Also where we live makes a whole lot of difference. LA or SF would need a guaranteed income of something like 50k. And there will never be enough housing because people want to move there.
Presumably you’d need to be a citizen to receive benefits. Although it’s possible that there might be a higher demand for workers if there are lots of jobs that people no longer want to do and employers don’t feel like offering wages high enough for citizens to accept.
The system would be unworkable in a country like ours. Our borders are too porous; our country too large with too much variance in COL; most voters not wanting a piece of their paycheck to go to the slacker down the block.
If there were some mandatory public service work for the otherwise healthy and employable maybe.
The whole point of basic income is to leave those decisions to the individuals. The only decision the lawmakers need to make is, how much money is necessary to provide necessities?
I suggest this can be done the same way the poverty level is currently determined, i.e. calculating the cost of a minimum food diet, and assuming that food cost constitutes 1/3 of all necessities. Much simpler than debating which things are necessities and then adding all that cost.
These are indeed possible roadblocks but have nothing to do with illegal immigration. I don’t think that there would be an uptick in illegal immigration because I’d have to assume that the percentage of unauthorized immigrants who currently illegally get welfare benefits is small: the vast majority get no assistance of the sort. In order for there to be a huge uptick in illegal immigration, the number of people coming in who somehow skirt around the system to illegally receive a GBI compared to current benefits would have to rise by more than an order of magnitude such that it swamps the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants that come in and otherwise work hard and play by the rules.
I think in general, illegal immigrants try to avoid getting any benefits from the government. Because the more they interact with the government, the more likely they are to be caught and deported.
But basic income may reduce the pool of Americans who are willing to do menial work for low wages. Your first dollar is more valuable to you than your 1000th.
I think you are probably correct that the number of illegal immigrants who come here to get the GBI would not be much larger than the ones who come here to collect welfare.
I expect the increase to come in illegal immigrants who come in to work the jobs that Americans no longer have to do because they are getting the GBI. Not just starvation jobs; any job that pays less than GBI. (This is assuming no MW.)
Regards,
Shodan
There is some talk about the potential of us entering a post scarcity society within our lifetimes. This is difficult to imagine, as it does seem as though wants are always infinite, and no matter how plentiful, resources could never cover all wants.
Needs are a different matter. I would argue that we have passed a “post-necessity” point many years ago. We have more than enough food for everyone, more than enough housing. Even medical care can be received by all who need it in a first world country. It just needs to be more equitably distributed.
Now, capitalism is a great way of distributing limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants, but is a terrible method for ensuring that the limited necessities can be fulfilled by our abundance of production. There are homeless people, and there are empty homes, there are hungry people, and there is surplus food that goes to waste. Capitalism has failed entirely in making efficient use of these resources.
Rather than a UBI, I’d go with more of a voucher system, and the vouchers are good for everything society has agreed you need to survive. If certain standards of necessity are adopted and agreed upon, then the vouchers can be good for what society has deemed to be necessary. If society says that all you get is a bunk bed and 1800 calories a day worth of crickets, then that’s what you get. I would hope that society would be a bit more generous, in providing for modest dignity in housing and nutrition, but as long as people are not starving or exposed to the elements, it is fulfilling the need.
Ideally, this would create a situation where people are less distracted by the anxieties of survival, that they can work on the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
A minimum wage is no longer needed, as people are no longer put in a position where they have to work or die, they can come to the table to negotiate their wage, and only accept a job that seems worth their time. If someone chooses to further their education or other productive skills, they have that option. If someone decides their time is better spent being artistic, they could work on a novel or painting or musical composition. By joining onto random message boards, they can join in the crowd of analysing and opinionising events around the world and community. If they don’t want to do any of that, they can just sit on the couch and play video games all day, and it will cost society very very little to keep them alive, and you never know, they may get bored of the sloth and idleness, and decide to do something productive, more than paying back for their time idle.
Politicians from high cost-of-living states would be constantly clamoring to raise it, and accusing politicians from low cost-of-living states of being heartless monsters.
In the long run, I am doubtful that it would keep up with inflation. If the politicians try to make it keep up with inflation, there is a nontrivial risk of hyperinflation. The politicians would have too many incentives for overindulgence, and too few incentives for discipline.
But that’s the system we have now. We have deemed certain things to be necessities, and make those things available to those who cannot afford them. So we have the SNAP program to provides food, Medicaid to provide health care, subsidized housing, and a few others.
The problem is, this requires a massive amount of bureaucracy to administer. And it robs people the flexibility to prioritize their spending - e.g. someone might choose to cut back on housing expenses and invest in training to start their own business. And further, it robs people of their dignity. If basic income is in the form of vouchers that only pays for necessities, you can’t save up for one special gift for their SO, one nice piece of clothing for special occasions, once-in-a-lifetime vacation, etc.
One week ago today my last call was to some creaky old thing that warbled, "But I’m on a limited income. Thirty seconds later I wished I was. 80% of the team was gone til 6/1.
Care to fill in some of the blanks there, dropzone? I’m having a hard time making sense of it. What sorts of calls do you make, why did you wish you were on a fixed income, what was the rest of your team, and how is it relevant that they were gone?
The UBI would be so expensive it would basically consume all the governments revenue and there would have to be huge cuts in defense, infrastructure, and education.
Workforce participation would drop among the young and the poorly educated. This would cause income and wealth inequality to increase by huge amounts as society bifurcates into those with high paying jobs and those on the basic income. It would be a huge boon to those in the real estate business.
Watch this TED talk for a full perspective:
An estimate for the US is around $175 billion per year. Expensive but not the entire federal budget.
The estimated cost of childhood poverty in the US is $500 billion per year.
Ontario is about to enter a pilot project on guaranteed income.
April 24, 2017
If you change nothing, and just hand out money, then yes. But that’s not how it will work.
First, the basic income needs to replace some of the welfare programs we have now. SNAP is $70 billion a year, for example. (Though probably not Medicaid, because people have different health care needs, and have little control over it.)
Then the tax code needs to be restructured so that if you are middle class or above, you are still paying roughly the same net amount to the government as before. That is, whatever you get in basic income, you are paying that much more in taxes. Perhaps even more, especially for higher income earners.
Yes, this will be a hard sell. People don’t like to pay for social safety nets because people are inherently selfish, and those who don’t need them now think they’ll never need them.
How do you arrive at this number?
It definitely wouldn’t consume the entire federal budget, but when I ran the numbers a year or so ago, even with the above assumptions of it taking the place of most welfare and social security and phase out by middle class, it would still cost nearly a trillion a year on top of our existing budget (but still small fry compared to the entire US economy).
And to address the other point about lack of workforce participation, there will be a whole bunch of people no longer working because of the streamlining of administering 2 or 3 programs instead of dozens, not to mention the personnel dedicated to calculating eligibility and rooting out fraud. Some of those would provide the labor for the jobs that other people suddenly don’t feel like doing anymore when they get a guaranteed income. Not to mention the entrepreneurs who will start their own business or create works of art with the time and money that they didn’t have before.
Let’s do some numbers.
US population is 321M. 61% of it is adults 19-64 (let’s remove kids and those on SS from the equation). That’s 195M.
U.S. poverty level is around 11K per single person.
Let’s assume that the guaranteed income will only apply to 30% of the people and the rest will work for a living (I think the % will be higher but just for argument’s sake). That’s roughly 59M people. At 11K a pop - 649B.
Current US welfare spending (excluding medicare/medicaid) is around 411B.
So - if you completely eliminate that, and instead funnel money into that guaranteed income thing, you will have to increase your welfare budget by 60%. More realistically (since we didn’t take children into account in the guaranteed income calculation) probably by 100%.
All that in order to have 30% of the adult non-geriatric population to be able to live at poverty level. A lofty goal.