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.
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.