensation should be easy to handle - a 10% savings rate will get you there in 4 years. Americans prefer a risky financial position in order to have high consumption. That's a choice.
I suppose it is disgraceful that so many Americans behave irresponsibly and then expect others to pick up the tab.
> The UK also has dramatically worse 5-year cancer survival rates than the US - in some cases, almost half what the US provides[0][1].
5-year survival rate is an extremely misleading statistic. Much of the increase in the US is simply attributable to the fact that we detect the cancers earlier, so that patients pass out of the 5-year window before they die.
>5-year survival rate is an extremely misleading statistic. Much of the increase in the US is simply attributable to the fact that we detect the cancers earlier, so that patients pass out of the 5-year window before they die.
This does not make sense. The earlier you detect cancer, the higher is the likelihood that treatment is effective.
5-year survival rate absolutely correlates with 10-year survival rate and 30-year survival rate.
Though it is undoubtedly true that in the long term, we're all dead. That is however not a meaningful indicator of health care system effectiveness.
If you detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE you cancer survival rates will look better. So you can't just look at cancer survival rates.
I meant what I said about AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE but experience tells me I have to repeat it. Merely detecting it earlier, BUT DOING NOTHING ABOUT IT, will improve your cancer survival stats.
<If you detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE...>
That is a meaningless population unless you are suggesting that providers are working hard to detect cancer and then, having found cancer, choose to not treat it at all.
Ugh, no, I'm not using that as a population to compare to.
Here, let me put it into a story.
We're comparing the health care of two countries, A & B. The survival rates of cancer are better in country A.
So researchers study what country A does to get better results. They find that it has a system of early detection followed by slathering people with chicken blood.
Well, you aren't sure if the chicken blood is the right thing, but surely the early detection means people are healthier, right?
No, because . . . ahem, "if you detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE you cancer survival rates will look better."
In fact, country A and country B may be exactly the same when it comes to treating cancer. But because of very real statistical artifacts like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon, it leads to statistics showing the country A is better when people have the exact same outcomes.
Perhaps you think that rubbing with chicken blood is an unfair comparison of the US health care system, because it uses science-y stuff. But measuring outcomes
is hard. Lots of things that people naturally assume improve health outcomes (see other discussion on this page about annual checkups) don't. Some things
that we assume improve health care outcomes actually worsen outcomes. Radical chemotherapy is the go-to example. And insurance companies were required to pay
for it, too, following expensive court cases. (Health care costs were held nearly flat in the US under HMOs, which put a lid of costs but had no noticeable
negative impact on outcomes. This pretty much broke their cost containment. They were also unpopular because they said no a lot.)
So figuring out if the US has better cancer outcomes is hard, because the US really puts a big emphasis on early detection, but it might be just early
detection which makes the stats look good.
I'm not trying to push a narrative right here. There are a bunch of different health care systems in the world, and the one thing we know about the US
system is that it costs more. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it's possible we are getting more benefit (by pushing new treatments) but it's
also something that the US has not explicitly decided to do, neither by policy nor by the invisible hand of a bunch of individual actors in the market.
I don't understand what you're getting at. It is completely pointless to talk about "detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE". Nobody does that. Even if the health care system did nothing but detect - which is an absurd idea of course - the patient in question would surely do something.
If you don't detect cancers, that will not stop people from dying to cancer.
The U.S. health system is expensive because it uses a lot of money for some cases that would receive less attention somewhere else. Some of these are difficult cases that other health systems even cannot treat; others are trivial things where the private insurance system spends a lot for some people while there are uninsured people who get no attention for things that could be cured or prevented relatively easily.
The priorities are not necessarily right; at least they are not producing optimal "bang for the buck" in national health - U.S. spends a lot but still people suffer from preventable diseases.
But early cancer detection is one of the undoubtedly good things.
(Infant mortality rate in the USA was lower than in my country in 1950; now it is more than double. Cuba is better than United States, if we can trust the statistics. However, I'm surprised that Canada is not that much better either.)
> It is completely pointless to talk about "detect cancer earlier AND CHANGE NOTHING ELSE".
No it isn't. I'm trying to ram home the statistical point with a counter-factual. I have to say this extreme because some people Just Don't Get It and keep on trying to talk about something else.
A system that ONLY detects cancers earlier will show better cancer survival numbers even if actual outcomes don't change at all. No, seriously.
Let's lay out an actual example.
Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David exist. Charlie has a minor cancer he won't die if. David has a major cancer he will die of.
In Country B, since detection is heavily correlated with the seriousness of cancer, they detect David has cancer, and David dies. Cancer survival rate = 0 of 1, or 0%.
In Country A, they detect Charlie and David have cancer. David dies, Charlie doesn't. Cancer survival rate = 1 of 2, of 50%.
> If you don't detect cancers, that will not stop people from dying to cancer.
No one said this.
> But early cancer detection is one of the undoubtedly good things.
This is wrong. I know your gut tells you this is true. Your gut is wrong.
Increased detection sometimes helps and sometimes hurts. There are a lot of people, like Charlie in the above example, who would never die of cancer, but because of increased detection they now undergo risky cancer treatment. All treatment involves risk, and for cancer treatment this is particularly true. Again, look up the history of radical chemotherapy. The people who underwent it had worse outcomes than people who had nothing at all done to them.
Researchers usually find that people in palliative care do better than people in active treatment. This isn't enough to say that no treatment is always better, but it is enough to say that some treatment is often worse.
Because so many people have your gut reaction, though, "early detection" is a popular way of throwing money at the problem in America.
> Infant mortality rate in the USA was lower than in my country in 1950; now it is more than double. Cuba is better than United States, if we can trust the statistics.
Here's good questions to ask yourself when looking at infant mortality.
1. What's the difference between a miscarriage, a stillbirth, and a dead newborn? Particularly, what does it mean when this answer changes between countries, and even within countries?
2. How do the numbers change if you compare white Americans to white Canadians and black Americans to black Canadians?
There isn't such a system, anywhere. Even if you could have a public health care that detects and tries not to treat, you still cannot effectively forbid people from getting treatment themselves - if you make a law against it, people will try to escape the country to get treatment. So if you have a better detection rate, there will be actions to treat.
>Increased detection sometimes helps and sometimes hurts.
Perhaps the fallacy here is the belief that the helps/hurts ratio of treatment is 50/50? It isn't.
Of course there are cases where the treatment actually made things worse. There are more cases where the treatment has no significant effect.
But it is rather silly to assume that cancer treatments would have a net negative of zero effect.
Regarding the infant mortality rate, the definitions of miscarriage, stillbirth and dead newborn are not so different between developed nations that it would change this. Where IMR is lower, also stillbirth rate is lower, so it's not really about moving the boundary between these.
Stipulating that five years is the wrong period to use, what would the right period be? Intuitively, there must be some period of time over which different nations could be meaningfully compared on this basic health result.
> Stipulating that five years is the wrong period to use, what would the right period be?
The short answer: Whenever death rates plateau for the 99th (or whatever) percentile, relative to progression of the illness. If you wait XX years until the effect of moving around the diagnosis date is largely mitigated statistically, then the error begins to fade.
The long answer:
This isn't quite the right question to ask at all, because it assumes away the possibility that the naive "years from diagnosis" is a flawed metric in the first place. The point of the comment you're responding to is that "n-year survival rate (from diagnosis)" as measured is a flawed statistic in general, because the baseline from which the counting starts can be different for people with the exact same outcomes. An illustrative _reductio ad absurdum_ thought experiment here is that of taking two people with the exact same cancer, detecting one earlier, and giving both exactly no treatment (or treatment on the exact same schedule). Despite having identical quality of care and outcome, the person whose cancer was detected earlier will show up as having a better 5-year survival rate, simply because we started counting earlier and her 5-year mark came earlier in the progression of the disease.
This can be mitigated to an extent by controlling for stage of cancer or whatever, and that's probably a good idea, but this is necessarily brittle and hard to scale and study.
You've proved too much. This same argument could be used to show that we can't decide e.g. which drugs or lifestyle choices make death due to cancer more or less likely, or indeed which behaviors make death due to any long-term illness more or less likely.
Congratulations I guess, but you've just put a bunch of medical researchers out of a job. They had to study a long time to do that job!
> This same argument could be used to show that we can't decide e.g. which drugs or lifestyle choices make death due to cancer more or less likely, or indeed which behaviors make death due to any long-term illness more or less likely.
I won't hazard a guess as to which argument you're imagining I made, but I'm not seeing how you jumped to this conclusion at all. As Dylan16807 points out below, "deciding which drugs or lifestyle choices make death due to longterm illness more likely" has approximately nothing to do with an apples to oranges comparison of time intervals starting at different points.
In fact, to the extent that attempts to figure this out do involve comparing intervals, they tend to be ages, which by definition are measured from birth. That's pretty much the highest standard for having a reasonable, stable beginning point when comparing time intervals across people's lives, in a way that "years after diagnosis" doesn't approach by a long shot.
> Congratulations I guess, but you've just put a bunch of medical researchers out of a job. They had to study a long time to do that job!
I'm assuming the juvenile tone is an attempt to cover up your lack of comprehension with bluster. "Congratulations I guess"
I don't see how you reach that conclusion. If your detection is the same, it's easy to see which treatments or lifestyles work better or worse. This seems to me to be a problem unique to measuring the value of different kinds of detection.
If the argument is that detecting cancer at year four isn't worse than detecting that cancer at year zero, then could we specify a year at which it would be worse to detect cancer? It's a deadly disease, so presumably if you wait too long the patient will have died already?
If I've misunderstood this complex and sophisticated argument and we're all ready to admit that detecting cancer later is worse, then the original point that USA is better than UK in this one tiny respect stands.
The argument is that while detecting cancer earlier is usually a good thing, you have to be careful how you measure the effects. Looking at survival X years from detection can give you false positives about what is best.
-
I'll lay out a particular scenario where this happens:
Currently we detect a cancer moderately far along, and aggressively treat it. The five year survival rate is 50%.
We figure out how to detect it two years earlier. We use the same aggressive treatments, and the five year survival rate is now 70%. Hooray! But looking closer, if we wait another two years to correct for the early detection, the survival rate is only 45%. Only some of those tumors would have continued growing. Of those, attacking early is only marginally helpful. In others, the tumor wouldn't have killed the patient, but the radio/chemotherapy killed a quarter of them.
In this case, we magically know we detected everything two years earlier, so we could look at the seven year survival rate instead of five year. But the real world is not so clean. It's very hard to figure out a timescale and normalize everyone to it.
-
Catching cancer earlier screws up your ability to measure survival. A naive analysis will see higher survival rates when smaller/earlier tumors are detected. A sophisticated analysis that corrects for this is actually hard to do.
Even when you do save lives by treating earlier, it's very hard to figure out how many lives are saved, and how much of a confounding factor your detection method is.
The UK also has infinitely better healthcare-related bankruptcy statistics.
I suspect it would be easier to improve the 5-year cancer survival rates in the UK than it would be to eliminate healthcare-related bankruptcies in the US.
The NHS has also become increasingly inefficient over the last couple of decades, as managerialisation and stealth privatisation have diverted funds away from front-line patient care towards administration costs and third-party profits.
I hate to break it to you, but the libertarian ideology isn't a philosophy and it isn't "anarcho-capitalistic" either. It's a umbrella term meaning that a person prefers a more liberty-minded government versus an authoritarian one.
Anarcho-capitalists are a subset of libertarians, and one which may not overlap much with the subset that sees UBI as a preferred alternative to current programs.
But "anarcho-capitalists do not..." is not a basis for any generalization about libertarians.
It's unfortunate that the word liberal is used for the position you describe. And conversely that the word libertarian must be used to describe liberalism, literally.
I read your "personally" sentence and immediately thought "this person has not lived in chicagoland where purposeful manipulation of such a system has famously been an artform".
If you're worried about the public good, there are nonviolent and consensual means of cooperation that I believe would make all of us far more prosperous than today.
I think it becomes even more clear; when children living in poverty are living in a society where their basic needs are sufficiently provided for, you take away a great deal of the social stigma associated with engaging child protective services.
If a parent can't function when the basics are provided, then teachers, neighbours, and family members will be less inclined to use the excuse "but times are tough, and that person is trying hard to be a good parent".
IDK - I am inclined to think, having come from a broken home and having done community service for shoplifting food for me and my brother, if $parent (father in my case) can't get their shit together, the children would have been better off without them.
Given your experience, what are your thoughts on being provided 3 full meals a day within the public school system?
Context, I see arguing over the cost of various food programs that public schools provide. I come down on the side of "Yes, you should be guaranteeing kids are fed (minimally breakfast & lunch and if I had my way dinner too). Otherwise there's no way they're going to be able to focus on school." While the counter argument exists and is usually made from a financial standpoint, "Why should I have to pay taxes for other people's kids to get fed?" Which is, in my opinion, a short sighted viewpoint.
Socially, children are dependents. If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents. In the same way we find people guilty of animal cruelty all the time for the same reasons the same must be made of children.
The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them, when we may or may not have macroeconomic desire to have more children at any given time (and that desire changes, at the society level, all the time).
It is much more important to fix the actual problem - providing sufficient adoption and relocation systems to get kids out of dysfunctional households than to give them awful school cafeteria food and hope the problem goes away while ignoring it. Hunger is just a symptom of broader abuses that we should not just use state dollars to make go away temporarily. Having mentally and emotionally healthy fresh generations is probably the most valuable investment anyone can make.
What you're saying is that we should provided more robust child protective services. Those services would have the authority to determine if dependents were malnourished. If found to be malnourished those dependents would be forcefully relocated into a state (or private) run system that would feed, clothe, and educate them in the interim before they were placed into an adequate adoptive or foster home. At which point the state would pay the foster parent(s) a daily stipend which would be used to continue to feed and clothe the dependent until the point at which they reached adulthood. The state would also provide healthcare and continue to send child protective workers to the foster home to evaluate the home and verify that it meets the standards of an adequate home.
I agree that the solution you presented has the potential to help "break the cycle" so to speak. But inherently the cost of a program the magnitude of which was described is likely to be a large investment. Which, would suffer from the same perspective of economic unfairness as society would end up paying even more than now to raise other people's children. Due to the economic impact, those opposed would likely spin it as a government program to "Steal away and indoctrinate your children with agenda of the state." A subset of the population gets angry when any mention of taking their guns away occurs. How do you think people would act if it was their children? It doesn't matter if you're a responsible guardian, any talk of the state increasing its power to "remove your children from your home" is bound to strike an instinctual part of your brain.
Proposing "free breakfast and lunch" to solve the immediate small term problem of hunger within the school system to help reduce behavioral problems has a direct positive impact. The only real negative is the cost.
> If guardians cannot feed their dependents adequately, they should lose their dependents.
If they cannot, then they should be helped to be able to. If they can but do not, then I'd agree that they should lose them. You're describing two problems with different solutions: Extreme poverty and outright abuse.
Adoption beyond infancy is rare, and I've never heard good things about the foster system, and I'd be loath to put kids into it, except as a last resort.
> The unfairness in the system emerges from when parents have kids through selfish motivation only to force society as a whole to pay the cost of raising them
Financial conditions for families change all the time. A parent looses a job and has difficulty getting a new one. The bread-winner in the family gets hurt, and the family has to limp along on a lesser income. You can't just ascribe unfairness to selfishness. Things aren't that simple.
I grew up poor. Subsidized school lunch made sure I ate at least one decent meal a day (to be fair, parental mental health was a bigger factor than income at times). A lot of people grow up a lot poorer than I did.
> "Tough shit" sucks when parents blow their handout on lottery tickets and drugs, leaving their children in perpetual poverty.
Seems to me that with a universal unconditional benefit that is sufficient for adequate support of both parents and children (which, incidentally, I don't see as likely in any early-phase UBI, though over time it would hopefully grow to that level), failure to provide adequate support for children is, without exception, culpable neglect; interventions to address such neglect exist and are outside of the scope of the public benefit programs UBI would replace (though, if children are counted as beneficiaries with the benefits flowing to their legal guardian, you've dramatically simplified some aspects of the administration of those programs, as well, with a UBI.)
In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'. In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need. As a result, children die in horrible circumstances.
So the question is a good one, and can't be answered with 'tough shit' quite that easily.
> In my very limited experience of these matters, there is rarely a clear line between 'bad but acceptable parenting' and 'culpable neglect'.
With a mature UBI, there's still certainly room for cases where there is ambiguity over whether culpability of the form represented by a criminal prosecution for abuse/neglect exists, but a lot less room for ambiguity (at least, compared to now) over whether there is a sufficient failure of basic parental duty to justify intervention to ensure the material adequacy of care for children.
> In the UK, a recent report suggested that child services spend so much of their time chasing the former, that the latter cases (which are much more serious) don't get the attention they need.
That's definitely true in the US as well. I don't disagree that these services need to be reformed and reprioritized, independently of the nature of the public benefit system.
But the problem with beneficiaries (parents or otherwise) blowing or trading their benefits without meeting their and/or dependents material needs exists independently of the nature of the public benefit system -- its quite clearly a feature of the status quo system -- so its not really an argument for or against any particular public benefit structure.
> You're taking on a whole new rat's nest of complex problems if you propose to push a much larger set of children into "the system."
I don't propose that, both because I think the size of the problem that would be addressed this way is no larger under a mature UBI than it is today (even if UBI makes the responsibilities more clear), and because I think a mature UBI would reduce other sources of children entering the system (both by reducing the social problems which result in children ending up in the system, and making it more likely that alternate, extended-family placements which are generally preferred could be found to keep children experiencing the kinds of problems which could result in them entering the system out of the system.)
The US has a separate set of social services that deals with protecting children from abuse and neglect, which handles such cases. Basic income can't fully replace that because not all of what it does is about poverty, so don't expect them to go away if basic income is adopted.
Most proponents of UBI see it as, at least eventually, replacing some range of existing government means- and/or behavior-tested benefit programs and, possibly, some age- or disability-tested ones (in the US, most advocates would probably include, at a minimum, EITC, General Assistance programs, SNAP, TANF, Section 8 housing subsidies; some would also include Child Tax Credit, Tuition and Student Loan related credits and deductions, Medicaid, Medicare, and/or Social Security.)
I've never heard any advocate argue that it would replace all social services.
OF course not. Money can't stop adults from abusing children, or each other. Money only fixed money problems. We don't have Child Protective Services because parents are poor; we have them because some people are assholes.
Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich.
> Personally, I'd like to see us end the welfare programs for the rich.
What welfare programs for the rich? The rich pay for everything. The bottom 60% net a negative ten thousand dollars. The next 20% break even (~$1000/year paid), and the top 20% pay out the nose.
For example, Walmart makes so much in government subsidies and tax breaks, and they pay their employees so little that their employees have to live off food stamps. The Waltons (owners of Walmart), are one of the richest families in the U.S. Pretty easy to see the connection.
Child protective services are not social welfare, they're law enforcement. If they were merely social services you could turn them away at the door. You can't. If you try that, they come back with the police and a court order.
I think there is not any one set of concepts that can be called basic income.
Anyway, if people really are proposing that the state should give money away because then there is no need to protect children from bad parents, that's pretty stupid.
I'm a foster parent. BI will most certainly NOT eliminate the need for me. It's not about being poor. It's about not taking proper care of your children.
All payment social services, but not those that are doing enforcement activities. Replacing college loans, food stamps, welfare, etc. will save quite enough particularly if you pair it with actual fraud prosecution and verifying identity.
For example, providing free breakfast & lunch in schools addresses malnutrition of poor children much better than providing the same resources indirectly through their families, especially in various cases of dysfunctional alcoholic parents.
Subsidized housing, day care, etc? Food stamps aren't a great example because you can sell them. You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing. You can't sell a service.
> You can't sell the $800 you save in subsidized housing.
People sublease housing units without permission (and even outright illegally, even before considering rental contract limits) all the time. This includes units that are subject to one form or another of public support, whether its rent control or section 8. So, yes, you absolutely can sell (as for Food Stamp benefits, usually at a value less than the subsidy) the benefit you receive from a housing voucher.
Food stamp administration has gotten better over the past 10 - 15 years, but as someone else in this discussion pointed out it is still fairly easy to turn food assistance into cash if you want to.
After-school programs only work if the kid actually goes to them.
The payments could be made weekly. That way if someone was irresponsible and blew their basic income on non-essentials they would only need to survive on whatever they had left for a week.
Also, there would still be a role for social services in getting kids out of harms way if their parents couldn't look after them, but basic income would be sorted out separately, without using means-based testing.
Michigander here. AFAIK, you can't just turn your Bridge card into cash. How does one purchase lottery tickets and drugs with welfare payments? The one way I can think of is hanging out with the high-school kids outside the liquor store and saying "I'll go buy you X if you go buy me lottery tickets and alcohol/go to your dealer and get me an O"
The market for trading benefits for cash/services/products is quite robust in communities where it is the norm to be on them.
I think you would be quite surprised - it's a very well developed shadow economy that has pretty well known "rule of thumb" exchange rates, money changers, runners, etc.
This will pop up in any market that offers non-cash items of value.
I think I would be too, which is why I asked. Do you have any concrete examples of such a market? I mean, I put one right in my comment. How else do you do this sort of thing?
EDIT: I'm not trying to call you out, I just want to know how these things are done. Being on HN, I've seen stolen credit card marketplaces and things like that. Do people put their welfare payments on something like that? Do you have resources like that?
What would a concrete example look like to you? They don't do these things on the internet or with apps, it's all face-to-face and word of mouth. I wouldn't bet on there being any academic studies of it either. Likely all we'll ever have is personal anecdotes from people who have been involved in these communities and somehow ended up spending much more time on the internet than is the norm there.
Someone else pointed out googling "tide as currency", and that opened my eyes. It made me realize that people doing this are working with pointers, not values.
> on HN, I've seen stolen credit card marketplaces and things like that. Do people put their welfare payments on something like that?
Sometimes, yes, people sell EBT cards online (a quick googling finds numerous reports of this being done on Craigslist and Facebook.)
Othertimes, they convert benefits to concrete goods, which are then sold at below-market prices to convert into cash to by things that would not be allowed by the benefit program (or traded directly for other goods, with the seller of the other goods either using the traded goods or selling them for cash.)
Here in Baltimore, the usual benefits fraud method involves small shop owners willing to claim false purchases to a given value, then disburse an equal value in cash partly to the benefits claimant and partly to themselves as a profit - so, yeah, you actually can just turn your SNAP card into cash, albeit at a sizable discount. No doubt the same is true of a Bridge card.
They can simply sell the card at a discount to what it's worth. The buyer can then use it to purchase goods that he needs and pocket the difference, or resell them at normal retail or more. It's a huge problem.
I've brought up this idea before. Have part of the UBI of children go into a fund that they can then access at 18 to use for schooling or whatever they please. With CPS helping with neglect cases while they are young, the child then isn't stuck in perpetual poverty, because at age 18 they will have savings and full UBI in hand to make their own life. The money not in the fund either is used responsibly for child rearing by the parents, or foster parents if it comes down to that.
It's a laudable goal, but giving a bunch of (mostly) naive, uneducated kids a lump sum of cash is a recipe for disaster. There would instantly be an industry focused on parting them from that money, one that would be extremely profitable and mostly not related to education.
You weren't given cash, but today kids are given an essentially unlimited amount of government backed loans to pay for school - the availability of which has caused education costs to skyrocket.
Just thinking of this on the fly but could you have certain things that you cannot spend BI dollars on like this? Or after layering all these restrictions you've essentially recreated the previous system?
So you just give money to people with no strings attached, and when they spend it however they like, you take their kids away. That is pure evil mastermind, a bit like imperial British did with Aboriginals in Australia.
I don't see how you can possibly consider that evil. What's evil is taking money to gamble instead of making sure your children have food.
If they have the means (thanks to basic income) to provide for their children and still choose not to, how can you possibly argue that person is a fit parent?
We theoretically already have Child Protective Services to take children away in that case. Child abuse includes "[failing to] provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care or supervision."
On the other hand, there's the darwinist approach...
>It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing guarantee" fund
Seems like basic income allows for this issue to be resolved by private organizations easier since cash is much more liquid than welfare/other government benefits.
So basically what I'm getting at, is if you can't manage your own life, there will be a corporation that provides shelter, food, and basic necessities for you in exchange for 100% of your BI (cue comparisons with the for-profit prison industry).
Those that are unfit for even this model (their special needs require more service than their BI can possibly cover) would be a small minority (assuming BI could cover basic but adequate care for the majority of the elderly) and I suspect they would need to be institutionalized if there were no family or charity organizations that could support them.
Well that's my off-the-cuff zero-research opinion anyways.
Just as a tangential addon to this - I think if this were to happen, a computer with internet would have to be part of the basic necessities package. Maybe it's because I'm a nerd or the internet has had such a huge effect on me, but I feel with the internet and proper guidance to get tutorials, search things online and so on can really help those people produce things and learn. Without it, they might end up just roaming in the streets, doing drugs, maybe watch TV. Not to be cliche but I really feel like if people aren't introduced to the more "intellectual" side of life, they may never seek it themselves.
> I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit"
So the more vulnerable you are, the more likely the system should fail? A critical system is poorly designed when it is more likely to fail when its function becomes more critical.
Most people don't have problems because they are lazy, but because they have serious problems. Consider people with mental health issues, costly diseases (e.g., alcoholism), disabilities, people who are old and not functioning well, etc. If an elderly person is scammed out of their money, I don't feel 'tough shit' is a good response.
A "payday loan" usurer would be all too happy to lend someone $1000 in cash, and then take $50 out of each of the next 52 weekly BI checks.
I don't see a way to BI without significant buy in from Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of HHS to provide some of the value of benefit as actual food and as gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing. Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut. The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.
So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens. The existing food aid programs use EBT cards that act like debit cards and just leverage the same grocery stores and farms that everyone else uses. BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population. It would be like building the postal service all over again, except shipping identical 3000 kcal packages to somewhere within a 1.5 mile radius of every person in America, every day. (Then also ship the older, unclaimed packages to the pork farms.)
The upside is that those jobs would be real, actually-do-something jobs instead of the bullshit, pencil-pusher, bureaucratic jobs that typically suck up some of the welfare budgets. The post office may have a bad reputation, but at the end of the day, they do have something to show for their work. Eventually, those jobs get replaced by robots, too.
Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever. Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods. Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.
> I don't see a way to BI without significant buy in from Dept. of Agriculture and Dept. of HHS to provide some of the value of benefit as actual food and as gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing.
HHS doesn't provide gratis-rent, subsidized-utilities housing without BI. Section 8 is subsidized-rent (and even so has long waiting lists and behavioral controls, so that many people that are income qualified for it don't receive it.)
> Moving 100% of the benefit as cash leaves too much opportunity for middlemen to take a cut.
Actually, it eliminates lots of the opportunities for middle men to take cuts (starting with government bureaucrats and government contractors.)
> The ways to do that range from straight-up charging you interest on advance loans secured by the benefit
So, just make contracts to secure loans by UBI benefit void as contrary to public policy. You can pay people from the benefit, you can contract to pay people from the benefit, you can't provide a lien on the benefit to secure a loan, because the benefit cannot legally be seized from you.
> to charging slightly more for the goods and services typically consumed by poor people.
Price increases are an expected market effect that drive increased quantity supplied. It's not a bad thing.
> So I don't see the same magnitude of cost savings as the idea-evangelists do. If anything, government payroll would probably expand in the short term, as it builds the infrastructure to provide non-cash benefits to citizens.
Yes, in a phase-in approach that phases out other programs using eligibility calculations (where UBI counts as part of income) rather than a slash-and-burn implementation where UBI immediately replaces other programs, in the short term you'd have an additional program office with only caseload related reductions in the administration of other programs, until the UBI reached a level that entire programs could be eliminated because it became impossible to qualify for them.
> BI would have to assemble 300 million fungible daily ration packages and truck them to distribution centers sized and located appropriately for the needs of the population.
No, the whole point of BI is that its just money. "fungible daily ration packs" are not being built and trucked, monthly fixed-amount benefit checks are delivered (or electronically deposited.) [0]
People use the money to buy services in the market.
> Just moving the money around is not going to be enough to satisfy the need. If all you do is cut checks, it may take decades for the supply chain to adapt, if ever.
If you use a ramp-up UBI and phase-out of other programs (which is the only way you get the short-term surge of government workers you talk about), the supply chain can adapt slowly, and its not a program.
> Food stamps have existed for a long time, and we still see "food deserts" in lower-income neighborhoods.
Arguably, the restrictions around food stamps and the administrative cost of dealing with them contributes to that problem.
> Even the promise of having a local monopoly on rent-seeking the free government money has not motivated food distributors to set up shop in otherwise unprofitable areas.
Food deserts typically do not have no food stores, or even no food stores that sell some things that qualify for government food benefits. There are lots of specific concrete definitions used to identify food deserts, and they tend to focus on local availability of particular variety of selections or prices of particular options.
Most food deserts have some (often small) food-selling stores, including ones that accept government food benefits.
[0] Incidentally, a universal basic banking service would be a useful side-program along with UBI, reducing the problem of the unbanked.
A loan shark can introduce a pipe wrench to your kneecap regardless of whether he can officially record a lien against your BI income or not.
My personal opinion is, like the ancestor post, that BI is unworkable as a cash-only benefit. People forget that money is an economic lubricant. It does not make the gears turn. Possession of cash is economic shorthand for being able to command the disposition of real goods and services.
Having cash is a symptom of providing value to the economy, not the cause of it.
If you take a big chunk of cash from rich folks, and dump it on poor folks, that does not alter the underlying structure of the economy. The real-world supply pipeline for bringing popcorn from a field in Indiana to a bodega in East L.A. remains the same size. You have to divert a lot of cash for a long time before anyone will even consider upping the bandwidth of that specific food channel. Until then, popcorn is just $N more expensive at the bodega.
You're not providing anyone with anything more than a temporary illusory benefit if you don't build some actual infrastructure. Giving cash for rent does little good, unless someone actually builds more houses and apartments as a means to getting some of that cash, or to more of it than their existing landlord competitors.
The same amount of cash, spent on eminent domain compensation and general building contractors, can directly generate a permanent reduction in the local monthly cost of housing, rather than as a potential incentive for someone out there to maybe try to get at it.
If you do not build the economic infrastructure required for the benefit to exist, the amount of cash you have to throw at the free market to provide it can increase without bound. The economy is currently structured to funnel property and luxuries towards the rich. Screwing on a bypass pipe from a rich person's consumption endpoint to somewhere further back in their existing cash flow structure does not accomplish much.
If the holes of a safety net are large enough for a person to fall through, than it's not a safety net at all is it? If a tightrope walker is learning the skill, you want a safety-net that will catch them 100% of the time, until they don't need it anymore. A social safety net should be the same - relentlessly available.
Personally, I'd be fine with overlooking what I would assume to be the small number of people who would shamelessly exploit it, because I'd like to think that basic dignity and self-respect would prevent that number from ever being very large. In other words, the system would need some functional slack and it should be funded adequately so that it's not considered a "scarce resource" and the slack can be generous.
Myself, I'm ok if a system like this existed so that if I did have a problem family member, it wouldn't be assumed to be my responsibility to take care of them, and further, I don't like the idea of charities because it presumes benign wealthy people are available to fund them. It seems better, with social programs, to socialize the cost so that I can pay into a general fund so that it can be another-person (aka a professional)'s problem.
"Someone being too expensive to help" ... that makes no real sense today given how much money is swirling around. It's just a matter of what you prioritize.
But then you get a bunch of people who complain that high schools shouldn't be teaching that stuff. Of course, I feel that those who espouse that viewpoint are doing so because they benefit from having a large group of people lacking these skills.
It's not actually that hard. People who prove they cannot manage their BI are required to participate in a managed BI program. The individual can chose from any/all licenced managers (or an individual/family member willing to accept the responsibility) who provide varying levels of service for a specified Percentage of your BI.
Maybe an efficiency apartment with groceries delivered for 80%. Maybe a bunk in a dorm and a meal ticket for 50%.
Even an individual who can't manage their own money can still chose a service based on their needs.
> Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help.
How about if they get a grave disease and need urgent treatments and related resources for that? Is medical treatment supposed to be free in the scenario of BI as well ? Because, THAT, we know how well it works (free medical coverage) in several countries where it's already applied.
"Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help."
But see, that's why his is a trick question ...
If the answer is "tough shit" then it's a concession that implementing BI (or anything like it) is simply adjusting the "tough shit dial" to a relatively different value. There's still a benefits ceiling, beyond which it's "tough shit".
At that point it becomes difficult to justify any particular point on the tough shit dial - especially when todays tough shit was, four generations ago, essentially heaven on earth.
No benefits at all is a rational position. Endless benefits, cradle to grave is also a rational position. Neither of them are self-contradictory or loony. You may disagree with either of them but neither of them are crazy.
It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically. His question - and your answer - illustrate that very well.
> It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically.
No. In most countries of the world, including the United states, limited social benefits exist.
It is sometimes messy, it is sometimes unfair. But they are reality.
"No. In most countries of the world, including the United states, limited social benefits exist. It is sometimes messy, it is sometimes unfair. But they are reality."
Yes, that is exactly my point and it is from knowledge of the US systems especially that that point is informed.
It is my contention that they don't work - not just practically, on the ground, but even theoretically.
But it doesn't mean that they don't work at all. You are dismissing them because they aren't working perfectly. And I am saying that it is wrong to dismiss something just because it isn't perfect, especially if there is no better alternative.
> At that point it becomes difficult to justify any particular point on the tough shit dial - especially when todays tough shit was, four generations ago, essentially heaven on earth.
I don't see how this follows.
You are arguing that perfect is the enemy of good?
This tough shit dial be as low as is acceptable fiscally and to the contemporary standards of society.
> It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically. His question - and your answer - illustrate that very well.
By this logic do current US welfare programs count as the "bullshit in-between?" Those are very much workable practically in the sense that they are currently in effect and are not planned to be dismantled. For that matter doesn't any level of government support for disadvantaged citizens count as the "bullshit in-between?"
This would lead eventually to the system we have now, only larger (because it's not means tested). It also has huge supply-side economics problems:
If you stipulate that every family can spend an extra $1000 on housing, rent will go up by $1000 pretty quickly, and housing prices will go up by whatever $1000/mo in mortgage payments will allow.
In consumption-based positional goods, rents will always go up by whatever the basic income is. Because people are entering a zero-sum rat race for status. That's irrelevant to whether it's doled out as BI or as housing voucher.
But in normal markets, people will still try to supply the good at the lowest cost and consumers will still try to gain it at the lowest price, and the market will find some midpoint.
Moreover, if you can't make "universal housing vouchers" work, how are you going to make "universal basic income" work? The former is a much simpler problem.
I suspect that the problem would not be huge (but it would need addressing). The key would be making accessing the emergency safety net sufficiently unpleasant/inconvenient as to dissuade casual fraud. (The welfare equivalent of being put on hold.)
The key questions in my mind are:
(a) how do we prevent people borrowing against it?
(b) what to do about kids of people who squander their basic entitlements, but it's not like the current system handles this issue well.
While I tentatively agree, I don't think BI in this manner could succeed without first setting people up for success. Financial education and the ability to manage finances is a crucial prerequisite skill that many who would qualify for BI might very well lack. We can't throw people in the deep end of the pool and say the ones who didn't drown learned to swim.
My knee-jerk reaction is to agree with you. However the problem with "tough shit" can be seen with the homeless today. The safety net doesn't give out, instead they fall onto the emergency services net, which does not have the option of not helping them, and is possibly the most expensive net of them all.
First, Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCT) work better than most people expect (http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...). As noted in the article, UCTs work surprisingly well in scenarios where lack of capital is the primary problem. A UBI (at least as usually is discussed in the US) is a de-scaling UCT.
Second, most proponents of a UBI see it as more efficient because of the savings on administrative overhead. So dollar for dollar the assumption is that your social safety net with UBI is larger than current welfare.
Which finally brings us to the observation that current welfare is not an all-inclusive safety net, so opposing UBI because it isn't either seems a bit of a distraction.
A more interesting question, raised by the Economist article linked above, is where do UCTs break down? This is a question whether or not UBI should be _entirely_ UCT or if there should also be some Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT). This would be like providing incentives for going to college.
CCTs are better at correcting deeper issues that contribute to the cycle of poverty.
Ultimately I feel like a UBI is a good first step, but ultimately a combination of UCTs and CCTs are needed to really combat poverty.
You completely side stepped the question. I find it absolutely amazing how naive BI supporters are. I grew up poor in a ghetto in New York. Studied, went to university, became an engineer and am no longer in that socioeconomic bracket. However it is very apparent that the people in my current bracket (the one's that support BI), have no idea about the issues of the poor. Poor people are mostly poor because of the decisions they make. At least that is my experience. Drug addiction, gambling, alcoholism, poor budgeting, mental illness, etc, etc, etc. Thinking back I do not know anyone in my neighborhood who was genuinely a hard working person with no vices. Hard working people with not vices don't live in the slums and generally can support their basic needs. Yes there are those occasions were an acute emergency happens and support is need but that is an atypical story. Giving $1200 check to someone without food and shelter most definitely isn't going to provide them food and shelter. It will more likely go to a stamp bag, scratch off, 40 ounce, etc.
Yes, we need to help these people. Mental health, substance abuse, etc do not make people "bad". But giving someone a months worth of rent/food/utilities/clothing in cash is going to be disastrous
In my experience, your characteristization of why people are poor is wrong and ignores the daily struggles the working poor faces. I agree that most people are flawed but that's because we are not taught in school how to deal with adversity or how to live life. People in general have poor critical and analytical thinking skills, and get trapped in a vicious cycle with no hope for a better life.
I grew up poor and my mother worked to get us into the middle class. As an adult, I have been poor and wealthy, and have good friends that are decent people but are trapped in a system of poverty, or a community of gangs and a cycle of jail. Life is incredibly hard and it's not as easy as saying that poor people have vices.
Last year, I'd buy breakfast for homeless friends on Hollywood Blvd. then go eat the free breakfast on the 28th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Residences. I lived there and I can assure you, wealthy people are as crazy, addicted and ignorant as any poor person. The amount of criminality and corruption within the 1%, and how the police and even retired high-level government officials protect them, is astonishing.
I wrote a previous comment on why I think if rich people were smarter then there'd be less poor people. We need a society with better systems where there's less friction and challenges for people to overcome. And for many reasons, I see Basic Income as one of those better systems.
Assholes aside, since turning an asshole into a non-asshole is an incredibly complex issue, people I've known who are like the ones you're describing tend to not like their situation, dream about and periodically pursue having a better life, but are utterly incapable of making a chain of steps towards that better life when it's so much harder to climb than it is to stay down in the ditch. The level of competitiveness in our world also means there's many people above them who have it in their interest to keep them down and dependent (as their livelihoods depend on it).
One would hope with a lessened burden and greater freedom for the millions of Americans who aren't like that, social support and community would increase. MOOCs and the like would get more support. More people would pursue experimentation. More people people would do it right instead of getting shit done. More people would be free to stop giving themselves to processes they know are unethical.
These people you're describing are only a problem to kill off / suck dry in the world we live in now. In a world of basic income, they'd at least have a chance of getting help from the people around them that do care, have a well-developed sense of empathy. Having said all this, I totally agree that giving a lump sum of money to the people you're describing is indeed a terrible idea, will have bad outcomes.
> Thinking back I do not know anyone in my neighborhood who was genuinely a hard working person with no vices.
You're mistaking correlation for causation, which many do and is why this debate is so polarizing. Many people develop vices because they are neglected, as a coping mechanism/self-medication for their hopelessness. With more resources, they have more opportunity and don't need to self-medicate as much. This effect has been studied.
> Poor people are mostly poor because of the decisions they make. At least that is my experience.
That's the crux of the question. It might turn out that you were in a pocket of the poorest decision makers around, and that most people will do a lot better than they did. Or it might turn out that you're exactly right, and all we're doing is funding drug dealers and lotteries. That's why we need studies like this.
If you are an engineer I would expect a better capability of root cause analysis than that. Your list of things there is entirely comprised of things that are largely outside of the control of individuals.
"Poor people are mostly poor because of the decisions they make."
* Drug addiction
Yes, a person can choose to use drugs. Usually the choice is made under intense peer pressure and at a young age. We won't let children under the age of 18 be bound by contracts, but we still stigmatize them with poor choices made when they were often younger than that. Once drug use becomes drug addiction, it is no longer a choice and is excruciatingly hard to break out without external help.
* poor budgeting
Yep, budgeting is important. It's a shame that this isn't given top billing from about grade 4 on. Budgeting isn't just about managing monthly income and expenditure, it's about forecasting, and understanding financial risk management. Unfortunately, at least in the US, the education system is pretty abysmal, and it appears to be difficult to actually get students through school in some parts of the country.
These are actually all tightly linked to the word "illness". Gambling is often a learned behaviour that is linked with poor risk management and financial planning knowledge (see previous section on budgeting). Alcoholism is learned behaviour, that like gambling depends on poor impulse control, and addictive tendencies which are both physical and mental illnesses (or just illnesses once you get past the labelling stigma).
"Hard working people with not vices don't live in the slums and generally can support their basic needs."
Turn on the news, or better yet, read a couple of socio economic studies -- especially ones whose conclusions you find distasteful (it helps break your personal filter). This is flat out false - it is hard to support your basic needs when minimum wages are too low, finding full time work is hard, and there is a glut of skilled professionals who can't find work in their field, so they take up all the entry level jobs.
If you are actually an engineer you should be capable of composing a better comment than what you wrote here simply by thinking it through first.
Wow, this is extremely condescending with no actual backing information.
The fact of the matter is, people make bad choices. People who make bad choices are more likely to be poor. Lack of impulse control is extremely prevalent in poor communities. Like the GP, I was poor, I know poor people, and 95% of them are just shit at thinking long term.
The educational system fails people sure, but why does that mean we should give $1200/mo to people who do not have the necessary discipline to use it appropriately? CCTs have been used extremely effectively, and do combat this problem on a structural level.
There is actually a huge lack of skilled professionals in blue collar fields. We import mechanics at a ridiculous rate. This is true throughout a large portion of the world -- a SKILLED mechanic in Mexico can earn roughly the same wage as a skilled mechanic in the U.S...
It is hard to support your basic needs because you need to budget appropriately and you don't have extra money to spend -- but a large portion of poor people spend it anyway. I can't tell you how many of the people I know will drop $30 on some alcohol, drugs, club cover, concert, when they know that they'll be struggling to pay rent at the end of the month.
If you're actually an engineer you'll realize that most problems are multi-faceted and flat out telling people who have lived in a situation that some poorly researched secondhand analysis (i.e. the joke that is modern Sociology) is more relevant is absurd.
> The fact of the matter is, people make bad choices. People who make bad choices are more likely to be poor. Lack of impulse control is extremely prevalent in poor communities. Like the GP, I was poor, I know poor people, and 95% of them are just shit at thinking long term.
This is true of most Americans and is incredibly condescending. The poor are better with the money they do have than the middle class by a huge margin IME. The poor by and large don't blow their money on "fine dining" or new cars. They change their own oil. They don't spend over $100/month on cable TV packages. You can find exceptions to all those of course, but they prove the rule IME.
You're right, they blow their money on not-so-fine dining (my poor friends think McDonalds is cheaper than "Real Food").
Saying that it's true of most Americans obscures the systemic problem of scratch-offs and 40s on the weekend. And there is clearly a difference when you're doing these things with disposable income and doing it when you do not have disposable income -- one indicates a problem, and I don't think that it's an economic one.
I know middle income people spending their money on craft beer on the weekend and not participating in their company 401K. Or living effectively paycheck to paycheck. They may have "disposable" income, but only in the sense that they can float emergency spending on credit.
So yeah, there's a difference, but it's one of privilege.
Bad long-term financial decisions aren't exclusive to the poor.
You grew up poor. That doesn't mean your new middle-class peers had to learn the same lessons you did. They aren't middle class because they're smarter, more disciplined or have a better work ethic. They're middle class because they were born middle class.
Wanting to improve class mobility is one thing. Blaming the poor for not doing so on their own is another.
No. I don't. I mean that they had the most important safety net of all: Family with the will and ability to help financially.
I'm genuinely curious what financial life lessons you think a middle class kid is learning that a poor kid doesn't understand at a much deeper level.
My own experience is that (some) middle class kids succeed despite their own failures (dropping college classes before the grade becomes part of record stands out in my mind), and then attribute their success to their superior work ethic and intellect.
If most poor people fail to move up the class ladder, then in their same situation you're just as likely to fail. It's either that, or believe yourself somehow innately superior. I can't really think of a third option. It's like the adage about being surrounded by assholes.
You're right. Life isn't fair. But that doesn't mean the person cleaning my house isn't entitled to financial stability. I'm not religious, but I can't think of a secular version of "but for the grace of God".
The impact of poverty is more than just being poor, it can also affect your state of mind. There are studies that show people who have grown up in poverty have (on average) less self-control than those who grew up without experiencing poverty. I'll dig up the study so you can see it for yourself.
EDIT: There are a bunch of studies related to poverty and self-control in this article:
Yep, I too came from a poor background, went to university, then became quite successful and left that economic bracket behind. I work in software and security engineering, and coupled with good investments am in a very solid financial position. I have also spent a good chunk of the last decade studying and learning about the root causes of poverty and it largely cured me of my "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps" mentality I had as I started to escape from the mess that my childhood was.
I've been poor, too (spent years in my youth in a family on public assistance and in public housing.)
I too got an education (mostly in public policy), now work in software, and am now in far better socioeconomic status.
I don't find the GP's description of the causes of poverty accurate -- or even internally consistent, nor do I see GP's background (or my own) as some kind of privileged position to comment on the issue from.
> Giving $1200 check to someone without food and shelter most definitely isn't going to provide them food and shelter. It will more likely go to a stamp bag, scratch off, 40 ounce, etc.
At first, absolutely, for some significant percentage of the homeless. Anyone would be a fool to think otherwise. And yet I still strongly support the idea because I think think a bit farther than that, and not just because many will rise up to the opportunity.
You can't even casually approach the issue without considering the cycle of poverty. It's equally foolish to doubt that; higher-income areas don't magically produce harder-working, more responsible kids.
A UBI allows more opportunities for those that do want to rise up. A UBI provides drastically more stability for kids, taking away the major dragging force that causes so much violence, homelessness, and instability. So many low-income parents are away all the time working shitty jobs. You can ignore it all you like, but these people are in shitty situations from the beginning.
And ditch the personal narrative. It doesn't help. I grew up poor (rural, not urban) and got educated, etc. Yet, looking back, my situation wasn't too bad; my mom was always around, education was a priority, government programs offered a lot of help, and ultimately the state paid for a lot of my education. I am very much the exception that proves the rule, and almost without fail, any time I meet someone like you describe yourself, I find they had lots of advantages, too. Sure, not as many as someone from the middle class, but not nothing.
> But giving someone a months worth of rent/food/utilities/clothing in cash is going to be disastrous
San Francisco used to give out cash to homeless, and realized that it didn't work well. So Gavin Newsom (previous mayor) started the "care not cash" program, where cash was replaced with services.
True or not, it doesn't matter for the purpose. If somebody is mentally ill, it doesn't matter what the cause is or who we can blame it on, it's still the case that cutting them 4 figure checks monthly is not going to magically get them out of their situation.
No, it's the reason the bad decisions get made. Same as alcoholism, drug addiction, and other "vices". Some may stem from initial poor decisions in the past, but they're all good contexts for why continued, daily bad decisions are made that serve to keep the person in poverty.
We ought to support NAMI (http://www.nami.org/). They're a large, slowly growing non-profit organization of doctors, families and researchers that is trying to get the US to shift the way it deals with mental illness from the bottom up: identification, treatment, support, public perception, everything.
Protip: This would also help with our mass shooting problem, too.
None of the things in that list were themselves decisions. They were causes of poor decisions. Do you dispute that mental illness can be a cause of poor decision making?
What about inverting the status quo and deducting UBI for each child you have (with a grandfather clause of course)? The problem would solve itself in a few generations. You've gotta work and plan if you want to have kids. If you want to party for your entire life, go ahead, but you don't get to leave kids behind for the rest of us to deal with.
At which point CPS intervenes. The other piece of the puzzle would be high quality orphanages, operated with expectation that the chidren will not be adopted, instead dedicated to providing the best possible environment for development.
Our current system tries to fill the role of the orphanage as best it can without taking the children away from their parents, and I don't think it works for anyone involved. Bad parents are enabled, poor kids rarely overcome their upbringing and continue the viscious cycle, well adjusted kids from stable homes have their education disrupted and often violence inflicted on them by the poor kids, and it only gets worse as time goes by.
Can the cause and result be (at least partly) reverse? That is, poor people is poor not because of their poor decisions, but being poor let them make poor decisions. Or maybe it's a feedback cycle. I don't have first-hand experience, though; just an impression from a book[1].
If being poor is a part of a cause, then guaranteed safety net may break the malicious cycle. But yeah, just blindly betting it seems too naive. That's why we need social experiments, right?
>But giving someone a months worth of rent/food/utilities/clothing in cash is going to be disastrous
If the poor can destroy our society because we cut them a check, we're fucked as it is. Who knows if BI is implemented "no strings attached cash", but it's not impossible to imagine outreach groups to get people to spend their money more wisely.
And despite the help, some of them will continue to buy vices. You cannot help those people until they decide they want to change. But this small waste of BI is not a strong argument against BI.
I mostly agree with GP, but "disastrous" as meaning destroying our society is pretty over the top all right.
People spending their BI money on vices instead of food and shelter isn't by itself an argument against BI, but it does call into question the supposed advantages of BI. We're supposed to be able to eliminate cumbersome, complex, admin-heavy welfare programs in favor of BI, thus making it an overall savings of taxpayer money. If many people spend all of their BI money on vices and are still starving on the streets at the end of the day, then we need the old programs back again to feed them, and we're just spending money on nothing.
I don't believe many people will be buying vices to the point that they also can't eat, but I also don't think BI's adoption will shut down soup kitchens and other benevolent places (nor stop people panhandling, but it certainly may change everyone's opinions on giving to panhandlers).
I don't mean to sound cold, but it sounds like the person your describing is at such a point that they simply can't care for themselves and need to be hospitalized.
BI is will certainly stop them from starving if the payments are very frequently (weekly or even daily). If they blow it, they will soon learn their lesson until their next "paycheck".
> Drug addiction, gambling, alcoholism, poor budgeting, mental illness
I come from a middle class background and I know a number of people, in my extended family and in my middle-class community, who have made the same choices (BTW mental illness is not a choice), and it didn't put them in poverty.
I don't think there's a strict cause and effect relationship there.
Some of that is due to the traditional monthly nature of payments and expenses, which is beyond some people's planning horizon. How do you think it would change if everything (both BI deposit and rent payment) were weekly, or even daily?
I've seen London rental advertisements list weekly prices as a way to conceal their cost, but I've never heard of anyone taking payments weekly. Do council-provided flats have weekly bills?
New Zealand also calculates weekly. For example, a landlord can only ask for two weeks "up front" (aside from a bond). Weekly is common outside the US, whether advertising-only or otherwise.
Well, it's a study... I can totally see giving someone $1200 once will not going to food and shelter. But just maybe, over time, it'll relieve what may be a sense of hopelessness, or other complex social factors that leads people to poor decisions. And it may not help for 100% of people in that socieconomic bracket, but optimistically I think it could help a large number of people get out of a bad cycle.
No, it's literally called enabling, and it doesn't help people's problems. There's a reason why you're told to cut off funds to people who have problems like this.
> Drug addiction, gambling, alcoholism, poor budgeting, mental illness
I come from a middle class background and I know a number of people, in my extended family and in my middle-class community, who have made the same choices (BTW mental illness is not a choice), and it didn't put them in poverty.
I don't think there's a cause and effect relationship there.
Somebody else suggested that payments should be divided into smaller amounts and disbursed more frequently. So instead of getting $1200 one a month (or whatever the amount is), you would get $20 every morning and $20 every evening. How do you think that would work in the neighborhood you grew up in?
You might have a point there, daily payments could turn the best of us into daily drunks.
Personally, I learned being moderately frugal from having a large (for a kid) stash of cash in the bank (piggy and otherwise). "Do I want X more than I want to keep the money?" is a very different kind of question than the two separate "Do I want X? Do I have the money?" that I observe in people who never had that chance.
Maybe something like annual/1460 a day (for not starving) + annual/24 a month (for regular bills) + annual/4 once a year (to keep that long term thinking sharp) could be the best pattern. Somewhat foolproof, but not unnecessarily fool-creating.
> Drug addiction, gambling, alcoholism, poor budgeting, mental illness
I come from a middle class background and I know a number of people, in my extended family and in my middle-class community, who have made the same choices (BTW mental illness is not a choice), and it didn't put them in poverty.
Serious question... By this logic have I plateaued in the middle class because I like to pay for and watch Netflix while having a few beers on the weekends instead of managing an investment portfolio for better returns or working on another startup idea?
I didn't at all, you just wanted to read that I did.
To recap, UBTs work better than most people expect. Within the extreme poverty bracket there are many people who actually use UBTs better than we anticipate. UBTs aren't a silver bullet, CCTs better address poor decision making and the deeper rooted issues which cause a cycle of poverty.
You, and many current welfare proponents, cling to the belief that the _majority_ of those on welfare would poorly allocate their funds, but again, this has been shown to not be the case (at least not to the degree we expect) time and time again.
I encourage you to actually read the Economist article...it is quite good.
I will also point out that while I cannot comment on the psychological benefits, I believe there to be strong economic benefits to a UBI over current welfare.
And finally, UCTs aren't the answer to everything. A UCT/CCT combination I think is inevitable to address the deeper decision making issues of poverty.
If most people born in poverty remain in poverty, while most people not born into poverty do not enter poverty, then it is self-evidently not the fault of the born-poor that they remain poor.
Thanks for your comment, I also grew up in a poor immigrant family (non academic parents) and was able to move to the top 0,5% and fully agree with you.
My personal experience is that the problems poor people face (at least here in the West) often originates in their own lack of self control, impulse control, ability to cooperate and ego.
I fear if we take away all outside pressure to be productive and yes, to some degree conform to society, we will create a disaster for all of us.
Giving free stuff to someone is the worst you can do for anyone. Giving opportunities helps.
Delivering the money in small chunks might help. Instead of 70$ every week, make it 5$ twice a day. So no matter how broke you were yesterday, you'll have enough money to eat in a few hours.
Another "make it easy to get food even if you really screwed up" option might be to give grocery stores 'first dibs' on the money. Basically, let people spend the money a couple days in advance if they do it at a grocery store. A foodstamp micro-loan.
The really tricky stuff is probably cases involving debt, where the debt-collector wants to pressure the person into paying them before buying food.
Solving this debt is not that tricky, it has known legal solutions - e.g. when you have a court order to collect debts from you, where your wages are garnished, it has a floor limit of monthly income that's untouchable and that monthly amount will be available on your bank account no matter what, and there are no legal ways to recover that from you. Threatening to break your legs may work, but that can be handled by the police.
Set this floor equal to BI, and that's it. On the other hand, it will mean that payday lenders will likely not lend to you at all if you have no other income, since you can easily never ever pay them back with impunity; but that might be considered a good thing - people won't get stuck with predatory loans en masse because they won't be given them.
I agree with that one. It is probably worth it to deliver the money each day or at least each weekday. You could handle the food stamp microloan via and debit card that only is for small food purchases which deducts payment from future daily payments over a certain period of time.
It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month.
Handling the debt-collector issue is probably going to take something like a law to force payments in very small amounts until legitimate debts are paid off.
> It would also stop the amazingly timed police checkpoint on the first day of the month.
I've never heard of this. Do you have a link or something? I assume it's like a checkpoint they set up in poor areas so they can get money from the welfare checks or something?
So, its the first of the month and people got their welfare check (or EBT these days), and need to drive into town to buy food. Amazingly, a police checkpoint appears and pulls every driver (well, not semis or high priced vehicles or well those without reservation plates) over. Of course the cars aren't well maintained (poor rural - got a grant based on those stats) so tickets fly. But I'm sure everyone feels safer now.
I am having one heck of a time finding the articles.
Ah so it's not to catch them while they have money, it's to catch them when they know the poor people with poorly maintained cars will be heading to town. That's quite shameful.
This is about the tiny daily portions of money, not about BI.
It's hard to make long term plans with that, because instead of putting aside $100 at the beginning of the month, now you need to save $3 a day. With amounts that small, it's easy to accidentally overspend.
Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.
Not all poor people are poor because they're drug addicts that cannot handle money. Poverty is hard to escape. I'd rather not humiliate these people any further and make it even harder for them to lead a dignified life just because some people might waste their money in the first week.
> Plus sometimes sudden unexpected costs happen, and you cannot wait another week to slowly save up for it, you need that money now.
If unexpected costs happen currently, you either have the money or you don't and have to wait - the situations are the same.
(Upfront payment - Have the money? Great. If not, wait until next payment. Daily payments - Have the money? Great. If not, wait)
> I'd rather not humiliate these people any further and make it even harder for them to lead a dignified life
(FWIW, I live on benefits due to medical issues) How is this undignified? If anything, it's one less thing to worry about (I've occasionally forgot about payments and ended up having ~zero money left just after a payment. A rolling income would at least mean I get money for essentials pretty much immediately)
I feel like it's undignified because it sounds to me like saying "You can have money, but since you are poor and don't know how to handle it, we give it to you in small daily portions so you don't waste it all at once.". Like parents do with their young kids.
If it's basic income, then you should be free to choose how and when to use it.
For your example about forgotten payments, the result would be that you did not pay, so potentially you may lose your insurance, or you receive a fine or something worse. That's a decision you should be able to make yourself.
If you don't have control over your own money, that's not very dignified.
I'm not sure how that is relevant at all. We're talking about how a BI system could work and whether it could be a good idea to split the money in tiny daily chunks. I stated that I believe that is a bad idea because I believe it's generally harder to put aside a dollar a day than $30 a month at the beginning of the month. So far I haven't heard any counter argument, just "How would that be worse than what we have now".
Plus that question has so many answers depending on which country you live in. I can tell you for example that in my country you are expected to save part of your welfare money for those cases, which does not necessarily work very well since it's often not enough money to really save it.
> What if your washing machine breaks or your kids need new clothes or your car needs gas?
paying out nightly would be better for the "car needs gas" and really no worse of the other two. Many families are going to take a hit on major repairs.
I assume we are talking about the same amount of money as the single monthly check divided up my payment days.
If you get all your money at once you can always have a buffer for these unexpected things. You also have more freedom to waste it all at once, but I don't believe most poor families are really that wasteful. It's just hard to get by. If you get your monthly check divided up, you can't first resolve the situation and then figure out how to deal with it financially. You have to wait. That might be the difference between making it to a job interview or not, or buying medicine for your kid when it needs it.
If you start coming up with extra cases for when it's urgent and you can get a bigger payout, you're again complicating the system and adding extra bureaucracy where part of the idea is that the simplicity of the system compared to classic welfare systems is what makes it more affordable and allows to give bigger monthly payouts.
> If you get all your money at once you can always have a buffer for these unexpected things.
That doesn't work in practice as people are really poor at budgeting thus the big trip on the 1st of the month to buy groceries.
> That might be the difference between making it to a job interview or not, or buying medicine for your kid when it needs it.
If I'm paid daily, its more likely I can buy that medicine or make that job interview. The actual difference is the big payments and frankly sucking up a chunk of the monthly is going to hurt pretty badly. We're talking about the same amount of money distributed differently.
> If you start coming up with extra cases for when it's urgent and you can get a bigger payout, you're again complicating the system and adding extra bureaucracy where part of the idea is that the simplicity of the system compared to classic welfare systems is what makes it more affordable and allows to give bigger monthly payouts.
I don't think I understand what you meant by this paragraph.
This has got to be the most pathetic strawman argument I've seen on HN in a long time. "BI doesn't work because it can't perfectly protect the most pathological outliers"? Ok. Did anyone say it would solve this scenario? And I'm sorry, but what existing agency currently helps people back on their feet after their 12th car accident in the first place? I'm really struggling to see the unequivocal BI take-down you tried to set up with your "riddle me this" quip.
They're asking how bad actors will be handled by the system. It's using an analogy to ask a question, not propping up a straw man and knocking it down.
The question is utterly hyperbolic, that's why it's a straw man. Phrasing your answer in the form of a question does not magically grant rhetorical validity to your line of reasoning.
The idea for Basic Income was that people have a better idea of how they need to apply money then one-size-fits-some programs government makes. This is the same argument that a market economy is better than a command economy, precisely because there are too many hidden variables for a mega-organization to understand.
What happens now, if someone has a financial emergency in our current system? Well, you're just fucked. Unemployment doesn't start until 2-4 weeks after you've been laid off/fired, and that's assuming they didn't fight it. Medical bills just linger, whilst the bill harassers keep calling. Your car broke? Well, too bad.
At least with BI, if money was disbursed every 2 weeks, then the crisis would be averted partially by that. Unlike now, if your car dies, you lose your job, and then no way to get a job or pay for a car.
The best solution I can think of to counter people blowing all their money is to trickle the money to an account, instead of giving it to them as a single fat paycheck every month. So if instead of giving them $1500/30days, give them $50 a day or maybe $25/day and a $750 "rent stipend" bulk at the end, so that they can't blow more than a certain amount a day unless they've been actively saving. This encourages the behavior of saving which is the biggest missing skill for the poor (because they are not used to having anything to save).
As for what happens when that gets blown out because of an emergency, I think addressing the cost of health care in a place like America is an independent and arguably more important challenge than providing BI. The system built around insurance policies and over-priced hospital procedures is ridiculous to say the least. You shouldn't need insurance to afford simple checkups, prescriptions and treatment, which would prevent most overcomplicated health conditions for the financially constrained.
Every other financial emergency I believe can be responded to with "tough shit you've exhausted your social safety nets," and it's probably ok. BI won't solve everything (or even anything) magically overnight, the intent is to build a culture long-term where people manage their lives around it and don't have to be told "tough shit" from birth.
If you've ever played "idle games" (e.g. bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens/#) they've effectively taken this concept to the extreme. Everything is earned and paid for as a rate of $/second. This strongly encourages you to leave your system in a state of positive rate before letting it idle, else you'll return to a ruined society.
Back in the real world, I think people might have a better understanding of their finances if they could view their position as a continuous function rather than only seeing the discrete transactions as most of us currently do.
Isn't 'a $750 "rent stipend" bulk at the end' an essentially direct redistribution of social wealth into the hands of those who don't necessarily need it?
It (and the rest of basic income) is a direct redistribution of social wealth into the hands of everyone, some of whom don't necessarily need it.
One of the things that distinguishes basic income from welfare is that the former is an unconditional transfer payment. That means that some of the folks who receive it don't actually need it. But it gains a lot of advantages over traditional welfare plans in the process - it is much simpler to administer, it doesn't require making politically fraught judgments of who is worthy, it eliminates disincentives to work that come from income cliffs, and it's easier to gather support since everybody sees a benefit.
Presumably those who don't need the basic income will end up funding a greater portion of it through higher taxes.
Well the money is generally earmarked. Your Section 8 voucher goes towards housing, food stamps go towards food, etc. That creates a limit on how the money can be spent.
That's fair. I guess part of the question is whether it's unacceptable to have any way people can fall through the cracks, or whether it's about relative improvement. The original comment felt more like the former, but that's just what I got from it.
Social Security is not a give away. People have paid into SSI for years and they are getting their money out of it. No one is giving them free money and they free to blow it as they see fit.
Social Security started out paying benefits to people who never paid in. The money you pay to Social Security is for your parents and the money they paid was for their parents.
You are splitting hairs. I pay into SSI and there is an expectation that I will get a certain amount out of it based on when I retire and when I die. It is known today what I will get out in the future. Also, since the Social Security fund holds a ton of T-Bills (Think savings account), the argument that people who are retired now are getting someone else's money is technically wrong. If the Social Security fund held no T-Bills and young people were paying into a fund that was then immediately paid out to retirees, then I would agree with you.
> I pay into SSI and there is an expectation that I will get a certain amount out of it based on when I retire and when I die. It is known today what I will get out in the future.
It isn't. Congress can change it whenever they want, and they have more than once already.
> Also, since the Social Security fund holds a ton of T-Bills (Think savings account), the argument that people who are retired now are getting someone else's money is technically wrong. If the Social Security fund held no T-Bills and young people were paying into a fund that was then immediately paid out to retirees, then I would agree with you.
The Social Security fund doesn't hold enough T-Bills to satisfy its "obligations" and the shortfall (and then some) is made up for by current payers. The only reason it has any T-Bills at all is that the population has been expanding so more people have been paying into it than collecting benefits, and the government promptly loans the extra money to itself and spends it on F-35s and gifting tanks to ISIS.
Moreover, T-Bills in the hands of the government issuing them are not money. The government can't redeem them to itself to get money because that action would only cancel out. The only way the Social Security fund can actually convert a T-Bill into money that came from somewhere other than current-year taxpayers is to sell it on the bond market. But that has all the economic consequences of the government issuing new debt.
In other words, the only place the money paid out to Social Security recipients can come from is either current-year taxpayers or by selling into the bond market. Which is exactly the same as any program that isn't holding any T-Bills. The trust fund is an economic no-op.
> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe's twelfth "my car broke down" case of the year?
I think you're comparing BI to a different standard than the existing programs.
The question isn't "Is BI perfect?", but rather "Is BI better than what we have today?"
The exact scenario you laid out can easily happen with the various programs that exist today. If BI reduces (but not eliminates) those scenarios, that would be a worthwhile improvement.
Depends which BI fans you ask. The ones who want to completely eliminate other welfare programs are generally right-wing and/or libertarian - they're opposed to existing welfare programs for all kinds of ideological reasons. Left-wing BI fans (like me) are not so gung-ho about eliminating other welfare systems for the reasons you described, and I at least am totally willing to accept that BI will cost money.
That said, I do think there are some welfare items that can be eliminated, namely those that provide an income guarantee rather than a safety net against catastrophic expenses. So for example, section 8 and food stamps might be phased out under a BI system (they're always going to get next month's or week's deposit), but I think government-subsidized healthcare should not be.
WRT things like the car breakdown case you described... I think that's a gray area? With a few very big exceptions (people with disabilities or living in rural areas) the lack of a car is mainly a catastrophic issue because it endangers jobs. If the person has a basic living standard guaranteed, the urgency goes down, and I think you can just say "tough shit, save up until you can afford the repair". But I do think that there has to be a social safety net for people for whom a greater variety of big-ticket outlays are essential.
> So for example, section 8 and food stamps might be phased out under a BI system (they're always going to get next month's or week's deposit)
But my point is, when you hand someone a check and they must in turn be responsible for spending that money on food and shelter, they might not actually do that and then what? At least with Section 8 and food stamps you're earmarking the money for a particular purpose so as to make it much harder for the money to not be used the way it was intended.
> WRT things like the car breakdown case you described...
Keep in mind "my car broke down" is a metaphor for any unexpected event that impacts someone financially (and commonly as an excuse for "I spent my money foolishly and now I'm broke"), so I didn't mean for that to be some single concrete case I wanted a specific answer for. But again, if we decide that we need to help someone on BI who had some particular financial hardship beyond what their check allows for, how do we police that?
To be fair, if the disbursements are frequent enough, you don't need to worry about food. It takes quite a while to actually starve, and a hungry enough person will buy food.
Shelter is another story, but as long as you provide a means to assign some of your BI ahead of time to a provider (landlord), this should also be a minor issue outside of the very mentally ill, who are going to be screwed in any system (including the current one) that doesn't take them under involuntary managed care.
When I say assigning your BI, I mean being able to go through a process on the spot that guarantees a landlord $x over y weeks from your BI in exchange for y weeks of tenancy, possibly with additional penalty fees the landlord can claim for any damage to the property. Essentially, a lease without the need for a security deposit or credit check. I'm certain you'd have quite a few places willing to take in renters with guaranteed rent coming in at regular intervals.
If someone has that much difficulty managing money, I think social services need to get involved and take some control over the person's decisions away from them. I just don't think that should be the default.
Keep in mind that, under many current programs, you are not allowed to have savings. If you do not use all of your welfare money, then you get your benefits cut. If you have too much in your savings account, then you get your benefits cut. So it's not so simple as to say they have difficulty managing money, it's that they are not allowed to do many of the things you'd associate with successful money managing.
Under many current basic income programs, or just under other welfare programs? My impression of basic income schemes is that they are universal - they don't care if you're a millionaire, you still get your $30K per year.
Yeah. My attribution of these issues to saving skills only applies in a UBI context, iff the scheme doesn't force people into particular spending patterns as some current welfare systems do.
My personal idea of a solution is to make basic income a "stream" of income instead of a lump sum once or twice a month. We have the technology to make a transfer happen hourly, or even minute by minute. By apportioning the income in that way it becomes impossible to "blow all [your] money" to the point where you can't afford food, because if you just wait half an hour or whatever you'll have enough on your card again for a decent meal. Rent is a little more complicated because with our current system you're typically expected to pay a month or more up front, but there could be an opportunity to come up with new rent contracts and payment methods at the low end that are paid hourly or minutely instead of weekly or monthly, removing the need to save up to pay a lump sum.
There's actually nothing in this scheme that's tied to basic income either -- we could do this reform with existing entitlement payments today in a totally revenue-neutral way.
There is a problem with that though. For instance, if you're on foodstamps right now, and gas is not cheap, or it's very time-expensive to make it to the grocery store too often, then you're making single large trips. A continuous stream doesn't gel as well with that situation. You'd need a more comprehensive solution, like getting rid of food deserts in poor areas.
Or at least, if you're going to do this, you'd have to be very careful to not overcorrect for the 1st of tha month problem.
Not to ding your overall idea, I like it, think it's very cool. Just, to implement it with current infrastructure it would require a lot of care.
(Actually also I think rent or other large payments are less of a problem in your solution than you think - for anything on contract like that, you could simply reduce the rate at which continuous income is obtained. If your basic income is 100 units per whatever, and your rent is 43% of your basic income, you just reduce the stream down to 57 units)
> For instance, if you're on foodstamps right now, and gas is not cheap, or it's very time-expensive to make it to the grocery store too often, then you're making single large trips. A continuous stream doesn't gel as well with that situation.
Sure it does. Just save up for the 3 days before you go or whatever. There's nothing forcing you to spend every cent as it comes in, and a financially stable and responsible BI recipient would do well to save up, buy in bulk, and have a rainy-day fund anyway. Making the income into a stream would just save you from being kicked out on the street hungry if something unexpected happens and you hit 0 at some point.
To solve many corner cases, you could maybe have a kind of voucher application at the grocery stores, gas stations, car mechanics, etc., which would provide a temporary advance (or just money from a designated separate emergency or unusual circumstance pool so that it isn't like a credit card) which would need various rules that would guarantee that the service provider would always see the money, but also ensure that the applicant would be registered and held legally liable for misuse of the voucher system.
There's a fascinating idea presented in a webcomic (that I totally cannot find right now) that really explores this idea.
Aside from what all else is going on in the society, everybody has a banked amount of money that is their steady-state; that amount is pegged to living costs (either civ wide, or locally, I don't remember, probably something in between). If you currently have less than that amount, your account gradually fills - if you current have more, it drains. I also don't remember if the rates are fixed, or are curved (further from baseline, higher the fill/drain rate is).
Time-based costs and payments - rent, salary - are then taken as a rate, while one-off payments (meals, events, items) are paid for normally.
The goal of the system is a more matured BI situation, /plus/ an incentive structure to keep producing. If you make a shit ton of money off something, it'll last for some amount of time, but you will have to eventually re-contribute to society in order to maintain the "rich" standard of living.
Yeah I wanted to address this in my comment above but didn't want to get down in the weeds. There's a couple decent solutions to this problem. The liberal/socialist approach would be to make a contract garnishing future basic income illegal. The libertarian approach would be to make bankrupcy laws so frictionless that you could declare bankrupcy three times a week without breaking a sweat, causing payday loan companies to stop offering their services to the least financially responsible sector of the population.
I think either of these solutions could be made to work in general. Certainly better than what we have right now.
I can't speak for MOST BI fans, but I can tell you my own answer to that question.
I believe that (like the rest of the world, but NOT the US) medical care ought to be provided to all, so I'd take medical emergencies off the table.
I also think it is important that there not be a way to confiscate one's basic income for the repayment of a debt -- everyone gets to keep their basic income no matter what.
Furthermore, we need to continue (as we do today) to allow governments to run programs intended to keep the price of food and housing low, like zoning laws requiring developers to produce a certain amount of low-income housing. We also need to continue to provide government sponsored care for those incapable of caring for themselves (for instance, those who need institutional care due to severe mental or physical handicaps).
And after that, if we create a basic income that is sufficient to cover basic living expenses, I think we DO get to eliminate much government aid for poverty. Eliminate unemployment insurance (or rather, the mandate to provide it). Eliminate aid to the poor. Eliminate social security. Eliminate a minimum wage.
You ask "what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food"? I think that yes, you DO tell them that. You example is someone who says "my car broke down" and I think we, as a society, could leave that person stranded without their own automobile. (Today I know of no government programs to help people whose cars have broken down, so I'm pretty sure we can all agree to live with that.)
Basic income should be subject to garnishment, just like any other income. There are limits to the amount that can be garnished (In WA state its 25-35% of total income, depending on type of debts) that would protect them from having it completely taken away.
Doughnut holes in benefits always create odd distortions where people would turn down a small raise or increase in hours because they would actually loose money due to the loss of benefits at the higher income level. In this case, it would be people not willing to work as the extra money they would make would go mostly to the debt rather than their pocket.
What sort of emergency do you envision? Most of today's financial emergencies hinge on either losing your job or incurring extreme debt due to uninsured medical care. I can't speak for all BI proponents but I, personally, support universal health care in addition to BI.
With health care taking care of medical expense emergencies, basic income is left to take care of job-related emergencies. Your example of "my car broke down" would seem to fit that category. So what then? Joe loses his job but basic income will make sure he never goes homeless and always has enough food to eat. Instead of having a major crisis he can take a break from working and maybe upgrade his skills.
Yes, of course. Universal health care coverage (read: insurance) can't be used to buy groceries or pay rent. Basic income will never be enough to pay for somebody's cancer treatments.
Neither one is a substitute for the other; both are extremely beneficial.
Currently under the PPACA you cannot be denied insurance for prexisting conditions, and it is reasonable to expect pegging UBI to just poverty + cost of bronze single person plan in your area rather than implementing universal healthcare.
Not trying to argue it isn't cheaper to cut out the insane middle men in the healthcare industry, or that the current insurance system works at all (deductibles cost society incredible amounts of money and time because people won't go to the doctor until they are dying because of the unsubsidized costs) but if your goal is to have everyone insured, fed, and sheltered you can do that with just the cash payments while just enduring a disastrously inefficient and harmful healthcare system besides it.
Right now you can blow all of your food stamps money on bottles of ketchup if you want. Nothing is stopping you. And there is no fall-back. And food stamps don't fix your car, section 8 housing doesn't fix your car, even if you have SSI, it's not really enough money to fix your car.
So all of this is a straw man and completely irrelevant to anything related to BI. Once you expend your welfare, you don't get more just because you asked.
> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?
In the simplest case, the same thing as when someone on existing cash benefits has an emergency or blows them all (and, yes, that happens even with restricted-use benefits like food stamps) -- there may be public and/or private emergency shelters, charity kitchens, etc. that operate at a level below the benefit programs that exist now that would be replaced eventually by UBI, and the transition to UBI doesn't really affect the use case for those.
There may be ways to improve the handling of those situations (or mitigate them) within a UBI by adding new public systems that leverage the UBI infrastructure, are voluntary, and don't change the basic nature of the UBI. But those are factors beyond the basics of a UBI -- in the simplest case, that's an issue that exists in the status quo and is not among those addressed by UBI.
A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget. Uber drivers. Servers at restaurants. General hospitality workers that are getting automated out. Ordinary white, working class Americans who lost their factory jobs to China in the last recession. People who are voting for Trump.
These people should be allowed to make the trade-off between using their BI to live in the city and use public transit, or to live in a cheaper, more rural town and having a car. Similarly, they could choose between eating chicken for dinner every night, or eating ramen all week and splurging on a box wine on the weekend. BI lets adults do this. It's embarrassing to stand behind someone at the grocery store trying to buy a bottle of wine with EBT.
It's worth noting that BI does not, by itself, solve mental illness, drug addiction, medical emergencies, or fraud. However, a homeless person that receives BI could rent themselves a small apartment somewhere -- which could reduce the number of 911 calls that person causes as a homeless person, and in turn free up cost savings for e.g. a social worker visiting them at their new apartment.
> A lot of the people who are going to be on BI in the next ten years are adults who are in good mental health and perfectly capable of spending within a budget.
Of course there are safety nets, look I can only speak from my perspective living in Sweden but it's my perception that we already have a sort of basic income through the various social services available.
I never understood BI until you said "cut a check", so that's the difference between BI and what we have today in a welfare state.
Because today you get a grant for your rent and you get a basic minimum income from social services. All of which is designed so that you should be able to survive but not in excess.
It's two sums of money that is essentially a BI but instead of cutting a check it's calculated based on your standard of living.
For example if you're keeping a 3 room apartment without a job then the public insurance company that issues the housing grant will require you to move to a smaller apartment to keep your grant.
There's also additional money you can request if you're sick or old. And of course some people have a disability so there's money for that too.
The problem with having many small creaks like that is most people don't know about all their rights, or are just too lazy to pursue them.
>The problem with having many small creaks like that is most people don't know about all their rights, or are just too lazy to pursue them.
That's why it's better to just cut EVERYONE a check. Everyone starts at the same BASIC level of subsistence, and there are no welfare cliffs, administration overheads, frauds, tricks, etc. etc. etc. Then we work to improve our situations - as we ought.
There's been a lot of research into this, particularly around the concept of savings as the big obstacle towards independence and freedom. The poorest people who struggle to achieve even a basic income (think participants in microcredit) face a difficult task of building enough savings to live past one catastrophic flood, one bad recession, one big purchase/investment (a new car that doesn't always break down vs. crappy money pit of repairs and bills).
IMO, research into developing savings capacity is arguably more important, and a much broader problem. But the wisdom of saving pennies is not a sexy idea. The people doing the most progressive work in this are orgs like Grameen.
It seems that a large portion of the very poor / homeless is caused not directly by poverty, but indirectly by poor decisions caused by mental health issues.
Obviously BI is not a fix for the health care system, but how do you propose that BI should address people that don't really have "legal capacity" to make decisions on their own ? Do you support paying BI to some dedicated caregiver instead in such cases, or is it beyond the scope of this initial experiment?
Poverty can also cause mental illness. There are plenty of studies on how children raised poor and hungry have developmental issues both physically and mentally, and how even adults who transition into poverty can become trapped in it and have their thought patterns altered through it.
How do we deal with this now? If you have a job, and you spend all your money before you pay your rent, how do we help those people out? I'm not aware of any government institutions that will pay your rent for you. If you spend all the money you have on food, I suppose you can get food stamps, but most likely you go to a soup kitchen.
I guess I'm wondering if there is any data on how many people "blow all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food", and how we help them now.
If you paid it weekly, or even daily electronically, this would be a non-issue. Joe doesn't have enough cash to buy food? Tough shit; he'll get $20 in his account tomorrow and can buy breakfast at 12:01am if he's hungry.
Every welfare or social safety net has a similar schedule. We would not give someone a $12,000 welfare check on January 1st and expect it to last very long. People reliant on welfare or BI have proven that they have very low financial literacy.
The way we solve giving money to people with low financial literacy is the same - don't give them their money all at once - spread it out over time to limit the financial harm they can do to themselves.
I'm actually shocked that someone would ask such a riddle. It's not clear to me if you actually thought that question through, or if you're just trying to take down BI from any angle you can.
As many others have pointed out - that's a straw man argument. The existing system doesn't cover your riddle either. Yes, people will abuse systems, and yes, systems will sometimes fail. But that alone is not a reason to stop pursuing it.
> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?
They still get the BI check every week which they can still use to buy food and pay the rent, so homelessness or starvation doesn't happen. Now they may have some other bills they can't pay, so their cable gets turned off and they lose their car and have to buy a fifteen year old one or carpool or take the bus.
I mean what happens now in that case? If wrap your car around a pole and don't have collision insurance the government isn't going to buy you a new car. If you rack up gambling debts the only thing Uncle Sam will give you is a ticket to bankruptcy court.
Insurance. There has to be insurance, and it should be part of BI. So Basic Income & Insurance. BII.
If someone keeps making claims, then they should be investigated for insurance fraud, and processed accordingly.
As for people wasting their income... This shouldn't be a concern for any BI system. The system distributes basic income. What people do with it should be up to them, just like they are free to spend their pay check as irresponsibly as they wish.
If there are specific cases where someone is mentally or physically incapable of responsibly converting income into basic necessities, we could let there be basic shelter and food (what homeless shelters are today) and have those expenses deducted from their BII.
That's exactly how existing welfare systems work. If you spend the money you must rely on charities like soup kitchens. BI changes nothing in that regard, what it does change is: it removes means testing and the huge cost, stigma, and unfairness that goes with it.
Many countries already pay for schooling, healthcare and military protection, why not do it for basic living costs?
For people with an income above the level where they can apply for assistance programs, what happens to them if they blow all their money? They're broke until their next paycheck. If they borrow too much and can't pay it off, they declare bankruptcy.
BI isn't a one-time payment. Presumably people would get checks every other week or every month like a paycheck. If they blow it all, worst case they will be stuck for a couple weeks. Not long enough for an eviction to go through or to starve to death. After being hungry for a couple weeks, they should figure out pretty quickly that they need to buy groceries before lottery tickets.
I know someone who blows his "bijstand" (the lowest welfare level in the Netherlands, about 1000 euro but you will also receive subsidies for rent (up to 350 euro) and healthcare). I can tell you that you will become homeless and live in homeless shelters when your parents can't or will not take you in.
GP understands this, I think. The assumption is that BI will replace food stamps and/or other social welfare programs. This being the case, the question is: what if the recipient carelessly spends their BI, and does not have enough money at the end of the month to pay for fundamentals (rent, food, etc.) given that the food stamp program has been replaced by BI.
I'd say you absolutely say 'tough shit'. Learning to manage a scarce resource effectively should be one of the goals of the program. It should not be the job of the state to take care of people who, of their own volition, regularly and repeatedly screw themselves over. That isn't to say that nobody should care for them, but I think that should fall to private charities, family, or other institutions.
If a person's issue is drug addiction for instance (probably the most common type of person who would blow all their money and not have enough for food), i'd like to see free treatment offered to those people. I would not, however, like to see more resources given to them other than that. They can keep getting their BI check and blowing it on drugs until they decide they're ready to stop, or they die. They will have their habit financed which will probably net to a far lower social cost than them stealing to pay for it or whatever else they may be doing.
The other major potential financial stress is healthcare. Healthcare is essentially a random high variance cost. For this reason, I think it makes sense for society/government to socialize high-cost healthcare problems for people. I think this is a true public good in the sense that it allows people to be untethered from their jobs and to pursue more risky enterprises without fear of harming theirs or their families health in so doing. This is ultimately a net good for society far above and beyond the health benefits that it gives to the actual end-recipients of the funds. Smoothing ultra-high variance, random inelastic expenses is critical to promoting innovation and keeping an economy running effectively.
As with current welfare programs: you get a check every <interval>, end of story. People are free to make bad decisions and get themselves evicted, but those situations will be because someone is incapable of managing their money, not because they're incapable of making it.
Likewise, landlords will be more willing to give people a chance because they know you're not going to 'lose your job' so to speak. That said, the idea of a basic income seems like it should also include free courses on managing your money – best practices, techniques, ways to work around impulse buying, how RRSPs/401k/etc. work, and so on.
Also, welfare programs as currently implemented aren't a safety net below existing incomes; they're not a line of credit that you fall back on when your car dies again. They're programs which are paid in lieu of an actual income, which is frustrating to apply for and be on, and in most cases they pay you so little that you can't afford e.g. child care and rent, but which also force you to prove that you're out there applying for jobs even though you can't afford someone to watch your kid while you do.
Just because someone isn't going to lose their "job" (BI), what's to say it will end up in the landlord's hand? They can still default on payments. I wonder if signing over all/some of the BI to the landlord so it goes direct could be a good upgrade. It comes with the creditworthiness of the state (in california that is less than 100% mind you).
Thoughts on the risk of someone not paying their BI to the landlord?
I hope BI just never flies because financial problems grow out of real problems. You cannot solve human problems by cutting a check to all the poor people. Poverty grows out of very real problems like chronic health issues, learning disabilities, abusive relationships, etc. These are not going to be magically fixed by giving all poor people a check. Furthermore, I have my fears that both poor people and the rest of society will put less effort into helping people with very serious, intractable problems to actually resolve them because "Hey, you have your UBI." And I think that is likely to cause far worse problems than we have currently.
I just hope to god UBI never is real. Pilot programs often go well. People who have the proverbial rich uncle to draw upon tend to do better than folks without such a resource. These pilot programs are more like that. When you actually try to guarantee universal support (a la communism), historically, it has always failed to work out well. It is a fundamentally broken model.
As a BI fan, this is a great question. While BI does simplify welfare distribution it does put more responsibility on the receiver. If we wanted to protect from misuse of funds we need a way to restrict how they spend their BI, like how food stamps work.
BI should be spent on life necessities while earned income should be disposable and/or go into savings.
> If we wanted to protect from misuse of funds we need a way to restrict how they spend their BI, like how food stamps work.
Except, of course, that food stamps don't work for that, despite the administrative overhead that trying to enforce specific uses puts, because people can (and do) find ways to illegally convert SNAP benefits, at a discount, to cash or non-covered goods and services.
Which is among the problems that UBI is offered to solve, by eliminating the ineffective paternalistic bureaucratic administration.
> Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"
Yes it's the same thing on the current welfare. You can blow your bridge card (food stamps) on bad food and be out of it and you don't get more. It would be the same thing, you can blow your money and then you're gonna have to find something else.
I would think any basic income program would come along with available education on budgeting and counseling for how to get out of debt, etc. I think besides lack of opportunity, another big problem with social mobility in our country is lack of financial education. People just don't realize how many sharks there are out there trying to take advantage of them, and just how deep of trouble they can easily get into.
You can present all kinds of edge cases how basic income can fail in individual, specific cases, but those are the exceptions. And you shouldn't kill a great idea because of the exceptions.
I think as long as they don't get into debt, it should be okay if they blow all their money on drugs and alcohol or whatever once or twice. Maybe they end up sleeping on the street for a few weeks, but I think there's only so much you can to help people who are totally self destructive. There should still be addiction programs that would be covered by universal health insurance to help people who do this sort of thing regularly.
I think to prevent 'payday loan' types of scams, a good fix would be to make these payments totally unrecoverable by debt collectors. Maybe people might still loan 50 or 100 dollars, but they would just be throwing away money if they loaded you up with thousands of dollars worth of debt.
Also my concern. It's only justification is that it's a more efficient alternative to all other welfare. That would put a LOT of bureaucrats out of work. It'll never happen. Also, it's hard to buy votes with something that doesn't expand.
The way I see basic income (BI) is like when you get money back after doing your taxes only with a BI you get it up front and more of it.
It's not meant to be your only source of income but I can see how some people would chose to use it as such. At first it would be confusing since any social programs currently in place such as welfare, unemployment insurance would be phased out.
The current government of Canada is proposing to implement or at least look at a basic income.
The problem I see with your statement is that most Americans know that SS is not a retirement fund, but they treat it as such because they don't save. So, when you say "It's not meant to be your only source of income ... " I see millions of people using it as such if BI is enacted.
> what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?
Pay daily instead of monthly. This way it is harder to "blow all their money" and not being able to afford food. Or a hybrid approach: 50% of the monthly income upfront and the other 50% distributed daily.
>> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? <<
What do we do today when someone with a job has a financial emergency or just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? You can't quit your job and instantly qualify for food stamps and you certainly can't instantly qualify for subsidizing housing -- in a lot of places it takes a decade or more to get public housing or a voucher.
Our current approach is telling them "though shit", so at worst we're back where we started. Most proposals protect UBI from wage garnishment so that people don't end up homeless because they are in debt. They also typically assume the existence of universal healthcare, not just treatment but also long-term care of the disabled. So I think the worst thing that can happen is temporary homelessness due to poor money management. Hopefully homeless shelters and social workers will still exist.
Most of our government programs are screwed up because they suffer from "over-fitting". Just like in statistics you can some up with a higher order polynomial that fits all your known data points but in practice it is going to be horribly broken if it is to be used to understand the nature of the curve.
The fact is:
1. We cant prevent all plane hijackings and incidents.
2. We cant prevent a lone wolf attack for whatever reason.
3. We cant help all people in all their difficulties
4. We can not come up with a government program or many programs that will help all needy
5. We can not prevent all frauds
Coming up rules like checking people shoes in TSA lines because of a past data point is overfiting.
The best way would be to come up with a very uniform welfare program that includes everyone without a racial, gender,handicap and any other bias.
Encourage private charity to help people get through exceptional situations.
Another problem with separate welfare programs is the massive wastage in overhead + the total lack of empathy among the people who actually run it. Encouraging private charity would solve that problem to a very large extent, a church group often achieves more with less money. Not to mention when there is more money in private charity companies like Watsi can come up which will bring in more innovative ways to help people. Currently federal government's welfare money will not promote innovation.
Additional safety nets would be needed. A transition wouldn't likely happen overnight. It would more likely be a gradual phasing out of old programs and a build-up of basic income as money is moved toward that program. At the same time, additional resources would need to be pushed into services to help people budget and manage their finances. A combination of traditional in-person financial counseling and software would work best.
I use Simple, and they have a good model for integrating budgeting into their bank app. A basic income program should follow the same principles, giving out a debit card with a budget along with a website and app to help people manage their money better. The first expense it can cover is a cheap smartphone for those that need it.
Analytics tracking the efficiency of the program should allow a lot of optimizations over time. There's no way to predict exactly what will happen without trying it, but data on a national scale should make beneficial adjustments to things like budgeting software pretty easy.
A basic income is not a perfect and ideal system, but I'd say it's definitely an improvement over the status quo. It does require having some trust in people to manage their money, but with a little assistance, I think people will be able to make better choices for themselves than a bureaucracy can make for them.
It would more likely be a gradual phasing out of old programs and a build-up of basic income as money is moved toward that program
Yes, this has been my conclusion.
I don't think a BI will ever happen. But I suspect/hope that in maybe a couple hundred years, we'll have something very similar to it under a different name ... probably still with some level of admin overhead to deal with the "poor people make bad decisions" issue that has been raised.
The welfare state has expanded massively over time just due to the increase in life expectancy and health care cost inflation. But if we assume that these things reach some sort of natural peak, then eventually as GDP grows and more taxes become available, a progressively more generous welfare state should be the natural outcome ... at least for governments that have got their debt levels under control.
Unfortunately the looming pension deficits mean it'll probably be a long time before we reach such a happy state. Our society is very obviously not rich enough to handle even the current levels of welfare (or put another way, our society misallocates resources). There is no realistic chance of a BI any time soon.
>Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"
At that point we would need to investigate to see if this failure is being caused by mental illness. Treatment would be much easier if our current homeless shelters could use their infrastructure to help people like this. They take your UBI check and give you a place to stay, treat you for drug addictions, etc etc.
Either that or you end up in jail, because making homelessness illegal would not be so immoral under a UBI system.
If you're just blowing through money too quickly, then that's not really a crisis that needs intervention from the state, imo. You'll either learn to spend your money better or learn to like ramen.
I'd say if you blow through your money consistently to the point of having to eat ramen all the time, that is a problem. And it's caused by bad decisions your mind makes. So while it might seem like a bit of a stretch, it could be considered a mental illness.
BI means that BI is the major form of monetary welfare assistance, but it doesn't mean it's the only safety net. Providing emergency shelter and food assistance for those who might otherwise starve or be homeless is actually pretty nearly dirt cheap, and there's no good reason to simply discontinue doing things like that (both privately and publicly run) even with BI.
Also, who cares about fraud? You can't solve the free rider problem so don't worry about it. It's an equivalent problem to letting the guilty go away because we're so concerned about avoiding incarcerated people or protecting people's rights. Yes, murderers absolutely do go free sometimes because we have a robust (sometimes) system of civil rights and legal protections, but that doesn't make the system worthless. Similarly, there will always be free riders who take advantage of any system of welfare more than they should. But realistically those people are not a serious drain on the resources of a rich, industrialized nation, and the benefit to the public at large from providing robust welfare support is more than enough to offset that problem.
The system already tells them tough shit. If you're on welfare and spend it all, you don't just get more food stamps. Why should this be any different?
The vast majority of welfare systems in the UK are already just some form of giving people money directly but for various different reasons and with an enormous list of complicated rules about who is eligible.
Just giving the people one bit of cash rather than several, and without the strings, wouldn't add the problem you're describing.
Are there particular programs in the US that are different and you think would be broken if they were changed to just cash?
Add a way to restrict your own purchasing. Rather than have the social program give you X money for food and Y for rent, you get BI, and then you can assign X to food and Y for rent /yourself/, so that your card (because it'll probably be a card) rejects purchases that don't fit your self-assigned allotments.
Heck, that might even work for normal people who want a better way to handle their money. Does that exist yet?
I think there ought to be two different classes of BI proposals. One would be a cash disbursement, like an actual paycheck. The other would be a single, orchestrated way to get food and housing -- basically a single, unifies program that provides what the first form of BI would buy. I think which one you should support largely depends on whether or not you can trust people. If you can, the first BI alone would be sufficient. If not, the second form of BI would be the only practical option, unless you consider a drastic enlargement of traditional welfare without any oversight BI, but to me that's absolutely ludicrous. Additionally, ignoring other, more complicated problems like mental health, I believe that the first form of BI is sufficient and that a very, very small portion of the population would actually blow the money and perhaps they could be absorbed by the prison system, where they would get a roof over their heads, daily meal, practical job training, and even real experience they can take with them (of course they would be free to leave at will).
1) That's a major benefit already of BI: people actually have more financial means to develop a safety cushion.
> just flat-out blows all their money
1) They'll do that anyway if they have an addiction or some sort of character flaw. There exist underground economies for the benefits (obviously at a lesser cash equivalent) to enable them to convert benefits to what they really want.
2) If it's endemic, the current high-danger interventions such as substance abuse homes, child protective services are usually invoked.
The basic response to the general question you're asking that is usually given is private charity. And it's not so much because of some conservative political agenda, but because you're talking about edge cases, and there is no feasible system anyone's suggested to get people "emergency cash" without bureaucratic delays. BI (or negative income tax, I prefer) is not a perfect system. You should be asking whether it would be superior for the people by in large who most need it than the current byzantine, perversely incentivized, and corruption-prone systems.
Not an answer to your question, but I think it's ironic that some people are proposing basic income as a solution to reduce overhead. After all, if we only need basic income because technology is taking people's jobs, then surely technology can also be used to minimize almost all the overhead in government departments.
So I think we just need far better social welfare programs, and far better government software.
I'm imagining a new kind of welfare that provides good quality housing, healthy meals, sports and other kinds of activities, counseling and mental health service. All free, and available at any point during your life. We already have the foundations for something like this in countries like New Zealand.
I think the US has a long way to go, and there are a lot of old mindsets to change. I feel that basic income would be a short-term solution to a much more complex problem. I don't think it can be properly tested in the US until the general population views socialism more favourably.
> But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets"
That already happens with existing welfare programs. It's not immediately obviously why BI would be worse.
What I think the system(s) should do at this point is actually 'arrest' the person, take them to someplace that evaluates them for why this situation occurred and then addresses the malfunction.
Maybe it's a legitimate case of hardship; the individual is doing the best the can, but society and circumstances have simply doomed them to failure. Forgiveness (of various kinds) and moving forward are recommended.
Maybe they are in an area where the cost of living is too high or they can't find jobs to supplement the basic income and allow them to afford additional expenses. Find them a job and/or help them move to an area that society needs them.
Maybe they cannot manage their own life and circumstances: convert BI to paying for semi-managed lifestyle (E.G. a dorm and/or community food kitchen in their housing block).
You might have noticed a common theme here, instead of handling an exception with a punishment you handle it with identifying the actual cause and attempting to address it. Any 'punishment' as a result is a loss of freedom (in exchange for society helping you with your problems).
The best answer that I've heard to this question (when I asked it on HN a year or two ago) is that you give people their money on a weekly basis. If they blow it and have no money for food, well they are going to get another check in a week.
This doesn't totally solve the problem of course, but makes the "I blew all my money on a new car and now I can't eat" issue much more manageable.
I'm aware of some who are currently in prison, and others who have left the business (which has got a lot more competitive as legal payday lenders have got a lot more efficient). Like burglary or any number of other crimes, we'll probably never be able to eliminate it entirely but it seems to be in massive decline and a pretty poor way to make a living - and one would expect it to be even less common in a world with basic income.
One solution I've been thinking about is if we could hand out the basic income in a daily increment. I don't know the actual implementation details, but something like you get a government card that can work at any ATM or something, which has an account that increments every day.
That way, at worst, you end up hungry for a day, which is manageable.
We'd need "basic income compatible" housing, hence my answer[0] to a previous YC question about what they should fund at YC Research. If the housing is cheap enough to accommodate BI, and it accepted payments every day, then you can't really spend yourself out of accommodations. At least, if the feedback loop is close enough such that "I buy this thing and now I can't get back into my apartment tonight" works, then I think that could prevent homelessness in the "poor budgeting" rather than "mental illness" case.
I've thought about this as well.. It's certainly an interesting response to BI that I don't think is debated enough.
My thoughts on the matter is that regulation on how the money is spent is only necessary in the cases where it's being abused. Current safety nets pays for this overhead on every beneficiary, whereas it's only really necessary on the people who no amount of unsupervised aid will help them (something like addictions would fall into this category). At this point we could have a single regulation and if BI isn't enough for this person to survive, it can be deemed that this person isn't functioning as a responsible adult and can have other systems act as a sort of legal guardian until they can be trusted to survive on BI. Yes it sounds like house arrest, but we can just have this be completely optional and equivalent to the "next" safety net. It's not more money or more food or whatever, it's simply guidance.
No one is saying that the idea is to immediately and completely dismantle the current welfare system.
It seems to me that the general idea is that current welfare systems, at least in the US, are piecemeal at best. There are many, many people who slip through the cracks because they don't know help is available or are unable to navigate the various bureaucracies well enough to get the help they need. Many others refuse to even ask for help because they don't want to admit how poor their position is or they want to avoid the humiliation of asking for help and being turned down. Basic income eliminates that problem because it is applied equally to everyone. On top of that, it will create enormous social pressure for people to spend their money wisely.
I think the concern about people blowing their money is valid, and it will happen, as it has with our current system. There will always be a few people trying to get over. That being said, I think that our current system does a lot to create these people. Try genuinely asking for help, only to be told that you are an idiot, an incompetent, and a freeloader. It's not hard to see how that sort of humiliation can breed resentment, which can lead to people misusing their welfare benefits out of spite or hopelessness.
That being said, I strongly feel that BI can do a lot to minimize welfare abuse. For most working people it won't be too much of a stretch to build up an emergency fund, and, for many, the extra money would mean the difference between living paycheck to paycheck and being able to actually build a savings. Also, for many working people (i.e. walmart employees), 10k is the difference between self sufficiency and living on food stamps, with all the arcane requirements that entails. By filtering out these good people (for lack of a better term) it will be much easier to assess whether the people asking for further assistance are in genuine need, mentally ill, drug abusers, physically disabled, or just fiscally irresponsible. From there, it will be much easier to provide these people with more comprehensive assistance based on their needs, be it personal finance classes, assisted living, drug treatment, housing placement, etc.
From there, the idea is that we can streamline the current welfare system by eliminating more general programs in favor of more direct and targeted assistance. Obviously that's not going to be all that easy to do, given the quagmire that is our current welfare system, but I don't think it's an insurmountable problem.
Our current social safety net doesn't handle sudden emergencies. People blow their entire general assistance and/or food stamps budget in a few days all the time. There are already not enough shelter beds to handle the homeless population in most major cities. BI wouldn't make any of this worse than it already is.
I fully expect the market to take over in this regard, providing opt-out "BI services," which will provide people all basic needs that fit within the basic income stipend. That way people won't even have to think about taking care of their most basic needs (utilities, food, communication, transit).
>what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money
New startup ideas:
1. Create a BI Credit Union: Like all CU's it will be owned by its members (the people on BI are the shareholders). The BICU will extend credit to these its members (who likely never had credit before) and because members are on BI, the loans/credit would all be pretty standard limiting the risk of default. Maybe members could even take a more active role in voting on approving individual loans of its members as opposed to Bank underwriters.
2. BI Death Insurance: Say you are one of the first recipients of this initial YC BI Project experiment which I believe lasts five years. You can pay a premium and in the instance you die before the end of the 5 years, x% of the remaining BI for the period will be distributed to your beneficiaries.
I don't think you are doing this intentionally but your question is a bit of a straw man. I've never heard anyone flat out propose BI replace basic social services and safety nets. Those programs IMO would continue to exist and function but with a different set of external realities (since BI would change everything).
It is hard to imagine that welfare itself would continue as there would simply be no one who qualifies but possibly it would for extreme situations. If you assume universal, single payer, healthcare then you are talking about education programs, drug addiction, etc programs continuing to exist as they do now.
Anyway, what happens if you take your entire welfare check and blow it now? You turn to your family or you go on the streets. So not much would really change on that front and this isn't really relevant to BI or a flaw in it.
I'm not a "BI fan" and I'm curious what they think too, but I think it could be done. I think it depends on the kind of emergency.
For not-really-critical ones (eg Joe's car broke down), you could just do nothing - if Joe wants to he can wait and use his next BI check to fix his car.
For life-threatening emergencies like can't afford food or rent, that's trickier. I would say that if we can afford to give a BI, we should also have soup kitchens and homeless shelters that don't have means testing, so while that does create a kind of social safety net "below BI", it should be much cheaper to run and harder to abuse.
The biggest source of financial emergency for most people is unexpected health problems, and I'm not sure what a solution is. Maybe free insurance for everyone? What would insurance fraud look like in such a world?
First, we should provide BI in a half/half combination of monthly and daily deposits since money management is a skill that is often lacking in the people who need BI the most.
Secondly, the government should continue to provide what I would call "Critical Infrastructure" programs, such as funding public transit, the public roads, and public education, public EMS and Fire Response, and public libraries. (I personally think that public dental, vision and preventative care clinics should fall in this category.) What else qualifies as 'critical infrastructure' is something that can be determined by voters at the local, state and federal level.
The finally, we should continue to support the further safety nets that are provided by private charities. (Food kitchens, homeless shelters.
BI would be for everyone, so pensioners would get it too. They'd probably be better off.
Plus, people wouldn't need to save for retirement if they didn't want to. They could spend more which would provide a stimulus to economic activity. That's another benefit of BI.
What do we currently do when someone faces a financial emergency or spends their whole welfare check on drugs? Last time I checked there's no government program to fund your emergency expenses.
Basic income isn't a cure for all problems, it's just a massive step in the right direction.
I would lean towards the "tough shit" method. Although, if it was paid bi-monthly they would only be screwed for 2 weeks. Not long enough to realistically have any life threatening consequences. They would learn pretty quick. Maybe even do weekly.
This is already an existing problem with SNAP (food stamps), which I believe are disbursed once a month. You can totally use it all the first week of the month and be SOL for the rest of the month.
As for rent, the current "safety net" has no problem with homelessness.
>But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed?
It always bottoms-out somewhere. You pick based on how often these emergencies or "emergencies" seem to happen, how many of them we have the budget to handle, and how likely it is that a certain number of so-called emergencies represent real emergencies.
Given that the project is at the privately funded research phase, questions about possible problems related to government implementations at scale are probably at the who-the-hell-knows stage.
As I interpret the YC Research's statements, it seems to be more a matter of adding a private basic income to the menu of existing public and private resources. If I had to predict, I wouldn't be surprised if the most problematic financial situations involved health care issues...i.e. Joe having a stroke. What does "basic income" mean for a person in the ICU?
So I guess the answer to the question is, the safety nets below basic income are whatever if any safety nets already exist.
Given the that someone on BI has a guaranteed income, loans will be no problem and affordable. The risk being assumed by the lender is lifespan and capacity to live within your means.
And if you get to the point where your cost of living and debt repayments can't be met by your BI, I guess you need to get a job, be institutionalized or declared bankrupt. Just like today. BI isn't going to replace prisons, mental hospitals, or rehabilitation centers (although it may provide a way of funding them, if for example you sign away a prisoner's BI to the prison).
I would think it would be the end of the line, just as social welfare programs are today. For example, if you run out of food stamps for the month, you can't just go get more.
The attempt is at least made to earmark the money so it becomes more difficult to do so. There is a BIG difference between giving someone money earmarked for specific purposes and a check that can be used for anything. You will see a tremendous amount of that happening if BI is implemented in this country that way.
The private sector will be more than eager to supply assistance in converting BI to a reliable stream of minimal food+shelter for those who can't trust themselves to do it on their own.
Protecting troubled individuals from all too nasty excesses of a debtor's prison renaissance emerging from the combined forces of payday loan and prison industries will be quite a challenge. Best solved maybe by forming lesser evil versions of the same.
Do add to that point, how do you handle people who need more than just BI, because they have some disabilities and because of ths they can't work. Remember there are lots of people who not only have physical disabilities but also mental disabilties and as such need support. How do we handle people who are sick in terms of cancer at alike?
We exclude all those people who really need our help.
Do you think our current government safety nets provide for this already? If so you are living in a dream world.
Besides we already have the answer, payday lending, while often predatory in the current system, becomes easier when you consider everyone you know will have capital to loan you, and everyone already has a basic income from which the loan can be paid.
This happens now, all the time. There isn't a government office of "I need money because my car broke down". Soup kitchens will still give out food and the Salvation Army will still provide shelter. Perhaps even more so, because Basic Income will allow more people to donate time and money to charity in their communities.
I would propose BI based loan systems. Borrow from bank a large amount and bank will recover the money from BI over a very long period depending on the age of the person.
If a 80 year old person get heart attack he will get far less money and will probably die. But a child can get several thousand dollars as the bank can recover the money over 10 years.
Basic Income doesn't necessitate eliminating all other social programs, though. That'd be, perhaps, a libertarian ideal, but as the minister above and at least many people discus it, BI allows a reconstruction, not the destruction, of the social welfare apparatus.
If you're having problems feeding yourself, I would like to see an opt-in program where you can receive food, in exchange for $X out of your BI. If you're having problems housing yourself, an opt-in program for housing in exchange for $Y out of your BI.
My belief is that a society as rich as the U.S. ought to ensure that every person has access to basic healthcare, has enough food to live on, and a safe place to sleep at night. In such a system I'd say tough shit to a person who claims to be on hard times.
And how do you prevent this money from being siphoned off by the payday loan industry? Lots of people will be willing to trade their monthly government check (plus some usurious interest rate like 30% compounded monthly) for a lump sum today.
> just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?
I would hope we (not necessarily by way of government) still offer them help, but in that context it is clear the kind of help they need is not simply handouts.
To add to this, what about those unable to take care of themselves. Children, the mentally ill, those who are badly addicted, those who are easily taken advantage of (like in borderline elder abuse cases).
One way is to think about BI as insurance. Then the emergency cases are averaged across the entire population. Joe's twelfth car break-down can be classified as "insurance fraud".
I think tough shit works for everything but healthcare. When even the private solution (health insurnce) is essentially needs based, it's pretty hard to escape some kind of policy-driven rationing.
The other side of this challenge is that the "savings" will come from downsizing vast swaths of the public sector. That would be a political nightmare.
This is the wrong question to ask, based on the wrong premise.
The point of BI is NOT to save money but to provide income for the increasing number of people who wont be able to provide value for the labour market.
If someone has a secured income then there is also a better chance that they can get insurance, a loan and so one.
Yeah this is what I have wanted to say about Basic Income. If you support this program, you also have to be ready to watch a junkie starve to death on the street because they blew all their BI funds on drugs and could not afford food (replace drugs with porn, liquor, travel, whatever).
everybody will have emergencies and blow the money. BI just makes it simpler to get money back from society in general (where some individuals have plenty) to people in a more just way
The system does currently say "tough shit" once resources have been exhausted. They just come in a bunch of different forms, and are sometimes incredibly difficult to deal with. I got somewhat involved in activism and support work for homeless folks a few years ago, and it was eye-opening. So many of the chronically homeless are mentally ill; and so many of them find it impossible to navigate the system to receive benefits because of their mental illness. The process is horrifically complex; when I tried to help folks get through it, I also occasionally found it impossible to figure out which benefits someone qualified for and how to apply for them. This was especially problematic for people who'd been kicked out of their family home as a teenager, due to being gay or other conflicts, and had never had a government-issued ID.
So, I've come around to a basic income, especially for the people who have the hardest time making it through each month. The people I know who have had success getting out of homelessness did so only after they had some sort of steady income (whether that was a part-time job, or getting some sort of cash benefit from the state). Almost every person I've worked with had been through the system a few times; they'd been provided housing one or more times, but had lost it due to being unable to keep up with the requirements (regular paperwork, office visits, etc.). They'd had food stamps occasionally, but also found it hard to keep on top of the process to continue the service or restart it after having found some short-term employment that disqualified them.
Honestly, the more I've interacted with the current support services in place, the more confident I am saying that it has the opposite of its intended consequence. I think it further entrenches people in cycles of poverty. And, not because of the bullshit GOP rhetoric about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or whatever. It didn't take long for me to realize that if there is no support infrastructure for the most in need, it is equivalent to saying, "If they can't support themselves, they should just die." because that's what happens when people completely fall through the cracks of the current system, which happens more than most people realize.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you're arguing in support of keeping a system that doesn't exist. There's already a point where the system says, "Fuck off and die." And, from what research I've seen, and from what I've experienced among the handful of people I've been around as they've gotten out of homelessness and began to be members of society on an equal footing again, is that the most sure-fire way to help someone out of poverty is to insure they have a steady income that they can plan their life around. Mysterious and arbitrary benefits increase the uncertainty of being in poverty; not knowing if you'll still have food next month, or not knowing if any given medical problem will be covered, leads to lots of sub-optimal decision-making.
Basic Income won't solve everything; mental illness is terrible and often untreatable, addiction is a tough problem, etc. But, of all the options, I'm reasonably confident it's the least damaging.
There is a lot wrong with how things currently work. I don't think that fact proves that we would be better off with basic income.
I am currently homeless. While homeless, I started a website to try to help me keep track of services that were actually useful to me with as few strings attached as possible so that I could, in fact, work on solving my problems and not get trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. There are some things that are currently being done that are useful. And I think we would be better off identifying those things and trying to grow those things and get more attention for those things than simply throwing it all and starting over with something entirely new, which tends to have the effect of fucking over the people who are familiar with the current system and managing to get something out of it without ever delivering the sweeping benefits that are always promised.
I am very much for finding a solution the terrible problem of "housing inflation" where new housing now is around 2500 sq. ft. The rise of homelessness in the U.S. is directly related to the rise in size and cost of housing.
I am also very much for developing more gig work that actually works. A lot of it is done very badly, but gig work has allowed me to develop an earned income of my own while still homeless and my problems are getting gradually better. I think this is a better approach than basic income.
I also think we are at a place where we can help people be physically healthier and where we can start to resolve the root causes of mental illness. Getting myself physically healthier has been a cornerstone of my plans to resolve my problems and get off the street. Poverty relief problems are terrible about not trying at all to actually help people improve their health status or mental health status. This helps make them more intractable problems.
Thank you for your excellent comment, and for the work you have done to help homeless people.
I'm interested in basic income, though I don't know much about economics or politics.
I personally wouldn't expect basic income to replace all of those other systems. I don't like the quote here:
> We think everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs
I think it should be just "Everyone should have their basic needs met". The money is a means to that end, but only a means, and not the best one for all needs. For example, I don't think people should have to use basic income for medical needs. Healthcare should just be provided.
That's good because our healthcare needs do not fit a nice flat monthly allotment. Most months, most people don't need to spend much on healthcare. Then there are some months where, holy shit, you need to spend tons. Some people have chronic illness and will over their lifetime spend way more money on healthcare. At the same time, most people don't have enough expertise to really shop around and choose how to best spend their healthcare dollar.
In contrast, I think basic income is a good fit for the needs where some personal discretion makes sense. That's probably housing, food, and personal essentials. I think of it as sort of like food stamps, except everyone gets them, even the wealthy, so hopefully they have less stigma. And you can use them to pay rent.
Even then, there needs to be safety nets below those. Some people—probably a small fraction—have either enough mental health problems, temporary misfortune, etc. where they may not reliably use their basic income to secure their needs. Those people certainly bear some responsibility for misallocating their basic income, but I don't believe the punishment for failing to do that should be a slow death by starvation or exposure. I certainly don't think the children of those people should be punished in that way.
I don't look at basic income as "more efficient welfare", though it may have some positive effects there. I care more that it creates a more efficient society by giving people more security and freedom. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck, you can try to find a better place to live, or find a job that's better suited to your skills. If you aren't terrified of ending up on the streets, you have a little more brainpower to devote to learning and improving.
No one is their best self when they are barely scraping by. I think something like basic income can help us all make the most of our potential. It's not a panacea, but I think it can help.
It may also be the case that with basic income that more people have the time to volunteer and provide some of the welfare and social services the government currently funds. That may not pan out at all, but it's a nice idea and a possible emergent property.
You just described the simple reason why BI fundamentally cannot work on a large scale. Since we will not be able to leave people on the side of the road if they spend their BI poorly, we will still have to have various programs to help them out. Hence, we might as well try to make those programs as efficient as possible if we are going to have them anyway and not worry about basic income.
> flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food?
Well for starters I'd imagine a future BI system to handle something like rent via direct transfer to the landlord. Food handled the same way, some prepaid debit card that only works at grocery stores, etc.
I don't envision a system where people pick up a stack of 20's with a post-it note on it that says "remember to pay your rent".
What you're describing is conditional cash transfers. We have that in the US already (public housing vouchers, food stamps). BI is an unconditional cash transfer. It really is more like a stack of 20s.
> Well for starters I'd imagine a future BI system to handle something like rent via direct transfer to the landlord. Food handled the same way, some prepaid debit card that only works at grocery stores, etc.
In other words, exactly what I said originally. You'd be recreating the administrative overhead BI is intended to eliminate (section 8 for housing, food stamps for food).
BI isn't necessarily intended to eliminate overhead. It's intended to acknowledge that we're rapidly approaching an economy where there aren't jobs for everyone (thanks to automation and a number of other factors that have been discussed) and to aid the transition to that point.
This doesn't have to be a government function. I do case management, and many of my clients receive social assistance in the form of unconditional cash transfers. They often have poor credit and incidents in their rental histories, so they don't meet the standards required to rent. However, landlords/property managers will grant exceptions if the social assistance is sent directly to a third party with an agreement that rent and utilities are paid first. Since this isn't a complicated or difficult role to fill, it's a competitive space with low fees.
The problem with most BI solutions is they just want to hand out money but not change how its used and where. There is certainly sufficient technology to track and even restrict the usage of BI funds.
So my idea is this, your restrictions on your BI lift as your income does to the point its just flat out money the ends up in your account. You could put forth some requirement that to receive BI you agree to have that portion of your income tracked.
So you get your BI. You are permitted to spend it at certified service and goods providers. A service provider could be your landlord, your mortgage company, or more, when it comes to residency. We already track food stamp usage so you lock down that too good healthy foods; no smokes, beer, or chips for you!.
With regards to medical. Catastrophic and preventative services are where government should look at for health care. Just play it out under similar rules to how most HSA based insurance plans work. You are subject to X amount per year and the rest is not your worry.
the danger of BI is that government fees which adversely impact the poor are just as likely to increase and worse knowing how many programs for the needy can work there are ample opportunities for fraud.
You don't get to decide what food or drinks other people can have. That's the whole point of a basic income - unconditional baseline support. Yes, many will fuck up and waste the money, but a majority is given peace of mind and leeway to improve their lives in ways not possible without it.
But at that point what you are describing isn't basic income. It's welfare+medicaid+food stamps+section 8 housing under a different moniker, along with all their administration costs and inefficiencies.
I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say.
But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all their money and now can't afford rent and/or food? Do you tell them "tough shit, you've exhausted all your social safety nets" or are there safety nets below BI, essentially recreating the welfare programs previously destroyed? If so, how do you prevent fraud without a department following up on Joe's twelfth "my car broke down" case of the year?